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Japan's Damaged Reactor Has High Radiation, No Water
mdsolar passes along this quote from an Associated Press report:
"One of Japan's crippled nuclear reactors still has fatally high radiation levels and hardly any water to cool it, according to an internal examination Tuesday that renews doubts about the plant's stability. A tool equipped with a tiny video camera, a thermometer, a dosimeter and a water gauge was used to assess damage inside the No. 2 reactor's containment chamber for the second time since the tsunami swept into the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant a year ago. The probe done in January failed to find the water surface and provided only images showing steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by exposure to radiation, heat and humidity. The data collected from the probes showed the damage from the disaster was so severe, the plant operator will have to develop special equipment and technology to tolerate the harsh environment and decommission the plant, a process expected to last decades."
The birth of Godzilla is near!
even TEPCO can manage a thermometer.
50 degrees is a bit too cool to melt through feet of concrete.
Wow, talk about retarded statements. That must top the cake!
It is like looking at a nuclear reactor and saying it reduces your exposure to U-238 by transmuting it into other isotopes. And guess what - I would be just as correct as your bullshit you have just posted!
Yeah, let's look at C12/C14 atmospheric levels, and proof that we are fucking up the planet for centuries with that (via AGW), but ignore all the radon, heavy metals, carcinogens, thorium, uranium whole crapton of other shit being emitted. Yes, must be quite as correct as stating that Fukushima helped to reduce our exposure to the evil U-238 and U-235. Bravo!
If you represent the modern environmental movement, then I fear we are fucked.
Well once you create the technology to run the wolds power plants off kittens and sunshine I'll be first in line to protest the nuke plants but till then I'd rather have a nuclear powerplant close to me then a coal plant.
FUD? watch this video (and lots of similar ones on YouTube) this is children's playground just outside of Tokyo, nowhere near Fuckupshima, months after the disaster.. the geiger shows 6.4 micro sieverts/h while the normal background level is in 0.1-0.3 range
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOIDFh3wPXY
Considering that was only ~.25% of land, I think they'll be alright on the "running out of land from nuclear reactor fallout" for the foreseeable future.
How rare/minor do these accidents have to be before alarmists stop condemning all nuclear activity? Condemn OLD nuclear plants that are no longer safe, sure. Quit trying to stop new plants and technology, that's why the old ones are still running in many cases.
Booga booga, radiation!
I see your nuclear reactor failure and raise you some coal seam fires.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
A better reference than TFA, the report from TEPCO: "Reference Result of the dose measurement in the second investigation inside of Primary Containment Vessels, Unit 2, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant" with the precise location of measurements and the last report (Mar 27,2012) from TEPCO regarding Unit 2 of Fukushima Daiichi:
- At 10:10 am on March 26, 2011, we started injecting freshwater to the reactor and are now injecting fresh water by a motor driven pump powered by the off-site transmission line.
- At 2:59 pm on September 14, 2011, in addition to water injection from feed water system, we started water injection from piping of core spray system to the reactor.
The current water injection amount from the reactor feed water system is approx. 2.7 m3/h and that from the core spray system is approx. 6m3/h.
- At 5:21 pm on May 31, 2011, we started cyclic cooling for the water in the spent fuel pool by an alternative cooling equipment of the Fuel Pool Cooling and Filtering System.
- At 8:06 pm on June 28, 2011, we started injecting nitrogen gas into the Primary Containment Vessel.
- At 6:00 pm on October 28, 2011, a full operation of the PCV gas control system started.
- From 9:40 am to 12:30 pm on March 26, the water level and water temperature inside the PCV of Unit 2 was investigated with the industrial endoscope. As a result, the water level was confirmed to be 60 cm from the bottom of the PCV and the water temperature was confirmed to be in the range of approx. 48.5 to 50.0 .
- At 12:10 pm on March 27, the amount of injected nitrogen into the PCV was adjusted from 0 Nm3/h to approx. 5 Nm3/h as the internal investigation of the Unit 2 PCV was finished.
