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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)
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?
-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"
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!
Problem is that the groundwater naturally flowing through the site appears to be flowing through the cracked foundations. The reactor cores in two, if not three, of those reactors are a pile of slag sitting in the bottom of the containment building. They continue to flush cooling water through the containment, in spite of the perforated reactor vessels and cracked containment building foundations. Some of this water is unnaccounted for -- more goes in than comes out in at least one reactor -- so clearly it's entering the ground. In addition, the leaks from the tanks are contaminating the groundwater stream(s). What they're trying to do is stop the movement of groundwater through the site.
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"
Quote Lex Luthor: WRONG!!!
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=-40C+in+Farenheit
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They both leak: the integrity of the reactor vessel is Not So Good these days; but it's still overheating so they are pumping water in and pumping whatever doesn't leak into the ground into the holding tanks, which are also leaking.
The tanks are more of a tragifarce, since they've got that 'You run nuclear fucking reactors and you weren't able to build some water storage tanks that don't leak within an alarmingly short time after construction???' thing going on, and the radiation levels of the leaking material are high enough that just sending in the welders isn't necessarily doable.
The reactor leakage is the more serious problem; because those are hot enough, thermally and in the radiation sense, that just fixing the leaks is not really on the table; but not pumping substantial amounts of water, which will promptly be contaminated and partially escape, isn't really optional.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no such thing as -500C, as it would violate the laws of physics.