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Leak Found In Fukushima Tank Holding Radioactive Water
The fallout from tsunami damage at Japan's Fukushima plant isn't over yet. New submitter OldJuke writes "Tokyo Electric power Co. said about 120 tons of the water are believed to have breached [a water storage tank's] inner linings, some of it possibly leaking into the soil. TEPCO is moving the water to a nearby tank at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant — a process that could take several days ...More than 270,000 tons of highly radioactive water is already stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks and another underground tank. They are visible even at the plant's entrance and built around the compound, taking up more than 80 percent of its storage capacity. TEPCO expects the amount to double over three years and plans to build hundreds of more tanks by mid-2015 to meet the demand."
Despite your post, noone has died at Fukushima from radiation. Compare that to coal.
The water itself is radioactive.
No it's not; this isn't tritium (T2O) being discussed, but normal water contaminated with Sr90. ALPS is supposed to separate the Sr. The remaining water has a modestly low level of tritium. Releasing tritium is no big deal; it may slightly harm seafood or maybe even kill it, but it will dilute quickly and is of no harm to humans who eat seafood. Sr90 on the other hand is a metal and while it's easily broken up into dust and carried around by currents it's heavier than water so collects in hot spots on the sea floor.
You're talking about Hanford. Approximately one third of Hanford's waste storage tanks are known to have been or be leaking into the groundwater, having contaminated approximately 270 billion gallons or one billion cubic meters of aquifers. This contaminated groundwater is expected to reach the Columbia river in 7 to 45 years, and start contaminating everything along the river from Eastern Washington to Portland and the Pacific ocean shortly thereafter. The loss of real estate values along that river is a very real concern. Waterfront property is normally very valuable. Waterfront property on a radioactive river, less so.
Currently there is no practical plan to deal with this situation nor adequate budget to even stop it from getting worse. It is likely impossible to prevent this radioactive waste from reaching the Pacific. The Columbia river is quite a considerable river, 4th largest in the US by volume and the largest draining into the Pacific. Though Hanford is the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the US - containing approximately 2/3rds of all US high-level waste, it still retains an operating nuclear power generating station to this day. It uses a newer version of the type of reactor used at Fukushima, a General Electric Type 5 Boiling Water Reactor.
Over $30 billions (pdf) have been spent cleaning up Hanford already. 20 years into the initial 30 year plan only minor progress has been made. The vitrification plant, for example, is not expected to complete vitrification operations for another 34 years from now - and that may be optimistic, meaning we are further from the end now than when the work was begun. The estimate for the cost of the remaining cleanup is $112 billion and is, given the nature of such things, likely to be at least three times even that.
Although the so-far estimated cost of $145 billion is very high it is important to remember than Hanford was a critical part of the Manhattan Project, essential for developing the technology and materials that made the US the first nuclear weapon capable global power at a critical cusp of international relations. The cost of not doing that might have been much higher than cleaning up or living with this mess will be.
Cleaning up Fukushima will cost far more than cleaning up Hanford. Cleaning up Chernobyl will also be more costly, to the extent cleanup is possible at all. If you add up the cleanup costs of all three and the off-book costs of getting rid of the current stock of spent nuclear fuels you could probably outfit the entire world with alternative electrical energy solutions like geothermal, wind and solar for less. On this scale a manned Mars colony would be a trivial side project. Of more concern might be that cleaning up these messes entirely is quite simply not possible, even given the full weight of the national economies involved. It cannot be done. We have developed the power to create problems we cannot cure no matter how hard we try.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The water itself is not radioactive. Particles in the water are. Therefore, distillation is one of the methods that will work.
Other methods include RO, Ion Exchange, Activated Carbon filtration. But Water itself is not radio active.
Further, there are already methods of removal, (this is done every day all around the world), and its not particularly a difficult problem, other than the fact that the Fukushima site has an awful lot of water to deal with.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The issue is that were treating stuff as ubber scary that's far less dangerous that what goes up coal plants smoke stacks. Things less radioactive than coal get treated as major problems that we have to contain forever we might as well just throw the stuff into the furnace.
Spent fuel rods are the major highly radioactive bit and those should be reprocessed to make more fuel rods. We don't because that reprocessing is also a good way to get weapon grade bits. Pretty much anything that's radioactive enough to need to be contained over huge periods is radioactive enough to run a reactor. Other bits are non issues.
No sir I dont like it.
I share your enthusiasm for the topic and your point of view. The whole coining words like "Fuckupshima" thing is antihelpful. Could you not do that? Please?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Coal must be the most often used straw man ever. Coal is not the only other way of generating electricity. Japan in particular has vast geothermal resources, for example.
Japan wanted nuclear because it made them look modern and technologically advances (everyone was at it in the 60s, which is also when they developed the world's first high speed train and launched their first satellite). They also wanted it because it means they could build a nuclear weapon in a few months if necessary, but don't actually need to become a nuclear sate with all the antagonism that would generate.
Every nuclear plant in Japan went offline at once, and they coped. No blackouts during the summer. No collapse of the economy or return to an agrarian society. If anything is spurred demand for more efficient products as people wanted to do their bit to help. The US seems to assume that more watts = better life, where as Japan, like most places, assumes that less watts and less pollution through efficiency = better life. They have a lot of cool tech now like whole-house battery packs - wouldn't you love you have a whole house UPS powered by free energy from the sun?
So despite pressure on politicians from energy companies and certain parts of industry to restart reactors it is unlikely that the majority will ever come back online due to public opposition and the rapid rise of renewable energy and more efficient devices. People also look at what has happened to the people who used to live near Fukushima and the farmers and fishermen who live in the wider area, and they don't want it to happen again in a country that has regular large earthquakes and occasional tsunami.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC