The latest from Fukushima is the acknowledgement that the #1 reactor has melted down, which means that there’s a pool of once-molten core at the bottom of the containment vessel (best case), and the heat from that lava apparently caused the containment vessel to crack. Nuclear engineers call this non-frothy mixture corium. The fact that fuel has slumped to the bottom of the containment vessel, and the vessel has cracked, means that the previous cooling plans for that reactor need to be revised.
In other news, Cesium contaminated tea has been found in Kanagawa prefecture, which is south of Tokyo. Fukushima is north of Tokyo (Here’s a prefecture map). Greenpeace has also found contamination in seaweed, a major Japanese foodstuff, and contaminated pasture grass and parsley have been detected in the Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures, which are south of Fukushima and north of Tokyo.
Japan has or will be shutting down up to 75% of its reactors this summer. One plant, in Hamaoka, will be permanently shut down on request of Prime Minister Kan, due to an 87% likelihood of a magnitude 8 quake or worse.
Steve
I didn’t think there was going to be any molten core until 4.2. Firelands, you know.
General Stuck
OH great. Molten lava breaks nuke plant. No one could have predicted that along the ring of fire. I hate what is happening to the Japanese people, and the environmental damage that has been and will continue for the next century of so well away from the plants.
I don’t know which is more clueless however, building nuke plants in a high earthquake zone, or drilling for oil in a mile deep ocean. Score at least two for the folly of mankind.
magurakurin
cue industry trolls to tell us how everything worked perfectly.
fuck the nuclear power industry. fuck it with rusty razors in a rape dungeon.
dmbeaster
Core melt down causing a breach of the containment vessel is the nightmare scenario for a nuclear accident. Nuclear experts are estimating a several centimeter hole in the containment vessel based on rate of coolant loss – no ones knows for sure since direct inspection is impossible.
The risk that this might have been happening was the subject of speculation at the beginning of the crisis. For some weird reason, this very serious nuclear crisis seemed to unfold in slow motion and disbelief that it could be this bad. When the initial steam explosions occurred, the official chatter was how it wasn’t that serious and don’t be too alarmed. I am not wishing that the reverse hysteria had occurred (which is something of how I remember Three Mile Island reactions), but the apparent blase attitude about the seriousness of this accident has been somewhat amazing.
4tehlulz
I’m sure if they just raised the radiation safety limits, everything will be fine.
Cat Lady
lethargytartare
@dmbeaster:
actually, that was the official and unofficial chatter at every single stage of this entire mess, while those of us who had any concerns were mocked as chicken-littles with no understanding of nuclear reactor safety.
I’ll be over here feeling sad but smug.
magurakurin
from the fifth graph of the third link above
that’s some fucked up shit. From how this has been going if TEPCO is admitting this much, my money is on 2 and 3 melted down as well.
Fuck TEPCO. Seppuku for the CEO and all the VP’S, and all the other executives and managers should be sent to the plant to take their 15 minute shifts in the hot zone. Those fucks should thank God every minute that I am not King of the World.
BR
Through all of this darkness, the one thing that Japan will benefit from is the wisdom right now they’re showing in not doubling down on nuclear.
As they shut down plants they’re going to have to learn to do with less, which means in just a couple of short years, they’ll be better prepared for the end of economic growth that the entire industrial world is hitting.
Jazz Superluminar
I can’t believe they shut the reactors down! What is this bullshit? Why won’t
ABLTEPCO allow the reactors to work? They can’t take criticism. I don’t understand why the water-spraying helicopters won’t be amused. I shall be emailing Cole about this discrace!ChrisS
[2] Indeed .. it’s far better for us to all starve to death in the dark.
These next few decades are going to be full of entertainment while we eat our cabbage and potato soup in the DOH dorms.
piratedan
well talk about incentive to invest in renewable resource energy. While the nuclear option has resulted in a complete fail for those folks, I honestly believe that they are also completely capable of going all in on green energy (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal). The hard part is handling the damage done to the environment from the current events and the traditional food supplies that they use. Going to be some extremely tough sledding for them and I hope that the US is smart/compassionate enough to partner up with Japan to develop and implement new technology and assist them with their cleanup efforts.
