Fukushima Nuclear Plant Cleanup May Take More Than 40 Years 218
mdsolar writes "'A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.' Meanwhile, Gregory B. Jaczko, former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology."
So permit them to fix them... (Score:2)
If this is honest and true permits should be issued post haste.
One caution.... newer is not better as Apple Map users found.
Re:So permit them to fix them... (Score:4, Interesting)
Jaczko isn't credible. He is a head case that drove his colleagues, including his fellow Obama appointees, to publically and unanimously condemn his tenure as NRC chairman while seated right next to him during congressional testimony. They forced him out because they'd had enough of his shit.
So now he is going to be a professional anti-nuke gadfly. Last week good 'ol Senator Harry Reid resurrected the head case [depletedcranium.com] and put him on the NNSA board so he can make that group dysfunctional and say scary things about the stockpile. Now that he's out of the shadows he's taking more shots as nuclear energy as well.
If you read the linked story you'll eventually learn what, specifically, his problem is with contemporary operating reactors; they are large and have enough residual heat to damage fuel after shutdown. The notion that our power reactors are too large is not new. It has been well understood since the beginning of nuclear energy production. Jaczko is talking about it because that's his job now; use the credibility of his "Former Chairman of the NRC" moniker to make headlines by saying scary things about nukes.
Incidentally this discussion raises the question; how large can a reactor be without risking fuel damage? The answer is about 60 MW thermal for traditional PWR light water designs. Common power reactors are 2000 MW thermal.
BTW, we aren't going to do anything about any of this. We're not replacing the reactors, or coal or gas or building out green energy [wind-watch.org] or anything else. We're a balkanized welfare state nation occupied with feathering our environmental nest while evacuating our industrial base to Asia. The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die. Maybe a reactor will melt and we'll replace our nukes with more gas consumption. That's about as much as you can expect.
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We're a balkanized welfare state nation occupied with feathering our environmental nest while evacuating our industrial base to Asia.
That's the most depressing phrase I've read all week.
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2) Have you noticed the annual 30-40% drop rate of solar panel prices?
3) Have you noticed the upcoming grid-scale storage developments (e.g.: GE's Durathon) which are nearing mass production?
I would say that the US grid will look VERY DIFFERENT in 20 years time whether anyone there like/want it or not. Renewables will simply kill fossil/nuclear based generation once adequate grid-scale stora
No one in the nuclear industry is credible (Score:2, Flamebait)
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I think we should replace all of our nuclear reactors with one big one.
The good news is that this is already in operation and has proven to be a stable design.
It has been generating power for millions of years and has a projected life of millions more.
It only gives earth a small amount of harmful radiation due to natural shielding. It provides many times the power the earth could possibly ever use.
I am, of course, referring to the sun.
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Cost of nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
Is nuclear power really more cost effective per megawatt if you incluse the cost of long term storage and clean up after a disaster? Those numbers never make it into the calculations because they are inevitably paid by taxpayers.
Re:Cost of nuclear power (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my god, don't start putting logic into your fiscal planning and equations! That's not how the world works. Witch! Burn the Witch!!!
Re:Cost of nuclear power - the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why this doesn't come up when they talk about where to bury the waste - building a reactor to make use of it IS an option. Of course the longer we wait, the more spent fuel will be contained in giant blocks of cement that can't be used as fuel either.
Re:Cost of nuclear power - the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
It wasn't due to proliferation risk, it was cost. All the LSFR reactors ever built were research testbeds and experienced major problems. None ever recycled fuel successfully in the way that would be needed for them to be commercially viable.
The cost of development would be huge and the potential risks to the ROI are worrying to investors. It would make sense for the government to try to build one, if it were able to see beyond the next election or two and didn't have better options like renewables and fusion to throw money at.
These things are just not commercially viable I'm afraid.
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Cost per Megawatt?
As in installed nominal power? Surely not.
Cost per Megawatthour?
As in total produced energy over nuke lifetime? Maybe
Nukes work almost all year long while solar panels and wind turbines work somewhere between 800 and 2000 hours a year.
