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."

Comments

So.. what?

[timrod]

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.

Re:So.. what?

[i kan reed]

Maybe we can start to talk about nuclear risk more pragmatically.

Ha. Hahaha. Ha.

Yeah. Also, maybe we can go down to hell and make some snow angels. Then get on our swines and fly off to a peaceful middle east.

Re:So.. what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, it's an mdsolar submission - so the inference you're expected to draw from it is OMG TEH NUCULAR IS BAD!!ONEONE!

Tell me again how many people died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima.
And how many died as a result of the tsunami.
And compare & contrast the relative panic and news coverage of the two.

Bah.

Re:So.. what?

[Wycliffe]

eh.

Any difference looks a lot smaller than the markup I've ended up paying for things like going through an energy co-op instead of straight from the generating company.

Those numbers are almost meaningless. The nuclear numbers for the most part don't include the cost of cleanup operations
like what happened in Japan or Chernobyl. They might include a little bit paid to the government for disaster recovery but that
would quickly get used up in a real disaster. Likewise coal doesn't include environmental damage and oil doesn't include all the
military needed to keep oil stable. Even solar and wind have some negative affects. We do need to talk about cost but we
need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.

Re:So.. what?

[AmiMoJo]

The tsunami continues to be a very big deal in Japan. More so than the nuclear accident at the time, and rivalling it now. The thing is the tsunami happened and that was it. Things are being done to improve safety and rebuild, but for the people left alive there isn't much on-going danger.

Fukushima, on the other hand, continues to release contaminated material and water into the environment, continues to suck up vast amounts of money with no limit and no end in sight, and continues to prevent full clean-up and re-building in the areas around the plant.

Both were terrible tragedies, but in the end Fukushima is going to cost more and last a lot longer. It also lead to the discovery of problems at many other plants, and brought into question many of the assumptions that were made about safety. The tsunami raised safety questions too, but the solution is clear: stronger defences, earlier warnings, move away from some areas. The way forward for nuclear is not so clear, so there is still a lot of debating to be done.

Japanese people have a far better understanding of the issues than you give them credit for, and I'd go as far as to say many of them have a better understanding than you.

Re:So.. what?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

We do need to talk about cost but we
need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.

We don't need to talk about costs at all. Costs are measured in the monopoly money we call "currency", and subject as they are to the vagaries and panics of the financial classes, are not an indicator or metric which we should rely on when planning our energy policies.

We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours, materials, hours of labour, and disposal of waste. We need to talk about physical things, things we know, understand, and can do in the physical world. Not about intellectual casino chips which are magicked in and out of existence like pixels in a video game.

Energy policy is a long game that humanity is playing with the forces of the natural world. Our (dysfunctional) systems of money are about as relevant as our spoken languages in this debate.

Re:So.. what?

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

Yeah, and maybe we can talk about about abortion pragmatically too . . .

The average member of the public has an emotional, visceral reaction to things such as GMO, global warming, nuclear power, et cetera. You might as well be talking about abortion, because Joe Sixpack doesn't understand things like nuclear physics, cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, et cetera.

After September 11th, the average American was more worried about being personally harmed by terrorism than bad driving, even though outside of a few major cities, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack was almost non-existent.

That is why there is such a disconnect between the public and scientists (and the scientifically literate) on these matters. It's easier to scare someone about strangers molesting their children than it is about their children dying or having a worse life because of global warming, even though the former is a remote probability and the later is almost inevitable.

Is anybody surprised?

[thsths]

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.

The man who saved Onagawa

[Old VMS Junkie]

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."

can not fail

[mdsolar]

Isn't that what they said about these reactors?

Re:I think this means

[angel'o'sphere]

That is incorrect.
The mag 9.5 quake was 450 miles away.
Ar the place of the reactor the quake was not even mag 6 ... the surrounding power pillions failed, shutting off the plant from external power.
The plant itself was damaged by far enough to be unable to produce its own power and cool itself.
And then the Tsunami hi tits emergency power.

So, claiming the 'plant survived' a '.... how was your words? Ah: "This reactor survived one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded." '

No, it certainly did not. It is smoldering in its ashes.

Not only was it NOT EVEN HIT, by the 'worst natural disaster', but it got destroyed by its wake (1 thousand times weaker than the a actual disaster/quake)!! Or actually as wake implies by the water of the tsunami.

Even if there had not been a tsunami, the plant was destroyed. What is so fucking difficult in accepting that? Sure, the emergency diesel power likely had prevented a 'disaster'.
But the plant never would have gone online again.
Claiming 'it survived the biggest catastrophe in mankind' is bullshit, and is a disrespect to the dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or the simple earth quakes of the last 100 years.

Google/Wikipedia for it. The official death toll is never even close to the 'unofficial' one. And all those quakes certainly qualify your brain dead definition of 'biggest disasters naturally recorded' ... Fukushima was no such thing yet. It will be in 30 or 50 years when the radiation death will start piling up.

Re:Idiot speaks: "So.. what?"

[MrL0G1C]

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.