Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Still waiting for nuclear fusion though.
The thing then will be who takes responsibility for accidents caused by robots..
* Fuckushima: A giant tsunami hit the plant, cut the external power lines and drawn the emergency generators. Not even waterproof robot will fix that. (You can blame bad design or not enough preparation, but robots will not solve that.)
* Chernobyl: They disable a few safety system to make some stupid tests. Apparently the safety system were necessary. If you can override the orders of the robots with a password, they will obey stupid orders. (You can blame bad design here too, to make the accident bigger.)
* Three Mile Island: Apparently it was partially an human error. Robots may have helped. (Let's blame also bad design a little.)
Auto accidents probably kill a few orders of magnitude more people than a nuclear accident, yet you don't see the evangelical preachings against cars like you do nuclear.
The other forms of power need to be well managed also, and they historically have not. I don't need to go into detail about the huge amounts of pollution the power industry has generated.
What is worse? A handful of accidents that kill a few hundred people? Or several thousand people dying from various cancers and respiratory illnesses cause by decades of pollution from coal plants? Not to mention the dangers of mining it.
Current where I live there is a huge push towards natural gas due to the increased supply/decreased costs thanks to fracking. I don't think we have even begun to understand the environmental impact of fracking, yet industry has unanimously declared it safe. Another huge mismanagement of our environment, in my opinion.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/world/asia/china-also-exp...
We could have 100 more Fukushimas and not even touch the number of people who have died of respiratory conditions due to coal.
Please don't let the outsized, dramatic media stories about nuclear sway you. It's a viable, efficient, almost limitless power source that should be a major part of the world's energy mix.
From Wikipedia:
> though there have been no fatalities linked to radiation due to the accident, the eventual number of cancer deaths, according to the linear no-threshold theory of radiation safety, that will be caused by the accident is expected to be around 130–640 people in the years and decades ahead...in the most contaminated areas faced a 70% higher relative risk of developing thyroid cancer for females exposed as infants...
> However, an estimated 1,600 deaths are believed to have occurred due to the resultant evacuation conditions...
> Summarizing all responses to questions related to evacuees' current family status, one-third of all surveyed families live apart from their children, while 50.1% live away from other family members (including elderly parents) with whom they lived before the disaster. The survey also showed that 34.7% of the evacuees have suffered salary cuts of 50% or more since the outbreak of the nuclear disaster. A total of 36.8% reported a lack of sleep, while 17.9% reported smoking or drinking more than before they evacuated.
> We know from Chernobyl that the psychological consequences are enormous. Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to 58 years – not because of cancer, but because of depression, alcoholism, and suicide. Relocation is not easy, the stress is very big.
> A frozen soil barrier has been constructed in an attempt to prevent further contamination of seeping groundwater, but in July 2016 TEPCO revealed that the ice wall had failed to stop groundwater from flowing in and mixing with highly radioactive water inside the wrecked reactor buildings, adding that they are "technically incapable of blocking off groundwater with the frozen wall"...every day 300 tons of contaminated water leak from the crippled nuclear plant...
> On 22 August 2011, a government spokesman mentioned the possibility that some areas around the plant "could stay for some decades a forbidden zone".
> The amount of compensation to be paid by TEPCO is expected to reach 7 trillion yen. Costs to Japanese taxpayers are likely to exceed 12 trillion yen ($100 billion). In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion), nearly double the 2013 estimate.
> In 2014 Japan enacted the State Secrecy Law. The Fukushima incident falls under this law and, as a "state secret", independent investigations and reports are forbidden by law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
In other words, nuclear accident is (pardon the Orwellianism) so un-dangerous that "fear of radioactivity" is more lethal than radioactivity itself.
Another way to put it is: when I see a group of anti-nuclear activists posing with children of Fukushima prefecture, asking "How long can they live?", it makes me shake my fist with anger, because they are literally harming these children more than the nuclear accident itself.