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Long-term storage of nuclear waste is paid for by a levy on the electricity generated by the reactors and not by the "taxpayers". In the US that's 0.1c per kWh. The total US fund for that is over 28 billion dollars and rising. In contrast the coal power station operators pay bupkis for long-term treatment of their unconstrained waste output -- any attempt to get them to cough up (so to speak) is a War On Coal.
Reinventing Fire (Score:2)
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From the zealot who brought us the biofuels disaster [nucleartownhall.com]? No thanks.
Regardless, the question isn't wether conventional nuclear is the most expensive, but if renewables can ever be cheaper than coal and natural gas, and deployed at a rate of say 100MW a day. (and with the low capacity factor of wind/solar, they would require several times that, not to mention several times the transmission infrastructure.)
Renewables simply don't cut it at the scales we require. The developing world is building coal plants ins
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Decommissioning costs are put aside during the life of a reactor. The formulas are found in 10 CFR 50.75(c). There isn't a similar requirement for a fund dedicated to clean up after a disaster, because it's so rare and the company is liable anyways. It'd probably be a good idea.
Re: Shhh. (Score:2)
Pretty obvious lies. Why do people still bother spouting this garbage?
There have been several studies done showing that the Prius has a significantly lower environmental footprint than the average car.
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Except that when you buy a Prius, you're probably throwing away a perfectly serviceable vehicle. What's the environmental cost of that?
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| A single friggen massive algae bloom could eat up all the CO2 produced in a year and turn it into O2 in a few weeks, and die dropping the carbon safely at the bottom of the sea.
Empirically, why hasn't this been happening to keep the CO2 concentration stable?
What makes one believe that such a circumstance could be engineered to happen every year for the next 300 years?
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There's one every time...
If it's 'hot' for millenia then it's not actually very 'hot' at all.
If it's 'hot' for decades it's not really a problem to store it.
It's only the stuff in the middle that's particularly nasty, and that can be controlled through good design of the reactor process
Reprocessing and breeder reactors will mean we can get rid of all the waste in it's entirety. Of course that would mean research, development and construction of new reactors. One of the biggest problems is that a lot of th
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Which LNG plants are you talking about? Various facilities were damaged, along with non-nuclear electric power plants and oil refineries (Cosmo at Ichihara, Chiba), but which ones were actually wiped out? There is considerable cost involved in cleanup and damage to those facilities, but do you believe it approaches the financial damage from Fukushima?
The compensation claims alone have forced TEPCO to ask the Japanese government for tens of billions of dollars. That's just for the compensation, not for clean
Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:4, Informative)
Moving away from the first & second generation light water reactor designs is definitely something we should be doing, but simply going to smaller plants is a dubious plan.
From TFA:
> Dr. Jaczko cited a well-known characteristic of nuclear reactor fuel to continue to generate copious amounts of heat after a chain reaction is shut down. That “decay heat” is what led to the Fukushima meltdowns. The solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point.
Actually innovating, bringing something like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to reality, is more along the lines of what we should be doing.
Also, it was the tsunami that actually caused the meltdowns. Fukushima had appropriate backups for cooling the reactor, and were well under way when the reactors were shut down after the quake, they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami to come and categorically knock them all out.
$0.02
Re:Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:5, Insightful)
it was the tsunami that actually caused the meltdowns
Has anyone said otherwise? What's your point?
they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami
It doesn't matter what other things were done right, because in the real world it still had a meltdown.
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and it does matter because in the real world the ideal is to learn from the past in order to better prepare for the future. No?
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The next time there is an accident (and there will be) the people living around it will be glad we learned something from this one ...
The idea of learning from this accident is to prevent another accident, so "the next time there is an accident (and there will be)" it will be because the lessons weren't learned or because of something completely different.
And the people living around where will be glad? Fukushima? I doubt they're going to let anyone build another nuke near them. Or do you mean the people living around the future inevitable accident? Why would they be happy - if there is an accident near them it means that the Fukushima
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Actually, if you were to check on the matter...
