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Robot Squeezes Suspected Nuclear Fuel Debris in Fukushima Reactor (theverge.com)
A robot outfitted with remotely controlled pinchers poked at debris that's suspected to contain molten nuclear fuel at the bottom of one of Fukushima's nuclear reactors, World Nuclear News reports. From a report: The poking and prodding is part of the ongoing cleanup effort at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the site of a major nuclear accident in 2011. The dextrous robot was dangled into the Unit 2 reactor on February 13th, according to a news release from the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Unit 2 is one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that overheated after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, which caused the reactor core to melt. TEPCO suspects that radioactive fuel may have melted through the bottom of the reactor vessel to fall into the containment structure surrounding it. The company has to find the radioactive debris and figure out how to remove them, so TEPCO has been sending in a series of robots to scout out the reactors. It's a dangerous journey that some of the robots haven't survived.
Scary.
Poke-e-mon.
Table-ized A.I.
I should hope they're trying to clean this mess up.
....for 1000, Alex.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Like, for a fat bum? ..or pincers?
Mr. Whipple will get upset.
Of course you can induce criticality that way. You can hit a small chunk of uranium with a hammer and reach criticality, at least for a moment. U-235 can reach criticality with a mass as small as 780 g under the right circumstances. And the presence of water, potentially with some amount of uranium in solution, greatly raises the risk. Of course, it would only remain critical while compressed, and so such a small criticality event would likely be a risk only to the robots, because it would be small and self-contained.
Perhaps you meant that it cannot cause a nuclear explosion (which requires not just enough material and moderation to sustain a reaction, but also for it to increase exponentially and not burn itself out in a fraction of a second).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Hard to believe this happened 8 YEARS ago. Even more hard to believe is just how little Japan has done to prevent further incidents. Though the wikipedia article is massive and outright redundant propaganda to read, one word you will not find is an arrest... of anyone.
ok, youre there, hows the environment? theres enough radiation down here to cook a chicken guys, can i come back up now? not just yet, see that radioactive material? give it a squeeze ....for real? is that safe? that sounds like its not safe.
sure yeah youre a robot just...give it a quick squeeze
ok, i squeezed it, what now??
wear it like a little hat. little robot hat. ....so but this is for science?
oh uh, yeah all the best robots do it for science
Good people go to bed earlier.
Well, it was (around) St. Valentine's day, even robots need to squeeze something...
Thank you, I will be here all week!
BookDetective.net - book search engine and ranker I donate my skills to.
Creimette is too busy making YouTube videos and studying for his Windows 10 certification after work.
He probably pays robots to squeeze it too.
The dextrous robot was dangled into the Unit 2 reactor
Maybe if they didn't make their robots out of sugar they would last longer under the heat.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Like we should have stopped building railroads after the first fatal accident and stopped building airplanes after the first crash killed someone and stopped the space program after the Apollo 1 fire and stopped production of all monoclonal antibodies after the first patient died from side effects?
We learn from each accident and improve. You are including accidents from the relative infancy of nuclear power. For example, at the time of the accident, Chernobyl was an ancient plant of ancient design with idiot operators.
Anthropogenic climate change is likely to be much more dangerous to humans than nuclear power is even if every kWh of energy used by humans were produced by modern nuclear power plants. As well, accidents arising from nuclear power plants have tiny scope compared to the worldwide impact of climate change. Generating power via nuclear fission is an excellent way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Not sure if just trolling or seriously arguing that a 40 year old product, built off of a 50 year old design, ignoring the warnings from oversight agencies indicating that something like this could happen, ignoring the warnings that the seawall wasn't high enough to prevent something like this from happening, should be the poster child for why development on nuclear energy is dumb...
Well, except for the bit of some of it getting into California wine. Or that "Further, most bottles of wine made after 1952 do contain at least a little bit of this nuclear twist." It's almost as if there were something nuclear throwing large amounts of something, something into the air. Thankfully none of that's dangerous levels, but it's not much of a selling point that you need large amounts of water for cooling and so any accident you have could potentially result in detectable traces a quarter a world away.