Linda Featheringill
Sigh. Very depressing news. I know that some folks speculated about such a development based on the clues we could see [on The Oil Drum]. I am just very sorry that the speculators were correct.
rootless_e
The best line on the whole fiasco is due to Moody’s Japan which noted recently that risks of operating nuclear power plants in Japan are evidently higher than expected. Those guys EARN their money.
ChrisS
[11] Actually, I take that comment back … somewhat.
We’re poised to be in a very serious energy deficiency at the same time that the American economy has been shredded all to hell by exporting our manufacturing base (which, true to globalization’s prophets, did result in a very significant increase in wealth – problem was that all went to a very tiny minority) combined with decreasing social support for the very massive infrastructure improvements we need to mitigate strife and pessimism during the transition to renewable energy.
I think it’s foolish to not support nuclear energy in some sense (or at least support a more safe reactor like an molten sodium breeder reactor) because I’m not entirely convinced that the first world standard of living that includes the things we do hold most dear is going to be around much longer. And I’m not interested in sitting around the cramped DOH housing project fighting off rats and scoundrels for my thin potato and cabbage soup.
dmbeaster
One line of chatter has been about how this reactor design was old, and the new ones are so much better, so dont worry.
I have been around long enough to remember similar assurances back in the 70s about reactors with just this design (as compared to the earlier primitive reactors designs such as the monstrous graphite reactors). I am sure that newer designs are better, but I refuse to accept any assurances from the industry that they got it covered.
The nuclear industry would not exist if we were not socializing the risk in two aspects. The first is the government agreement to accept responsibility for the waste – no private enterprise would build and operate these things if it was financially responsible for the waste (unless they went for the DuPont solution of outsourcing the risky stuff to undercapitalized “separate” companies). The non-certification of Yucca Mtn has resulted in billions of dollars of liability for the US government for breaching contracts to take the waste from private industry – is that effed up?
The second is the ridiculously low liability caps for an accident. Kind of like putting a $1,000 cap on responsibility for car accidents. Again, private industry would not build these things without this limitation.
ChrisS
@piratedan:
I hope that the US is smart/compassionate enough to partner up with Japan to develop and implement new technology and assist them with their cleanup efforts.
You would, you marxist, one-world, DFH. Way to undermine America.
Seriously, though. Yes I hope people take advantage of this disaster to prepare ourselves for the future. China is going to clean our clocks with renewable technology and Germany already is. I guess we could export reality tv to them in exchange for some cabbage and a few MW to power our heat plates.
ChrisS
BTW … off topic … is it just me or do other people have an issue with missing words, homonyms, and other minor grammatical mistakes when they type?
I know what I’m saying, but whenever I read back through a paragraph of writing, I’m amazed at the number of those mistakes. I’ve read that it’s a form of dyslexia, but I’m unconvinced.
Egypt Steve
Damn. Smell the sweet Corium.
PeakVT
@ChrisS: The Chinese will clean our clocks if they don’t poison themselves first. And if we keep electing Republicans to federal offices.
dmbeaster
Chris – I do a lot of writing for a living, and its normal. Effective editing requires distance, which is tough to do when you are the writer. You get better at spotting your own errors the more you write, but the best device is to let some time pass and then revisit your draft with fresh eyes.
DBrown
@ChrisS: Your joking about breeders being more safe? Strange, the rest of your post seemed rather serious.
As someone who supports nuclear power (fission) but feels that most standard plants are unsafe but the risks are worth the power (except for that crazy plant located on the california coast, few face the danger the Japanese plant did) we need to upgrade existing plants and focus on green production. Long range work on fusion, too.
In any case, the Candu reactor is far safer – even if it loses power for weeks, no melt down. Now that would be the better approch for the next generation plant here in the US.
rootless_e
Candu can melt down if the complex system of cooling pipes starts to leak.
jheartney
@dmbeaster:
This.
It was ever thus. Nuclear energy is supposed to be so safe that only soft-headed hippies would worry about safety. The crap we’re brewing up in our reactors will stay toxic for 50K years or more, but we’re sure we can keep it from leaking out during that time, despite the fact that in the 70 or so years we’ve been doing this we’ve seen breach after breach.
It’s only due to pure luck (i.e. the direction the wind happened to be blowing) that all of central Japan isn’t an exclusion zone now. And the fact that the radiation blew out to sea doesn’t mean it won’t kill people in the decades to come. It just means the deaths will be more spread out geographically.