The quake already disabled the plants, the tsunami just gave the final blow.
AND NO, NO AND NO.
THE QUAKE AT THE SITE OF THE PLANT WAS NOT BIGGER THAN WHAT THE PLANT WHAT SUPPOSEDLY BUILD TO SUSTAIN.
The quake was a 9 something at sea, but much much lower at the coast of Japan.
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Has anyone said otherwise?
Jaczko did. Which was the point of the original poster's clarification.
It doesn't matter what other things were done right, because in the real world it still had a meltdown.
Of course it matters. Do you think less radiation would be released, if say the melted core had stayed critical for days after the tsunami, generating heat a considerable fraction of that of a working reactor? (Just scramming the reactor dropped heat production by a factor of ten. And keeping the reactor cool for about nine hours, dropped heat production significantly more.) Or while the core continued to boil sea water and release measu
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Actually the tsunami was not the only cause, the earthquake itself damaged the plant. That was not known at the time but has come to light during the clean-up operation.
Another interesting fact that has recently been discovered was that the meltdowns could have been avoided. When the emergency cooling system failed the plant operators used fire engines to pump water into the reactor using a pipe designed for just such an emergency. Unfortunately a valve that was supposed to be closed was open, and no-one kn
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got bit by an outlier (or their "acceptable level" wasn't good enough).
Indeed, their acceptable level wasn't good enough. There have been tsunamis larger than this one in the region within the last two hundred years, so it was predictable that eventually another one just as large would happen.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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They have already been built long ago, and all of the fundamental concepts have been proven. What is left is the engineering and development left to make a commercial grade reactor. For a small fraction of what we are spending to turn our excess plutonium into MOX fuel which none of our reactors are equipped to use, molten salt reactors could solve the plutonium and spent fuel issues once and for all, at far less cost.
The corrosion problems used as an excuse to shut down the program, already had known so
Re:Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:5, Interesting)
They have already been built long ago, and all of the fundamental concepts have been proven.
Incorrect. There has never been any breeding. Th fuel cycles need breeding and thus a breeding ratio of 1 or better. This has never been done and numerically looks pretty tight. So tight that in situ reprocessing is typically proposed to remove the 233Pa which acts as a neutron poison. This also has never been done or shown to work in any way. These things would be considered a pretty fundamental part of a LFTR.
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Thermal breeding of U-233 was demonstrated in the Shippingport reactor [wikipedia.org], and there are no reasons to expect that it will not work in LFTR as well. U-233 releases about 2.3 neutrons per fission, which while slow for breeding, is not that tight for breaking even.
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Re:Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:4, Insightful)
233Pa removal helps with the neutron economy. Since your reactor is not infinite in size, and since there are other things that absorb neutrons and that neutron reflectors are not 100%. Keeping enough neutrons around to sustain fission is not as straight forward as it looks. When you need to ensure that at least one of these 2.3 neutrons are absorb by 232Th, its gets much harder. Given that 233Pa has a much higher neutron absorption cross section and that 234Pa is quite undesirable due to the creation of 234U, a nasty gamma emitter. It is constantly suggested to remove 233Pa in situ to solve some of the serious problems that 232Th cycles have.
I am amazed at the profound misconceptions that a couple of naysayers have been able to propagate..
Oh please. The last LFTR post a while back was "the waste is so safe you can eat it". There is a prevailing belief that LFTR are magic and stop nuclear being nuclear. Its wrong.
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Re:Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:4, Insightful)
they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami to come and categorically knock them all out.
Geological records show that a Tsunami about that size hits the coast of Japan every 300 years. The reactor was built to last 60 years. Just by random chance there was a 20% probability of being hit by a tsunami. But tsunamis don't happen randomly, they roughly happen at a known frequency, and northwest Japan was "due". So they failed to account for something that had a better than even chance of happening over the life of the reactor. This is why the greenies roll their eyes when the nukies say "Trust us, we know what we're doing!"
Re:Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why the greenies roll their eyes when the nukies say "Trust us, we know what we're doing!"
