Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Its Reactors' Melted Uranium Fuel (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: Earlier this year, remotely piloted robots transmitted what officials believe was a direct view of melted radioactive fuel inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant's destroyed reactors [YouTube] -- a major discovery, but one that took a long and painful six years to achieve... Japanese officials are now hoping that they can convince a skeptical public that the worst of the disaster is over, the New York Times reported, but it's not clear whether it's too late despite the deployment of 7,000 workers and massive resources to return the region to something approaching normal.

Per the Times, officials admit the recovery plan -- involving the complete destruction of the plant, rather than simply building a concrete sarcophagus around it as the Russians did in Chernobyl -- will take decades and tens of billions of dollars. Currently, Tepco plans to begin removing waste from one of the three contaminated reactors at the plant by 2021, "though they have yet to choose which one"... Currently, radiation levels are so high in the ruined facility that it fries robots sent in within a matter of hours, which will necessitate developing a new generation of droids with even higher radiation tolerances.
Friday a group of Japanese businesses and doctors sued General Electric of behalf of 150,000 Japanese citizens, saying their designs for the Fukushima reactors were reckless and negligent.

Comments

Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[jez9999]

I always like to remind people that this thing was older than Chernobyl. This was NOT a modern nuke plant with decent safety features that went meltdown. There is no comparison.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to remind people that practically all nuke plants are old and don't have decent safety standards, and that it will always be this way because nobody likes to decommission an expensive nuclear power plant if it can be kept online just a little bit longer. Hence Fukushima.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[b0s0z0ku]

The design wasn't terrible -- placing it and its backup generators in a tsunami zone was the terrible part.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is another good example of why we need effective government oversight, and regulatory agencies with actual enforcement power - despite it being trendy in some circles to claim things would be better if only the government would get out of the way.

Agreed.

There may be a better term, but of late I've kind of boiled it down to something akin to a false religion, although perhaps not in how the term is ordinarily used. People have been indoctrinated in beliefs that can be largely or completely dis-proven by science or simple data. They filter all their responses through these beliefs, and facts that disagree with those beliefs are simply filtered out. I suppose another term is willful blindness, but to me it still seems like some strange and twisted form of faith. I'm not against faith, I just don't think we should look to our faith for answers to questions better answered by well science, data, and simple observation.

It is all over and represents such a stack of issues. The "faith" in tax cuts. The "faith" that climate change is fiction. The "faith" that Roy Moore is a godly man, despite all evidence to the contrary. The "faith" that there is some kind of persecution of white people that must be addressed. People believe this stuff and their beliefs often don't square with reality. They belief that by not allowing new nuclear plants they are safer, while the truth is that the older plants are just forced to run longer and keep getting band aid fixes. A very common false believe is to believe that the horrible thing on the news is likely to affect them, but the odds are usually tiny.

I don't have a solution for this, beyond a better educated society that values lifelong learning in all things. People need to doubt and to question. Truth is seldom as simple as a sound bite.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[dgatwood]

No matter what issue is raised with any nuclear reactor technology, somebody on this site pops up to say that would never happen if we only used reactors with some different element as fuel, some different physical layout, some different size, some different cooling scheme, yada, yada, yada.

That's because they're almost always right. Whenever a problem is identified in a nuclear reactor design, manufacturers work to update the designs so that future power plants won't exhibit those problems. As a result, the known flaws in existing reactors have been solved in new designs, and the only thing standing in the way of replacing all those old reactors with reactors based on newer, safer designs are NIMBY pseudo-environmentalists who have somehow convinced themselves that if they prevent new nuclear generators from being built, the need for base load will somehow magically go away.

Old enough to predate modern computer analysis.

[Anonymous Coward]

And BWRs were chosen at the time for performance and efficiency, not safety. Plus I am pretty sure those reactors were about 20 years past their accepted usable life, so claiming they are unsafe after operating them far longer than their expected lifespan without doing your own retrofits seems pretty negligent on the part of the owners to me.

If this had failed a few years into the reactor's life, maybe I would agree with them, but they've had 30 years of warning on these exact reactor designs to shut down and replace them, and they chose to keep them running without taking adequate precautions themselves. I hope every one of the TEPCO executives gets irradiated for their part in this disaster.