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Japan To Create a Nuclear Meltdown
Taco Cowboy writes "Japanese researchers are planning an experiment to better understand what transpires during a nuclear meltdown by attempting to create a controlled nuclear meltdown. Using a scaled down version of a nuclear reactor — essentially a meter long stainless steel container — the experiment will involve the insertion of a foot long (30 cm) nuclear fuel rod, starting the fission process, and then draining the coolant. The experiment is scheduled to take place later this year."
What could possibly go wrong?
By the way, didn't they have to hand in their license to do nuclear stuff already?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Carry on, Japan.
Meep.
I mean, didn't they see all those Godzilla movies?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Can't wait for this mini meltdown to lead to its inevitable ultimate conclusion: MiniGodzilla!
It seems so obvious to me now, having seen the idea in print. This is not the sort of thing that is easy to analyze. A test is really a good way to understand the phenomenon. The paradigm where engineers attempt to make sure it never happens has its limits. Looking at what happens during the failure will allow engineers to develop meaningful "defense in depth" measures.
Regards,
Jason C. Wells
Old news
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_of_nuclear_fuel_during_a_reactor_accident#PHEBUS
>In France a facility exists in which a fuel melting incident can be made to happen under strictly controlled conditions.
I set off scaled explosions and controlled fires all the time. So do you. We usually call them "fireworks".
Sensationalism.
Just give it a little time folks. You will have your answer just like the rest of the world, only sooner.
My cynical mind conjures up images of concerned scientist speculating on the future of Fukushima.
Personally, I speculate what would happen to Japan if they lost control of the situation at Fukushima.
"Given that nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that an earthquake of 7.0 or larger could cause the entire fuel pool structure collapse, it is urgent that everything humanly possible is done to stabilize the structure housing the fuel pools at reactor number 4."
And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Gundersen#Fukushima
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Are they going to do this in already contaminated areas, or are they going to potentially screw up some new place?
It's not unreasonable to want to know more from a scientific standpoint, but hopefully someone is asking "what if this goes worse than expected?"
Hmm, contractors lie about it and do a crap job and the government lies about it and does a crap job. That's what my simulation of a Japanese nuclear meltdown resulted in.
Don't they have an open-air experiment going on already? Just take a day trip to Fukushima.
They need to make sure they do this somewhere where if it all goes wrong, nothing of value is lost, like maybe Croydon.
The situation with the imports of coal and oil / gas is not sustainable.
Renewable sources are part of it, but they do not have the energy density for baseload required to run a modern society. Japan is a nation with limited resources. Their power options are limited. Import of power from neighbors isn't a great long term move for sovereignty.
This puts them between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. Mark my words though, those reactors will be fired up, because they need to be. They should build more.
The scale of the amount of energy consumed by modern civilization is head-spinning. Nuclear is our only real option. Existing technologies should be deployed, and new ones researched. No politician in the west has the balls to do that, so we're going to burn every drop of oil instead, largely because nobody ever looks at the numbers and amount of energy required. (I however, did.)
Thankfully, China may save us.
I just hope the nuclear option picked isn't the one with the warheads. That will fix the problem too. There is some quality black humor and irony there.
..don't panic
It's possible that because of some failure, their test reactor does not melt down.
Alas.. nobody remembers the Gargantua movie as well as the ToHo Frankenstein movie. Those were much better than any of the Godzilla flicks. We have monsters eating humans, when did Godzilla or any of his other frenemies do that?!?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Is this the birth of Godzilla ?
first, they have three meltdowns because they can't get things right in the face of a storm. now, the Japanese seek a meltdown just... because. those Ninjas have the curiosity of a 3 year old...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yes, but they didn't create that disaster on purpose. The scientists want a disaster that they created. Probably to gain entrence to the evil league of evil.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If it's controlled, it's not really a meltdown, is it?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Better yet, use nuclear power designs that can't melt down to matter what. Plenty of them. Still, more knowledge on a subject is almost always a good thing. SCIENCE!
holy crap, next you're gonna be blathering about non-existent sequels to "The Matrix", "Highlander" or Star Wars prequels.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When considering fissionable materials they better get their destructive testing planning right the first time. I don't think they'll get another chance to repeat it. Much like the NASA/FAA crashing the Boeing 707 (720) in 1984 to anti-misting agent in the fuel.. Unfortunately the plane didn't land as they had planned but ultimately it showed that the anti-misting agent didn't work but because of smoke, they estimated that only about 23%-25% of the 113 passengers would have survived.