ChrisS
@DBrown:
Your joking about breeders being more safe? Strange, the rest of your post seemed rather serious.
I admit that my knowledge of the technologies for nuclear fission are nowhere near adequate. My understanding is that the thorium MSR uses much less fuel, is not pressurized, and is highly efficient.
But more to the point, I support growing nuclear fission foremost and less as to which type of reactor.
rootless_e
@ChrisS: because, of course, nothing can go wrong with a machine that relies on pressurized radioactive molten flouride salt for coolant. The stuff is like mother’s milk – if not nicer.
BR
@jheartney:
One of the most insightful comments on nuclear safety comes from Nicole Foss who, after studying nuclear safety in the former Soviet bloc after the fall of the USSR, points out that nuclear power is incompatible with hard times because there isn’t money to pay for all of the very expensive pieces of machinery that make nuclear safe.
Given that we’re in hard times now and entering even harder times soon, it seems like a bad idea to go more down this road.
My personal favorite alternative energy source is solar thermal: it’s unbelievably low-tech so it doesn’t require rare earths or specialized manufacturing, it can be built at almost any scale, is made of non-toxic components that have a very long lifespan, and it can store energy for power production at night. The main downside is that it isn’t as energy dense as other options, but that’s ok.
PeakVT
@ChrisS: A MSR is only one type of breeder reactor, and one that our experience with is very limited. You need to be specific because other types of breeder reactors each have different problems.
Uloborus
@magurakurin:
That would be because descriptions of what’s happened to a nuclear power plant sound ridiculously awful and it’s almost impossible to describe them in context. For example, that containment vessel that cracked? Not the thing nobody thought would crack. The meltdown is bad news, but it’s also not a meltdown in the sense you’re thinking. It means they weren’t able to prevent the fuel rods from getting hot enough to sustain damage. Note from the article that this is not something that just happened. It’s something that already happened and is over with that is changing their plans for how to deal with the site. From what I just read, it means that it’ll take extra cooling efforts longer until the fuel rods go through enough radioactive decay that they can be removed – always the plan. It also makes it unlikely they’ll ever be able to fix and reuse the reactor itself, at least for a few decades.
The findings of cesium contamination are much more important, but they’re also almost impossible to understand out of context. Dangerous amounts of cesium release was the one thing no one was really sure about. But since this doesn’t jibe with other radiation findings so far, it’s way, way too early to panic.
Do you want context? We’re STILL in the ‘It’s unlikely anyone who didn’t work at the site cleaning it up will ever die because of this’ territory. The cesium findings remain the question mark that could change that, but like everything involved in this accident it’s damned easy to make something unimportant sound catastrophic.
rootless_e
@Uloborus: you are wrong on multiple facts.
Yes, exactly the thing.
Nope. It’s far from over. It means they now have a problem for which there is no known solution. The meltdown at TMI, which did not crack containment, required a billion dollar gift from the Feds to dismantle the reactor – a process that is still not over and resulted in a huge store of very dangerous waste that is not safely disposable. What TEPCO has to deal with is worse, is probably in multiple reactors, and is currently a dangerous and unstable situation that requires vast amounts of money to keep from getting much worse.
ChrisS
@rootless_e: @BR:
Given that we’re in hard times now and entering even harder times soon, it seems like a bad idea to go more down this road.
Except that we really aren’t in hard times. We’re nowhere near the level of economic futility that pre-collapse Russia was. We’ve got plenty of money and more. Sorry, correction, the US has plenty of money. Ridiculous gobs of money tied up in the richest 1% that rely on a functioning market economy to maintain that wealth. Halving the DoD budget would go to great lengths in supporting a new renewable & nuclear energy paradigm. And that’s not even getting into eliminating the Bush tax cuts or, gasp!, raising new ones (gas tax anyone?).
because, of course, nothing can go wrong with a machine that relies on pressurized radioactive molten flouride salt for coolant. The stuff is like mother’s milk – if not nicer.
There’s something wrong with everything. And from what I’ve read, admittedly limited, the next gen MSRs aren’t pressurized and have passive safety features incorporated that prevent runaway reactions.
rootless_e
@ChrisS: Well, “the next generation MSRs” are a pie-in-the-sky concept, and Wind and solar are working technologies, not to mention that we can save 30% of current power use with efficiencies anyways without sacrificing performance.
