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Fukushima Nuclear Plant Cleanup May Take More Than 40 Years
mdsolar writes "'A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.' Meanwhile, Gregory B. Jaczko, former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology."
Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Maybe the could us it as a setting and roll out another Matt Groening show, call it Fukurama
i'd watch it
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is nuclear power really more cost effective per megawatt if you incluse the cost of long term storage and clean up after a disaster? Those numbers never make it into the calculations because they are inevitably paid by taxpayers.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Moving away from the first & second generation light water reactor designs is definitely something we should be doing, but simply going to smaller plants is a dubious plan.
From TFA:
> Dr. Jaczko cited a well-known characteristic of nuclear reactor fuel to continue to generate copious amounts of heat after a chain reaction is shut down. That “decay heat” is what led to the Fukushima meltdowns. The solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point.
Actually innovating, bringing something like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to reality, is more along the lines of what we should be doing.
Also, it was the tsunami that actually caused the meltdowns. Fukushima had appropriate backups for cooling the reactor, and were well under way when the reactors were shut down after the quake, they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami to come and categorically knock them all out.
$0.02
It would be good if other areas of industry had the strong safety regulation that nuclear has. for example fertiliser plants.
Canadian reactors overheat if the outside temperature exceeds 25C.
Any large industrial accident can take decades to clean up. More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez accident, there are still lingering effects. There are many Superfund toxic waste sites that have been on the Superfund list for 30 years (the list was started 30 years ago or many would have listed longer)
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
Concrete doesn't last forever, nor does a big dirt pile when you're in an earthquake and tsunami zone. Burying it just makes it even harder to clean up when whatever containment method you used fails the next time.
Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Luckily, there is a solution! When our man Larry Summers was chief economist at the World Bank, he did a little writing...
In this case, we can't really export the pollution(gathering the radioactive particles simply isn't plausible or cost effective); but we can import the population! Other than the carcinogenic fallout, it's a nice piece of real estate. Plenty of people live in places that are much ghastlier, even without fallout. All we have to do is find the wealthiest tenants who still live in a place with higher mortality(eg. from tropical parasites or malnutrition from marginally arable land) and offer them an attractively priced 50 year lease. The new occupants overall mortality goes down slightly, Japan makes some money back, and everyone basks in the warm glow of the human spirit, and gamma radiation.
How could this possibly be a bad plan?
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
The plan at Chernobyl worked so well that we are now constructing a bigger, better, new sarcophagus to enclose the reactor and the current leaky and structurally unsound old sarcophagus...
Who cares if the containment fails. It's buried.
Oh sorry, I thought the problem was radioactive elements leaking out into the environment. As long as no one is worried about the containment failing and allowing radioactive contaminants top leach into the soil and groundwater, then sure, just put an umbrella over the current reactor and call it a day.
Jaczko isn't credible. He is a head case that drove his colleagues, including his fellow Obama appointees, to publically and unanimously condemn his tenure as NRC chairman while seated right next to him during congressional testimony. They forced him out because they'd had enough of his shit.
So now he is going to be a professional anti-nuke gadfly. Last week good 'ol Senator Harry Reid resurrected the head case and put him on the NNSA board so he can make that group dysfunctional and say scary things about the stockpile. Now that he's out of the shadows he's taking more shots as nuclear energy as well.
If you read the linked story you'll eventually learn what, specifically, his problem is with contemporary operating reactors; they are large and have enough residual heat to damage fuel after shutdown. The notion that our power reactors are too large is not new. It has been well understood since the beginning of nuclear energy production. Jaczko is talking about it because that's his job now; use the credibility of his "Former Chairman of the NRC" moniker to make headlines by saying scary things about nukes.
Incidentally this discussion raises the question; how large can a reactor be without risking fuel damage? The answer is about 60 MW thermal for traditional PWR light water designs. Common power reactors are 2000 MW thermal.
BTW, we aren't going to do anything about any of this. We're not replacing the reactors, or coal or gas or building out green energy or anything else. We're a balkanized welfare state nation occupied with feathering our environmental nest while evacuating our industrial base to Asia. The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die. Maybe a reactor will melt and we'll replace our nukes with more gas consumption. That's about as much as you can expect.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
No, Chii. That's the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
The problem is that there were supposed to be other types of reactors that would "burn" the waste. That would generate even more power while getting rid of the "spent" fuel. Problem is those reactors never got approved due to proliferation risk. But of course they keep renewing licenses for the existing ones to create more waste and IIRC even allowing some more to be built.