That article is out of date. The frozen wall has been working for quite a while but TEPCO wasn't (isn't) allowed to completely close it.
June 29, 2017
Tepco applies to the NRA for permission to finish the Fukushima Daiichi ice wall. Closure of the wall has been throttled down by Tokyo’s Nuclear Regulation Authority due to fears concerning groundwater outside the turbine buildings falling below the level of water inside. Tepco has been forced to freeze the last half-dozen seven-meter-wide sections individually, wait to see what it does to external groundwater levels, and then proceed to the next section if groundwater level is maintained according to plan. One section on the inland side of the 1.5 kilometer ice structure is all that needs to be activated to complete the wall. To date, the sequential closure of Tokyo-mandated gaps has dropped the groundwater influx from 400 tons per day down to about 100 tons per day. No projections are being made as to how much more the in-flow will abate after the last part of the wall is frozen.
I would also like to give a pointer to the "Fukushima Accident Updates" blog-page at hiroshimasyndrome.com. It collects and summarizes a lot of Japanse news and updates concerning Fukishima and related on a regular basis that will never reach the mainstream/ international press.
http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-accident-updates....
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ho...
https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSBRE9BT00520131230
The idea that they all escaped unscathed with no impact on their health or some weren't simply "offed" for being uncooperative is laughable on its face.
That there were no deaths associated with Fukushima is only possible if you accept a demonstrably false construction of the energy industry in Japan that ignores its intersection with organized crime and government corruption, which is something that goes back decades.
Consider: coal alone kills about a million people a year. If those were all concentrated in a small area, we'd call it the greatest disaster the world has ever seen. But it's spread out over the whole world, so we just shrug our shoulders and say, eh, at least it doesn't go badly wrong like nuclear does.
Put another way: coal kills more people each year than nuclear ever has over its entire history, including the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.
And yes, you do get harmful particles on the coast of the US from activity in Asia:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518323094/...
People are suffering and dying from fossil fuel pollution emitted half a world away. Pollution from Fukushima can only be detected on the US west coast with the most sensitive instruments, and has no health effects.
Nuclear isn't perfect, but if you want to compare it with fossil fuels, you need to look at the constant deadly impact of fossil fuels, not merely look at big splashy accidents.
Edit: also, I frequently hear this argument about coal, but it's not a choice between nuclear and coal. Nuclear advocates promote investment in nuclear, but if we were to invest huge amounts into new energy infrastructure, we might as well invest in renewables, rather than another dirty hard to manage source.
But the news can't get flashy photos of areas destroyed by coal damage. It doesn't happen in big single events that the news likes to cover. So the damage seems basically invisible compared to nuclear. If the news reported on every death and environmental incident caused by coal et al, it would be banned within a year.
Furthermore, coal plants can and do explode - aerosolised coal dust goes with a bang.
To me (and I suspect to many others), the huge difference lies in the indelibility of the damages of nuclear power.
Sure, coal might kill a million people a year, but the remnants of a nuclear incident will remain for thousands of years and affect hundreds of generations after that, in ways we don't even fully understand yet.
For example, children and pregnant women are warned to be careful about the fish they eat because of mercury contamination. A large part of that mercury contamination comes from burning coal. That's food from 70% of the planet rendered partially unfit for human consumption by coal.
There's nothing like that for nuclear. Yes, you should avoid food grown around Chernobyl, and there have been incidents where farmers had to dump milk for a while and things like that, but no nuclear accident has ever (nor could one ever conceivably) contaminate food from so much of the planet so badly.
I'm in no ways a defender or a supporter of coal here; I think we should be moving to clean energies as fast as we can. Still, the damages from nuclear catastrophes are orders of magnitude bigger than those of coal, imo.
Note that even if you think radiation is particularly scary and vastly worse than chemical poisons, coal power plants emit many tons of uranium in addition to all the other nasty pollution.
