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TEPCO: Nearly All Nuclear Fuel Melted At Fukushima No. 3 Reactor
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Almost all of the nuclear fuel in the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant melted within days of the March 11, 2011, disaster, according to a new estimate by Tokyo Electric Power Co. TEPCO originally estimated that about 60 percent of the nuclear fuel melted at the reactor. But the latest estimate released on Aug. 6 revealed that the fuel started to melt about six hours earlier than previously thought. TEPCO said most of the melted fuel likely dropped to the bottom of the containment unit from the pressure vessel after the disaster set off by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami."
This article really doesn't explain why this finding matters. TEPCO themselves said they do not know how this will effect the decommissioning process for the reactor, if at all. The only thing that seems to be different is that they now believe some of the fuel is still inside the pressure vessel, and it's not clear that they didn't already know that to begin with. It doesn't seem like anything will really change until TEPCO actually sends people in to get a look at it.
considering that the recently passed 'state secrets' law in japan effectively gags anyone from talking about fukushima in an honest way, the fact that this is being released at all probably means it's just to warm up the public for the real shoe to drop..
oh, and in case you don't know the law... here it is.
In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
fuel at the No. 3 reactor began melting at 5:30 a.m. on March 13
I think this confirms that that they should not have flooded the reactor with seawater because the meltdown had already happened by the time they made that decision. They flooded the reactor on March 15th, as a last ditch attempt to prevent a meltdown. But it was too late to save the reactor since the fuel was already completely melted. So all the seawater did was let more nuclear material escape.
Or, alternatively, they should have flooded it with seawater days ahead of time. The tsunami was March 11th, so perhaps had they made that decision on March 12th it would have been in time to prevent the worst of it? Ehh... maybe not.... the reactor foundation was probably already damaged by that point. :-(
As if asahi.com wasn't already borked from the canal story, we link to them again?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
They aren't lying this time!
Back when the accident happened, a significant number of Slashdotters were saying that no meltdown had occurred, that there was no significant structural damage, that no radioactive material would reach the sea, that the incident was overblown and that the plant would be largely still operational.
At this point, the discussion is not about how thoroughly the facility has been totalled but in what way.
I don't care that there was limited data available at the start, drawing conclusions from data you don't have (aka making things up) is not an excuse. If you don't know, don't pretend you do. It is because TEPCO pretended that they knew that the world lacks much-needed nuclear power. It is because TEPCO made things up rather than obtained data that an accident was possible. Don't be a TEPCO.
For those who defended the company, who downplayed the crisis as a nothing, who ignored any available information that didn't suit their preferred outcome, I am still awaiting an apology.
An apology for deliberate pollution of the debate
An apology for every post by every sceptical slashdotter modded to oblivion for the purpose of stifling debate
An apology to Slashdot itself for so abusing the moderating system
An apology for depriving the community of your own thought processes
An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control
Maybe, by 2024, pride and conceit will be at levels where this is possible.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It could have been worse except for one determined engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, who insisted on a higher seawall for the Onagawa plant. A good article can be found at http://www.oregonlive.com/opin.... I have a quote on my wall from Tatsuji Oshima, one of his proteges. "Corporate ethics and compliance may be similar, but their cores are different. From the perspective of corporate social responsibility, we cannot say that there is no need to question a company's actions just because they are not a crime under the law."
Seriously, the mistake that everybody is making is stopping new ultra-safe reactors from replacing these old second gen reactors. Companies like Transatomic can make it so that the reactor can not fail.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The estimated start of the fuel melting is roughly consistent with when neutrons were detected near the front gate of the nuclear plant, according to the officials."
Isn't that what they said about these reactors?
A large amount of radioactive material was released into the ocean where it will remain in the food chain for decades. Approximately 100,000 people are unable to return to their homes and a large area of land in a country where land is scarce and precious is uninhabitable. But...that's just the short term. Long term: Japan will have to deal with electric power shortages for years until their power generation can be rebuilt with new technology. Hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be spent over the next 20 years to decommission the mess at Fukushima and attempt to decontaminate the surrounding downwind land. All of this was avoidable...but happened because the resident village idiots were able to prevent realistic plans from being implemented for electric power generation at Fukushima. The Onagawa power station was closer to the earthquake epicenter and yet it survived undamaged thanks to a losing battle by the resident village idiots to ensure that it was built according to their idiot plans. They lost at Onagawa but 'won' at Fukushima. Idiots who said...why spend a lot of money on a bigger seawall at Fukushima? Idiot engineers at GE who said 'there's no need for a failsafe design for something that will never happen,' and idiots who say 'what's the big deal about a meltdown?'