I'm not sure why this doesn't come up when they talk about where to bury the waste - building a reactor to make use of it IS an option. Of course the longer we wait, the more spent fuel will be contained in giant blocks of cement that can't be used as fuel either.
LFTR will solve these problems -- but YOUR help is needed
Imagine a nuclear reactor so safe you can walk away from it or shut its internal power and it will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Imagine that this process will be scalable from local megawatts to nation-wide terawatts by a simple replication of standard industrial components, with no increase in risk or change in the overall safety factor --- because it is not just an 'improvement' over present plants, risk of explosion or radiation leakage into the atmosphere is nil. Light and heavy water reactors operate at high pressure. This one doesn't.
Imagine that it has no need to be near a body of coolant water at all. No need to site it near a lake or stream or coastline. Imagine that it can (slowly, productively) help to turn all that spent fuel presently at nuclear plants into electricity. All of it.
Imagine that it can be manufactured here in the USA. Now (my fellow Americans) imagine that it should and must be manufactured in the USA, soon, to make us completely self-sufficient for grid energy, power a new era of electric transportation. And because I would (respectfully) prefer this technology we have conceived developed here --- rather than purchase it from the Chinese.
LFTR is the golden ticket. Perhaps the thing that could transform humanity.
But your help is needed... why?
Because for one reason or another, all of the people you'd "expect" to jump on this idea are not doing so. And more tragic still, most of us are merely "expecting" to hear more about it some day. Without your help, that day may never arrive.
One hundred years ago a great many people did not have running water, access to reliable transportation or grid electricity. Even though news travelled slowly on paper, people took an active interest in the science, process and product of infrastructure building.
Today that basic aging infrastructure is in place, we enjoy our electronic gadgets, expect electricity to arrive, wait for good things to happen. We expect our politicians to be generally informed about emerging technologies (they aren't, really) and we expect smart money to go after smart ideas in the marketplace (it does not, always).
You cannot expect the people who have invested so much in water cooled nuclear reactors to drop everything and work up completely new designs. They're not doing it! With LFTR they cannot sell their solid-fuel solutions. Which is not to say that they are incapable of adapting. But why should they? So long as LFTR is not a household word their mindset need not change.
You cannot expect environmentally conscious people who are (rightfully!) afraid of Chernobyl happening in their backyard to understand how different LFTR is at first. They must be pointed in the right direction, encouraged to research it on their own.
You cannot expect big philanthropist money to deliver miracles either in any reasonable time frame. Bill Gates is backing Travelling Wave Reactors, a type of Integral Fast Reactor that is cooled by (dangerous!) liquid sodium. It is the right idea (nuclear) wrong horse (approach) but he just does not know it yet.
But the biggest issue here is the urgency with which this idea needs to be pursued. These things need to be funded --- through your active interest and by mentioning it to at least two other people. At least ten thousand people from all walks of life (such as you) need to devote a little bit of time to get up to speed on this technology.
I nominate you! I am no real expert on the subject, I've only recently begun to research LFTR and in the material available on the net I see the idea proposed directly and succinctly five years ago, but so little has happened since then... well, it's shameful. I used to assume that good things just happen. They don't. A real eye opener.
So I am reaching out to you. It begins right here: Thorium Remix 2011
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It's not that hard to build a reactor that can't melt down at all.
Fukushima, in short, has cesium contamination like Chernobyl (because cesium is volatile at low temperatures) but basically none of the heavy isotope contamination. So we can fast forward about 20 years on the recovery (virtually the entire open-air dose rate near Chernobyl is now Cesium decay). So while the radiation levels at Chernobyl have decreased from lethal to sorta-dangerous relatively quickly, it will still be another 120 years or so until they go from sorta-dangerous to pretty-much-not-dangerous.
Personally, I'd guess that around 2040 (one more Cs half-life) enough of the radiation from both Chernobyl and Fukushima will be gone, either truly due to decay or apparently by diffusing into the ground away from the surface, that there will be significant human return to much of the exclusion zones, although monitoring will have to be ongoing for a long time.