And the rest of us roll their eyes when the greenies expect us to roll back ~100+ years of progress because nuclear accidents have happened.
Nuclear power has the lowest carbon output per megawatt of ANY base load power supply. Full stop.
This is a chart of deaths per TwH of power:
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976 [ibm.com]
Nuclear? 0.04. Coal? *161*
Wow, great, we've had Chernobyl and Fukushima as major incidents. You know how many people die every year because of coal-fired generation? Hundreds of thousands. Greenies can fuck off.
Transistor invented after reactor (Score:2)
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And the rest of us roll their eyes when the greenies expect us to roll back ~100+ years of progress because nuclear accidents have happened.
Sigh. Can we please drop this particular straw man. Yeah, maybe there are a few extremists who rant on the internet about this, but it is hardly the mainstream point of view.
I want the world to move forwards, not backwards. German and Japanese homes of a similar size to mine use less energy (and thus cost less to run) and are more pleasant to live in. I want that quality of life, and the way to get it is by being greener.
You know how many people die every year because of coal-fired generation?
Yeah, I do, which is one reason why I don't want more coal plants either.
Fuck off. Seri
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Taking the comparison a bit further, here are some (mostly) 2008 death statistics from the US:
Tobacco – 500,000
Alcohol – 100,000
Car Phones (2002) - 2,500
Motorcycles – 2,500
Agriculture - 1,300
Bicycles (1995) - 800
Candles - 126
Skiing deaths – 34
Dog Bites – 20
Drawstring hoods – 17
Window blind cords – 13
Roller skates - 10
Nuclear Power - 0
Roller skates are a much bigger menace than nuclear power.
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And with no links to data souced to back up your claim of 100's of 1000's - guess what kind of sexual act I'd recommend?
www.google.com
There you go, all you need to know. I think the list of possible medical conditions coal power production causes is actually longer than the list of people who have died as a result of a nuclear accident.
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They planned for earthquakes and tsunami. What they didn't account for was the size of the 2011 event, which was larger than any in recorded history, as a result the tsunami went right over the sea wall.
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Yep, fires, explosions, meltdowns, partial meltdowns, critical electrical errors. A rather short list, repeated over and over again. Sure seems like you learn each time. How to cause the same effect in partially new way every time, that is.
This demonstrates the fundamental difference between nuclear engineering and environmentalism. The mistakes that are made in nuclear power can't be covered up or glossed over like they can in environmentalism. You end up with that "rather short list". And they are fixed. We've only had one meltdown in the thirty year period since Chernobyl and this was due to overwhelming natural disaster rather than the human errors common to the three previous meltdowns (of civilian reactors used for power generation).
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Also, it was the tsunami that actually caused the meltdowns. Fukushima had appropriate backups for cooling the reactor, and were well under way when the reactors were shut down after the quake, they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami to come and categorically knock them all out.
They didn't entirely ignore the possibility—there was a 19ft sea wall designed to protect the plant from the tsunami. It was just unfortunate that it wasn't sufficient to protect the plant from the 46ft wave that actually came. In fairness though, a tsunami higher than 19ft in that area was pretty much unprecedented until the afternoon of March 11th 2011, and had the plant been made one generation later, a newer backup system would have been in place that used gravity rather than knockoutable electric
Re:Newer tech yes, Smaller reactors no (Score:5, Interesting)
A liquid flouride thorium reactor has exceptionally radioactive fission products dissolved in a caustic, very hot liquid. Every nuclear plant also has to be a chemical reprocessing plant of 700 degree radioactive liquids sufficiently dangerous that humans cannot get close to them for decades.
This system also happens to be very water-soluble, so that a breach and flood similar to Fukushima would be extraordinarily dangerous---most of the waste would have entered the environment instead of a modest fraction.
Conventional reactors have fission products encased in zirconium steel.
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Fluoride salts are very stable with a ~1000C liquide range, not water soluble, and do not react violently with air or water, no matter how many times you and others insist on repeating this FUD. Even in the event of an accident, the fission products remain safely locked up in the salts and will eventually freeze solid with no intervention. Obviously, you want to avoid flooding for any number of reasons, but there is no requirement to build the plants anywhere near water, or use water for cooling.