Seriously, the only reason the US was interested in nuclear power in the past was precisely the massive amounts of waste material the US was creating in its nuclear weapons program. With the US building massive amounts of bombs and fronting almost all the costs of initial collection and processing of fuel, it's little wonder that nuclear power seemed so dirt cheap that it wouldn't need to be metered. Then the 80s happened and just growing the stockpile was seen as a bad idea.
Of course at that point we also started to learn that decommissioning old plants was going to be tons more expensive than original stated, and we still had no idea what to do with all the waste because the US refuses to allow reprocessing it. Even if the US was willing to take up the cost itself of processing the waste, we'd still want to decommission all those older plants and start over. Yet, that's incredibly expensive, and no one wants to pay for it. Should the US buy out all the old nuclear plants to build better designs? I'm not saying NMBY has nothing to do with it, but it has very little to do with it in a lot of areas; I mean, as much as people bitch about fracking, that's happening all over the place and still heavily expanding.
about 20 years ramping up from 0 to 2000 TWh/yr, plus 30 years at about 2200 TWh/yr = (20*2000/2) + (30*2200) = 86000
Cost of the above two cleanups divided by the amount of energy generated by nuclear power: $432 billion / 86000 billion kWh = $0.005 per kWh = 0.5 cents per kWh
I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?
What makes you think that the "cleanup cost" of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters is yet known in its entirety?
Also, there are not only costs for disaster clean-ups, but currently completely unknown costs for the safe storage of the nuclear waste produced. The Asse II mine alone, which was attempted to be used for nuclear waste storage during 11 years, has cost ~9 billion Euro as of today, with no end of additional costs in sight. And that was just one small site.
I'm not a nuclear apologist by any means, but it's an empty argument to say Fukushima means nuclear is impossible. Nobody would build a plant remotely like this one, or situate a modern plant anywhere like there.
I'm a huge proponent of upgrade the electric grid. This would enable renewable sources to power distant cities, but it could *coincidentally* give more flexibility in locating nuclear plants, should we decide to build more of them. And if we do we need to build what we've learned about organizations running nuclear plants (we can't rely on them doing the right thing) into the design.
I don't believe we should have a all-eggs-in-one basket approach to our energy needs. A diverse portfolio of energy sources means we can build them where the marginal risk/environmental cost is minimal.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just drop a nuke on it. No further attention needed. Its not like it will be the first time.
... idiot operators.
Have we solved this problem yet?
dna.js
I'm not a nuclear apologist by any means, but it's an empty argument to say Fukushima means nuclear is impossible. Nobody would build a plant remotely like this one, or situate a modern plant anywhere like there.
Consider that there is approximately 80 of these types of reactors still in operation and that their service life is 40 years which has been extended to increase the return on investment.
The next thing to consider is that it is possible to make a reactor design that isn't an improvement over older designs. Currently the best one is EPR which...
And if we do we need to build what we've learned about organizations running nuclear plants (we can't rely on them doing the right thing) into the design.
incorporates some of the improvements the NRC commissioned the Nuclear industry to uncover. They came up with 30 improvements to Nuclear reactor design. The most significant improvement was to build them underground. What was discovered is that this makes Nuclear power more costly to build, which scares off investors. So it's not impossible to make nuclear safe, it's very expensive.
I'm a huge proponent of upgrade the electric grid. This would enable renewable sources to power distant cities, but it could *coincidentally* give more flexibility in locating nuclear plants, should we decide to build more of them.
The criteria for locating nuclear facilities is specific process based on its requirements. It is a difficult process so it is surrounded by law to exclude the general population from interfering with it. It's much easier to extend the grid to somewhere it is appropriate to build a nuclear facility.
I don't believe we should have a all-eggs-in-one basket approach to our energy needs. A diverse portfolio of energy sources means we can build them where the marginal risk/environmental cost is minimal.
Indeed. We should immediately begin a program to increase the amount of solar, wind and geothermal energy that we are producing while we can draw energy from these legacy supply methods.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?
The first is that information related to this subject is heavily censored. The information you have provided is from organizations who are restricted in what they are allowed to publish.
Money isn't the main consideration. The impact of a single disaster is. Fukushima was four disasters at once and considering the amount of spent fuel rods stored on the site had the potential to be an extinction level event. It still does as the removal process has stalled with 566 rods remaining in a precarious position in the heavily damaged Unit 3 spent fuel pool. Tepco itself acknowledges this as the most potent risk for a much more serious disaster than the original.
