Nuclear reactions are smoldering again at Chernobyl
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
I can't believe Fukushima was 10 years ago already. It feels like it was just last year.
Imo: worth being defined separately from the earthquake, and worth being called a disaster
It seems that you missed the part where a nuclear plant was destroyed by those same tsunami and earthquake. Everybody is talking about how to fix it since 2011, so it must be something big.
Yes, I'm aware that some people will keep repeating this damage control PR stunt a thousand times, and that other naive people could even believe them and spread it, but it will still be false (and irrelevant).
Every time that we talk about Fukushima we have the but "almost nobody died" rabbit out of the hat again. We have yet discussed why this is false ten times and frankly I'm a little tired about this tactics of draining our energy making us to repeat obvious facts again and again until everybody quits the room.
There's plenty of evidence of increased cancer rates in the affected areas. That's never a statement made in good faith in the context of nuclear disasters, because radiation effects on the environment, including the people, have a very long tail.
You're basically saying nothing, while ostensibly implying there's nearly zero risk of fatalities.
[1] https://cuttingthegordianknot.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/houst...
[2] https://earther.gizmodo.com/japan-s-new-fukushima-plan-dumpi...
The Soviet Union and the United Kingdom both dumped nuclear waste into the ocean for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_....
Second, tritium is an extremely harmless radioactive isotope, probably the least harmful one there is. Releasing water containing tritium is absolute and definitely completely harmless as well, and a good decision.
But yes, Covid is also incredibly expensive, and with a couple of years of hindsight we will no doubt talk about its major political impact just like we are talking about Chernobyl contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union.
1: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...
Do you suggest that the soviet union should not have collapsed?
Perhaps it could have collapsed in a better way?
It was, and rather violent: go, and cleanse the remnants of the old system. A missed opportunity now.
Instead, people let them live for them just to come back in 9 years time.
Let’s just be glad it went away and pray it never returns: it was one of the greatest horrors this Earth has ever seen.
This optimism is very premature. CPSU has morphed into Russian mafia, and the current Russian Kleptostate, and ChiComs... well just turn on the news any day.
A very positive "disaster" for multiple countries that were occupied by Russia since the end of the war. We regained our freedom and started to catch up to the NATO countries.
The nearly 50 year under Moscow's boot was a much bigger disaster and, although I was born in a communist state, I'm glad I could grow up in a now free and democratic country.
But the propaganda machine LOVED telling us how much better we had it in such an equalitarian society and what a nightmare was to live in the decadent West where the rich took advantage of the poor. We were literally waiting for capitalism to fall... while queueing in line for the allotted bread, flour and sugar rations.
They were the masters of ecology as well. Just read up what happened to the Aral Sea and, you know, the subject at hand, Chernobyl.
The people praising such a system it are either the purely evil overlords-to-be or their "useful idiots" losers blinded by desire of a of personal gain they are utterly unable to obtain in a meritocratic, free-market, capitalist system.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/chernobyl-and-the-fall-...
Edit: Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy also makes a claim that the accident let to political instability in the Ukraine which certainly didn't help with the integrity of the SU.
Shouldn't you be a little skeptical, when he tries to blame one of his disasters for another?
I'm not saying Chernobyl wasn't a disaster. I'm just saying, as far as heavy industry goes $2B isn't much. I know that's hard to fathom but it's true.
Further, consider that the Chernobyl complex did already produce value, and for many years. In fact, there were four reactors at Chernobyl. No. 4 is the one that suffered the catastrophic failure in 1986.
However the remaining 3 reactors continued to operate for many years. No. 2 was shut down in 1991, No. 1 was shut down in 1996 and No. 3 was shut down in 2000.
Even that was reluctant, the Ukrainians only agreed to shut them down in exchange for assistance with the NSC and putting up 2 new reactors, Khmelnitski 2 and Rovno 4.
[1] https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...
The Wikipedia page for STP talks about some $10-14B for two new reactors on the existing site. Originally applied for circa'07. If the reactors ever get built they will cut down on natural gas usage and be more more profitable than gas plants over their 25+ year lifespan.
I can only imagine a modern net-new nuclear power generation facility in the most hospitable jurisdiction would cost beyond $20B when all is said and done.
you forget the $40B in cleanup costs if no disaster happens, of course disaster or cleanup costs will be socialized in "developed" countries. all cleanup costs were grosly underestimated, in germany and everywhere else.