Conventio
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The long and
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LFTR and other molten salt reactors have significantly less decay heat to deal with, since they do not trap the volatile fission products within a solid fuel. This reduces the difficulty of the problem from the outset. Furthermore, the drain tank is separate, contains no moderator, and can be optimized for passive decay heat removal--something not possible with solid fueled reactors.
Also, your graphite red herring is not only irrelevant, but false. This has been studied, and graphite does not burn in air.
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Also, your graphite red herring is not only irrelevant, but false. This has been studied, and graphite does not burn in air.
Tell that to the people directly involved with Chernobyl. You seem to have forgotten some basic chemistry, that is reaction rates, and even what reactions happens, are temperature dependent.
No concern to you, is not the same as not a concern. These concerns where raised/pointed out in scientific papers on LFTR.
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Tell that to the people directly involved with Chernobyl. You seem to have forgotten some basic chemistry, that is reaction rates, and even what reactions happens, are temperature dependent.
No concern to you, is not the same as not a concern. These concerns where raised/pointed out in scientific papers on LFTR.
Here you go. For various reasons, it is not a concern [energyfromthorium.com] in a LFTR.
Still, there is still no graphite present in the drain tanks, so it is largely academic.
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This has been studied, and graphite does not burn in air.
Oh that's good. I thought for a minute there was a nuclear accident at Windscale. Guess that never happened.
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The solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point.
Probably. Or, design a cooling system that works on convection during a power-down state. Like modern Generation-3 and Generation-4 reactor designs utilize.
The Westinghouse AP1000 requires no operator action for 72 hours in the event of a shutdown.
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fertiliser (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be good if other areas of industry had the strong safety regulation that nuclear has. for example fertiliser plants.
Re:fertiliser (Score:4, Insightful)
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It doesn't take 40 years to clean up after a fertilizer plant explodes. BTW, what happens if they get another tsunami while they're cleaning up the mess?
On the other hand, it doesn't take an explosion for a fertilizer company to leave land toxic, uninhabitable, and a risk to groundwater for over 30 years:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/vwsoalphabetic/Frontier+Fertilizer?OpenDocument [epa.gov]
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The principal chemicals in groundwater and soil are three pesticides, ethylene dibromide (EDB), 1,2-dichloropropane (DCP), and 1,2-dibromo-3-chloropropane (DBCP), which were used as soil fumigants, as well as the solvent carbon tetrachloride.
Doesn't look like it was the fertilizer that caused the problems, fertilizer company or not.
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If they get a Tsunami in central Texas while they're cleaning it up, I'm pretty sure the flooding will be the least of our worries; the dust cloud from the giant asteroid will be a more pressing concern....
Oh, you meant in Japan.
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How long is it going to take to clean the atmosphere of all the pollutants pumped into it by thousands of coal plants around the world for the last 100+ years?
So what if it takes 40 years? Its contained to a small physical area.
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Yep because no chemical plant accident has long term environmental effects [wikipedia.org], or even a single event which has caused more deaths [wikipedia.org] than all nuclear accidents combined by several orders of magnitude.
The focus on nuclear power in a world where every other industry is effectively worse is just bizarre.
Re:fertiliser (Score:4, Insightful)
Radioactive material has a half life at least. It'll sort itself out over time. but some chemical contamination lasts forever.
Just because it's known exactly how long it'll last, to the point where the most accurate clocks are based on it. It sounds worse than something with no time limit.
It doesn't take a reactor for a 40 year cleanup (Score:5, Interesting)
Any large industrial accident can take decades to clean up. More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez [wikipedia.org] accident, there are still lingering effects. There are many Superfund toxic waste [wikipedia.org] sites that have been on the Superfund list for 30 years (the list was started 30 years ago or many would have listed longer)
Best. Cleanup Plan. Ever. (Score:2)
2. Do exactly the opposite.
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I was so going to post a massive bitch-fest about #1, until I saw #2 and started laughing.
