The Status of the Fukushima Clean-Up 136
doom writes "Ian Sample at the Guardian UK does a really thorough write-up of what's going on with the Fukushima Clean-up. From the article: 'Though delicate and painstaking, retrieving the fuel rod assemblies from the pools is not the toughest job the workers face. More challenging by far will be digging out the molten cores in the reactors themselves. Some of the fuel burned through its primary containment and is now mixed with cladding, steel and concrete. The mixture will have to be broken up, sealed in steel containers and moved to a nuclear waste storage site. That work will not start until some time after 2020.'"
TL;DR version (Score:4, Interesting)
it still sucks and it's going to take forever to clean up.
I live on the Pacific (Score:2, Interesting)
And I've stopped eating Sushi.
I Live 90 Miles From the Site (Score:5, Interesting)
And I have two things to say.
1. It's an incredibly difficult job where new challenges have to be met with new thinking every day.
2. The people who are doing the difficult work deserve a huge gratitude of thanks for their effort. Working in full radiation suits and masks in 35C temperatures in summer took extraordinary strength of purpose and determination.
All of you that are going to make jokes about glowing whatever and Godzilla can go fuck yourselves. And I mean it. Go Fuck Yourself.
Re:Please explain to a dum-dum... (Score:5, Interesting)
That a simplification but essentially correct.
In fact both the earthquake and tsunami damaged the cooling system. They could have recovered from that using emergency pump trucks, which in fact they did try to do. The problem was that all the monitoring equipment was out of action due to lack of power, so they were unaware that a valve was open and syphoning off the water they were pumping in before it reached the reactors. The tsunami damage made getting near enough to make manual checks difficult, and then things started to explode as well.
The plant was designed to survive flooding and tsunami, it just didn't work in a real emergency situation. That is why when operators claim that their plants are safer or they have some new design that can't possibly go wrong people are sceptical. The same reassurances have been made before.