The current one is only designed to last 100 years.
so yes, at some point the new containment cap need not be as expensive, but by the time we have gotten to that point, the site will probably have consumed a lot more money than just building the same containment over and over again. Some future leader(s) would probably do the calculations and just say "let's build another 100-year-containment so the next generation can deal with the disposal" and pocket the money.
It's the "tech debt" discussion embodied in real life.
It's estimated that the ruins will remain highly radiactive for 20,000 years, meaning that a scarcophagus-like containment is needed at least for that long. If human technology remains as is (ok I am really hoping for tech advancements in this area), we will need to build 200 of such structures if the design specifications work as planned.
The area is only "safe" because we keep the site contained. Without renewal of the containment structure, the radiation will spread.
https://www.power-technology.com/features/making-chernobyl-s...
"Meanwhile, Reactor No. 4, now covered by the New Safe Confinement, is estimated to remain highly radioactive for up to 20,000 years. "
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant-dis...
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bp-deepwaterhorizon-idUSK...
That's "BP paid", I believe.
>If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
This meant that it to work in such a way that reactivity would increase if coolant boiled away or other voids (spaces without nuclear moderating materials) formed in the fuel assembly. To keep reactions under control, it was necessary to ensure that there was always some material present to moderate the reaction.
Almost every other reactor design will essentially shut itself off if coolant is lost (negative void coefficient). This is a safety factor in case situations unexpected by the designers occur. In the event something really strange happens, the reactor turns off.
With a positive void coefficient, if something unforeseen by the designers happens, the reactor ramps up to higher output. Combine that with human mistakes in a certain sequence and safety systems that don't operate 100% correctly when the reactor is overheating and running away and you can get an out of control excursion as happened at Chernobyl.
1. Personnel who didn't understand the risks of deviating from written procedure
2. Engineers who didn't anticipate or underestimated certain failure modes and didn't design the reactor and monitoring systems with sufficient redundancy and failsafes
3. Grossly insufficient monitoring systems
4. Denial at every level once it was obvious that something was Seriously Wrong
The monitors and failsafes were there. Maybe could have been better, but they would have worked had they not been disregarded and deliberately overriden.
It was completely preventable. RBMK reactors of the same design are still operating safely today.
The issue with the fuel rods is that they were double purpose - the lower portion actually increased the reaction rate, while the upper portion decreased it. Because the team had manually fully retracted the rods, both portions were outside the reactor vessel. When it scrammed, the first portion to enter the vessel was the lower portion, which counterproductively increased the reaction rate further. This was one of several poor design choices in RBMK reactors.
You are correct that the people on shift did everything wrong at every step along the way - alongside management, who pushed forward the safety test that caused the accident on a skeleton night shift who hadn't explicitly prepared for it. The test deliberately had the reactor operating in an unusual, low-power state because it was supposed to test whether you could use momentum still in the turbines to bridge a gap until emergency diesel could be brought on line in the event of a power failure affecting the pumps that circulated coolant water to the reactor. However, the shift let the power in the reactor get too low, starving the reaction, and then took increasingly dramatic steps to attempt to bring the power back to specified (low but not that low) levels. These steps included disabling automated control of fuel rods, decreasing the rate of coolant flow, the removal of 18 of the 28 'fail-safe' control rods which were never to be removed, and disabling most of the automated scram mechanisms. Obviously, these steps were not normal procedure and constituted serious flaws in judgement.
Normal procedure would be to shut down completely when power levels drop that low, and then a waiting period and a several-hour-long startup procedure. The extremely low power state allowed a phenomenon called xenon poisoning to build up, which made restoring normal operation difficult - hence the normal procedure to shut down completley and allow the xenon to naturally decay. The attempt at restoring power despite this condition led to very unstable neutron flux, and with it unstable core temperatures, triggering alarms from several systems that were continually ignored.