Well done.
LFTR will solve these problems -- with YOUR help! (Score:2)
LFTR will solve these problems -- but YOUR help is needed
Imagine a nuclear reactor so safe you can walk away from it or shut its internal power and it will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Imagine that this process will be scalable from local megawatts to nation-wide terawatts by a simple replication of standard industrial components, with no increase in risk or change in the overall safety factor --- because it is not just an 'improvement' over present plant
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| will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
A LFTR is a chemical reprocessing plant with astonishingly racdioactive liquid (since it just came out of the fission core) circulating at hundreds of degrees with caustic chemical properties. There will be leaks. There will be breaches. E
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| will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
The salts are not water soluble, and have no violent reactions with either air or water. Contrary to your claims of "all sorts of fun", ORNL even dumped some in a pool at one point, and it did little more than create some steam. Fluoride salts are among the most chemically stable substances on earth, and both the fissile and fission products remain safely dissolved in just about any imaginable circumstances. Even so, keeping water out is not an issue, as there is no need to site the plants anywhere near
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Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
I cannot much that isn't covered in Kaitiff's reply [slashdot.org] to your concern last December --- aside from pointing out we're talking about fluoride not sodium salts.
Even the most complicated designs for LFTR are simple at the bottom. Drains in the containment floor after a pipe rupture --- or at shutdown through a melted freeze plug, the liquid comes to rest in a vessel where it is already sub-critical.
Yes it's temperature-hot, for awhile. While the salts are not chemically reactive with water (or air), as long as
40 Months? (Score:2)
"public-to-forget-about-it-within-40-months"
40 months? How about 40 weeks. When is the last time you heard anything of substance about Fukushima?
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Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Maybe the could us it as a setting and roll out another Matt Groening show, call it Fukurama
i'd watch it
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We'll finally get to see where Leela's ancestors grew up, before moving to the big city :)
And the natural owner of the new Fukurama II nuclear plant would be Monty Burns-san!
hai! ehhhxcellent
Re:Cheap at half the price! (Score:4, Funny)
Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Luckily, there is a solution! When our man Larry Summers was chief economist at the World Bank, he did a little writing [whirledbank.org]...
In this case, we can't really export the pollution(gathering the radioactive particles simply isn't plausible or cost effective); but we can import the population! Other than the carcinogenic fallout, it's a nice piece of real estate. Plenty of people live in places that are much ghastlier, even without fallout. All we have to do is find the wealthiest tenants who still live in a place with higher mortality(eg. from tropical parasites or malnutrition from marginally arable land) and offer them an attractively priced 50 year lease. The new occupants overall mortality goes down slightly, Japan makes some money back, and everyone basks in the warm glow of the human spirit, and gamma radiation.
How could this possibly be a bad plan?
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Retirement homes; what are the old of developing cancer in 20 years when you are already 80?
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That actually did figure into common cold war protocols for dealing with contaminated food and water sources: prioritize less-contaminated ones for the young(both because they are of greater economic use, and because they have more time to accrue chronic radiation damage) and leave the more contaminated stuff to the old people...
Plus, an excellent reason not to take the kids to visit that old relative you never liked much anyway!
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You get the idea.
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Hit by a fricking wall of water several times larger than anybody had ever planned for
We knew tsunamis could be that large. The plant owners were told the wall was not adequate, but to save a few pennies, they opted to ignore the warnings and lean hard on any balky engineers and safety inspectors to accept it. They also used propaganda to discredit and minimize the warnings. Took nature to show the world how very wrong they were. Then, it turned out that the failsafes also hadn't been maintained, to save a few more pennies. Don't buy their bull about the "unprecedented" size of the tsun
Land made useless (Score:2)
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Re:Cheap at half the price! (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole "being inhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years" means that you have extremely large amounts of something that is stable enough to be safe to handle.
It depends a lot on the contaminant. Something like tritium is a problem, for example, because it has a relatively short half life, but it will bond to oxygen and form water and if you drink it then it can cause serious problems. Radon gas is also a problem (present in a lot of places with granite) because it is heavier than air and so accumulates in any enclosed space: if you breathe it in then it is quite dangerous.
