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Japanese Ice Wall To Stop Reactor Leaks
minstrelmike writes "Japan is planning to install a two-mile, subterranean ice wall around the Fukushima nuclear plant. 'The ice wall would freeze the ground to a depth of up to 30 meters (100 feet) through a system of pipes carrying a coolant as cold as minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit). That would block contaminated water from escaping from the facility's immediate surroundings, as well as keep underground water from entering the reactor and turbine buildings, where much of the radioactive water has collected.' The technology they're using has not been used to that extent before, nor for more than a couple years. An underground water expert said, 'the frozen wall won't be ready for another two years, which means contaminated water would continue to leak out.' But at least they have a $470 million plan ready to present to the Olympic committee choosing between Madrid, Istanbul or Tokyo."
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Will there be a semi-monastic order of warriors pledged to man it and protect the realms of men?
minus 40 degrees Celsius != (minus 40 Fahrenheit)
Really? A wall, when you're not spending time to actually remove the fuel, which is the recommended (but more expensive in the short term) procedure?
I don't understand why so many nations are trying to reach a consensus on military action in Syria over a chemical weapon attack that may or may not have been done by the regime there but nobody has suggested multi-national cooperation to take over the mess in Fukushima. Japan has failed miserably at dealing with this crisis and continues to do so. It's time to tell them to get the fuck out of the way and bring world-wide resources to bear on this. The UN should be bringing countries together to solve problems like this.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Turn in your geek card.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...with laser beams. Lots of robotic submarines and other stuff so that I can build my super villain lair in there where no one will find me shielded by a huge lead wall to keep out the radiation.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
-40 Celsius IS equal to -40 Fahrenheit.
We don't need no radiation
We don't need no Tepcontrol
No dark sarcasm in the controlroom
Tepco leave them rods alone
Hey! Tepco! leave the rods alone!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
... build a wall around it. I seriously hope, that the spent fuel pools don't need to live through another earthquake.
Invest in offshore wind power and water power.
It might sound silly, but it is much more cost effective than nuclear power.
Look at how much damage the Fukushima has already cost TEPCO and the Japanese government.
And it is not over yet: Fukushima's Radioactive Plume Could Reach U.S. Waters By 2014
Everybody get are "fair" share.
Just one of these accidents every twenty years and it is goodbye turnover.
Radiant Orange!
So, how soluble is the iodine in ice? As the temperature goes down, doesn't the solubility? Will this induce emission of vaporous radioactive iodine?
What about cesium? Particles of cesium will be hot, right? Won't they selectively migrate through a wall like this?
Disclaimer: the previous sentences were all questions.
minus 40 degrees Celsius != (minus 40 Fahrenheit)
I was going to make a snarky comment thanking them for the conversion, but I guess it was needed! -40F does equal -40C.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Right?
Tis where the two meet. I'm guessing the conversion was included just to show off that fact (and maybe see who would assume it was a typo).
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Why has no one discuss the reason that the good old concrete injection would not do the trick. We have the drilling technology and the injection technology at our disposal, both prove to be highly efficient. Are there issues we don't know about? Also I think the cost estimate seems to be too low.
A giant wall of ice? Where have I seen that before?
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Seriously, this is high school stuff here guys. The conversion formula (F to C) is:
F = (9/5)*C + 32
@ -40 C...
F(-40) = (9/5)*(-40) + 32
F(-40) = -72 + 32
F(-40) = -40
If you want it in reverse (C to F), the formula is:
C = (5/9)*(F - 32)
@ -40 F...
C(-40) = (5/9)*(-40 - 32)
C(-40) = (5/9)*(-72)
C(-40) = -40
Oh and if you were all trolling, it was moderately effective.
The prohibition on armed forces is written into Article 9 the Japanese Constitution of 1947, which states that Japan forever swears off war as a mechanism of foreign policy to resolve disputes. This was an article that was pressed in in order to ensure that Japan could never rise up militarily again - the Pacific campaign was incredibly brutal, and the Americans didn't see the worst of it (the Chinese and Koreans were treated worse). To this day China and both Korea's are still angry with Japan for what they perceive as a failure to sufficiently apologize for what the Japanese did earlier this century, and they would massively oppose any move by Japan towards returning to that state (i.e., getting a real military instead of the Self-Defense Forces they currently have).