At this point though it is worthwhile to point out that Tepco has removed approximately 1000 spent fuel rods - which is an enormous effort that should be commended, with gratitude to the workers and engineers that continue to risk their lives to eliminate this risk.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Another genuinely cute reply modded down by one of Slashdot's prudish INCEL party-poopers. Go fuck yourself, yeah?
Send in the CEO.
Please excuse my ignorance, but how do you figure that Fukushima had the potential to be an extinction level event? Even if every gram of radioactive substance on site detonated in a sustained criticality, my understanding is we'd be left with a big crater and a hot, ugly mess that could potentially increase cancer rates by a small amount. The atmosphere would not catch fire, the zombie virus would not be released and we would not even suffer a nuclear winter. We wouldn't even lose our current global civilization, much less need to worry about a human extinction event.
Unless there's some sort of rare protected species on the site, and the increased radiation means we lose a species of snowy plover or something?
The plants failed for 3 reasons. 1, Diesel generators and electrical systems for emergency cooling systems were built below sea level so the tsunami wrecked the engines and the electrical switch gear. Ruined all. 2, off site emergency power was routed thru the same under sea lever switch gear, so no cooling was available. 3, Years before the tsunami, engineers wanted a wall added to keep the emergency cooling stuff dry but management refused due to cost in money and in loss of face.
Emergency cooling is needed due to reactions that continue after the poison rods move to 0 power position. About 6 hours are needed for core power to decay down near normal idle level. When earthquakes or winds wreck power lines, the reactor must be tripped & secondary or emergency cooling systems employed to prevent over temperatures in the pot.
Primary containment of nuclear fuel in use is the reactor pot, a thick steel pressure vessel. Secondary containment is the floor of the reactor building. US plants have over 5 feet of thick rebars and concrete as floor of the reactor building. Japanese? Until the fuel gets thru the floor, it has not escaped. Temperatures and neutron radiation needed to wreck the floor did not exist during the first 2 months after the tsunami, so the floor is intact, the is fuel contained.
Vigorous washing with seawater did propel burned equipment bits up out of the building.
Initial robots failed due to neutron radiation while the fuel decayed. Now the fuel has largely decayed and is not in configuration needed to generate neutrons & high temperatures. So the robot now survives. If the pot was perforated, is was soon after the tsunami. Over, done. Not going to happen now. Comparisons to the Russian plants with fuel surrounded by carbon is foolish. Russians used carbon as moderator, Japan & US use water as moderator. Most often, water does not burn. Comparisons to nuclear bombs is more foolish. 2% nuclear fuel is not capable of nuclear explosions. Over 98% fissionable uranium is needed for bombs. Go read how bombs work, how all must activate fully in sequence for a nuclear explosion. You will not again compare any power plant to such a bomb. Unless you are a troll.
Large 550,000 volt power lines are the only way to transport power interstate. Bow, arrow, sting, rope & wire are all the equipment needed to again down high power lines. Local power generation, local lines & local storage are the only safe way in this country that invites Muslims. Jihad is not compatible with country wide power systems.
with a Uranium fetish!
What makes you think that the "cleanup cost" of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters is yet known in its entirety?
You want to double it up? Go ahead, it's still cheap.
How about the "cleanup cost" of coal?
For some reason, you whine about random places in the world where you've never been. Why can't you NIMBY your own backyard, all those mines are in the middle of nowhere, good old acid rain, all the radioactivity hiding in coal, not to mention that AGW which we can't stop without crashing the economy.
Unless there's some sort of rare protected species on the site, and the increased radiation means we lose a species of snowy plover or something?
Godzilla has the potential to destroy civilization. There's a conspiracy to censor his implication in the incident.
Nobody would build a plant remotely like this one, or situate a modern plant anywhere like there.
And was this the last unsafe plant in operation, or are there more plants at risk ? If there are more, what are the plans for shutting them down ?
Of course you can induce criticality that way. You can hit a small chunk of uranium with a hammer and reach criticality, at least for a moment. U-235 can reach criticality with a mass as small as 780 g under the right circumstances. And the presence of water, potentially with some amount of uranium in solution, greatly raises the risk. Of course, it would only remain critical while compressed, and so such a small criticality event would likely be a risk only to the robots, because it would be small and self-contained.