Finally, the flaw in the design of a positive void coefficient (meaning that as heat goes up, water turns to steam, and the presence of the steam causes the reaction to become more efficient and produce more heat, in a runaway) actually struck, as the unstable neutron flux presumably spiked and the coolant flow was already further decreased (they had started the actual test, so the coolant pumps were being powered only by leftover momentum in the turbines). In combination, large steam voids formed, and then thermal runaway, and then a scram that actually first increased reaction rates further. (And then fuel rods fractured and many control rods got stuck at only 1/3 insertion, with the increasing portion still within the reactor). The void coefficient is why the test was supposed to take place around 700 MW, not the ~200 the operators had managed to restore; above around 700 MW the void coefficient in RBMK reactors is negative and such a runaway would not occur.
But, hey what do I know, experienced Chernobyl when it happened.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698
Just to put this in perspective, the affected part of wales in something like 1,500 miles from Chernobyl. I would guess some freak of the weather conditions caused Wales to be badly affected.
Apparently there was fallout on the grass that cows would eat, resulting in radioactive milk?
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1220/ML12205A469.pdf
For the most part a critical mass that produces enough heat to expand will have the reaction stop because the expansion causes the surface area per reactive nucleus to increase and the neutrons leak out.
It's unlikely that a situation like that will produce enough energy to be dangerous far from the reactor (an explosion or "meltdown") but it sure is dangerous for workers in the vicinity.
I can't believe it will make enough heat to damage the structure or disperse radioactivity directly.
If the neutron flux means that people can't go near the structure to maintain it then in the very long term you have more risk that the roof leaks, water leaks out, other paths of leakage don't get closed.
Really they should scrape up the corium (like they did at TMI) and put it through reprocessing like any other nuclear waste. The risk of a criticality accident doesn't make that any easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
I still find it fascinating that there is a fungus that lives inside the remains on Chernobyl and thrives in the radiation.
Is it as involved as replacing all the electronics with hardened components, or could you just make a lead suit to cover it sufficiently? Not sure how the sensors etc. function in that environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Cher...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
... or both, depending on how you look at it.
From wikipedia:
The term "stalker" became a part of the Russian language and according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the book, a stalker is a person who breaks the prohibition, enters the Zone and takes out artifacts from it, which they sell as a living. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, the term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates forbidden and uncharted territories; later on, fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.
Vadim - "Oy Aleksei, we are getting Neutron spikes in Sub basement 4A"
Aleksei - "Ah noi, eh cheeki breeki, iv damke"
It's too bad their job is a long-standing one.
While I don't remember seeing the site that often in the past.
Someone's back reading the entire site and posting the interesting bits? :)
How do slow neutrons have higher odds of splitting a nuclei? I'd have thought the exact opposite: faster neutrons--therefore, having more energy--would increase the odds.
Nuclear Waste has heavy elements that are dangerous specifically because they're radioactive. The heat might accelerate their half-life decay rate but it doesn't "burn" the atoms.
Interesting.
Is research being done to try figure out safer disposal of nuclear waste?
I assume that the waste in Chernobyl is largely/entirely distributed and contaminated with sand, dirt, other various debris, and thus probably couldn't benefit from that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
Ultimately, the total volume of Radioactive waste ever created is tiny in the grand scheme of things. Burying it is not a technical problem. The problems are entirely political. This is also why breeder reactors don't make sense. They're trying to apply a technical solution to a political problem.
it is. the problem is that it needs to be stored way longer than any human is living. basically there are very few sites which might be able to withstand a timeframe so large without every polluting the environment. you know just burying is not enough, you need to be sure that no water or anything else might break your containments. it's probably impossible to do it and it's also not a good idea to think that burying it and forgetting about it is a good idea either.
Finding places where you can control the groundwater isn't that hard. We have many candidates. Old salt mines are preferred because the salt slowly flows around the containers and entombs them. This is where the relatively small volume of the radioactive waste is a feature, you don't need a massive number of old mines to handle all of the waste. One or two would be sufficient.
Most of the concern about this is people demanding solutions that are grossly more complex and elaborate than the problem really demands. A political problem. Imagine if coal mines had to treat their tailings with the same level of care? They are similarly radioactive after a few years and just as poisonous, but we let them be dumped right into streams. Natural gas is extracted by pumping poisonous chemicals into the ground to break up rocks--greatly increasing the possibility of groundwater contamination. Imagine if they had to extract all of those chemicals back out of the ground and then store them someplace where they could be proven to never leak out again.
