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Safety Measures Fail To Stop Fukushima Plant Leaks
AmiMoJo writes "The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been developing countermeasures to deal with repeated leaks from tanks of contaminated water. But despite the measures, 100 tons of radioactive water leaked on Wednesday and Thursday. 'The leaked water was among the most severely contaminated that Tepco has reported in the aftermath of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, when damage caused by an earthquake and a tsunami led to meltdowns in three of the plant’s reactors. Each liter of the water contained, on average, 230 million becquerels of particles giving off beta radiation, the company said. About half of the particles were likely to be strontium 90, which is readily taken up by the human body in the same way that calcium is, and can cause bone cancer and leukemia.' The estimated volume of the leaked radioactive materials caused Japan's nuclear regulator to rank the leak a level-3 serious accident. The international scale of nuclear and radiological events ranges from zero to 7."
just in time for the new godzilla movie
Dilute it into the ocean; Presto! Nothing but background levels.
What are we waiting for?
Just curious,
Instead of pumping in (then polluting) seawater, why not just let the thing meltdown? It would essentially bury the fuel. After it drops down a 1000' or so, fill the hole in with cement. I wouldn't be too worried about volcanic eruptions, radiation is what keeps the earth core nice and soft.
I wasn't disappointed! On a serious note, I thought they were building the godzilla of ice walls to fix this?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
It's not like everyone hasn't been saying this for 3 years now. If you'd been paying attention, you would already know this was the case. But I remember when people were saying this in 2011, 2012, even into 2013, they were nay-sayed and called coal shills and alarmists. Now what?
It should obviously be reported as 90,000,000,000 milligrams of water with an average activity of greater than 6 billion picocuries. That'd be more frightening, I think.
How nice it would be to have some one-on-one time with the engineering team that covered up the flaws in the containment vessel during initial construction.
Alright slashdot, you pop a cookies prompt up. I don't want to agree to it, I can still use the rest of the site and all the links work but it blocks my view of the first post.
Instead, consider everyone opt-out and if they haven't already accepted cookies, put a small box (not an overlay) in the top right to allow the user to opt-in.
I hope you've got a big mixer to make sure that blends evenly, because it turns out that dropping stuff in the ocean isn't like putting food coloring in a glass. The ocean is big and has currents and thermal zones that prevent even, global mixing. That's why Fukushima raised Strontium-90 levels 100-fold in some hot spots in the three months after the disaster.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Becquerels of particles? Really? That's like saying (obligatory car analogy incoming) joules of cars. A becquerel is a measure of activity - each litre gives off 2.3e8 electrons per second. While this is a problem, this is a nonsensical way to talk about it. What's that law again? The one that says that "every news article in your field of expertise is utter garbage". I'm pretty sure it holds here.
Cynical Idealist
It's 2014.
Simple solution:
1) Install noscript
2) Don't whitelist fsdn.com or rpxnow.com
Result:
No beta. No popups.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Homer J. Simpson really needs to get his act together over there.
Everybody Wang-Chung tonight!
They have had it well under control for the past 3 years, that way they can blame global sea water contamination on a recent event.
But workers first determined that the alarm and information from the gauges were malfunctions, as they found no abnormalities around the tank, at least when the alarm went off.
Seriously, this isn't stuff that you shrug your shoulders on and ignore. Fire them, and possibly charge them (employees and employer) with whatever Japan's equivalent to "criminal negligence" is
Anyone who has played Fallout will have a tune in his heart as he reads this cherry news.
nonsense, the leaking isotopes will decay in decades not centuries.
Fukushimi diachi is a local problem, never mind hysteria over non-events like the detected level of one extra xenon atom per cubic meter in the USA, that's nothing. less than nothing.
Chernobyl was just bad engineering meets bad management, other plants in the world can't do what that one did. And Fukushima diachi hasn't caused widespread damage like Chernobyl did.
As I understand Indecent levels, level 3 tops out just before the actual release of radioactive materials outside the plant. Once you have materials leaving the plant in an uncontrolled manner, we are at Level 4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Cause slashdot proves it, beta = fail. Fkuc Beta.
Strontium 90 has a half-life of 29 years. Obviously the process of decay will go on indefinitely, so it's pretty much meaningless to say that the leaking isotopes will decay "in decades".
What we need to know is how long will it take the concentrations of harmful isotopes to drop to acceptable levels. Thata of course depends on how many times greater the concentration is than acceptable levels.
