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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

Aha, we have confirmation, using interesting technology, that there is pretty much no fuel remaining in the reactor vessel of reactor 1:

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20150320p2g00m0dm028000c.html

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday it has confirmed that nearly all fuel in the No. 1 reactor at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has melted and fallen into the containment vessel, through analysis using elementary particles called muons.
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This isn't surprising given how long Unit 1 lacked proper cooling, and given the temperature, and lack of temperature fluctuations, of that reactor since the disaster. Using the same tech to study reactors 2 & 3 will interest me more, because there are greater unknowns with those reactors.
 
"national sacrifice zone"

You can expect to hear this term more often in the next few decades in the state of Pennsylvania...... not just over the nuclear industry , but also the fracking ....

welcome to the experiment !
 
Also

Fukushima disaster radiation detected off Canada's coast

Radiation from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has for the first time been detected along a North American shoreline, though at levels too low to pose a significant threat to human or marine life, scientists said.

Trace amounts of Cesium-134 and Cesium-137 were detected in samples collected on 19 February off the coast of Ucluelet, a small town on Vancouver Island in Canada’s British Columbia, said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Ken Buesseler....
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yield said:
http://enenews.com/times-worst-poss...-before-humans-invent-deal-molten-fuel-videos

Times 28/03/15 (paywall)

200 years! :(
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I don't think there are many who ever really expected the most optimistic timescales to be met. In the 4 years since the disaster we barely know any more about the location of the fuel in any of the three reactors. A few things have been ruled out, but we don't even have the tech to take a peek in a timely fashion.

In some ways the really slow pace of progress at this stage suits them precisely because they are playing for time both because the fuel extraction tech won't exist for ages if ever, and also because the heat that is given off by the fuel is slowly reducing. That latter reason is, along with radioactive decay, one of the main reasons that even standard decommissioning of straightforward reactors takes so many decades.

I expect that a picture will eventually emerge of a situation where fuel recovery from at least one of reactors is even more difficult than plans presently acknowledge. In the meantime they might eventually manage to remove the fuel from the spent fuel pools at the remaining three reactor spent fuel pools that still have fuel in them (units 1, 2 and 3, with 4 having already been emptied in their biggest success to date). Perhaps they will eventually manage to remove a lot of the fuel from one or two of the reactors, but at the very minimum its expected the likely location of fuel debris at reactor 1 is not conducive to the sort of fuel removal operations that currently feature in their plans.

My hope is that they at least eventually get the tech and other factors right enough to be able to see exactly where the fuel is. Because even if they can't recover it, I would think its important to know where it is and in what form (e.g. how densely packed) so that they can calculate when it would be practical to cease water cooling and consider other medium-long term options.

The really short, oversimplified answer to people who still think they should have 'buried the reactors in concrete' is that they have other nuclear fuel to deal with first, i.e. that remaining in the fuel pools. Once that is all moved and more is known about the fuel debris in the reactors, they can consider other options that don't actually involve removing the fuel, and may well have more in common with the concrete idea.
 
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So towards the end of last week I checked the TEPCO website to see if any interesting work was imminent. Turns out I was in luck, they were about to try to stick a new kind of camera robot inside reactor 1 containment.

It wasn't supposed to directly explore the area of most interest, the pedestal area below the reactor. But it was supposed to investigate feasibility of accessing that area via a removable grate, in preparation for other work at a much later date, and have a good old look around one level of the drywell containment.

Well it turns out that it broke after being in there for 3 hours. All the same there is at least footage from the period before it died. I haven't attempted to view and analyse it properly yet, I've just now seen the following BBC item with the news that it died:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32294740

Off the top of my head there is at least one factual inaccuracy in the narrative to that BBC video - This isn't the first time a camera has been inside the reactor drywell. The image quality looks interesting this time though, since in the past the camera was often dangling and spinning whereas this time it was part of a robot. Quite an interesting one too, being designed to transform from a cylindrical shape for travelling down pipes to enter the containment, to something thats better suited to moving around on floors.
 
Outage hits pumps at Fukushima plant; toxic water leaks into ocean

Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Tuesday reported that a power outage has shut down all eight water transfer pumps at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power station and that radioactive water is again leaking into the Pacific Ocean.

The pumps are being used to pump tainted water from a drainage channel to another channel leading to a fence-enclosed artificial bay facing the station. The beleaguered utility said it was checking into what happened and how much water had leaked.

The pumping had begun last Friday, in response to a finding in late February that highly radioactive water in the channel was reaching the ocean. They were confirmed to be working Monday afternoon but found stopped at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday.