What is your basis for that last statement? Coal: about a million deaths per year. Nuclear: about half a million ever, including weapons. Given that, how can you possibly say that damage from nuclear is orders of magnitude bigger?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Tell people that the mercury that comes out of a coal plant will outlast the Earth itself, and you get a shrug. Tell them that nuclear waste will remain dangerous for 10,000 years and suddenly it's a Big Problem that needs Extraordinary Measures in order to Safeguard Future Civilizations.
The way to make nuclear waste safe is not to concentrate it and bury it. It's to disperse it in such low concentrations that it doesn't make any difference.
Several countries tried your approach around the middle of the last century, pulverizing large amounts of radioactive material and dispersing it into the atmosphere. The results weren't catastrophic, but thousands did die from it.
We shouldn't be irrationally fearful of nuclear waste, but we shouldn't be completely blase about it either. The stuff is dangerous... just not dangerous on a level beyond anything else out there, the way many treat it.
I don't see that you have refuted my point - you just have to look at the record (thousands of nuclear incidents worldwide over decades) to see that humanity apparently is not capable of safely using nuclear, and I'm sceptical that the benefits in terms of reduced exigencies are as great as is often claimed. And personally I'd far rather have the damage spread out over a wide area if it means we don't have to every now and then throw away all the milk in Wales for years and distribute iodine tablets to thousands..
Do you really prefer killing a million people a year, every year, to "every now and then" throwing away all the milk in Wales, just because the million deaths are spread out? I can't fathom this.
There is a natural level of background radiation, but it's not equal in all places. I think it's possible to detect some isotopes that crossed the ocean from Japan to USA, but if you compare the amount of additional radioactivity with the background level additional difference is tiny.
I'd like to give some tranquility with some numbers that compare the amount of additional radioactivity with other sources. (If you leave with someone, he/she is slightly radioactive. Some food are more radioactive than other. And other radiation sources like X-ray, CT, plane flight, sunbath ...)
Anyway, I prefer to post something to make you more nervous. "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... Coal plants also emit a lot of radioactive particles that are distributed worldwide.
> The fire is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet (90 m) over an 8-mile (13 km) stretch of 3,700 acres (15 km2). At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years.[2]
Today, Pripyat is perfectly safe except for the immediate vicinity of the reactor. People could live there.
Attributing the damage of this to general nuclear accident is inappropriate.
No, that's not quite right. In fact with all oil-based energy consumption, we get harmful particles. And its worse, because: oil-based consumption is massively distributed, and it is therefore harder to turn off.
Apropros management of energy, we humans are surrounded by free energy we haven't yet learned to manage. If we will perish because of oil-greed, then the lesson learned in all of this is that we must continue to go "local" in production and consumption.
(Myself, I'd be happy to transition to 100% solar-power, and I de-incentivize my own personal oil consumption, i.e. I ride a bicycle to work.)
My belief in the technology hasn't changed. It's my belief in humanity that has faltered.
It's not the technology that needs improvement before it can be safely used.
> Because of the high radioactivity levels inside the reactor, only specially designed robots can probe the unit
There must be some sort of really powerful shielding on the robot. Cool stuff.
http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/the-elephant-foot-of-the-che...
I couldn't find if robots were used here, but I'm sure more were later.
> From a safe distance, workers – or “liquidators” as they were called – rigged up a crude wheeled camera contraption and pushed it towards the Elephant’s Foot
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KxRuWaD0sXg/U7MHoNyBuiI/AAAAAAAAJ...
Shielding is hard.
A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. They'd need to burn a few holes, but none of the reactor vessels are intact so that wouldn't allow additional radioactive material to escape.
I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium contaminated water into the ocean hasn't made more news.
What about the animals you possibly didn't see and how many animals reach fertility in 2-3 years?
https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-26/30-years-after-cherno...
It's probably unwise, but it's not super deadly.
With an electronics-free periscope, they could have saved five years. And keep in mind, the radioisotopes are still flowing into the ocean this whole time.