Perhaps you meant that it cannot cause a nuclear explosion (which requires not just enough material and moderation to sustain a reaction, but also for it to increase exponentially and not burn itself out in a fraction of a second).
But since it was a 60's style LWR, there wouldn't be pure U-235 in the reactor. It would be LEU which is probably 4% U-235 and 96% U-238 or so as new fuel. Exactly what the isotopic distribution of this material is, I'm not exactly sure, but I'm 100% certain it doesn't contain more than a few percent of U-235. Since U-238 is a neutron poison, I seriously doubt that criticality could be induced accidentally. You probably couldn't induce criticality in this material without explosives (or lots of a moderator material) but I can't be sure of that. The hazard with this material is the fission products and all but the medium lived ones like Cs-137 and Sr-90 will have already burned out by now to stable elements. The long lived stuff like U-235 isn't very radioactive (but it is poisonous). The short lived stuff is now stable isotopes, mostly heavy metals. Its still a hazard to human life, but not in the dramatic fashion you imagine. Its more dangerous because of the amount of heavy metals which are poisonous to humans in high amounts and less dangerous because of nuclear issues at this point.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
... idiot operators.
Have we solved this problem yet?
Somehow I don't think anyone will ever be that stupid again. Basically, they simulated a meltdown by shutting off all the safety and power systems to see if the momentum of the spinning turbines could keep the cooling system going. Well, they couldn't so then they turned up the reactor to full power to keep them going which caused the reactor to get too hot and then try tried backing off the reactor but it was already out of control. And since all the safety systems were already disabled and couldn't quickly be re-enabled, the reaction ran out of control and produced a huge steam explosion. Since it never happened before or since, I'm not sure its as big a problem as you think. Also, considering the deaths per TWh for all other power sources are the same or (often much) worse than nuclear, I'm not sure this is quite the showstopping problem you imagine it is.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
You can't point at the cleanup costs, any more than you can point out how cheap it is for a dude to dig coal out of the ground and burn it or someone who just randomly put a wind turbine on his house and now claims to get free electricity.
The best method we have is levelised cost of energy. I don't know if LCOE for nuclear includes cleanup costs - I would guess not as it's rare that they need to deal with it, but as you note it might not be that much anyway.
The most interesting thing though is the LCOE of renewables continues to fall, while nuclear seems to be pretty steady in terms of cost.
Note: I'm not super opposed to nuclear. But I prefer the idea of small, more decentralised power generation + smart grid. Ultimately though most of what I read in LCOE terms seems to indicate that nuclear is just more expensive. (You can make the argument that nuclear is expensive because of regulatory pain, which is fair - but doesn't really help much. Expensive is expensive! )
You pay this in addition to other costs for nuclear which are already so high that nobody really invests in nuclear anymore. Also the deaths per TWh you refer to from a random source on the internet is not plausible as it obviously ignores excess deaths from radiation which is hard to estimate but also can't be ignored completely.
I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up
Something you wouldn't need to do if our reactors weren't 40+ years old and if the greenies hadn't handcuffed development of safer nuclear technologies for the past 50 years.
but currently completely unknown costs for the safe storage of the nuclear waste produced
1. Hyperbole claiming something we've been doing for 40 years is unknown. X.
2. Pointing to a single case to make a general claim rather than a study of industry practice. X.
3. Ignoring that the issue is mostly of political nature and that many better options for waste exist. X
4. Not reading the original links posted and making a claim that something is unknown. X
BINGO! Hey everyone, I got NIMBY Nuclear Bullshit Bingo!
That's a vast under-estimate for the cost of the Fukushima clean up. Are you including all the compensation and knock-on costs like delayed tsunami damage repair and having to build new communities because the old ones have dissipated over the years?
Also, calculating the per kWh cost based on global production is ridiculous. Only Japanese people are paying that cost, and for them it's vastly higher.
Of course, this is a pretty horrific example of externalizing your costs. Even if you accept the monetary cost, you are not the one being forced out of your home, your community and your job, or getting cancer.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, except for the bit of some of it getting into California wine.
lol
If you're stupid enough to believe that's an issue, you can be safely ignored.
