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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."
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?
I'm no nuclear engineer, but it seems to me that IF (big if) It were as simple as letting the fuel melt through the floor like a big ol' glowin' gopher, you'd have a hell of a time containing the vapor emitted.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Once the melted core hit the water table (considerably shallower than 1000' down considering the proximity to the ocean), you would get a huge radioactive steam geyser throwing the fission products into the atmosphere.
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Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
Ummm, Physics would happen? Unless you had a convenient hole to pool the melt in it will just spread out and solidify ( that what the "core catcher" dishes under the reactors are designed to do ) and stop "reacting" so you would not get the melt actually burning a hole in the ground, you just have a spread out highly radioactive glassy metallic mess sitting at hot temps because of the residual decay heat.
That and ground water, if the melt would burn down it's going to heat up water in the ground, resulting in radio-steam blasting from the hole, probable widening of the fractures the water is flowing through leading to ground instabilities, and irradiating of your groundwater supply.
As others have stated as well, anything the hot melt would burn would also be irradiated and sent to the atmosphere, as well as radio-decay gasses.
In other words, it would be a much more horrible headache than trying to control the decay heat until the fuel can be decanted and put into a longer term storage.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
"Google Cherynobyl? To this very day it is so radioactive you can't get within 50 to 100 miles of it?"
After the accident/explosion/fire etc. in 1986 the Ukrainian authorities continued to operate the three other undamaged reactors at Chernobyl (they needed the electricity supplies). After a few years folks started running tourist trips to visit the area including the evacuated towns surrounding the damaged reactor. Thousands of workers have been working on the reactor building for decades attempting to entomb it or at least cover it up so it doesn't leak quite as much residual radioactivity as it does even today.
Sure in a Hollywood disaster movie script the Chernobyl site is so radioactive you can't get within 50 to 100 miles of it. However this is real life which is kinda different.
Ah, I just realised you're trolling, aren't you? Silly me.
Love that comic. Bloom County was amazing and I miss it daily. Seen that particular one many times and had no interest in copying it from that website (I already own at least one book that includes it) until I tried to run my cursor over it. I just wanted to read it and kind of use my mouse cursor sometimes like a person would their fingertip to follow the text. The moment I did that the big red COPYNO.com image replaced what I was trying to read and it became my mission in life to copy the damned picture. Out comes my screenshot utility and moments later I'm sending that out to several people just because I can.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Unless you take a guided tour.
However, this demonstrates nicely the factual level anti-nuclear lobby operates at.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Well, dilution *is* a reasonable approach to disposing of this waste, but what we have here appears to be an ongoing leak from a point source into tidal waters, which is not at all the way you'd design a project to dilute the waste.
There are several big differences between letting the stuff leak and a proper attempt to diffuse the waste over a large area of the ocean. First of all the leak is a point source discharging into an intertidal zone. My wife is a physical oceanographer who helped site a major sewage outfall, so I remember some of the concerns. Stuff that is discharged right near the shore doesn't diffuse nicely out to deep water, it gets transported along the shore with the same currents that deposit sand from rivers along the coast.
This means that the S90 may well get deposited in sediments. The concentration of S90 probably won't be enough to be a direct concern to humans, but because strontium is an analog to calcium, it can bioaccumulate. This means the somewhat incomplete process of dilution gets undone when critters like benthic worms on the bottom of the food chain consume the S90, and are in turn consumed by ground fish and so on up the food chain. At each trophic level the S90 is concentrated a little more.
I agree that the amount here reported is probably not a serious threat to human and environmental health, but the problem is that this process is ongoing. It is possible that what is going on doesn't present any threat to human or environmental health, but we can't be sure. By the time we figure it out it will be too late to do anything (or anything affordable) about it if it is a problem.
In a nutshell: dilution could work, but there's a significant chance that just letting the stuff leak into the sea won't do the job. This stuff needs to be contained or otherwise dealt with *now*.
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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.
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I didn't think you were trying to be an apologist. I agree this situation is not an issue for global, regional, or even local panic.
There's a lot of ground between "not a serious problem at all" and "everybody run for the hills", and this situation falls into that territory.
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I don't dispute your claim that coal puts a lot of radioactive material into the air, and I'm not anti-nuclear. However, with a coal power plant, it is a gradual and controlled release of radiation and if the coal-fired plant malfunctions or gets damaged, the release of that radioactivity stops. Contrast this with nuclear power, where a failure releases huge amounts of radioactivity at one time, in a concentrated area and continues to release radiation as additional systems fail (e.g. hydrogen explosions due to lack of cooling). The problem becomes compounded when you can't fix it, because the site is too radioactive to sustain human life.
'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.
That's 380 million per liter times 100,000 liters. Considering how much of this stuff they have on the site the total must be quite horrific.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
False dichotomy, coal is not the only other option. You are also selecting one statistic (deaths) that favours nuclear, ignoring the many others that suggest we should be reducing our reliance on it (cost, affect on people's lives, loss of land, contamination of the environment, waste).
Your assertion that modern designs are fail-safe in "every sense of the word" doesn't even make sense, but I assume you mean that there is absolutely no way they could fail and release radioactive material. I'm afraid that simply isn't true. They are better, but not infallible. For example many rely on gravity to work, meaning that they can cope with external power loss. However, that does nothing to prevent the mechanism jamming when the plant is hit by an extremely large earthquake. Just like the last generation the current designers have tried to account for everything they think is a likely failure mode, but apparently didn't think Tohoku size earthquakes were very probable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 :)