Why does that surprise you?
That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal and I'm having trouble thinking of any tested fiber in the range of a molten reactor core. The flux is really crazy near that thing, and not just photons, but relativistic electrons and some very angry helium nuclei.
Or you could put a scintillating detector in a lead ball with a hole, and scan by rotation and pipe the light from the scintillator out to external electronics. All you need is a long pipe installed to get started.
Could you go into more detail?
The robots will likely at least be useful for retrieving the samples.
Why? It seems relatively safe, and there doesn't seem to be much else to do with it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
They are putting a little over 50mL of a weakly radioactive, fast decaying isotope into the ocean. It will be undetectable within a few years.
Natural tritium production (from cosmic rays) occurs at at a rate 3 orders of magnitude higher [0] than is occurring at Fukushima [1].
Oh you mean the dump that had 4 grams of tritium in it?
Not drinking water for sure, but less worrying than it seems at first
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6nenrd/fukushima...
Radiation shielding is a hard problem. For meaningful reduction of xray and gamma radiation in this environment, we're talking inches of lead cladding [0]. And even that won't ensure a useful lifespan for your fiber, exposed to at least tens of Sv/h along much of its length. And cladding doesn't even begin to address the problem posed by neutron radiation.
The environment in Reactor 2 isn't just hostile to life; it's hostile to organized matter.
http://www.eichrom.com/PDF/gamma-ray-attenuation-white-paper...
Did they consider non-electronics solutions? Who knows. It may be the sooner they discover where the fuel went, the sooner they need to start spending the $80B to dig it out. So slow is a feature.
You absolutely would need cladding on a light pipe, and lots of it. All kinds of optical materials are subject to darkening, clouding, and embrittlement by much lower levels of ionizing radiation than exist in the reactor [0]. Again, here we're talking about tremendous amounts of radiation over much of the pipe's length, so even small amounts of damage per unit length are going to quickly render the pipe useless for imaging.
As for the illumination, collimated light down a polish steel tube would obviously work, but a rod of glass should work as well.
Imaging is a problem. Your search for "refractive elements that would work in the high radiation environment" would likely lead you to something like the optics that Toshiba has developed for these robots. Remember to also account for the thermal effects; radiation of this magnitude is capable of heating the internal elements of your assembly by hundreds of degrees, and your telescope-like camera must maintain its tolerances very precisely to produce a usable image. And perhaps the hardest problem of all: how to maneuver all of this stuff into place through hundreds of meters of industrial hell, where humans can't even stay long in the parking lot outside of a shielded truck. Tackle these problems using no robotics, and you'll be famous, I guarantee it :)
* You can transfer light through such cables. This means you use one cable to send light into the scene and another cable to see to the scene. Please just look up how endoscopy works for many many many decades, long before computers were a thing. (face palm #2) You probably have a SPDIF connector at your home entertainment devices. Have a look at the fiber cable and hold it against a light or look through it, to get the idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/PDIF (it's about a single fiber cable, not a multi-fiber cable that is nowadays more common)
* Endoscopes are operated with wires, mechanical wires operated by a human (or could be by low tech remote pneumatic construct many feets away from the scene) - just look up endoscop (face palm #3)
So a low tech solution would work in such environments, though it's not as news worthy and not as cool as some robots, but it would be useful for a long time, not die at all.
I am surprised by the lacking education here, unfortunately the site got mainstream and attracted average joes from everywhere - with even basic education like in physics and mechanical engineering we could have a proper conversation here. Even CS and startup topics are now littered by corporate drones and fanboys of minor things. Maybe different tags/channels would help to channel the news.
I don't know where you got that idea, but it's very wrong. Optical glasses of all kinds are quite vulnerable to darkening, clouding, and embrittlement by much lower levels of ionizing radiation than those at Fukushima [0].