The plant shut down so safely that it served as an evacuation center in Onagawa
this is the standard to which nuclear power plants should be built.
This needs mod points!!!!
A large amount of radioactive material was released into the ocean where it will remain in the food chain for decades.
what isotopes are you talking about.. Some of this stuff is centuries before it goes away... Oh, and never mind that in Japan they currently occupy the only two locations where nuclear weapons have been used.... So, I'm not so sure this is as totally bad as folks claim.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
the China Syndrome was less about a nuclear disaster and more about cover ups and ignoring of known safety issues. It sorta sounds like we _did_ have a China Syndrome situation here...
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I told everyone this the week after the reactor detonated.
I got labeled a crack pot, a troll and a fear mongering ignorant ranter.
I also said TEPCO is lying and so is the Japanese government that everything was contained.
But now that they admit it, it is OK.
Why these people are not immediately arrested, and prosecuted is beyond me.
The entire TEPCO board should be prosecuted, arrested and jailed. No need for a trail as they have publicly admitted they comitted a crime.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong. They were in deep shit, and they knew it.
Here is a very good documentary on how things played out.
There were poor decisions and communication between various designers and operators. Take for example, the situation at reactor 1. After the generators started, the emergency reactor cooling condensers should have switched on to provide cooling. However, operators had found that they were very effective and being unfamiliar with their use were concerned that they would cause thermal shock to the reactor. Not familiar with the operation of this system, the operators decided to manually switch off the condenser system to arrest the temperature drop. They would then switch them on again manually as reactor temp rose again. This worked fine, until the generators failed, removing control and monitoring from this system.
Operators at emergency control, in a separate quake-proof building asked for confirmation of operation, but the control room could not give it. So,workers went out to inspect the reactor building for steam rising from the condenser stacks. They reported some steam rising, and it was assumed that the system was operational. However, the condenser system had never been used or tested since the plants were constructed 40 years ago. No one knew how they worked and how quickly they could cool the reactor, no one knew how much steam was produced during operation. It turns out that the workers sent out for reconnaissance saw only faint steam trickling from the stacks, consistent with the system having been switched off for many minutes, but still containing some residual heat. Had the system been switched on, the clouds of steam would have been so profuse and so dense that the it would have been impossible even to see the reactor building, let alone identify the condenser stacks.
On the assumption that the system was operational, other attempts to provide emergency cooling were suspended or delayed. A steam/battery powered pump system was available to deliver fresh water to the reactor, but without a heatsink (condenser) available, the reactor temperature rapidly rose and so did reactor pressure, eventually overcoming the maximum discharge pressure of the coolant injection system. After a few hours, the UPS controlling this system discharged and it also failed.
After 24 hours, reactor pressure unexpectedly dropped. Operators realised that this might permit external coolant injection and fire engines were called in. There was a huge delay, as the fire engines were unable to reach the site due to debris and some had been destroyed by the tsunami. Subsequent investigation showed that despite massive coolant injection, coolant did not rise in the reactor. The cause was thought to be due to damage to the reactor vessel or a pipe. In retrospect, it probably indicated damage to the reactor following meltdown of the fuel.
There were also design oversights in the emergency systems for the plants. One of the final backup schemes for reactor cooling was the ability to connect fire engines to the reactor to inject coolant. It subsequently became apparent that in units 2 and 3, this water didn't reach the reactor, and collected in a condenser unit instead. This was always going to happen, due to the way in which the water pipes were connected. There was a pump connected between the storage tank and the injection flow pipe. Under normal injection conditions, the pump would have been running, and any additional water from the fire engine would likely have gone towards the reactor, and this presumably was the assumption under which the water injection protocol was developed. However, under power failure conditions, the pump was unpowered. Due to the design of the pump - a rotodynamic (impeller) pump. this pump would have offered little or no resistance to reverse flow when unpowered.
Hmm, 1.3 billion cubic km of ocean, at 3 ppb uranium naturally...
So, the ocean has, as a matter of course, ~4 billion tons of uranium, of which 0.72% is U-235. So 28,000,000 tons of U-235 in the ocean naturally.
So, if the reactor in question had a MILLION TONS of fuel (trust me, it didn't), it increased the natural radioactivity on the oceans by less than 4%.
A more realistic number would be 0.001% for the increase.
And even that number is a generous overestimate.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The media had a hayday trying to cover an event in deep coverup. What they reported revealed volumes.
They reported the Hydrogen Explosion. This was the first indicator to the public a major event happened. What the media does not know.