High level radioactive waste doesn't stay high level for very long by its very nature. This is why nuclear power plants have ponds where they store the hot stuff until it cools down enough for long term storage. After that they just have to be handled like any other nasty industrial chemical, plus some extra shielding to protect the workers from hitting their total yearly exposure limits too quickly.
good, so we take it out after 50 years and place it in your yard than? just kidding, but saying such things is stupid, the stuff is still highly dangerous even after > 1000 years, especially if the shielding gets blown away, people die from that. the fuel NEEDS to be on site for the first 10-20 years, since it's impossible to shield it good enough. after that it needs to be stored 100000 years at a minimum.
> Finding places where you can control the groundwater isn't that hard. We have many candidates. Old salt mines are preferred because the salt slowly flows around the containers and entombs them. This is where the relatively small volume of the radioactive waste is a feature, you don't need a massive number of old mines to handle all of the waste. One or two would be sufficient.
good idea. in germany we already found a salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine oh... wait.
btw. you can actually recycle some material, but that is expensive and is not done for all material, but it drain more billions of dollar for a single plant, most often it's easier to socialize the storage of the radioactive waste.
> High level radioactive waste doesn't stay high level for very long by its very nature
spent fuels is radiotoxic over 100000 years? I mean, that is long. of course for more money it can be reprocessed, reducing the long livity waste by a far margin and also not everything needs to be stored that long. it's still problem and down talking it does not help.
> Natural gas is extracted by pumping poisonous chemicals into the ground to break up rocks--greatly increasing the possibility of groundwater contamination. Imagine if they had to extract all of those chemicals back out of the ground and then store them someplace where they could be proven to never leak out again.
ok, because that's also bad it's ok to use another bad technology? heck coal is also bad it produces flying ash, way way more tones than all reactors in the world will produce over their lifetime. does it make the waste of nuclear better? no. is it good to point fingers on other technologies that are as bad? no. (to make it clear high level waste per 1000MW reactor is like 3m^3 (around a tonne) per reactor. of course it's not a lot compared to stuff that coal, mining (uranium gets mined, too and produces a shit ton of tailings) and gas, etc..., but a lot for the timeframe it needs to be stored)
According to the Wiki that Asse II mine has not released radioactivity into the environment? It was maybe not the best choice given that the mine had been prone to flooding even when it was operational, but it's a manageable problem.
Dropping nuclear is exactly about using the other bad technologies. Renewables are slowly coming online to help, but for the most part you shut down a nuclear plant you open 4 natural gas plants in its place. Unless you are China, then it's 4 coal plants.
I bet Elon would do a massive discount for that.
I still think nuclear must be part of the solution NOW (for an effect on CO@ in 2030 and on climate drift on 2050). Nuclear in 50 year will be too late. And i don't think nuclear is "the best", nor do i think that it isn't dangerous, nor do i think we should stop with renewables. Nuclear is a crutch and should be used as such.
Basically nothing would happen except that the radioactive materials would be dispersed among the environment.
Launches would be risky, though, and it's easier to send off to deep space instead. An out-of-the-solar-system orbit is cheaper energy wise than an into-the-sun one.
Launching into deep space reminds me of the drill instructor in the game Mass Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q1IaWLsyrQ
And then in a few thousand years we will be kicking ourselves for incinerating incredibly valuable resources.
Assuming you're not worried about nuclear waste leaving our solar system and becoming a problem for others, it makes absolutely no sense to launch it into the sun.
That seems a bit optimistic of a problem to have. Space is incredibly huge. For someone to accidentaly bump into it would have odds so huge I don't even know how to aproximate it.
Anything less, and it will be in an orbit that floats close to the sun then floats back up towards earth, more or less forever.
My point is that you can't cancel out the velocity of your orbit around the sun using solar sails.
It's all a moot point anyway since solar sails are so ridiculously impractical that this would basically never work in real life regardless.
Another potential issue: is getting rid of nuclear waste _permanently_ really such a good idea? What if we discover some other use for it in the future?
Interesting how that changed.
"The substance proved too hard for a drill mounted on a motorized trolley, ... Finally, a police marksman arrived and shot a fragment of the surface away with a rifle. The sample revealed that the Elephant's Foot was a solidified mass of silicon dioxide, titanium, zirconium, magnesium, and uranium"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)#...
