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Fukushima Leak Traced To Overflow Tank Built On a Slope
AmiMoJo writes "The ongoing leak of radioactive wastewater at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been traced to an overflow tank that was built on a slope. Because one side of the tank is lower than the other, water slops over the side when it is nearly full. TEPCO estimates that 430 litres of wastewater seeped outside the barrier around the tank and say some of this water may have flowed into the sea, about 200 meters away. They detected 200,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances in water pooled inside the barrier around the tank. The safety limit is 30 becquerels per liter. Officials say that a miscommunication with contractors led to the blunder."
So they can't even manage a level holding tank and they are allowed to keep managing this clean up?
How is this level of incompetence possible?
Does Japan lack the technology to build level storage tanks? Or to inscribe a maximum fill line in the tank otherwise?
They should have hired Hank Hill to put it in. The could have told him it was a septic tank. It would have been perfect and had a lawn over it.
It was 430 liters of wastewater with a comparatively low radiation level(0.2kBq, for nuclear medicine image studies you're counting mega-Bq and you're injecting it, for radionuclide therapy you're up in high and wild GBq numbers). So yes indeed no worries, really.
Regarding the safety limit of 30 becquerel: that's two banana equivalent doses, meaning that a banana shake can exceed the safety limit. And 6 million bananas being equivalent to the total leaked value.
Vanguely reminiscent of Titanic's "watertight" compartments, which were watertight at the SIDES, but open at the TOP. I believe it was "unsinkable" in some technical understanding of the word. That is, a localized hull breach that filled only one compartment would not have sunk the ship. But water could spill from one compartment to another when the ship was tilted, and thus the entry of water was not confined to the compartments where the leak was. Or something like that...
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Vanguely reminiscent of Titanic's "watertight" compartments, which were watertight at the SIDES, but open at the TOP.
That is a reasonable design when you look at the tradeoffs. Titantic had 16 compartments, and could withstand up to four being breached at either the bow or stern, and even more could be breached amidship (where they would not cause much tilt). The problem is that five were breached, all at the bow. This was a "worst case" scenario. Even then, they may have been able to save the ship if they reacted quickly, by flooding the last compartment aft. That would have helped to balance the ship. But by the time the captain realized the full extent of the damage, the bow was sinking, the stern was rising, and it was too late.
What's funny here is that this is just beta-ray radiation, which is more penetrating ionizing radiation than alpha-ray radiation... made of electrons.
In short: the best way to handle this is to slowly dump it into the sea. Not kidding. That would solve the problem. the impact would be uh... ... nothing. You'd have a few extra electrons here and there and that's it; I mean yeah you don't want to just unload all of this in one spot in one shot, it would be kind of shitty there for a few hours (possibly not really important), but overall this is going to dilute and emit not-very-scary electricity.
Now tell me what is emitting those beta-rays. Is it plutonium? We don't want plutonium in the ocean. Oh, wait, plutonium emits neutron radiation, so that's not it. Unless this is beta-ray radiation from the decay of neptunium into plutonium, which would be bad--and would make sense, since the water is probably filled with depleted uranium.
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I question if gazillions of gallons of oil gushing into the ocean all at once is more or less bad than a little plutonium.
I go with more bad.
Plutonium is pretty fucking toxic.
If you breathe it in under ideal conditions. Most sea life doesn't have lungs, the plutonium would all be chemically bounded up as salts or other compounds, the whole mess would be greatly diluted, and there wasn't much in the way of plutonium anyway - they're far more worried about radioactive isotopes of cesium or strontium.
Have you ever heard of "bio-accumulation"? It's a process where e.g. a growing child drinks so much milk or eats so much fish, that part of the resulting Calcium intake can be used to grow her skeleton. Like the bits around her bone marrow. Where the blood cells are made. For the rest of her life (well, there is probably some replacement; one Calcium atom is as good as any other).
If you look at the periodic table, Sr is one below Ca. Beta radiation may not be very penetrating outside your skin, but you wouldn't want the source to be inside your bones, irradiating your marrow.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
The limit is 30 becquerels per litre for beta radiation emissions. The potassium level in your body also remains fairly constant, so you will only have an elevated level for a few hours until it passes out. The stuff in this water can sit inside you indefinitely. Becquerels are an absolute measure of radiation, where as "banana equivalent dose" is supposed to be an "equivalent dose" based on how much harm it does the body and is not in any way directly comparable.
Obviously the people who set these limits are not morons, they understand that it is perfectly safe to eat a banana or two. In any case, the level in this water is 200,000 becquerels per litre.
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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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IIRC, there was a show I watched on the sinking that took the premise of counterflooding and tested it. They built a scale model, and they were able to fairly accurately recreate the actual sinking, without counterflooding. They then tested what would have happened if they had counterflooded the ship to maintain its trim. Counterintuitively, the ship actually sank faster with counterflooding. I think they explained it by showing that while the out of trim condition contributed to the "ice cube tray" phenomenon that finally sank the ship, the counterflooding would not stop that. It wouldn't even slow it down. With the flooding in the bow from the strike of the glacier, combined with the negative buoyancy of the counterflooded aft, the ship was so low in the water at that point, it allowed the compartments aft of the comprised compartments to fill the adjacent compartments even faster, while the ship was now that much closer to sinking due to the negative buoyancy of the counterflooded aft. They also explored the stability of the ship in such a condition. They found that the ship became unstable laterally, and thus it would have risked a capsize as well. Overall, it was better not to counterflood.
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430 liters is about 2x 55 gallon drums. It's nothing. The level of radioactivity is also rather low; 200kBq is literally 200,000 decay events per liter. A 7' long granite counter top radiates over 100kBq into your food.
This is small and inconsequential. That it was even noticed is outstanding. The fact that the media has hysterical people like you in a lather is SOP.
Don't worry; the hype has had the intended effect; the idiots are convinced TEPCO is destroying the planet. Yurts and Hobby Farms Now!!!11 herp derp.
The fact that they're wasting resources to store water this clean is tragic. It should be pumped to the bottom of some ocean trench and the resources wasted storing it should be spent on useful work recovering the cores, spent fuel, etc. Instead, they're carpeting the area with water tanks in a monumentally stupid act of Nuclear Theater.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
all the other TEPCO blunders..
...are almost all the same sort of media hype designed to feed the prefered narrative of sheeple like you.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!