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Fukushima: the Removal of Nuclear Fuel Rods From Damaged Reactor Building Begins (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Workers at the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have begun removing fuel rods from a storage pool near one of the three reactors that suffered meltdowns eight years ago. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said on Monday that work had begun to remove the first of 566 used and unused fuel assemblies in reactor building No 3. The fuel rods stored in unit No 3's cooling pool were not damaged in the 2011 disaster, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi's backup power supply and triggered the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, 25 years earlier.
Tepco said the operation to remove the fuel rods, which are in uncovered pools, would take two years, adding that transferring them to safer ground would better protect them in the event of another catastrophic earthquake. Workers are remotely operating a crane to raise the fuel from a storage rack in the pool and place it into a protective cask. The whole process occurs underwater to prevent radiation leaks. The utility plans to repeat the procedure in the two other reactors that suffered meltdowns.
Tepco said the operation to remove the fuel rods, which are in uncovered pools, would take two years, adding that transferring them to safer ground would better protect them in the event of another catastrophic earthquake. Workers are remotely operating a crane to raise the fuel from a storage rack in the pool and place it into a protective cask. The whole process occurs underwater to prevent radiation leaks. The utility plans to repeat the procedure in the two other reactors that suffered meltdowns.
When are we going to find out that all the older reactors similar to Fukushima are shut down safely... Seriously, I have no great problem with the newer designs, but the older ones need phased out, not renewed.
This is what happens when the oligarchs literally take over your country and install thir own leader's that care not about the environmnent but only about themselves, sickening at best. In the case of America, it was Putin leveraging the KGB to mindcontrol voters thru hacking into making them think he wasn't a Soviet operative. In the case of Japan, it was TEPCO owning the government who took there hands off. Again, sickening at best. This is why we need to have a real discussion about the wrong people getting control, why we need to get rid of fake news (the type where TRUMP would be backed up by lies and treasury), and how we can roundtable get the world back on track.
S beauhd E
E beauhd D
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You are welcome on my lawn.
The parent was posted by a troll. Obviously he's not the real BeauHD. However, when I click on his username from the desktop version of Slashdot, I get an error stating that the user doesn't exist. This prevents me from viewing his comment history, seeing his friends and foes, any stories he's submitter, or anything else done by this user account. Instead, I get text saying, "The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case."
That's an embarrassment. This bug has existed for months, at least, and Slashdot hasn't fixed it. This bug didn't exist previously. It used to be that Slashdot's source code was open sourced on SourceForge, allowing anyone to open a bug report, view the code, and suggest fixes. Is SourceForge that bad, or Slashdot's code such an embarrassment that management has decided not to release any new versions of the code?
Good lord this place has turned to shit. The editors should be embarrassed. Whipslash made so many promises to improve Slashdot, but he hasn't done a damn thing... except delete comments. What a joke...
Fuck you all. Slashdot is so jacked up.
Was very cool that they were able to image the internal state of the reactors with muon detectors. Those particles from some far away cosmic event from before the dinosaurs (in many cases) go through all that concrete, lead and come out the other side and hit detectors to provide an image of meltdown in just a couple of weeks of exposure. Amazing stuff.
to work on this.
This is some very welcome news in developments at Fukushima as the foundations of Unit 3 are damaged. Workers at Fukushima have already removed 1000 fuel rods IIRC from that reactor building due to concerns about what would happen if the building collapsed.
To get a better understanding of why its an urgent issue, a report called Nuclear Power Plant Security and Vulnerabilities explored vulnerabilities at nuclear power plants.
From that report 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. It details variations of scenarios created from vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks, however the potential outcomes are similar if they are initiated by a natural disaster.
The most sobering scenarios came from analyzing what happens from loosing the cooling water from a spent fuel pool. Spent fuel rods are kept in a pool with a constant supply of water because the water not only cools them, it moderates the neutrons so that they don't become critical. One scenario examined from loosing the cooling water was a plutonium fire that creates plutonium oxide in the smoke with reactors that are MOX fueled, such as Unit 3 was. With several hundred tons of fuel it would be the largest plutonium fire we have ever faced, it would also be in open air.
You can find information about plutonium oxidization Evaluation of source-term data for plutonium aerosolization which starts at around 500 centigrade. I think that because of the proximity to the sea, plutonium chloride would also be created.
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 pools of reactors that are still operating. All very practical, affordable actions for reducing this risk of reactors that are still operating.
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 about Nuclear power from an idealistic viewpoint. To idealize that nuclear power is perfect and requires no improvements means that the nuclear industry cannot evolve legal requirements for new processes. This, according to the official report into the Fukushima accident, is the main reason the disaster occurred.