As for “passive safety feature”, that’s a marketing term. If radioactive, highly toxic and highly flammable flouride salts probably with beryllium added to make it extra fine leak out of the network of cooling pipes then all fucking bets are off and you have a Chernobyl or worse disaster.
Of course, your wind tower could fall over so the two scenarios are comparable in some odd sense.
PeakVT
@rootless_e: Fluoride salts are not flammable, from what I understand. (Liquid-sodium, the coolant used in most LMFRs, is VERY flammable.) Fluoride salts will release gaseous fluoride if left unattended for years, as was done at the MSRE at ORNL, which is just a tad dangerous.
trollhattan
What continues to occur both at the plant and the evacuation zone is horrible. For that part of Japan I suspect it’s the new Normal.
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105110150.html
How long before TEPCO is completely pulled out of the picture? They remain overmatched by the task.
rootless_e
@PeakVT: pretty much, and I was thinking of the sodium reactors, but what happens to high temperature radioactive flouride salts are released e.g. under steam is not nice or even will known
http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/Documents/3318090.pdf
JR
I’m not an expert in nuclear technologies. I am however, extremely glad my wife and I were visiting my parents in FL when Three-mile Island almost melted down, instead of central WV…
I’m also glad that the majority of the Earth is between US and Japan, as the radioactive pollution from the Fukushima disaster has more time to decay before entering our local ecology.
I would like to express my total awe at the bravery and persistence of the Fukushima staff as they attempt to recover from the meltdown(s) their facility has experienced. Some of their actions have seemed odd or poorly timed from thousands of miles away, but I’m sure that it was the best they could do with what they had to work with.
Those guys have the courage to do what needs to be done, just as the Russian troops showed their bravery at their reactor fire in Chernobyl.
Isn’t it a shame that so often the very best among us sacrifice their lives to protect people they never met, while people not worth a bucket of warm spit wind up rich beyond belief – like Newt… or Don?
Irony is the ruling principle of the Universe!
dmbeaster
@Uloborus:
I think you missed the news reports and posts about the level of background radiation contamination in parts of the exclusion zone (not just the area immediately around the plant) to be 100 times the level deemed safe for civilian exposure. Or that the levels in the zone are currently in excess of the current levels (i.e., 25 years later) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
That is not something unimportant, and seems to fit the definition of catastrophic. When will it be safe for people to return to their homes in the exclusion zone – want to hazard a guess? Or is the fact that they wont die now since they have been forbidden to return proof that the situation is not catastrophic?
The Cesium has only one source – leakage from the ruptured containment vessel. It has apparently been transported into the environment with the 10 million liters of water that has been pumped through the reactor and has since exited it – to where, they dont know for sure. But the presence of the cesium indicates that it has made it into the environment. It is not a question mark, but direct evidence that the situation is deadly serious.
daveNYC
@JR:
Um, no. We’re obviously better off than a place like Kiev was during Chernobyl, but the hot sexy atoms that make Geiger counters go click-click-click are already here from Japan.
BR
@ChrisS:
We’re going to be in hard times soon – peak oil will put an end to the partial recovery we’re in now.
ChrisS
@BR:
Well then, the only solution is to starve to death in the dark.
How fucking chipper.
PeakVT
@rootless_e: Thanks for the link.
Seanly
Where’s that expert one of the front pagers linked way back when? The guy was convinced that things could not get aaa bad as chernobyl. Ummm, huge pundit fail…
The Duc d'Fuck
Hey, would just be happy if Martin would come back and admit how completely and totally fucking wrong he was from the start of this thing.
Eh, probably too busy humping his AAPL portfolio and praying that Jobs can hang on for just a few more years.
Robert Sneddon
@dmbeaster:
There are areas within the current 20km exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant which would be safe to return to today for people to live there, grow food etc. They are well under the radiation limits for such activities. Conversely there are some places outside the 20km zone, as much as 40km from the Fukushima Daiichi plant which are way too high to resettle the inhabitants until the area is decontaminated. Nearly all the landside contamination was deposited in an airborne plume north-west of the plant during the days after the initial earthquake and tsunami damage caused the explosions. Leakage of highly-contaminated water from the plant into the sea seems to have been stopped although low level waste water is still being released, I think. They are now storing contaminated waste water preparatory to treating it to remove the contamination — the French are supplying a water treatment plant from reports I read about earlier but it will take some time to get to Japan and be put into operation.