- At 10:46 am on December 1, 2011, we started the nitrogen injection to the Reactor Pressure Vessel.
- At 11:50 am on January 19, 2012, we started the operation of the spent fuel pool desalting facility.
TEPCO should be blamed for their negligence in not raising the height of the seawalls and leaving two big nuclear power stations at the mercy of a tsunami, the executives that didn't do it are 1 year late to jail, but after march their engineers have dealt with the nuclear emergency as good as possible.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Yes, if they live on that playground, they will receive nearly as much radiation in a year as a resident of Denver.
Do not look at enhanced geothermal systems. They do not exist! Continue to argue the relative merits of nuclear and coal. Geothermal is not the cheap, clean, safe renewable locally sourced baseload power you are looking for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And that's just solar / cosmic irradiation due to the altitude and therefore doesn't even count the exposure from natural concentrations of uranium (and therefore radon). Denver also so happens to be quite the hot spot for that, more so than any other large city/metro.
Yeah, but how sure are we their readings are accurate, either way?
First, high radiation messes up electronics. I have a tennis-ball sized chunk of natural thorium ore (thorite), that was just lying on the ground in Colorado. Put it near a digital camera, you get a lot of static (~52 uSv/h of gamma alone on a PM1703 if anyone was curious).
So, you've got radiation levels over 1,500,000 times more than my little rock that causes obvious interference, and non-redundant electronics on a prototype probe someone slapped together with minimal testing. I doubt it was all radiation-hardened sapphire circuitry.
I'd just be wary of drawing too many conclusions from a single measurement from a single probe in such an environment. There's a lot of things that can cause imperfect results, even not in nuclear reactors.
High radiation just does weird stuff. At Chernobyl they had to dive into the water to release a valve (suicide mission, obviously). As I recall the first team couldn't even find it, because ultra-intense alpha radiation had turned the water into H2O2 and it oxidized their suits, skin, and equipment too quickly.
I doubt it's hot enough to melt through the concrete, but just sayin'.
A fission nuclear bomb consumes a large part of its fissile fuel for its explosion. And it contains a small amount of it, to begin with. When a nuclear reactor blows up, it is usually a non-nuclear explosion (steam release, graphite fire) that spreads unspent nuclear fuel all over an area. They're two different phenomena.
Unlike chernobyl, this isn't a graphite fire kept burning by the heat generated by the radioactive uranium. so while it is very 'hot', it is not going to melt through anything..
While it's true that radiation will mess with electronics, measuring things like temperature can be done reliably even in the core of an operating power reactor, which is a much harsher radiation environment than this. For instance, an off-the-shelf type-K thermocouple will last a year or two in-core before transmutation causes serious problems.
In this case, the trick is to keep the circuitry out of that kind of radiation but wires, high voltage, and most metals and ceramics will be fine for a while. A good fiber-optic scope will last maybe an hour before becoming too opaque, and you can keep the CCD etc. well away.
Thermocouples, not so much.
I don't know what they used but it's expected that such a thing would be taken into account.
A fission nuclear bomb consumes a large part of its fissile fuel for its explosion
Not really, Fat Man converted about 20% of it's Pu load into energy; also of lot of radioactive elements were probably produced by the encasing during the explosion.
And it contains a small amount of it, to begin with
That's most certainly the point. Fat Man contained 6kg of plutonium. Tepco estimates that about 68 tons of fuel melted in Fukushima reactor no 1 alone.
Okay, some cards on the table here. I work for a nuclear industry company. I'm not a nuclear anything -- just an IT guy -- but I have seen and learned a lot over the past few years about the nuclear industry and about the Japanese nuclear industry and the Japanese business mindsets and more.