There's also the problem that a lot of the byproducts of a nuclear reactor are only mildly radioactive, but highly toxic for other reasons. The low decay rate means that they remain toxic chemicals for a long time. On the other hand, this isn't too different from any other chemical plant if there's an accident.
Re: Cheap at half the price! (Score:2)
Yes and no. It's true that isotopes with longer half lives are less radioactive in a prompt sense, but it also matters what the type of decay is and what it decays into.
If you have something that undergoes fission slowly, but gives off gamma radiation and splits into a chain of very nasty stuff that has half-life measured in minutes, you've got a problem.
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"So basically, actual real world experience tells us 40 years is far longer than is actually required for 'safety' once you pull your head out of your ass and base your world view on actual science."
So you bought some real-estate real cheap there for your retirement?
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Fukushima is not done yet. While it is true that the chain reactions have stopped, there is sufficient decay heat being generated that managing its festering corpse is an on-going problem: structures are continuing to deform and fuel rods may still be rupturing. The potential for steam or chemical explosions capable of breaching the containment is still there. And might be for decades. No one has any experience in handling a zombie nuclear plant.
Persons who read only the simplified nuclear industry report
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There are valid concerns with the above points. Heavy metal poisoning can kill you as easily as radiation. Reprocessing nuclear waste has its own issues. But nothing is perfect. Solar tends to kill more people from falls during installation than nuclear does overall
Re:They could use Canadian reactors.... (Score:5, Funny)
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French ones actually do when the temperatures get into the mid 30s. A few summers ago they had to shut a load down and dump hot water into rivers (killing the fish living there) when ambient temperatures got too high and the cooling systems were unable to cope.
Keep in mind the French are supposed to have the best and safest nuclear plants in the world, but apparently forgot to account for warm weather.
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it's more a problem with proliferation than "we don't like Canadian designs."
CANDU designs, through their use of heavy water, produce Tritium, which can then be used in a "boosted fission" weapon design. Is the amount of Tritium enough to hold back adoption of CANDU? No, but it is a concern that comes up.
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all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology. But that costs money, and we're not going to spend it.
So fuck you future people. Your problem. Sucks to be you.
To be fair, the problem is not just money, but also political. Many people want no new reactors, even if a new reactor will replace one of an older, less safe design.
Re:Brute Force (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
Concrete doesn't last forever, nor does a big dirt pile when you're in an earthquake and tsunami zone. Burying it just makes it even harder to clean up when whatever containment method you used fails the next time.
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Who cares if the containment fails. It's buried.
Oh sorry, I thought the problem was radioactive elements leaking out into the environment. As long as no one is worried about the containment failing and allowing radioactive contaminants top leach into the soil and groundwater, then sure, just put an umbrella over the current reactor and call it a day.
Re:Brute Force (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
The plan at Chernobyl worked so well that we are now constructing a bigger, better, new sarcophagus to enclose the reactor and the current leaky and structurally unsound old sarcophagus...
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Oh, I don't doubt that they could do a better job(both because it isn't as hot, and because we probably now have access to robots that are even more radiation tolerant than soviet conscripts...); but the sarcophagus is just the most notable example of the fact that actually encapsulating something properly(so that it doesn't just keep bleeding contaminated rainwater forever) gets surprisingly tricky if you have to build the enclosure under radiation constraints, and you can't necessarily just send in a main
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No, Chii. That's the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
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that would be a very dirty "ground burst" with incredible amounts of fallout contributed by the plant....let's not
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That incident you are referring to was the result of an idiot bureaucracy with a culture of unaccountability that decided it was the Highway Department's responsibility to clear it, because the whale wasn't within the border of a State Park, and at the time, Oregon classified the beach as highway. And guess what's in the Highway Department's toolbox for clearing large obstructions? Big yellow excavation equipment, and TNT.
So, they used half a ton of dynamite.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explod [wikipedia.org]