As for the meltdown in reactor 1, it’s not confirmed for certain yet how much of the core structure has been deposited at the bottom of the reactor vessel, or if any of it has made its way through the bottom of the vessel into the primary containment. The reason they are calling it a meltdown is that workers got into the building and recalibrated the water level gauge and they now know the current water level in the reactor vessel is below the core. However the core was successfully cooled for over 8 hours after fission shutdown which reduced the energy in the reactor from the operating level of 3000 megawatts of heat to something under 10 megawatts. That heat is easily enough to damage the fuel rods and the core structures but a complete slagging meltdown of the hundreds of tonnes of metal in the core is going to take a lot more energy than that, I think.
Weirdly enough (and I’m not trying to make light of this) a meltdown simplifies the engineering problem of cooling reactor no. 1. The core is situated quite high up in the reactor vessel and the primary containment. If most of the hot fuel elements are now at the bottom of the reactor vessel then it’s a lot easier to cover them with water and cool them to continue removing decay heat. Similarly if some or even all of the damaged fuel is in the bottom of the primary containment under the reactor vessel the cooling requirements are similarly simplified. The original plan was to flood the primary containment up to the level of the core, and that would mean putting a lot of water into the structure which is believed to be compromised in various places.
PeakVT
@The Duc d’Fuck: He’s around in other threads if you want track him down.
AhabTRuler
@Robert Sneddon:
I don’t think this is entirely correct.
BattleCat
The Japanese are an industrious people.
And now they’ve got radioactive inspired superpowers.
Every man a Spiderman! Every woman a Batgirl!
Kudos, I say, and perhaps America can one day follow in their footsteps.
Robert Sneddon
@AhabTRuler: The plan originally put forward was to build a recirculating system inside the building of reactor 1 to cool the core fuel rods in-situ in the reactor vessel. If most of the fuel pellets, the stuff giving off heat that needs to be removed from the reactor, are lying loose at the bottom of the reactor vessel then they only need to get enough water in to cool that low-lying part of the vessel, not high up. That is easier to achieve than the planned recirculating pump and heat exchanger system.
The bad news is that it’s going to make decommissioning and removal of the fuel pellets a lot more difficult but that’s years away, in part to allow a lot more of the radioactive heat to decay. The also need to build an airtight structure over the reactor top to contain any contamination before they can lift the reactor vessel’s lid and find out what the situation really is inside the reactor vessel itself.
The engineers believe a meltdown has occurred based on the current water level in the reactor now the gauge has been fixed. How much fuel has melted and what condition it is in can only be guessed at right now. At Three Mile Island when the investigators finally opened the reactor they discovered the damage to the core structure was not as bad as many had feared and this may turn out to be the case at Fukushima no. 1.
Note that reactor no. 1 is an earlier smaller version (BWR-3) of the no.2 and no. 3 reactors (BWR-4) so they may be more or less damaged than no. 1 is. Until the workers can get into those buildings safely and get the instruments working properly again then we won’t know what’s going on there with any certainty.
AhabTRuler
@Robert Sneddon: Without knowing the state of the fuel, and it is not at all clear that the fuel pellets haven’t melted to some degree, there is no way of knowing the efficacy of any attempts to cool the fuel pellets/mass. Furthermore, it still isn’t clear what effect salt accretion has had on efforts to cool.
I will add that the engineers think that the fuel has melted down because now it is quite clear that once coolant was lost, it was never recovered to the point where it was even touching the bottom of the fuel elements, much less the 2 meters below the top as they were saying.
I ain’t no doomer, but it would seem that you are taking a rather optimistic view of things. I remain in the “too soon to tell” camp with Zhou Enlai, and deeply pessamistic (and skeptical, to say nothing of the cynicism).
ETA:
Yeah, certainty is one of those things that is in short supply, no matter how many instruments they restore.
Corner Stone
@AhabTRuler: Man, I thought you was dead.
AhabTRuler
@Corner Stone: Just walked away for awhile.