If the initial concentration of S90 is acceptable, the answer is "instantaneously". If the concentration is 4x acceptable, the answer is "116 years". So it's not inconceivable that an S90 contamination problem could persist for centuries, although we have yet to determine whether we have such a problem.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Strontium 90 has a half-life of 30 years, genius. So if for example it's 100 times natural now, it will decay to 50x in 30 years, 25x in 60 years, 13x in 90 years, 6x in 120 years, 3x in 150 years, 1.6x in 180 years.
Cesium 137 has the same half-life: 30 years.
I suppose 180 years is "decades". Just as much as it is also "centuries".
Hell, a million years is 100,000 "decades".
Fukushima is a serious nuclear disaster. It's a very situation that we should all be concerned about. But this should not lead to any pause in our appetite for nuclear energy.
What people often fail to appreciate is that even coal fired powerstations release quite large amounts of radioactive material in to atmosphere. Coal fired powerstations burn about a million times as much material as a nuclear powerstation per joule of energy produced. Some of that material is radioactive. That stuff isn't been sealed in a container in burrried in a mountain, it's being blown up chimney stacks along with the rest of the rather unpleasant stuff.
Don't believe me? Reflect on this passage taken from this (PDF) document:
So far, there has not been a single confirmed death due to Fukushima accident. In comparison, there were 20 deaths in the US just mining for coal in 2013. This is not to mention all the deaths being caused by cancers and other health problems being caused by breathing polluted air.
If we're ever going to get on top of this climate change challenge, nuclear must be leading the charge. Nuclear is a safe, non-polluting technology. Modern designs are fail-safe in every sense of the word. The newer designs can even cope with a loss of external power (like Fukushima experienced) yet still stay safe.
This is the 21st century. The technology is mature, sensible and safe. Really, we should be looking to retire every coal fired plant as a matter of urgency, if only to reduce the amount of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere!!
Bzzzt.. wrong-o, this a Pacific wide scale disaster, various ocean layers don't mix as much as they hoped it would.
Sr-90 (beta emitter, calcium replacement has a half life of 28.79 years.. I.E. three decades later nearly half of the original material remains..
Cs-137 both a Beta and Gamma emitter, has a half life of 30.17 years.. Again half of the original amount will still be around in 30 years..
There is a significant risk the Fukishima Area will get too hot for humans, or electronics to work in/around. Thus insuring nearly all the contents of the reactors and spent fuel pools end up in the environment.
Note: Where there is high levels of Beta radiation from Sr-90 their will also be high levels of Gamma radiation from Cs-137, no protective suit, nor reasonable amount of lead shielding will protect from high levels of Gamma radiation. It would take 3" of solid lead shielding to reduce Cs-137 Gamma radiation component by 100x (which is not enough)..
I'm calling you on sensationalist bullshit. If I go to the west coast of the USA and take a piss in the sea, do you start calling the Pacific Ocean "a trillion tonnes of piss water"?
That's a dilution factor, not a measure of radioactivity. Quit fucktard sensationalist FUDing.
TEPCO still doesn't have adequate water-processing capacity Fukushima. They installed three units of the "advanced liquid processing system" (which is basically a big ion-exchange resin water purifier) in 2012, and they are still not working reliably. Failures are occuring for dumb reasons: "TEPCO officials believe the cause of that problem was due to a failure to remove a rubber pad from the tank, leading to a blockage in the system." On another occasion, they had to shut down because a crane failed.
Toshiba has overall charge of the project. Why a major Japanese company is having so much trouble with routine industrial tasks is not clear. As a result of all these processing problems, Fukushima has far too much contaminated water in temporary storage.
The process won't remove tritium, but that, at least, has a decay life of only 12 years, and it's not concentrated by biological processes like strontium and cesium, so dumping tritum-contaminated water isn't too bad.)
Correction make that 1.5" of solid lead to block 99% of gamma radiation(not listed in article) from Cs-137.. (The remaining 1% will still be extremely detrimental in short order. )
.
Nonsense, the concentration in the pacific is negligible and not a danger. you have no understanding of units of meaure of radioactive contamination. You read alarmist nonsense without sense of proportion or scale.
The area around Fukushima that is considered of any possible danger to humans is quite small, measured in low double digits of kilometers
there is no significant CS-137 contamination even ten miles from Fukushima. Not a danger to humans, and the levels now are less than 1/10,000 from when the disaster happened.
It does not improve my comfort with nuclear power that these people are still in charge of this plant.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Is the water in these storage tanks still being used for cooling? If not, just add a whole bunch of gelatin. That'd at least make it much more manageable. You can thank me later, environment.
or simply join soylentnews.org
100 tons of water is 24,000 gallons, or about 3600 cubic feet of water.