Even if you shielded the fibers with centimeters of lead, the radiation received along the fiber's length would quickly render it useless for either imaging or lighting. And with that much shielding, good luck moving it around. How exactly do you think you'll get your low-tech thingy into place, maneuvering it hundreds of meters of abandoned building, ruble and industrial wreckage? Remember that you can't even be in the parking lot unless you're in a heavily shielded truck. How would you protect the optical assemblies at the working end of your cable, which cannot be shielded and are thus exposed to hundreds of Sv/hr? Do you know how Toshiba designed the optics on their Scorpion robot? How would you improve on their materials or lens arrangements? Have you considered the thermal effects of this much radiation, which is capable of heating the internal elements of your assembly to hundreds of degrees?
Read the links I gave, maybe do a bit of googling, and be assured that you have not actually outsmarted hundreds of nuclear physicists and robot experts with your super clever idea.
And glass and probably types of plastics can be quite hardened against negative effects of radiation. Think of transparent windows where you can look at the reactor core of research reactors, NASA space missions with high precision optics that last for decades, etc.
The issue in Japan is their culture, their problem with "loss of face" which inevitably caused problems in the hours when the worst case scenario unleashed - and the whole world watched 24h live while they did little and USA proposed (and had them ready on the nearby ship) to send in helicopters with backup generators but Japan made no official request for help - lesson learned, in the end US should have crossed their border and fixed the generators because Japan hasn't acted rational at all. Even the years later, they could have learned from Russia how to fix it quickly by sending in human people. But again false bride, and "loss of face" gets in their way. They keep going on with business as usual, and the leaks aren't fixed or anything worth mentioning. Chinese and Japanese have a related culture, yet Chinese know what they are doing and are very successful.
"All optical fibers undergo some darkening depending on a number of factors that include: ionization type, optical fiber core glass composition, operating wavelength, dose rate, total accumulated dose, temperature and power propagating through the core. Since attenuation is composition dependent, it is observed that fibers having pure silica cores and fluorine down doped claddings are amongst the most radiation hard fibers. To minimize damage consequences, it is better to use a pure silica core fiber at higher operating wavelength, higher temperature (accelerated recovery) and higher signal power (photo-bleaching)." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_on_optical_f... -- (shortened snip)
Have you ever actually seen an endoscope? Do you have any idea how complicated they are, how many optical elements they have and how precise the tolerances must be?
Did your study of wikipedia reveal the extent of transmission loss in rad-hard optical materials after exposure to levels of radiation near those at Fukushima? Because the link I gave you does. Read that and tell me how long you expect your fiber optics to last down there. I'll give you a hint: not very long.
Tell you what, just make a sketch of your "low-tech" endoscope that withstands hundreds of Sv/hr, deals with hundreds of degrees of internal heating, is waterproof of course, and is robust to extreme physical abuse. And then come up with a way to remotely maneuver it into place through hundreds of meters of industrial wreckage, without using a robot.
Then get ready to be famous, for your brilliant low-tech solution will be lauded by the international team of scientists and engineers working on Fukushima who simply hadn't thought of it for over 6 years.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-robot-swimming-expl...
Hmm, pricey.
And remember that the Fukushima circumstances were pretty extraordinary indeed -- the reactor meltdowns were the consequence of a thousand year tsunami which directly killed nearly 20,000 people.
Even just some small adjustments would make it more readable: "Japanese pictures may show melted fuel from Fukushima for the first time."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldT2g2qDQNQ
Besides that, I'm not sure either "Japan" or "Japanese" is really necessary, because "Fukushima" makes it clear that the pictures are from Japan.
Which is nice.
First photos of melted Fukushima fuel.
If you take away the tentativeness of "may", "likely", etc., you can make the sentence much easier to read. I wouldn't mind a slight lack of qualifiers as long as the whole thing is not too linkbaity and the content puts the qualifiers back where they belong.
Even though I'm a non native speaker, I haven't experienced any difficulties parsing and processing this headline. I am not sure what part of it that got you off balance.