As a result of analysis of the crash, the FAA instituted new flammability standards for seat cushions which required the use of fire-blocking layers, resulting in seats which performed better than those in the test. It also implemented a standard requiring floor proximity lighting to be mechanically fastened, due to the apparent detachment of two types of adhesive-fastened emergency lights during the impact. Federal aviation regulations for flight data recorder sampling rates for pitch, roll and acceleration were found to be insufficient.
So out of a somewhat failed test good things were learned. So let's hope these guys learn something rather than irradiating more of Japan unnecessarily.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That sounds like a worst case scenario to me, at least in the scope of a single experiment. Rinse, repeat, SCIENCE!!!!
I seem to recall a story about some place in Russia that just had to simulate a "worst case" scenario. Something about the machines safe guards to prevent the very scenario they were trying to cause forced them to dismantle a significant portion. I think something important happened. Maybe one of these researches could look it up, and explain why this isn't a similar stupid procedure.
guess that means we can blame chernobyl and fukushima on the damn environmentalists
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
What have you not done?
Damn you! Damn you to hell!
I am not a nuclear physicist, so I really don't know the answer to this. Hasn't a controlled meltdown been done in a lab experiment before though? If so, what is different with this one in comparison to past experiments?
It certainly sounds useful - if for no other reason than because we likely have much better detection equipment (and hence should get much better data) than we likely did the last time something like this was done.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
ever walk down the street, and stumble, but mid-way turn it into a move that some part of you thinks will convince on-lookers that you did it on purpose? like you were just testing out a new dance move for the clubs? what - you mean those thousands of broken spent fuel rod assemblies? yeah - it's cool.. we're into EXPERUMENTING. oh - and if you ask questions in japan on this, off to jail you go!
I know we had unplanned criticality accidents that melted fuel; The US and USSR should have tons of this kind of data.
Shit, ORNL had liquid metal reactors.
Seems like one had to be shut down before it exploded... U233 is a strange beast, apparently; it separates from the liquid metal coolant in globs, lol.
Alvin Weinberg talked about some of the stuff in his books; like burning a whole rail car of uranium to see what happens...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
The ultra dense heavy radioactive material should burn its way through the mantle and keep falling into the core of the earth. If they can control this and avoid an explosion which would litter the surrounding area in radioactive fallout as happened in Chernobyl this is the clear solution to dispense with Fukashima once and for all.
Loss of Fluid Test at National Reactor Testing Station (now Idaho National Laboratory) tried in the late 60s early 70s, but environmentalists got it blocked.
Cite? Some people blame environmentalists for everything including ingrown toenails. Did they also halt research on MSR's? Also, the anti-nuke part of environmentalism didn't really get started until TMI in 1979.
The same might have been said before Chernobyl 1986. A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
I'm not knockin' the Japanese for wanting to conduct this test. I agree that it is a test that should be conducted (well, should have been conducted, decades ago), and they'll probably do it properly. Doing it with a single fuel rod, rather than an entire reactor, seems a prudent move. The "what could possibly go wrong" alarm immediately flashed into my head nevertheless.
If only they already had some kind of meltdown that had already happened that they could learn from.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
From what I remember, there were at least 2 tests at that facility, they were successful. By MSR, do you mean molten salt? Personally I've always been a fan of the HTGR design. What I don't understand is why the NRC has not approved any design beyond the BWR and PWR designs. These designs are more than 40 years old. Think of using a computer or a car from 40 years ago. Instead of zircronium we can encase the fuel in ceramics whose melting point exceeds the maximum thermal output of the fuel. We have passive heat exchangers which depend on gravity instead of pumps. We have thorium designs that make nuclear proliferation almost impossible (or at least a heck of a lot harder). We have traveling wave designs that mean no refueling for 30 years. But instead we are stuck with designs from the 1960's.
Good luck to them...the quicker they find some sensible way of dealing with and looking after their radioactive material and meltdowns the better IMO. I just hope they've got their calculations right.
A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
Yeah, like maintaining their equipment regularly, am I right? ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
of, what, 8 dozen anime stories?
god remind me to stay home that day and have the popcorn ready. I figure the new site are going to be busy. facepalm. really? you can't simulate this with a pc or a beowulf cluster? I never stuck my screwdriver into a HV coil either. gesh maybe I should try that to make sure it would shock me. NOT!
Hmm...yeah, you apear to be correct here. Perhaps we could help funnel it through into the mantle, though I suppose we would have no way to assure it would not then circulate and come right back out under even more unfavorable circumstances through a volcano. The current idea is to flash freeze the entire area and keeping it frozen indeffinitly. Fission is simply a terrible idea as Fukashima proves. THe problem is that it brings to the fore the fact that we do not have control. We can manage the plant under normal circumstances, but can't assure that there wont be a tornado, or an earthquake, or a volcano, or an astroid and suddenly all the gains we made from the nuclear energy are a huge liability. The corporations involved will quickly go bankrupt once the profit evaporates leaving the clean up to the people.