1 The fuel pellets are held in rods made of Zirconium. This is because it is transparant to the reaction and does not slow the reaction so it can be controlled by control rods.
2 Zirconium is flamable, even in water. It burns even better in water than in air. It breaks down water to use the Oxygen.
3 There was a LOT of hydrogen produced in a short time to fill the containment building with an explosive Hydrogen air mix. There are other ways to generate Hydrogen, but not in huge quanities.
When the Hydrogen explosion removed the containment, they were quick to point out this was not a Russian style steam explosion, but a Hydrogen explosion. I suspected at that time, they had burned the fuel rod structures in water. I suspected the fuel pellets were quite hot too.
The truth shall set you free!
So you think all of the radioactive crap that got dumped into the ocean is going to be magically dispersed evenly throughout the globes oceans?
Or more likely it's going to bugger up seafood local to japan for decades to come.
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Much of the leakage was cesium which reacts violently with water forming a cesium hydroxide solution. So yes, it will disperse nicely.
Why just accept that crap churned out an an Oak Ridge administrator, and later author of joke books, who managed to force his unreviewed bullshit into an issue of Scientific American without actually thinking about it first?
Since coal is mostly plant material and radioactive carbon decays quickly in geological terms how is that even possible? Since power stations now have scrubbers, bag filters and other stuff to prevent solid material going up into the air how is that even possible? Gravity also does stuff to heavy elements remember, plus they tend to have very high melting points and are difficult to reduce.
It's an easy and cunning answer. You just consider an ideal nuclear plant, on paper, not a real one, over a short time span - not long enough to change fuel. The amount of radioactive material put out by such a theoretical plant is zero. You then compare it to background radiation - DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR - suddenly ANYTHING is infinitely worse.
So by the trick used to devise the statement you've regurgitated your own body is putting out more radioactive material, per unit of energy produced, than a nuclear power plant.
It's a pointless and annoying trick played by Alex Gabbard, the manipulative prick that also went as far as declaring that terrorists could build nuclear bombs from fly ash. If it's that easy don't you wonder why Iran is having so much trouble? After all these years it's still finding credulous suckers willing to eat that shit and spew it up again all over the place.
Come on. Even for those readers that didn't go to high school they've surely seen one of those weather maps with high and low pressures and can get some idea of what happens to air between them. The "no wind" argument only holds up if you only have windmills in one location. There are plenty of downsides to wind (small unit size, high maintainance, not cheap) but do you really think the readers here are so utterly stupid as to fall for that one? It's a bit insulting that you are trying that on.
It's radioactive decay so just about anything lighter than the fuel, which makes waste management so damn hard and was the reason to develop Synrok.
IMOX. Plutonium enhanced pressurized water reactor. #3 was the single enhanced core in the 6 Tepco disasterous failures.
The total melt is due primarily to the larger volume of daughter products with far smaller percentage of stable transuranic transmutational products v. daughter products of fission.
Once again, the theory of breeder cost reduction takes a hit.
If it dissolves in water, it'll disperse due to entropy, if it doesn't, it'll fall to seabed and get buried by sediment.
"More likely"... on what basis?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You incorrectly assume that water in the global oceans quickly mixes with all of the other water, I expect that process takes centuries considering the size of the oceans.
Radioactive materials do not "disperse nicely"
http://www.theguardian.com/env....
http://enenews.com/vancouver-s...
http://naturalsociety.com/thir...
http://enenews.com/npr-affilia...
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...And
http://www.thelibertybeacon.co...
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Those articles are not even about nuclear contamination in the ocean.
Note on the 3rd link, the Cs measures in West Coast soil is a TINY amount and is most likely left over from our own atomic testing.
It's right there in the quote. It is dispersing into the ocean quite well. Unfortunately, they appear to have failed to prevent further contamination. If they will do the right thing there, the levels will fall right off.
Enenews.com decided to load for me now. Those do discuss the ocean, but they are talking about minute traces of radiation and actually demonstrate my point. If the stuff didn't disburse, it wouldn't ever make it to the U.S. west coast from Japan.
To give you a good scale, banannas have about 30,000 times the radiation of the fish. A Bq is a truly tiny amount.
When cars move, do they disperse? No.
The ocean has currents:
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
So, the radioactive waters can traverse to ocean without completely dispersing. And note the diagrams all showing the current goes from japan to the US... and back.
In fact where I live in Europe is warm because water travels around the globe without dispersing
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
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And those currents constantly mix at the boundaries with the rest of the water. If the water has barely detectable concentrations by the time it gets to the U.S. it will have undetectable concentrations by the time it makes it back to Japan. That's pretty good dispersion.