Heh, didn’t even lurk.
mrmobi
Cue McLaren. Come on, guy, explain why we are all being hysterical and unreasonable. It’s remarkable, isn’t it, given the extreme nature of the multiple catastrophe’s experienced at Fukushima, that only a complete meltdown has happened? It hasn’t exploded yet, (as Chernobyl almost did) has it?
Now, if we can just remain un-hysterical, we can cover over this motherfucker, (in plastic, no less, gotta love the efficiency of the Japanese) and re-start the rest of the reactors, because, you know, this is a completely safe and secure technology, even considering that not one, not two, but three engineers from GE either resigned or were fired for their opposition to the sale of this fatally flawed design. (and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that no engineer ever considered storing tons of spent fuel rods forever, outside of the primary vessel).
Oh, and the fact that no one, anywhere, has any plan for the safe (for 100,000 years) storage of the hundreds of tons of this witches brew of deadly materials means, well, it means you are just a fucking hysteric.
Lest anyone think I’m anti-nuclear, I’m not. There are interesting new designs, which appear to be much safer, even fail-safe. Of course, power companies will not invest in such technologies, because they would be much more expensive to implement. Power generation is about making profits, not being safe.
I would finally like to point out that the economics of nuclear power (sans massive government subsidies, government liability insurance free passes, etc.) totally suck, because it never takes into account the cost of decommissioning, since the NRC simply re-ups every time a plant reaches the end of it’s useful life.
The nuclear power industry is proof of my favorite maxim, which is: nothing is foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.
Robert Sneddon
@mrmobi: Finished panicking yet? Good. Take a deep breath now, there isn’t a nuclear bogeyman hiding under your bed, really.
1. The engineers BELIEVE there’s been a meltdown. Whether it is complete or not is not known, my own semi-educated guess is that a complete meltdown is very unlikely. For that to happen would mean the entire core structure, the control rods plus a hundred tonnes of fuel pellets and their cladding all melted, turned liquid and dripped in a white-hot puddle into the bottom of the reactor vessel. That would require a massive amount of energy which I don’t think is actually there any more. An operating reactor producing 1 or 2 gigawatts of heat energy that lost cooling instantaneously might have a complete meltdown of that sort although there are other factors that mitigate against that happening — losing coolant in a light-water reactor means fission stops, it’s part of the design and something for example, that didn’t happen at Tchernobyl because of the RMBK-4’s crappy Soviet design with its solid carbon moderator (see also Windscale).
At Fukushima all the reactors were shut down, the fuel stopped fissioning and the cores were successfully cooled by the emergency loop for at least 8 hours after the earthquake before loss of coolant happened. That reduced the heat being generated by the decay products in the fuel rods to about 10 megawatts, less than 1% of the normal operating power. With insufficient cooling (and the steam disassociation which produced the hydrogen which exploded indicates that there was some coolant circulating via convection in the reactor vessels, they had not boiled dry at that point) then the first thing to melt would be the fuel rod cladding. The fuel pellets themselves are made from uranium oxide (and in the case of MOX fuel rods, plutonium oxide too) and they wouldn’t melt until they reach 2300 degrees C, a temperature which is very difficult to achieve in a purpose-built furnace never mind in a loose conglomeration of pellets at the bottom of the reactor vessel.
Assuming they burned their way through the bottom of the reactor vessel (the steel casing would need to reach temperatures of about 1600 deg C locally for this to happen, or for the seals around the control rod ports in the bottom of the reactor vessel to fail) the pellets would fall into the primary containment vessel which surrounds the reactor vessel. At that point the hot pellets are spread out further and covered in more water which is going to cool them. Worst case is they also burn their way through that containment as the water boils away. If that happens they land on the floor of the secondary containment which is the concrete structure holding the primary containment, which is now being flooded with water at Fukushima. After that the pellets are not going anywhere.