The nuclear accident at Fukushima has been greatly overblown.
My family owns a condo in the city mentioned in Pandora's Promise (Guarapari-ES-Brazil), where a Geiger counter reads 20 micro sievert/second, while a half mile away from Fukushima Daichi plant it reads about 4 micro sievert/second these days. That spot isn't isolated, it's in a beach right in the downtown area, people have been sunbathing right there for generations. hundreds of thousands of people flock every summer to the beaches there.
There has been studies and studies trying to find a pattern of elevated cancer in that city. There's none !
The real problem isn't radiation per se. It's the leak of radioactive materials (that in turn produce radiation), mostly Cesium.
With the containment areas and everything, you'd need to actually ingest that material in order to get sick (in large enough quantities).
People mix up the hydrogen gas explosions (which is not radioactive), trying to make the case that it is.
The interesting fact is should the plant operators decided to keep it going, the accident would have been prevented.
Radiation is everywhere. Our body produces radiation from Potassium and other elements that have naturally radioactive isotopes in small concentrations.
It's possible in the days right after the accident it was dangerous, but the risk now is beyond tiny considering the area they relocated people from.
No one wants to take responsibility for approving a new design. Nuclear regulatory agencies and insurance companies in all the advanced countries are run by risk-adverse bureaucrats and (even worse) political appointees, not engineers. It's going to take someone building a reactor for free in the Third World to show the new designs work, hiding the whole process from the insurance companies. Or China could do it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...
Well, that's true if you consider "knew what they were doing" as disabling all the safety measures, disregarding all standard operating procedures, and operating the reactor in a known-unsafe condition. The Chernobyl operators were doing and ill-advised, poorly-planned, badly-implemented test of some reactor systems that involved going completely off the farm vis-a-vis approved operation of the reactor. True, the RBMK designs were fickle and dangerous to begin with, but they'd operated for a long time without incident because operators *respected* that danger. Chernobyl was an example of what happens when you don't respect it. Had the reactor been operated within its safety margins, nothing would've happened.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We're not dumb. At least provide a link that has a description or diagram of how they're planning to do this.
It is mostly accepted that none of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accidents were runaway reactions. That is because those skwewy nucwear engineews came up with an invention called control rods: rods that absorb neutrons and can be lowered into the reactor so that it can no longer sustain a chain reaction. Commercial reactors have several mechanisms to ensure all the rods are lowered fully at the first sign of impending trouble, and this happened immediately after the earthquake. The problem is that the "radioactive stuff" is still activated by neutrons it captured before the rods were lowered, and still produces heat by the Megawatts. Even if not a single neutron is passed around between the remaining "radioactive stuff", this residual heat is enough to melt the thing down for weeks to come, whether you pull the stuff apart or not. The only option is to keep on cooling it. If you can't do that, you get a molten mix of radioactive stuff, control rod material and other reactor material, which typically cannot sustain a chain reaction either, but is hot enough to melt through things for a while. That is what happened in the reactors.
At Fukushima Daiichi, there were also "spent fuel" pools containing radioactive stuff that was removed from the reactors (and somewhat pulled apart) weeks before the accident, and that was not undergoing chain reactions but still needed to be cooled. When the cooling failed, that stuff got too hot as well, and in Unit 3, it produced hydrogen, which exploded. A little bit like what you proposed to do deliberately. Incidentally, it turns out that "radioactive stuff" coming out of a reactor is much, much more radioactive than what went in, which is why a large area around Fukushima Daiichi is now uninhabitable, and a large swathe of Japan up to and including Tokyo is measurably contaminated. The authorities claim the contamination is below levels that could produce a measurable increase in cancer, but some experts say this claim is based on inappropriate measurements (radioactivity in the air vs. radioactive dust that settled to the ground).
TL;DR version: blowing up stuff that comes out of a reactor is a very very bad idea. So bad that the US government fears terrorists might try it some day (see "dirty bomb").
See Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham.
My thought is that it would just be easier and quicker to clean up a bunch of rods than it would a molten blob.
Except that that fresh-out-of-the-reactor fuel rods (in the hypothetical case that they don't melt or produce hydrogen explosions in contact with water) are so insanely radioactive that you need special radiation-hardened robots to even get close to them. Of course, this also goes for the molten blob, but that one is resting "safely" on a specially designed concrete structure at the bottom of the reactor building. For very cynical definitions of "safely".