So this is a great time to commend the workers and engineers at the Fukushima plant and express gratitude for their efforts to get this disaster under control. Thank you!!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yeh, damn NIMBY's causing Fukushima with their pseudo-regulatory barriers.
Solar's also dangerous! What if a solar panel fell and landed on a bird, it could chop the bird in two!...
NIMBY's kill birds!
"they couldn't cope with the regulatory burden" = Horseshit. Renewable power dropped 40% in cost in 5 years and hasn't hit bottom, nuclear is only going up because IT'S NUCLEAR, you have to fund it for thousands of years, DIPSHIT.
Replacing Nuclear With Renewables Would Save France $44.5 Billion
"the government would cancel plans to construct 15 new nuclear power plants, and instead replace its aging nuclear reactors with renewable infrastructure over the next several decades, according to a new report published Monday by the French environmental agency. The report details how France could increase its dependence on solar and wind energy over time, gradually shutting down nuclear power plants to make room for renewables.
Doing so will still be costly: the report suggests that developing these new power plants as well as the necessary infrastructure to support them will cost the government $1.45 trillion (1.28 trillion euros) over the next 42 years. That’s a huge investment, but it’s still much cheaper than maintaining the status quo and replacing the country’s aging nuclear power plants with more modernized reactors."
You simply don't understand how this math works. Nuclear will always be a money pit. Renewables will continue to get cheaper forever until they are 100% of the power humanity needs, by literaly definition of sustainability.
Go clean up Fukushima or one of the hundreds of contaminated sites worldwide if you want to put your pom poms where your mouth is, tapdancer.
"So even with the bad old nuclear designs from the 50s to 70s that we currently use are better than any other energy source. " = HORSESHIT, moron! Falling off a roof is NOT A RESULT OF ANY POWER SOURCE yet is tabulated as one?
You are dumber than you ought to be given what you've invested time to know halfway. NOBODY DIED AS A RESULT OF SOLAR OR WIND POWER TECHNOLOGIES. They threaten nobody ongoing! Nuclear can't say that.
When dishonest faggots like you try to pretend the likelihood of morons falling off their roof proves industry-investment-dying nuclear power is somehow "safer" than anything else, you know you've hit rock bottom of the slag pool.
Boron (boric acid) does not prevent splitting of water (which happens at a low enough rate anyway). It's used to reliably shut down the chain reaction, boron is a great neutron poison and borated water is an easy way to deliver it into the core.
As I said, water radiolysis even at full power is generally negligible. The danger is in steam-zirconium reaction, that happens when fuel rods lose cooling and fuel temperature rises past about 800C. This is a purely chemical reaction - zirconium displaces oxygen from water, releasing hydrogen.
"Imagine how much more your new solar plant would cost if everything controlling it had to be analog and specially designed as a one-off." = Still cheaper than the money pit that is nuclear, you don't have to face it, the industry did.
You lost this already. Waving the pom poms as if "deregulation helped the banks, why not do it for nuclear waste?" just makes you a fucking moron well after the fact of nuclear's economic decline became inevitable.
Sorry. Renewables will always get cheaper. Nuclear is not going to anytime soon, and you're not trustworthy meanwhile - hence you don't work on it or have anything real to do with it. Go tell Reddit all about your ideas.
The nuclear industry doesn't give a flying fuck what you think unless you've got a few dozen Billions of dollars lying around to put up - or shut up. The market has spoken and it's renewables investment exploding, not nuclear failures.
Nuclear is failing because renewables are cheaper, safer, faster to ramp up, better all around. Suck it bitch. The investment industry spoke, you lose, renewables won. Want to see the graph, lol?
Learn to read nuclear propaganda faggots.
https://blog.aee.net/the-numbers-are-in-and-renewables-are-winning-on-price-alone
You are not a nuclear engineer. You do not understand the problem with the nuclear industry is twofold, that it's got a lot of cleanup it can't afford and renewable power is cheaper, cleaner, and projects ramp up incomparably faster.
There's almost no risk associated with renewable power investment, which is why it's exploding while nuclear is shuttering. Because the cost of operating nuclear power as-is is a socialist national-grade investment need.
You either account for that up front, or you stop pretending the subsidized power is artificially cheap, but you will be made to stop lying about it here one way or another.
As if nuclear spills/leaks/meltdowns compared to the risk of falling off a roof if careless or done on a budget, you dishonest and complete fucking moron lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents - Yeah falling off a roof is a concern for any rooftop activity, chimney work, antennae, gutters, plumbing, roofing.. yet we do those things, moron.
None of them makes nuclear power any safer, and falling off a roof isn't the fault of "solar power" dipshit. You don't, for a single example, have to install solar panels on a roof to begin with, you dishonest nuclear shill moron.
The usual lying nuclear proponents want to simultaneously pretend safety regulations aren't needed and that renewables are somehow "more dangerous" - it's just theater of the retarded ongoing around here.