The utility said earlier this year that water samples from the drainage channel last May contained concentrations of radioactive materials that surpassed the legal limit.
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Former Tepco execs indicted:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...ict-ex-tepco-execs-311-disaster/#.Vb5SaLlUHHO

Three former top executives at Tokyo Electric Power Co. are set to be hauled into court over their alleged responsibility for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution voted Friday that Tsunehisa Katsumata, chairman of Tepco at the time of the disaster, and two former vice presidents, Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, should be indicted for professional negligence resulting in death and injury.
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Japan heads for Nuclear unknown with reactor restart
05/08/15
Japan is about to do something that’s never been done before: Restart a fleet of mothballed nuclear reactors.

The first reactor to meet new safety standards could come online as early as next week. Japan is reviving its nuclear industry after all its plants were shut for safety checks since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that wrecked the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station north of Tokyo, causing radiation leaks that forced the evacuation of 160,000 people.

Mothballed reactors have been turned back on in other parts of the world, though not on this scale -- 25 of Japan’s 43 reactors have applied for restart permits. One lesson learned elsewhere is that the process rarely goes smoothly. Of 14 reactors that resumed operations after being offline for at least four years, all had emergency shutdowns and technical failures, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and regulators in the U.S. and Canada.
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Fingers crossed
 
Interesting headline:

Japan reboots nuclear power despite protests and no waste plan

In the south of the country, workers at the Sendai nuclear complex in Kagoshima prefecture, Kyushu island, pulled out control rods to begin booting up the plant’s Number 1 reactor on Monday. Households are expected to begin receiving nuclear-sourced electricity by Friday, after the reactor has booted up.

...distrust of nuclear power in Japan is unabated. Around 100 anti-nuclear protesters gathered outside the plant as it was being restarted. A poll of 1000 Kagoshima residents earlier this month for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper showed that 57 per cent were opposed to the restart, with 30 per cent in favour.

Another problem is where to put highly reactive nuclear waste. According to The Japan Times, about 17,000 tonnes is languishing in temporary storage pools around the country, with some tipped to reach capacity within three years.
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A BBC piece 'Can we learn to live with nuclear technology?' based on a world service broadcast that I haven't listened to yet, seems to have a more gloomy and reflective tone than we often get, even without touching on the topic of nuclear waste.

Can we learn to live with nuclear technology? - BBC News

I was sort of looking for a more appropriate thread to stick it in but there don't seem to be many nuclear threads that are active, and the tone of the piece is no doubt rather influenced by Fukushima.
 
The waste problem is serious with leakage in December TEPCO confronts new problem of radioactive water at Fukushima plant - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

Here is a round up: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/...er-from-fukushima-is-leaking-into-the-pacific

TEPCO detected levels of radioactive cesium (a material which has a half-life of 30 years) in water samples that were 4,000 times higher than data taken the same month one year earlier. The samples also contained levels of a beta-ray-emitting radioactive substance that were 4,100 times higher than they were from the same period a year earlier.
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Gannon Hinckley, massively over budget, will cost consumers a bliddy fortune,but it will "keep the lights on"
We won't need lights, we will all be frigging glowing in the dark!
 
coley said:
Gannon Hinckley, massively over budget, will cost consumers a bliddy fortune,but it will "keep the lights on"
We won't need lights, we will all be frigging glowing in the dark!
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There's nothing I like better than wandering down the beach and seeing that fucker hunkered down on the horizon. Prevailing winds would hopefully take the radiation cloud away rather than towards us but there ain't no guarantees.

However, and serious question, how do we solve the energy mix with proven technology in a sufficiently short space of time as to avert (if that is indeed possible) catastrophic global warming?
 
sihhi said:
The waste problem is serious with leakage in December TEPCO confronts new problem of radioactive water at Fukushima plant - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

Here is a round up: Dahr Jamail | Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Leaking Into the Pacific
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The second article is hampered by reliance on quotes from sources who were hysterical and unreliable at the best of times. In this case the problem is not so much what they are saying, but when they probably said it (years ago) and as a result there is almost no detail in that article that has much to do with the water problems in December. It's another lazy Fukushima rehash which will be broadly accurate in terms of describing the scale of the disaster, but will not shed a bunch of useful detail on present events and setbacks at the plant. I will try to do that later this evening.
 
elbows said:
The second article is hampered by reliance on quotes from sources who were hysterical and unreliable at the best of times. In this case the problem is not so much what they are saying, but when they probably said it (years ago) and as a result there is almost no detail in that article that has much to do with the water problems in December. It's another lazy Fukushima rehash which will be broadly accurate in terms of describing the scale of the disaster, but will not shed a bunch of useful detail on present events and setbacks at the plant. I will try to do that later this evening.
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Which are the unreliable sources? The quotes are from Dr M.V. Ramana, Prof Michio Aoyama, Dr Helen Caldicott and Arnold Gundersen.

Aoyama is a local and concerned about background radiation from before the earthquake.

Ramana has written books opposing Indian nuclear industry's rise and its deals with US firms.