Fukushima was four disasters at once and considering the amount of spent fuel rods stored on the site had the potential to be an extinction level event.
This is by far the stupidest thing I have read so far in 2019. You have another 10 months to try and top it, but I doubt that's possible.
Yes. Simply put, modern reactors won't let you blow them up. They're designed in such a way where even if you had administrative control over the system, you would not be capable of sabotaging anything in a catastrophic fashion.
A friend of mine is studying nuclear power in university. She showed me a simulation of a modern reactor's controls on her computer. I kept asking her to simulate a meltdown and she kept showing me that it's IMPOSSIBLE. I'm like no, can't you just turn that off, or crank that up, etc., and she'd show me how every time she'd try to muck with the controls, the system's failsafes would kick in and automatically adjust themselves to safe levels faster than she could keep up with them. It was pretty cool, gave me a lot of peace of mind.
Most modern reactors barely even need to be staffed at all. They run themselves.
Please excuse my ignorance, but how do you figure that Fukushima had the potential to be an extinction level event?
Not had, *has*. Fukushima *has* the potential to be an extinction level event.
I know I will probably get a lot of criticism for sharing this viewpoint and I don't care, this is a serious matter relevant to us all. The Fukushima disaster is still not controlled almost 10 years later. It's not over.
Even if every gram of radioactive substance on site detonated in a sustained criticality, my understanding is we'd be left with a big crater and a hot, ugly mess that could potentially increase cancer rates by a small amount.
There is a reason that spent fuel rods are kept in a pool with a constant supply of cool water. That is because the water not only cools them, it moderates the neutrons. When the water is absent the fuel rods become supercritical, rapidly heat and ignite into a plutonium fire that burns around 3000 degrees centigrade. Water cannot put this type of fire out as it turns to hydrogen and oxygen, concrete simply melts and IIRC the only thing that puts it out is large amounts of boron - if anything can get close enough to place it. The smoke produced is plutonium oxide and plutonium chloride due to the presence of seawater. Plutonium Oxide is an inhalant and hundreds of tons would pumped into the atmosphere from a fire which will continue burning until there is no fuel left. In that volume anything that breathes it in will have it accumulate in the lungs as they die.
With the context out of the way we can move onto our present scenario. Fukushima Unit 3 spent fuel pool still contains 500+ spent fuel rods. Currently Tepco have the crane offline for repairs after removing approximately 1000 fuel rods so they are fully aware of this scenario and are working to resolve it urgently.
A consequence of attempting to stop the groundwater flow is that the ground below the reactor has become softened as the water level rose. Any further seismic activity, flooding or industrial accident that damages this building, causing it to either loose the water it contains or topple it, will create the conditions for super-criticality resulting in a plutonium fire from the remaining fuel bundles in open air. To make matters worse another spent fuel pool facility containing another 6000 spent fuel rods is close enough to be ignited by the initial 500 rods. I doubt there would be anyone alive in Japan after a few weeks to handle the situation.
Were such a thing to occur the plutonium oxide contained in the smoke would rise to the jet stream above Japan, spread rapidly to the continental United States and then onto the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. I'm sure the death rate has been modeled by the US Government as there are a lot of smart people there. If I were to guess the entire population of the Northern hemisphere would be dead in about a month, certainly within a year. The Southern Hemisphere would probably suffer the slowest death. When I say death I mean all animal and plant life above a few centimeters turning the China Syndrome reactor meltdown scenario into a parody.
Whilst I can excuse your ignorance, it is ignorance that got us into this situation in the first place. We will remain in this situation until all of the spent fuel rods have been removed from the Fukushima Unit 3 Spent Fuel pool. You need only look to science for the behavior of the plutonium and its products for the veracity of my claims. I don't know if reports from Japanese civil engineers are still available however their claims from interviews are sobering reading.
Whilst all this doom and gloom maybe hard to get your head around and likely to be met with scoffing disbelief, the reason to share it is for enough people to know and pressure government into providing more resources to resolve this issue while it can be controlled.
The good news though is this is the optimistic scenario, t
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No. There are a number of plants *exactly like this one*, although few in such dangerous places.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Fukushima was four disasters at once and considering the amount of spent fuel rods stored on the site had the potential to be an extinction level event.