Always the same nuclear propaganda morons with the same trite thoughtless bullshit lies. As if solar panels can only go on roofs, and roofs are the real danger society needs to be concerned about, not failing nuclear infrastructure like Fukushima or the ~30 similar reactors still in operation in backyards all over, just waiting for the quake or other malfunction, always costing more money the while.
Throw the propaganda faggots like sfcat off the roof and we'll get the panels on safely without their lies. As if solar panels can only go on rooftops anyway lol. What a dumb cunt.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-labor/fukushima-worker-dies-after-falling-into-water-storage-tank-idUSKBN0KT05K20150120
Why should THEY be dishonored when it was the TEPCO executives responsible for this mess? The engineers can only do what they have the budget to do, and unless they get funding, plans, and approval to make modifications to the plant, they are for the most part stuck following procedure. In this case both the plant and procedures were flawed for the situation that arose, but the mitigations required to have avoided the event would have required reengineering the generator locations, changing failsafe designs around the reactors, and expecting a tsunami as big as hit to happen. None of those were within the operating engineers or workers abilities to change. They could only try and hold the place together within the scenario they had been given. The fact that the whole plant didn't melt down completely in a chernobyl-like fashion, complete with an ion fountain seems pretty good in my book. It would have been better if it didn't melt down at all, but that is on the TEPCO officials who should have been saving money towards seawall improvements and earthquake reinforcements 20,30,40 years before this happened. Those reactors were so far beyond their rated lifetime it wasn't funny. And lets not forget the regional government or the Diet in these discussions. They certainly have their share of blame in not better overseeing TEPCOs operations or helping securing funding for needed improvements. But Japanese leadership is just as corrupt as American leadership toward, as the sun shifts from the East and sets in the west, towards China not Japan. Maybe it's time for Japan to give some serious thought on how to make the metaphoric sun rise from the East again.
We've been lucky we only have a few ongoing distasters. The obvious trouble with nuclear is ramp-up and ramp-down. TCO until safer and cleaner processes are created seems not favourable. Humans simply have no way to account for hundreds of years of waste disposal or half-life of 10K years. The biggest trouble with better and cleaner nuclear is weaponization though, proliferation of such designs would mean guaranteed end of the human lifeform.
But you have to mine for the metals and other things that go into solar/wind etc... You have pollution released during mining and production/recycling of these... and you need a shitload of them to be able to provide a small amount of the worlds energy. Not to mention pollution from production/recycling for the needed batteries.
I'm not against safety regulation, but i'm against non-scientific ways to prevent nuclear-plants from being built and secured, and there is a shitload of this going on..
Nuclear is probably the only way if we want to reduce the amount of CO2 we release per year while not reducing our energy-needs.
"Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima" by James Mahaffey is another enlightening source on what and why goes and could go wrong.
I only have a little information on this whole Fukushima-Daiichi decommissioning process, but the "Ichi-F" manga by Kazuto Tatsuta (pseudonym) helped me get some perspective on the whole situation. The cleanup seems really well organized (at the time it was depicted) and TEPCO appeared to take every precaution with their workers.
Yes, I also know it could be manufactured propaganda, but it seems truthful to me. Judge for yourselves.
Just to be clear, this is just cleaning up [part of] the mess that was lying around before the disaster. This is making absolutely zero progress on the actual cleanup, it's just cleaning up things that should have been cleaned up long ago.
Spent fuel rods lying around in pools is proof positive that nuclear is bullshit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have to mine a metal for nuclear power too.
And for pressure vessels, containment, etc.
YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS. Renewables are the only way to reduce c02 in the next 50 years unless you have TRILLIONS TO DONATE, SOCIALIST BENEFACTOR? PAY UP OR SHUT UP MORON.
Nuclear is probably the only way if we want to reduce the amount of CO2 we release per year while not reducing our energy-needs.
Unfortunately, this: one need not like fission (it gives me the creeps) but the above observation simply can't be argued with.
Yes, but uranium mining is an automated process (by necessity), and AFAIK none of that process involves leaving uranium ore lying around to contaminate runoff.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You write "the water not only cools them, it moderates the neutrons so that they don't become critical." This makes no sense. Moderating materials increase the potential for criticality.
In a nuclear reactor, "moderation" is the process of slowing rapid neutrons (emitted by fission) so they are more likely to be absorbed by a fissile nucleus.
Graphite and heavy water are pure moderators; they slow neutrons without absorbing any significant amount. Light water moderates, but also absorbs, requiring some careful design to ensure that the water heating and expanding (or boiling) doesn't create unstable positive feedback.
P.S. a free copy of that report may be found at Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage.
The Fukishima cleanup cost 187 billion Dollars and counting.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Apparently youve never heard of uranium tailings.