2. If the reactor vessels haven’t exploded from internal pressure by now, they’re not going to explode at all. There just isn’t enough energy left in the fuel to generate enough pressure to do that, two months after shutdown. Leaks, yes, but they were caused immediately after the hydrogen exploded. The engineers on site are trying to find out where the leaks are and dealing with them as best they can, without panicking and running around screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
3. Actually lots of people have plans to deal with the “witches brew”, as you call it, of nuclear waste. What’s more those plans are actually being implemented and have been for the past thirty or forty years. It’s just not happening in America, that’s all. The Japanese nuclear industry recently started bringing their own nuclear waste reprocessing plant at Rokkasho on-line. This plant will deal with 800 tonnes of spent fuel rods a year when it is up to speed. It uses a variant of the Purex process licenced from the UKAEA which we in the UK have been operating since the 1970s. The French use a similar process, turning spent fuel rods into fresh fuel pellets and separating out the dangerous long-lived radioactives in the spent fuel elements to be embedded in molten glass (a process called vitrification) and prepared for geological storage/disposal.
The US refuses to reprocess their stored fuel rods, citing nuclear weapons material proliferation worries but there are also financial considerations — right now mining uranium is a lot cheaper than reprocessing fuel rods. The economic benefit for reprocessing is currently only in saving the cost of storage of spent fuel rods, not in the return of recycled fuel to the reactors for power generation.
“There’s no plan to deal with nuclear waste” is a common cry of people who have been lied to time and time again by folks with an axe to grind. It’s not true.
4. The cost of decommissioning end-of-life reactors is front-loaded into the licencing process before they are ever built. Taking reactors apart costs, by some accounts, about 3% of the dollar value of the power generated over their lifespans. As the engineers learn more about decommissioning reactors they are being designed to make this process easier and cheaper — the new French EPR1000 design, for example allows for the reactor vessel to be removed from the containment and the reactor building at end-of-life rather than requiring the building to be demolished around it. This simplifies greatly the radiological problems of dealing with the most radioactive residues in the reactor structures when they are being taken apart.
AhabTRuler
@Robert Sneddon: You are still being entirely too cavalier about the entire situation. When before has so much nuclear fuel been in such a precarious state? The entire situation represents a massive failure on the part of the nuclear industry, and the situation is and will be in flux for years if not decades. Even more, you are assuming speculation as facts, which is not appropriate in this situation. Finally, your faith in private industry to manage the funding and process of decommissioning in an appropriate, safe, and professional manner is naive at best.
It is quite clear that you have reached a conclusion and are attempting to fix what few facts are available into a narrative that supports that conclusion, which is equally insuperable on the pro- or anti- side.
Robert Sneddon
@AhabTRuler:
“Even more, you are assuming speculation as facts, which is not appropriate in this situation.”
Until the engineers can get at the reactors themselves and open them up then pretty much everything being said about their current condition is speculation, including the “China Syndrome” disaster scenario so many folks here and other places are touting. All we onlookers can do is observe the measurable effects of the ongoing crisis and make speculative guesses.
There is almost certainly no criticality going on in the failed reactors or the spent fuel pools. The results of such activity would be very noticeable in the energy budgets of the cooling system currently being used, the “feed and bleed” operation. If there has been a “hot” meltdown producing large masses of molten corium puncturing the reactor vessel and primary containment in any or all of the failed reactors then it happened weeks ago when there was a lot more decay heat in the fuel than today. Even given that corium meltdown scenario what the engineers on site are doing wouldn’t change substantially, other than modifying or abandoning the coolant loop systems they planned to install. Their primary objective is to cool the fuel/corium, prevent any more hydrogen buildups and stop more radioactive material escaping the reactor buildings and spent fuel pools. Beyond that they are preparing to build shelters around the reactor buildings so they can eventually open the reactor vessels and defuel and decontaminate them as far as possible before they are dismantled.
TEPCO has been decommissioning shut-down reactors for more than fifteen years — there are several reactors in Japan that are mothballed in preparation for, or in the process of being taken apart right now. See for example reactor no. 1 at Tokai which was shut down in 1998 and is now almost completely dismantled (they expect to complete the operation this year).
Who would you put in charge of decommissioning reactors other than the owner/operators? I have seen people posting about covering the Fukushima reactors with concrete or blowing them up with tactical nukes. I don’t see that as an appropriate, safe or professional method of dealing with the reactors, spent fuel pools and indeed the turbine halls and other contaminated ancilliary facilities on the site.
As an aside, here’s a map showing contamination measurements around the Fukushima Daiichi plant, including soil contamination levels for Cs-137. It shows the plume to the NW of the plant I’ve mentioned before as well as max and minimum Cs-137 levels monitored in seawater offshore from the plant.
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_1305269890P.pdf