That's roughly about the same amount as two (2) of the large tanker trucks that fill up a gas station.
Or, in Olympic Pool metrics, about 1/24th of a Pool.
In radiation terms, 230m Bq per liter (for 24,000 Gal = 91,000 L) or 21 Trillion Bq.
A single (average) coal plant puts out about 4 Quadrillion Bq via emissions pollution. So this spill is roughly 0.5% of the yearly output of a coal plant (or, 46 hours of operation of one).
In terms Banana Equivalent Dosage, you're talking about 1.4 Trillion bananas per hour to start with, halving every hour.
And Now You Know.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Considering your smoke detectors have about 37,000 Bq of radioactive material in them, the amount of radioactive material released is equal to the same number becquerels as 10,270 smoke detectors.
Chernobyl's release of Strontium 90 was estimated at 200 PetaBecquerels. That is 200 * 10^15 power. Or 536 million times as much as that was recently leaked at Fukushima.
But hey, 380 million is a scary sounding number, so it works well for propaganda purposes.
He did say "decay" in decades not "disappear" in decades. Using a 30-year half-life, that means it's decayed by half in 3 decades. If you want to chart out decay to 1.001x, it's about 30 decades (or 3.0 centuries). If you want it to decay down to 1x, wait until sometime after the universe achieves heat death.
BTW, sarcastically calling somebody "genius" because he didn't completely clarify his statement just makes you sound petty, genius. I'm not saying that I agree with GP, just that squabbling over decades vs centuries with no indication of what level of "decay" implies "decayed" makes less sense than squabbling over milliliters vs square meters of contaminated water. If it's at 100x and you're waiting for it to decay to 99x, it takes a little over 5 months (or 0.0043 centuries.)
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
'Corium' is basically molten ceramic (The fuel is a uranium-oxide matrix.) It has such poor heat conducting properties that during normal operations, it could be 3000F in the center of a pellet, and 650F on the surface of the cladding- 3/16" away from the center.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Yup. We sure do. No reason not to.
Nope, none at all...
is that like having 200 seconds of pennies?
I'm surprised the free-marketeers haven't trolled this article yet, so I guess I'll do it for them. Here goes...
SEE?? This just proves that government bureaucrats can't do anything!!!1 If they'd just gotten those stupid regulators to get their boots of the throats of the job-creators, the guiding hand of free-market capitalism would have fixed this by now! This is why we need to cut capital-gains taxes and destroy the EPA!!!1
THANKS OBAMA WHERZ TEH BIRF CERTIFICATE BENGHRZGGG etc
Why is this still news?
Assume we actually cared about the minuscule amount of radioactives coming from this site...
The U.S. Navy offered to bury the material under millions of tons of cement only days after the incident was first observed by equipment on a U.S. Navy carrier off the coast of Japan. Just bury the crap in cement, as was already suggested, and let it half-life it's way down to edible levels in the next 90-180 years. Problem solved.
Why is new water being pumped into a holding tank containing the material, and then being allowed to leak over the edge and onto the ground near the tank? Because they haven't brought in water reprocessing equipment, and continue adding water to the system as a whole. It's not like Japan lacks the industrial capacity or the transportation infrastructure to get more reprocessing equipment built and delivered to the site. Problem solved.
Again: Why is this still news?
At the time of the original incident, a lot of people were saying that NHK was TEPCO's mouthpiece or something. But they happily report stuff like this.
4x acceptable concentration would be only 2 half lifes... so it would be 58 years, not 116.
Just saying.
A single (average) coal plant puts out about 4 Quadrillion Bq via emissions pollution. So this spill is roughly 0.5% of the yearly output of a coal plant (or, 46 hours of operation of one).
In terms Banana Equivalent Dosage, you're talking about 1.4 Trillion bananas per hour to start with, halving every hour.
You are not comparing like with like. The potassium in a banana is mostly passed through the body harmlessly, as only enough to maintain the normal level is absorbed. The strontium in this water is absorbed by the body like calcium, accumulating in the bones where it will sit for years or decades slowly irradiating you, which is why is causes cancer and leukaemia.
Similarly the output from coal plants is not nearly as dangerous as the content of this water.
I'm disappointed. I expect more than this level of scientific illiteracy from +4 Slashdot comments. The Banana Equivalent Dosage is about as credible as the claim that bananas prove intelligent design, and yet it keeps getting repeated here as if it were a convincing argument.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Tell that to the farmers who have had to destroy crops or the fishermen who have had to write off catches due to contamination.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Last time i did nuclear physics, a becquerel was a unit of rate of decay...1bq being 1 decay per second
to me 230bq of particles makes no sense at all
They could probably solve this by giving people free pizza
http://rt.com/usa/chevron-frac...