In defense of "bury it," the sarcophagus at Chernobyl was built using late-Soviet era materials, under unbelievable constraints of time and construction difficulty. You try "doing it right" when your welders can literally work for about 15 minutes before they have to leave and never return, building structurally sound walls to support your dome is impossible, and all while knowing that every single vehicle and piece of equipment you bring in will have to be abandoned and left to rot because it's now Contaminated.
Any sarcophagus built at Fukushima will be as if construction at Chernobyl were to begin today: "This area is somewhat contaminated. Mind your dosimeter, wear your protective clothes, take a shower after every shift and don't lick your tools and you'll be fine. Oh, and smile for the tourists."
| will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
A LFTR is a chemical reprocessing plant with astonishingly racdioactive liquid (since it just came out of the fission core) circulating at hundreds of degrees with caustic chemical properties. There will be leaks. There will be breaches. Every drop is a huge problem. There will be----well anything that can go wrong in a hot chemical plant---now add in the fact that humans even in suits can't go in there for decades if something is wrong.
Nuclear reprocessing plants are the nastiest ones, because of the combination of liquids and radiaoactivity. I do not trust a utility with such an installation, and only want a tiny number of them, not every power plant to be one.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
I cannot much that isn't covered in Kaitiff's reply to your concern last December --- aside from pointing out we're talking about fluoride not sodium salts.
Even the most complicated designs for LFTR are simple at the bottom. Drains in the containment floor after a pipe rupture --- or at shutdown through a melted freeze plug, the liquid comes to rest in a vessel where it is already sub-critical.
Yes it's temperature-hot, for awhile. While the salts are not chemically reactive with water (or air), as long as they are hot water will flash to steam. This is days, perhaps.
The steam risk for an active or recently-dumped reactor would be related to how much water intrudes.
This industrial process like many must be sensibly contained and kept away from water. Fukushima had generators in a basement without water-tight doors. A superior level of engineering is called for. Shouldn't be too hard.
Water solubility is another matter, you're right. Actual residual waste from normal LFTR operation is extremely small in volume compared to waste from water reactors, and should be vitrified into glass for storage. Here is another area where LFTR shines, for it would take ~300 years to decay to the harmless level of natural uranium. Small volumes of 300-year waste in glass is a can-do solution..
But would the temperature-cold solidified salts abandoned in a concrete and steel LFTR drain tank pose a threat to the water table, soil?
Eventually, slightly. Does that seem like an uncomfortable answer?
Often discussions of nuclear accidents take on some "Life After People" flavor, where the person posing the challenge to waste (or disaster!) management seems to get free license to presume no attempt at cleanup or rescue.
I challenge that license. A position of zero tolerance for risk, especially for existential issues such as energy, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Especially when it comes to the due diligence we should bring to bear to assess new technology. I hope you can agree with that, because we are all so dependent on this modern way of life. It has its good moments.
At Chernobyl radioactive graphite presented a horrible challenge, to be near certain places is deadly.
Radioactivity from fissile elements in LFTR materials will be uniform (completely mixed as liquids are) and relatively low dose, predictable in characteristic and risk. There will be no danger of 'hot pockets' and unknowns as those which plague Chernobyl and Pripyat today.
Because it's just glop in a large bucket. It will stay in the bucket, and regardless of the nature of the mishap the glop will not explode all over the biosphere or fission forever. It will wait patiently until people clean it up and recycle the useable salts into other reactors.
This is "Life With People". We should always keep our thoughts centered on that because life is fun and people are cool.
Check out this documentary on George Westinghouse to glimpse what it was like when we were building infrastructure. Then please help give Thorium the chance it deserves.
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1) Have you noticed the huge amount of solar and wind generation capacity installed in your country recently?
2) Have you noticed the annual 30-40% drop rate of solar panel prices?
3) Have you noticed the upcoming grid-scale storage developments (e.g.: GE's Durathon) which are nearing mass production?
I would say that the US grid will look VERY DIFFERENT in 20 years time whether anyone there like/want it or not. Renewables will simply kill fossil/nuclear based generation once adequate grid-scale storage solutions are deployed (which is not far ahead, see no 3).
Hit by a fricking wall of water several times larger than anybody had ever planned for and if it weren't for the fact that they put the generators in the basement there is a good chance it wouldn't have had an accident at all?