Plus, the majority of the Japanese population supports Article 9 - the long-term suffering of the Japanese population via Allied air raids (read about the Tokyo firebombings that killed more people directly than the A-bomb attacks) punctuated by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has provided an inherent anti-war sentiment in subsequent generations of Japanese people.
In short, the US cannot decide for Japan whether to allow them to have an actual military - the US does not have the legal power to do so, and no one involved wants to eliminate this situation. (copy pasted from Yahoo)
The long;
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/89apr/defend.htm
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Some icehole will be responsible for leaking radioactive water.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
It seems like there are many reasons why this won't work. Why are they trying to beat this thing thermally? It seems unsustainable at the outset, in terms of cost and maintenance, let alone whether it will work in terms of mechanics and chemistry. If it's such a grand scheme that it's projected two years out, maybe the assumption should be that it's too complicated for Tepco to handle and/or it's too complicated for the delicate situation on the ground at Fukushima (where what integrity exists seem to be falling apart quickly).
And though it seems like Tepco and Japan have been a bit incompetent in handling things like disclosure, responsibility, approach, and honesty, it probably will never happen that Japan will be elbowed out of the way by any outside agency, including the UN. Japan still has Tepco on the ground at Fukushima because it's Tepco's problem and potentially Tepco's fault. It's much easier to keep the blame-monster fully enclosed in one cheap and effective enclosure than to spread its infection to numerous other parties. If Tepco fails, Japan can blame them because nobody else has had a hand in it. If Tepco moves out of the way and lets the Japanese government handle it, then Tepco can be dispatched for being incompetent, and potentially all of their resources and assets can be liquidated toward the effort. Having a third party involved make it a potentially stickier situation with less decisive consequences and less narrow goals and demands to be met.
You can take that relationship and expand on it to see why it is almost a bad idea to step in from outside of Japan. If radioactive plumes reach California and nobody has been involved but Japan and Tepco, then who can be blamed? Only Japan and only Tepco. If it has become an international effort involving Russians ... no, bad idea ... involving some engineers from somewhere (?) then that at worst leaves us with even more parties to blame and, potentially, even more duplicity along the way while at best it leaves us with a sort of muddied water where feel-good "we're all in this together" has completely erased the instinct to place blame. Without the prospect of blame and consequences, you get foot-dragging and indecisiveness which all the bleeding hearts in the world won't drag out of lethargy.
You can say that the real-world, radio and chemical consequences should be enough to push us all to shove those competitive instincts out of the way but I personally don't think that will ever happen.
As some have pointed out, Fukushima isn't even a talking point. Grand standing and chest-beating over an obviously snafu situation where major news reporting more closely resembles yellow journalism than actual information and where the politically accused party is being accused by those with vested interests in that party's failure who've made this accusation and failed before, is the call of the day.
I'm sure the level of sardonic "irony" so prevalent in global culture today is enough that most people can understand why Japan will be left to figure this out on their own until they ask for help, and why at which point any countries expected to help will have to be dragged out of bed kicking and screaming by citizens "blowing whistles" about irradiation before any semblance of effort is really shown.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
As I recall, the water tanks were the leaky part, not the reactor. Or am I just being pedantic?
Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-death-toll-985-000-mostly-from-cancer/20908
we can dance around the word "proven", but deaths there certainly have been.
What's really dumb is that you could have made your point without including that stupid statement as your first paragraph. Fossil fuels are currently killing people in fairly large number and have the potential, through climate change, to kill millions. Nuclear accidents are killing people, but improved technologies have the potential to limit this and nuclear power need not be "dirty" in normal use. None of that means we should decrease our investments in renewables.
Nuclear winter is coming? :/
Presumably the efficiency of the chiller drops and the ice starts to melt (one presumes relatively slowly; because it's mostly insulated by being underground and water has a pretty high enthalpy of fusion) until they stop fucking up and fix the leak.
It's big and expensive(and it wouldn't totally surprise me if 'lots of vertical tubes running deep into the ground' is not a fun thing to have to maintain in earthquakeville); but the coolant is unlikely to become substantially contaminated, and virtually all contemporary refrigerants aren't particularly scary(ammonia's not fun, most of the rest are just suffocation risks).
