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

[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.