This is by far the stupidest thing I have read so far in 2019. You have another 10 months to try and top it, but I doubt that's possible.
Your comment suggests this information is so far out of your capacity to process you have to use ridicule to mask your fear, knowing that the truth is far from your capacity to comprehend. Your discomfit is evident in your inability to ask questions which exposes ignorance that Mr AC had the social skills to ask to be excused for.
It seems from the way you communicate, c6gunner, that you carry the consequences of some serious trauma. From your pseudonym you are presumably a serviceman or woman, probably some kind of infantry, who received either psychological or head trauma, perhaps both if you were exposed to explosions. At the very least you were probably bullied a lot when you were very young, which may have led you to serve. You probably blame smart people for that, so you come here to take your anger out on smart people.
Whilst I appreciate your potential service it seems that whatever trauma you carry has locked you into a very low level of cognition and has made your higher brain functions unavailable. Despite your rudeness I offer you compassion out of recognition that you are someone who has been brutally victimized, probably as a child which causes you to act like a bit of a dick (which you may know but can't understand why). For now I offer you the benefit of the doubt as a service to you so you can find out who you are underneath all of the bravado of your trauma because you still act like an abused little boy.
I would suggest that my posts may be far too traumatizing for you to absorb and that you should refrain from reading them in your fragile psychological state as they may lead you to self-harm some months after you read them when you have forgotten you have. The punishing voices inside your head that compel you to behave the way you do can be resolved as you resolve the trauma however for now engaging me in conversation on this subject may trigger them relentlessly, I suggest, for weeks to come.
As for your teenage like responses, they are a sign of your collapsed ego boundaries which is why you are so boring to interact with in a forum designed for adult conversation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sorry, all I read was "blah blah blah, I'm a dirty tramp".
That's an incredibly long way of saying "I have absolutely nothing to support my ridiculous assertion".
You pay this in addition to other costs for nuclear which are already so high that nobody really invests in nuclear anymore. Also the deaths per TWh you refer to from a random source on the internet is not plausible as it obviously ignores excess deaths from radiation which is hard to estimate but also can't be ignored completely.
You mean "...which we can't prove that happen at all, so we will just make up some random huge number and add it"?
LOL.
Plutonium.
The very fact that you use plutonium for your scaremongering signifies that you have no freaking clue about what you're talking about. Plutonium is not something that you would want to keep under your pillow, but you can google up images of people handling few kilogram-sized chunks of it with minimal protective equipnemt like facemasks and gloves. And there's about 200 kg of it total at Fukushima, as the main fuel was uranium, only a tiny amount of plutonium was mixed-in into fuel in reactor 3. That 200 kg enough to poison a small-to-modeate size lake, not cause a freaking planetary-scale extincion event. Heck, we have already put several thousand of TONNES of this shit right into the atmosphere through nuclear tests.
And yes, "poison" the lake, not "irradiate" the lake. Plutonium's radiation is so (comparably) weak that it's not even the main concern when talking about releasing plutonium into the environment, its main hazard is that it is a heavy metal like lead or mercury, and just like them, it's toxic. That's of course talking about reactor-grade plutonium, the isotopic composition used for RTGs is more nasty. I guess you could do a large lake with that. But here we have reactor-grade plutonium.
There's a reason why everyone is reporting concentrations of iodium and caesium isotopes when talking about radiation release - because THOSE are the nasties, not plutonium. But then again, those are transmutation products, so we're not talking about multiple-kilogram amounts, not multiple hundred tons amount. But "ZOMG few kilos of caesium got leaked we're all gonna DIE" sounds much less scary, eh?
Now let me go over your post to show you and everyone else how much of an idiot you are.
Please excuse my ignorance, but how do you figure that Fukushima had the potential to be an extinction level event?
Not had, *has*. Fukushima *has* the potential to be an extinction level event.
I know I will probably get a lot of criticism for sharing this viewpoint and I don't care, this is a serious matter relevant to us all. The Fukushima disaster is still not controlled almost 10 years later. It's not over.
Even if every gram of radioactive substance on site detonated in a sustained criticality, my understanding is we'd be left with a big crater and a hot, ugly mess that could potentially increase cancer rates by a small amount.