"Uh... we shot the nuclear waste. With an AK-47."
Imagine what would happen to your Lego buildings if some of the bricks got smaller or larger, changed the number of bumps, or split into two bricks.
Note that we're not just talking about metals here. For example, an element in a nuclear reactor might be a transition metal, an alkali metal, a halogen, or a noble gas at different points in the last 35 years--with radically different chemical properties.
I am definitely not an expert, but I did take inorganic chemistry and nuclear chemistry in college.
(Note that some of these changes in naturally occurring minerals, and the presence of compounds like noble gases trapped in minerals, are used to date minerals... you can estimate how long ago the mineral melted and cooled.)
It's really like a big mess of uncontrolled alchemy of matter shifting around at chernobyl. I know it's a actually a giant mess of nuclear chemistry going on with all sorts of unknown distributions and spatial proximities of various atoms but wild to think about.
Typically this stuff is well controlled and reactor configurations are well established as are the types of reactions and byproducts produced with fairly high certainty. Take those very detailed designs away and you have no idea what sort of materials are shifting states in these globs of materials. They have designs and can reason basic percentages of what may have ended up where but lots of guesswork and lots of those are not highly refined materials I'm sure, which means a bunch of impurities are incorporated in as well.
For example, one important fission product in a nuclear reactor is xenon-135, which is produced from the decay of iodine-135, which is a product of nuclear fission. When you run the reactor, it produces iodine-135, which has a half-life of 6.6 hours, producing xenon-135.
Xenon-135 is a "nuclear poison." It is the the strongest known neutron absorber, and it absorbs neutrons in the reactor that would otherwise be used for fission. While the reactor is operating normally, the reactor neutrons will "burn off" the xenon-135, and the fission products will produce new xenon-135, and you can run these reactions in equilibrium.
If you turn a reactor off, the xenon-135 builds up to higher levels--remember, takes hours for the iodine-135 to decay. Because xenon-135 inhibits the reactor, you have to either wait for the xenon-135 to decay (9.14 hour half-life) or you have to pull out the control rods to compensate.
The Chernobyl operators turned the reactor off (not on purpose), xenon-135 built up, and then they pulled out the control rods to start it back up. When the reactor finally started up, the xenon-135 was burned off by the neutrons in the reactor, but this happened quickly, and the control rods were still out.
Steel rusts. Masonry turns to sand. Wood rots.
"As the technical discussion gets more popular, the likelihood of Elon having a purported solution approaches one"
- Designing and building reactor that is demonstrably and knowingly unsafe by its own creators and other scientists
- Building it in the cash starved near collapse Soviet Union in a satellite state
- Having technicians carry out tests that are known to be unsafe for the sake of it
- Lying and attempt to cover up the issue because your entire power structure is all about saving face
What am I saying? Of course Chernobyl would've still happened!
I'm not particularly invested in if nuclear power is good or bad but holding up Chernobyl as a snarky "watch as the nerds ignore THIS!" is a herring so unimaginably red that it beggars belief
Should only collapse-proof nations build nuclear plants? If it looks like a collapse is coming, should they decommission them early?
I get the better tech arguments-- those are solid. But this idea that they were dumb and we're smart is, I guarantee you, the same exact idea they had at Chernobyl. The whole reason they wanted to save face so much is because the whole thing was built on that idea.
The same could be said for Boeing, etc., but that doesn’t mean we need to abandon air travel. We just need better leadership in safety critical organizations.
The cold war suggests Russia is anything but dumb. And as those bullets demonstrate, they where smart enough to know better - but the problem with the Soviet Union was not that it collapsed (or was unstable), but that it wasn't transparent - it cared more about the image of functionality than actual functionality.
To have credit, you have to look good. To look good, you have to hide the bad under the mantle and show how much you can do with so little! In a way, soviet russia was more productivist than any company ever was and will ever be.
There are a lot of ways governments can harm the environment on purpose using tools that are generally helpful.
Like all energy sources, there are risks and there are solutions to mitigate these risks. And I don't know any sane proponent of nuclear energy that think that we should ignore the lessons learned.
Same for airplane accidents vs car accidents.
We know how to build safe nuclear plants. We should do that, and also make sure there’s enough independent oversight to make sure they’re not being managed by people actively trying to melt them down.