How To Take Apart Fukushima's 3 Melted-Down Reactors 167
the_newsbeagle writes "In Japan, workers have spent nearly three years on the clean-up and decommissioning of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. They only have 37 years to go. Taking apart the plant's three melted-down reactors is expected to take 40 years and cost $15 billion. The plant's owner, TEPCO, admits that its engineers don't yet know how they'll pull off this monumental task. An in-depth examination of the decommissioning process explains the challenges, such as working amid the radioactive rubble, stopping up the leaks that spill radioactive water throughout the site, and handling the blobs of melted nuclear fuel. Many of the tasks will be accomplished by newly invented robots that can go where humans fear to tread."
Re:Wait for better robots (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait for better robots (Score:4, Informative)
I got tired of reading godlikeproductions and globalresearch and enenews and the other bullshit sites posting about the Fukushima disaster because they were garbage sources full of fairy tales, improbable conspiracies and Hollywood disaster movie physics. I've not read the item you posted but the link text claims says fuel pellets were blasted thirty kilometres by the force of the explosions. Think about that for a moment, the physics of it, launching ANYTHING that sort of distance requires precision engineering as in large artillery pieces or an explosion that would have levelled the entire site and for kilometres around it too. No giant explosion, site not levelled, no artillery in evidence, bullshit story.
Re:Wait for better robots (Score:4, Informative)
Just keeping track of the circular loops of fairy stories, fantasy physics, delusions and "make shit up" that passes for citizen science and knowledgeable discourse on the subject of the radiation releases from Fukushima would be a full-time job and it wouldn't do any good anyway as the stories are self-reinforcing, passed from blog to blog and repeated in the comments with addenda and shifting decimal points among the Dark Conspiracy theories.
At least when you see enenews or globalresearch in the link or you find Arne Gunderson or Chris Busby headlining the DOOM! DOOM! and THRICE DOOM! story the link ends up at you know you've reached the bullshit zero energy point and you can stop there but the perpetual notion machine is still churning away in the background -- did you know that if a fuel rod is dropped while being moved from the SFP in reactor 4 it will trigger a flash-fission event resulting in a flux of neutrons so intense it will make the reactors in the Daini plant ten kilometres south of Fukushima Daiichi explode? I read that on the globalresearch website a few days ago, written by a Japanese guy who's been going into the exclusion zone to offer herbal therapy to folks living there, so it must be true /snark.
As for U and Pu being detected in soil samples at Fukushima, uranium is quite a common constituent of soil. The samples tested don't show any enrichment from natural levels whereas pollution due to fuel pellets would be at least 2% U-235 and maybe more. As for plutonium there's about the same amount of Pu-239 and Pu-240 as was present before the reactors were built courtesy of Fat Man, Castle Bravo and its sisters (amounting to about 150 megatonnes of Instant Sunshine in the Pacific) and even the Tsarbomba made its presence felt in the isotopic record. Some more was added in 1986 when Chernobyl let rip and its core burned to atmosphere. As long as the TEPCO engineers keep cooling the core remnants in the three reactors that's where the non-volatile elements like U and Pu will stay until they can be properly safed.