I know the kind of hard-mindedness behind what has led up to Fukushima and what has PERSISTED it. It's the persistence that really gets under my U.S. American skin. In the U.S., we KNOW when we've made mistakes and we learn from them quickly, readily and even hungrily. Sure, we have our share of arrogant assholes too, but it's not our "culture" to be that way. Watching the Japanese in action routinely fills me with a sense of "WTF?!"
Fortunately, not all Japanese are alike. Some think in far better ways. But unfortunately, there are too many arrogant assholes who are still trying to keep it covered up and glossed over and they simply don't want to talk about it. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) situation uses Japanese nuclear equipment and it has recently been determined that there is a design flaw in it leading to the problems they are experiencing over there. (BTW, does it help to know that the gear in Fukushima is mostly Westinghouse? I suppose not as the problems come from poor disaster planning, maintenance and other factors of implementation... the gear itself was just fine.)
@MrKaos
Sorry bud, but you're just wrong. Nuclear is the best thing we've got for energy. The problems you are identifying is jackasses who don't respect the danger and manage it properly. Do you also think that fire is a bad idea as well? After all, it also has incredible destructive potential but can be perfectly safe when managed properly. Nuclear incidents are rare. Extremely rare. The problem is people who don't understand running and funding these things thinking they can save a few bucks (or yen) here and there or make bad decisions because they have a business partner who could benefit from using one thing over another and so on and on. It's the PEOPLE, MrKaos, which is the problem... and actually, a relatively small number of people at that. I find most people in the nuclear industry to be quite competent and capable. But there are arrogant jackasses everywhere thinking "I could save $1 million by cutting back on...." The problems here are the same as the ones found in the BP oil catastrophe. THE SAME.
What pisses me off the most is the people who wring their hands and say we should end Nuclear Power based on a first generation commercial design 20 years past it's design life in the most seismically active place in the world on the coast of the country that has such bad Tsunamis that they actually got the world to use their language in naming it. At the same time there have been near zero coverage of the tens of thousands of people and billions of dollars in property destroyed by the quake and Tsunami.
This is all a result of preventing the industry from advancing. Imagine if we were stuck with first generation airplanes? Sure there were accidents as the technology developed and many were killed on the planes and on the ground. But the only way to get better is to do it. We could be sitting here with near limitless energy and zero CO2 emissions if breeders were pursued.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
that's why the old ones are still running in many cases.
I don't believe that, and I think you are deluding yourself at best, dishonest at worst. The reason if much more probably because it's more profitable to let things go this way.
Well, reality got tedious and disagreed. Japan discontinued a bunch of new nuclear construction projects from the late 90s to early 00s. Fukushima's lifespan was subsequently extended. I'd say there's a definite cause and effect here.
Oh please! To use a /. car analogy this would be like saying cars need to be banned because some LOL got killed driving her 58 Ford with non safety glass. the plants SHOULD have been shut down more than 15 years ago, but instead the government took bribes and kept them running WELL past their limits and you act like that proves anything? The only thing it proves is shitty governments are shitty. Build the latest designs, place thorium reactors next to them to use any waste and voila! A nice safe and clean power source that I would have no problem having a house next to.
So you keep that NIMBY attitude, I'm sure the coal guys will love your ass, me I'll enjoy living in a state where the power is cheap enough many of the apts come with it as part of the rent.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Math fail.
When one factors in the easily quantifiable expense to clean up the mess of any "accident" like this (never mind the fact that it was actually quite predictable in this case), the almost incalculable impact of such an event on the surrounding community, the expense of "safely" transporting and storing the mess associated with any nuclear power plant (spent fuel and other haz-mat), etc., etc., nuclear power does not seem like much of bargain. Now, if you want to "encumber" the poor nuclear energy industry with regulations that have a realistic chance of preventing events like Fukishima, and if your government has the will to consistently and vigourously enforce those regulations, we can talk. Seriously. Nuclear energy has the potential to be the clean and efficient power source you pro-nuke fanboys want so badly to believe it is, but as long as it is run by profit driven corporate interests, it will never be so. Never.