(On a serious note, why does it take a PR scandal to make a fatal explosion at an gas well newsworthy?)
Aaaand you only get your basic score of 2. Yeah. The geeks have abandoned ship.
there is no significant CS-137 contamination even ten miles from Fukushima. Not a danger to humans, and the levels now are less than 1/10,000 from when the disaster happened.
Thanks to the magic of bio-accumulation, trace concentrations can be increased by many orders of magnitude:
Tourism industry officials and restaurant operators have been aghast to learn that wild mushrooms picked far from the site of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture last year are showing high levels of radioactive cesium.
Last year, only wild mushrooms picked in Fukushima Prefecture were found to have cesium levels that exceeded legal standards.
This year, however, wild mushrooms from as far away as Aomori, Nagano and Shizuoka prefectures, all more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima, have been found to be contaminated with cesium.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0...
You are not comparing like with like. The potassium in a banana is mostly passed through the body harmlessly, as only enough to maintain the normal level is absorbed.
Mostly correct. Instead of only absorbing "only enough to maintain the normal level", what you will actually get is absorption of a bit more than enough to maintain the normal level, coupled with increased elimination (mostly via urine) to maintain that normal level. Either way there is no difference -- there is no long-term storage of Potassium in the body, it is all present as the soluble, highly-mobile aqueous ion. So any increased level of from a radioactive source will relatively rapidly come back down to equilibrium levels of radioactivity, once you return to your intake from your regular Potassium sources.
Anyway, the ratio of radioactive Potassium (to non-radioactive Potassium) in your body will be equal to the average level of radioactive Potassium in Bananas (and other dietary sources, mostly plant-derived materials); the Potassium-40 isotope to non-radioactive isotopes is mostly at equilibrium concentration in the environment. For a 70kg human this means approximately 160g of total Potassium in the body, with 0.0187 grams of 40K, producing 4,900 disintegrations per second (becquerels).
The strontium in this water is absorbed by the body like calcium, accumulating in the bones where it will sit for years or decades slowly irradiating you, which is why is causes cancer and leukaemia.
Partially correct. Like Potassium, Calcium is regulated at a "normal" level, and the body will reduce absorption (from the gut), and increase elimination (mostly through urine) to eliminate excess. Accumulation happens if there is a deficit, or with active deposition of osseous material. However, due to constant turn-over of bone Calcium, at any given time a small amount of material is simultaneously being both absorbed and released from long-term storage. So this means a small amount of the ingested material will go into long-term storage, even when your body is not actively increasing Calcium stores.
However, note that while Potassium-40 and non-radioactive Potassium are chemically identical (well, almost identical -- some tiny kinetic effects may be present, negligible), Calcium and Strontium are not. They are grossly handled the same by the body, but there may be some differences in absorption / retention / excretion rates between the two substances -- so the radioactive Strontium will not be a straightforward constant fraction of the Calcium pool as it moves around in the body.
I'm disappointed. I expect more than this level of scientific illiteracy from +4 Slashdot comments.
I'm not disappointed; I never had any expectations to begin with :)
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Conclusion: We're soon going to run out of monkeys.
nonsense, the leaking isotopes will decay in decades not centuries.
pu-239, a component of reactor four's fuel mix has a 25,000 year half life and is a fatal dose to a human in the microgram range - at least according to Oppenheimer.
Fukushimi diachi is a local problem, never mind hysteria over non-events like the detected level of one extra xenon atom per cubic meter in the USA, that's nothing. less than nothing.
No, it's a Pacific wide problem and atmospheric effluents are a serious problem for the US food producers. Bioaccumulation has no regard for your ignorance of the facts.
Chernobyl was just bad engineering meets bad management, other plants in the world can't do what that one did.
The only difference is Fukushima adds criminal negligence.
And Fukushima diachi is causing widespread damage, slowly, like Chernobyl did.
FTFY
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nonsense, the concentration in the pacific is negligible and not a danger. you have no understanding of units of meaure of radioactive contamination. You read alarmist nonsense without sense of proportion or scale.
Except that you are talking about radioactive contamination, instead of radioisotope contamination, so it does call into question your capacity to asses the comment at all.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is so much bad info here its ironic. I will comment on a couple of points for those that are seriously interested, please ignore the trolls
Some facts worth noting first:
those mushrooms have two and a half times the government limit, but nevertheless in absolute terms will not harm anyone.
it's a local problem