There is a reason that spent fuel rods are kept in a pool with a constant supply of cool water. That is because the water not only cools them, it moderates the neutrons. When the water is absent the fuel rods become supercritical, rapidly heat and ignite into a plutonium fire that burns around 3000 degrees centigrade. Water cannot put this type of fire out as it turns to hydrogen and oxygen, concrete simply melts and IIRC the only thing that puts it out is large amounts of boron - if anything can get close enough to place it. The smoke produced is plutonium oxide and plutonium chloride due to the presence of seawater. Plutonium Oxide is an inhalant and hundreds of tons would pumped into the atmosphere from a fire which will continue burning until there is no fuel left. In that volume anything that breathes it in will have it accumulate in the lungs as they die.
With the context out of the way we can move onto our present scenario. Fukushima Unit 3 spent fuel pool still contains 500+ spent fuel rods. Currently Tepco have the crane offline for repairs after removing approximately 1000 fuel rods so they are fully aware of this scenario and are working to resolve it urgently.
A consequence of attempting to stop the groundwater flow is that the ground below the reactor has become softened as the water level rose. Any further seismic activity, flooding or industrial accident that damages this building, causing it to either loose the water it contains or topple it, will create the conditions for super-criticality resulting in a plutonium
A report called Nuclear Power Plant Security and Vulnerabilities explored vulnerabilities at nuclear power plants.
From that the issue of spent fuel pool vulnerabilities warranted further study in the now declassified report Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report by the Committee on the Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage within the National Research Council which details variation of the above scenario from a terrorist attack, as opposed to a disaster.
You can find information about plutonium oxidization Evaluation of source-term data for plutonium aerosolization which starts at around 500 centigrade.
Actions to reduce the possibility of these kinds of scenarios are simple and cost effective. Mainly by dry cask storing fuel that has cooled for 5 years and separating and dispersing spent fuel recently removed from the reactor throughout the pool. All very practical, affordable actions for reducing this risk.
Information about the fuel removal process and the damage to the Unit 3 spent fuel pool in Tepco's Fukushima spent fuel removal plan.
There is very little point arguing with people who look at Nuclear power from an idealistic viewpoint. For them Nuclear power is perfect and requires no improvements. This, according to the official report into the Fukushima accident is how it occurred.
Again I would like to express my gratitude to the workers and engineers attempting to get the Fukushima disaster under control.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I said "There is a reason that spent fuel rods are kept in a pool with a constant supply of cool water" that is the context. The fuel rods are MOX so we agree that they contain plutonium.
Sure, you could swim in a spent fuel pool, you just wouldn't open your eyes. However I wouldn't hang around if the water drained out or the spent fuel pool collapsed and smashed several thousands tones of concrete and fuel rods together.
Unless you happen to have the manifest for the fuel composition of Fukushima Unit 3 that you can share it's fair to say that you don't know what it is going into the reactor. No one has any idea what the composition of those fuel rods are when they are hot and coming out of the reactor. At issue is there is enough plutonium to start criticality and more than enough energy in the mass of remaining spent fuel for it to become critical within a supercritical radioactive fire outside of a nuclear reactor.
The key take-away for you here is the difference between inside and outside of the body and bio-accumulation in the food chain.
I think you're missing that Fukushima is in the presence of seawater because it's next to the ocean therfore Plutonium *Chloride* is produced which is highly soluble to metabolic processes. Your ignorance lies in that plutonium is an energetic alpha emitter which you refer to as weak because most living things are resistant to external alpha exposure. However it is an energetic alpha so when it is absorbed *into* the body that exposure is *internal* exposure and much more problematic because the layers of skin aren't wrapped around our internal organs.
Plutonium oxide is a potential inhalant and once it is breathed in it is very difficult to remove.
This is the difference between external radiation exposure and internal radiation exposure.
Except we are talking about reactor cores that weigh about 160 tonnes and we have 40 years worth of spent fuel stacked up. So yeah it's many hundreds of tonnes.
I note how emotional you appear and how divorced from reality this makes your rant.
In this sentence several thousand of TONNES with roughly a one kilo warhead would translate to "several thousands" of nuclear warheads when we know there were several hundreds of nuclear tests. That's several hundred kilograms, not several thousand tonnes. Quite a discrepancy in what
My ism, it's full of beliefs.