Gundersen is obviously speaking to an American audience about deceit from the nuclear industry - his experience. Caldicott about potential ecological effects - her area.

Every source everywhere has some background - government agencies are broadly in favour of starting up Japan's nuclear power industry quicker the better to avoid expensive imported liquiefied gas and oil.

Obviously progress is being made in clearing the fuel, but the leaks are making things difficult.
 
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Gundersens quotes are the main subject of my scorn, although I also have Caldicott firmly in the unreliable camp. Gundersen made an extremely serious mistake when describing what he thought he saw in photos of reactor 4 fuel pool, and I never saw him retract it. It was such a large error for a declared expert to make that I never took him seriously from that point on. He claimed to be seeing the reactor 4 fuel racks being exposed to the air, a situation which would have been very bad. It wasn't true though, he was actually looking at part of a rail of the fuel handling bridge which fell into the pool. But he and others carried on quacking about reactor 4 fuel pool for ages, moving on to reactor 3 pool once it was obvious the fuel in pool 4 had survived (and was in fact subsequently removed).

The only reason I think this is still relevant is because of the quotes that article is using. Just look at this:

"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," Gundersen said. "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
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The only way this quote ever made any sense is if it was from the first week or so of the disaster. And four 'fuel cores' must mean four fuel pools. All four of which have been cooled for years, and one of which is now empty (reactor 4 pool). So please forgive me for pointing out that these quotes are unhelpful shit when talking about the cooling and water situation in 2016.

The other reason these quotes are unhelpful is that Gundersen is talking about all the water as if its coming from the reactor cooling operation. Thats not true either, because a lot of the water is groundwater, a problem of the site that has been looked at in detail for some years now. Even if they stopped having to inject water into the remains of the reactors they would still have a continual and large problem of groundwater oozing through the plant, getting contaminated and trying to reach the sea.

A I hinted at in my previous post, in this case its more the sloppy nature of the article I'm complaining about rather than some fresh absurdity from Gundersen - these quotes have no place in an explanation of the situation at any point past the first weeks of the disaster, and certainly not now.
 
Nor does the following have any place in a credible report:

A declassified report from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission written immediately after the disaster began states that massive amounts of radiation from the plant were released into the atmosphere early on.

The report states: "25% of the total fuel in unit 2 released to the atmosphere ... 50% of the total spent fuel from unit 3 was released to the atmosphere, and ... 100% of the total spent fuel was released to the atmosphere from unit 4."
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What that report actually demonstrates was the low quality of information available in the first days of the disaster. We know for absolute fact that the situation at reactor 4 pool did not turn out to resemble that scenario. Its wrong about spent fuel in reactor 2 and reactor 3 as well, but those aren't quite as easy to demonstrate so its easier for me to make my point using reactor 4.

The reason I feel the need to point this out is that there are no end of useless, dribbling blogs etc on the internet that were still talking complete misleading shit about this stuff as of December 2015, valuing the sensational and out of date over the informative and accurate. Why bother? My stance all along has been that Fukushima was such a stupendously bad nuclear disaster that there is no need to be misleading about it, no need to hype it up.
 
What often makes me laugh is the level of non-nuclear stupidity on site. The water is a huge problem, one they've met with numerous cockups over the years.

Take for example the following from the AJW article:

To compound the problem, the seaside walls have also significantly raised groundwater levels, forcing the utility to pump a lot more groundwater than it originally planned.
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Why the hell are they surprised by the groundwater level increase considering they built a wall to stop the groundwater going to the sea?
 
Meanwhile its been nearly 5 years and I'm still watching the tedious progress towards getting a robot with camera into the pedestal area of at least one of the reactors. So that we might learn something about the state of some of the melted fuel.

Progress has been made on this front at times, but oh so slowly. I was really hoping they were close to trying to take a peek inside reactor 2 pedestal but a press release from late January made clear the latest delay on this front.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/2016/1266495_7763.html
After several decontamination measures were conducted, the radiation level in the vicinity of the X-6 penetration pipe is beginning to decrease partially. But the radiation level being still high as a whole, TEPCO has concluded that the insertion of the robot should be rescheduled, likely for some time after FY 2015. The rescheduling is not expected to have a impact on the medium-term road map.
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'beginning to decrease partially' is classic TEPCO spin, I'll try to remember to post the actual numbers once the data is available in English so I know I haven't made a mistake.
 
Thems
bendeus said:
There's nothing I like better than wandering down the beach and seeing that fucker hunkered down on the horizon. Prevailing winds would hopefully take the radiation cloud away rather than towards us but there ain't no guarantees.

However, and serious question, how do we solve the energy mix with proven technology in a sufficiently short space of time as to avert (if that is indeed possible) catastrophic global warming?
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The swansea tidal project would be a good start, although Cameron is prepared to write a blank cheque for Hinckley,they are haggling over the strike price for Swansea.
 
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