Can ice be hot and cold at the same time?
Quote Lex Luthor: WRONG!!!
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=-40C+in+Farenheit
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Over here in The Netherlands our soil is rather soft and soggy yet we manage (at a cost) to build subway and other tunnels.
Freezing of the surrounding soil untill the concrete is well in place is a common technology.
It's done with liquid Nitrogen that's trucked in from existing factories, once a sizeable chunk of soil is frozen it can withstand a few days without additional Nitrogen.
There's a reason I suggested this option: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4125869&cid=44665565, I'm glad the Japanese read Slashdot :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
They are the same temperature. That is the crossover point of the two scales: (-40C * 9/5) + 32 == -40F
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
As I mentioned in another post they'll likely use liquid Nitrogen as a coolant, something that works fine even from cracked pipes.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
In Boston, for parts of the Big Dig in the Back Bay area, this was how the tunneling was done. The ground there is far too soupy (that's a technical term used by geologists) to tunnel through effectively. They ran water with an antifreeze agent (just salt I think) through the pipes and kept it chilled below the freezing point of regular water. Over time it froze the ground in the whole area so they could tunnel in it and reinforce the tunnel before finally allowing the ground to thaw. It seems to have worked just fine for Boston.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
That death toll is completely bunk. It fails even the most basic mathematical analysis.
Chernobyl, the city, had approximately 50,000 people living there. Chernobyl was also emptied out after the disaster.
The 985,000 figure comes from extrapolating the LNT model way beyond parameters it was formulated for. Basically, the 985,000 only makes sense if you ascribed any death that happened to people exposed to Chernobyl radiation to the effects of the radiation.
And globalresearch.ca is not exactly the bastion of scientific research either. Their limited understanding of radioactivity shows in the article. They claim that the fact that the radioactive materials with a half life of 200,000 years means the affected area will remain radioactive "practically forever". Blimey, the longer the half-life, the less radioactive. I am not a physicist, but even I understand the score there.
But most importantly, the "study" was commissioned by Greanpeace, who, in my opinion, are a bunch of well meaning but ultimately uninformed nutters.
??? It DOES
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I'm not sure we can trust you crazy Dutch about infrastructure questions... You have this freaky habit of consistently, sometimes for several centuries at a time, actually acting as though 'vital infrastructure' is something that should be carefully maintained and cared for, even when just slapping some duct tape on it and leaving it for the next guy to deal with would be cheaper in the short term... That's just so sensible and consistently virtuous that it makes me nervous.
That number is almost certainly crap. But to suggest that the number is zero is also crap. Thirty people died from acute radiation poisoning during the Chernobyl clean-up. You can say all you want to that "Nuclear accidents have not been proven to have killed a single person," but only if you can show a plausible way for them to have gotten acute radiation poisoning without it having been caused by the accident.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Nuclear accidents have not been proven to have killed a single person.
Not a single person. Not a one? I mean, if you had led with "the numbers are vastly inflated," and then provided a supporting link debunking the inflated estimated cancer statistics, you would have sounded reasonable -- though a bit biased in being willing to accept similar loose causation for deaths from coal. Instead, you have revealed yourself as someone who is willing to disregard facts that are inconvenient to your worldview, regardless of how ridiculous the end result may seem.
At least 40 staff members and rescue workers died directly as a result of Chernobyl. 4 died in a tragic helicopter crash attempting to extinguish the fire, but the vast majority died with in a few days or months from acute radiation poisoning. That's just the people on site during the disaster and its aftermath. It doesn't count the 9 children who died of thyroid cancer or the IAEA's estimate of 4000 additional cancer deaths out of 600,000 exposed.
That also doesn't count the Soviet K-431, K-27, and K-19 nuclear submarine reactor incidents (28 acute radiation fatalities and many more radiation injuries between them) or the two radiation deaths in Tokimura in 1999. It also doesn't count non-radiation deaths like the Mihama steam pipe explosion that kill 4 workers in 2004 or the 3 killed by the SL-1 reactor explosion. It doesn't count cancer deaths from those and more incidents such as the Windscale fire or those caused by the Rocky Flats Plant (which, admittedly, was used to create bomb materials and not simply civilian power generation).