Yeah I'd call that pretty damned good, especially when our choices are that or burning fossil fuels..no renewables will NOT cut it, even the most pie in the sky estimates won't give us even 30% of the energy we are using NOW, much less give us jack shit for growth.
Does that mean we shouldn't build safer nuclear plants? Or sink money into R&D on renewables? Of course not, in fact I think we should be sinking more money into both instead of blowing cash playing the world's policeman, but you have to face reality and the reality is unless you are gonna wipe out a good 70% of the population on planet earth you are gonna need power and so far we haven't come up with anything that fills that need as good as nuclear.
Of course that is ignoring the fact that the USA has been crippled by the NIMBYs, you name it they cockblock it, in fact China will have a couple of dozen plants built before we can even get a single one built thanks to the NIMBYs. You name the source NIMBYs will find a reason to bitch, nuclear? "It'll make us glow in the dark ZOMG!" hydro? "ZOMG you'll kill teh fishes!" wind? "ZOMG its noisy and you'll kill teh birds!" and so on and so on. This is why I actually enjoyed watching California suffer their "energy crisis" and get buttraped by Enron because they have more NIMBYs per square mile than any place on the planet. I mean where do the NIMBYs think all that power they are blowing on their little laptops and AC units is gonna come from if they don't allow any plants to be built? Its just gonna be dropped by the power fairy?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The whole "being inhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years" means that you have extremely large amounts of something that is stable enough to be safe to handle.
It depends a lot on the contaminant. Something like tritium is a problem, for example, because it has a relatively short half life, but it will bond to oxygen and form water and if you drink it then it can cause serious problems. Radon gas is also a problem (present in a lot of places with granite) because it is heavier than air and so accumulates in any enclosed space: if you breathe it in then it is quite dangerous.
There's also the problem that a lot of the byproducts of a nuclear reactor are only mildly radioactive, but highly toxic for other reasons. The low decay rate means that they remain toxic chemicals for a long time. On the other hand, this isn't too different from any other chemical plant if there's an accident.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It wasn't due to proliferation risk, it was cost. All the LSFR reactors ever built were research testbeds and experienced major problems. None ever recycled fuel successfully in the way that would be needed for them to be commercially viable.
The cost of development would be huge and the potential risks to the ROI are worrying to investors. It would make sense for the government to try to build one, if it were able to see beyond the next election or two and didn't have better options like renewables and fusion to throw money at.
These things are just not commercially viable I'm afraid.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oh, I don't doubt that they could do a better job(both because it isn't as hot, and because we probably now have access to robots that are even more radiation tolerant than soviet conscripts...); but the sarcophagus is just the most notable example of the fact that actually encapsulating something properly(so that it doesn't just keep bleeding contaminated rainwater forever) gets surprisingly tricky if you have to build the enclosure under radiation constraints, and you can't necessarily just send in a maintenance guy whenever you feel like it.
Given the number of "TEPCO reluctantly announces that local seawater radiation levels suggest that they've got another leak, they just have no idea where" stories, I'm less than 100% optimistic about their ability to encapsulate something for long term storage, though the conditions are certainly more favorable than Chernobyl.
French ones actually do when the temperatures get into the mid 30s. A few summers ago they had to shut a load down and dump hot water into rivers (killing the fish living there) when ambient temperatures got too high and the cooling systems were unable to cope.
Keep in mind the French are supposed to have the best and safest nuclear plants in the world, but apparently forgot to account for warm weather.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Except that when you buy a Prius, you're probably throwing away a perfectly serviceable vehicle. What's the environmental cost of that?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Fukushima is not done yet. While it is true that the chain reactions have stopped, there is sufficient decay heat being generated that managing its festering corpse is an on-going problem: structures are continuing to deform and fuel rods may still be rupturing. The potential for steam or chemical explosions capable of breaching the containment is still there. And might be for decades. No one has any experience in handling a zombie nuclear plant.
Persons who read only the simplified nuclear industry reports and analyses are neglecting the incredibly complex chemical problems that are happening in that environment of intense heat and multiple reactants, many of which have behaviors under those conditions that have never been explored in the laboratory. You could write a book about the chemistry happening in a candle's flame; what is going on in Fukushima is much more complex than that.
Hell, we don't even know how to handle the canned waste at Hanford; we don't even know how to figure out what is going on in those tanks. Fukushima is many times more complex than that.
Will