One can argue about whether coal is more dangerous in the long-run than nuclear (which I think is true), but one shouldn't do so by making up nonsense about nuclear accidents never once causing harm.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Frozen ground is only waterproof if there are no holes. Frost heaves tend to break up the ground and make holes. The ideal solution is to make new containment ponds and move the radioactive stuff to that.
Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-death-toll-985-000-mostly-from-cancer/20908
between 1986 and 2004
All studies done on cleanup workers showed average percentage of cancer deaths to be same as for example in the US in the same period = there was no significant bump over a large population
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
1 - How long will the melted down core remnants needs to water to be applied? Can the corium still sustain a nuclear chain reaction if it were exposed?
2 - Whats would occur if water were interrupted at this point? (They called it cold shutdown a year ago but sources seem to conflict)
3 - How long will water need to be applied to the spent fuel ponds? From my understanding the fuel above reactor 4 is somewhat precarious since the building was compromised during the original explosions. Would these fuel rods ignite without water? Is there a real criticality danger if removal does not go exactly as planned? (Wikipedia seems to say criticality in fuel pools is a low-probability event under normal conditions)
4 - Whats your worst case scenario?
Just trying to find some basic scientific answers here, hoping someone can provide insight.
They contain the radioactive ground water with an ice wall. When do they turn it off? When the radiation decays? If they turn it off sooner, all the built up contaminated water will just leak through again.
Agree that the number is not zero. I was only objecting to the 985,000 number. I know WHO's estimates a number in the low thousands, like 4,000 or so, and that I can believe and accept. I remember seeing a Ted talk where someone added the death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the nuclear power deaths total because it was almost undistinguishable from zero. It really grinds my gears when people take advantage of people's ignorance to peddles lies masquerading as scientific facts.
I think there is an argument to be had about nuclear power based on facts, and I can accept that people may come to a conclusion that is different from mine.
So are they going to build another nuclear power plant to generate the power for this giant refrigerator??
Brace yourself, leakage is coming
No studies have been able to point to a direct link between Chernobyl and increased cancer risks or other health problems outside the immediately affected republics of Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation.
My main point, that using exaggerated claims to make a point weakens, rather than strengthens your argument, remains.
Base PUBLIC SAFETY DECISIONS on meaningless sports spectacles!!! GENIUS!
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I didnt say there was no effect. I said cancer rates rose insignificantly compared to the rest of the planet.
Did people die? yes. Did people die at same rates in other parts of the globe without radiation effects from the Chernobyl? YES.
All in all effects of Chernobyl are meaningless compared to car accident death toll.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
SL-1 was the incident that pinned one guy to the ceiling, impaled. Doesn't get much more direct than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Is there a better link than DenverPost?
Conveyer-belt animated right-column ads aren't my thing. Nor popups.
And the page loads to blank if you block.
I think if we pitched to them the idea of forming an international super soldier team, give them all different colours and their own robotic animals.... we might have a chance of convincing them to form a huge mecharobot to solve the crisis.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
It definitely gets below -40 here (not including windchill) on occasion. Not a very good time.
I guess the record here was -51 (-60F),
record windchill was -60 (-76F)
brrr
Sent from my PDP-11
Where I live +40C is a moderately hot summers day. It's when it tops 45C that I really start having trouble.
OK, personally, I start having trouble over about 37C, but we've had temperatures up to about 48C in recent years (Black Saturday fires).
We don't see a whole lot lower than -5C around here.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I would have added a (coincidentally) into the summary at that point to make people double check before posting that the conversion was wrong.
My question about this plan is how does it stop the water from leaking out the bottom. If they are making a vertical ice wall around the reactor then it does not have a bottom. Wouldn't the radioactive water from the core or the storage tanks that leaks out just seep into the ground and continue to sink until it goes under the wall? It might slow the flow down as you don't have a lot of new groundwater rushing into the area washing the radioactive leaks away. But it seems to be ineffective in the end and just another example of what we have seen from TEPCO through this whole fiasco.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
So they obviously picked this temperature because it is Zen in both measuring standards.