12 Years After Fukushima, Removal of Melted Nuclear Fuel Hasn't Started (apnews.com) 49
"Twelve years after the triple reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan is preparing to release a massive amount of treated radioactive wastewater into the sea," writes the Associated Press. "Japanese officials say the release is unavoidable and should start soon.
"Dealing with the wastewater is less of a challenge than the daunting task of decommissioning the plant. That process has barely progressed, and the removal of melted nuclear fuel hasn't even started." Massive amounts of fatally radioactive melted nuclear fuel remain inside the reactors. Robotic probes have provided some information but the status of the melted debris is largely unknown. kira Ono, who heads the cleanup as president of TEPCO's decommissioning unit, says the work is "unconceivably difficult."
Earlier this year, a remote-controlled underwater vehicle successfully collected a tiny sample from inside Unit 1âs reactor — only a spoonful of about 880 tons of melted fuel debris in the three reactors. That's 10 times the amount of damaged fuel removed at the Three Mile Island cleanup following its 1979 partial core melt.
Trial removal of melted debris will begin in Unit 2 later this year after a nearly two-year delay. Spent fuel removal from Unit 1 reactor's cooling pool is to start in 2027 after a 10-year delay. Once all the spent fuel is removed the focus will turn in 2031 to taking melted debris out of the reactors.... The government has stuck to its initial 30-40 year target for completing the decommissioning, without defining what that means....
Some experts say it would be impossible to remove all the melted fuel debris by 2051.
Meanwhile, groundwater is creating 130 tons of contaminated water each day, according to the article. The tanks holding that water "are 96% full and expected to reach their capacity of 1.37 million tons in the fall."
"Dealing with the wastewater is less of a challenge than the daunting task of decommissioning the plant. That process has barely progressed, and the removal of melted nuclear fuel hasn't even started." Massive amounts of fatally radioactive melted nuclear fuel remain inside the reactors. Robotic probes have provided some information but the status of the melted debris is largely unknown. kira Ono, who heads the cleanup as president of TEPCO's decommissioning unit, says the work is "unconceivably difficult."
Earlier this year, a remote-controlled underwater vehicle successfully collected a tiny sample from inside Unit 1âs reactor — only a spoonful of about 880 tons of melted fuel debris in the three reactors. That's 10 times the amount of damaged fuel removed at the Three Mile Island cleanup following its 1979 partial core melt.
Trial removal of melted debris will begin in Unit 2 later this year after a nearly two-year delay. Spent fuel removal from Unit 1 reactor's cooling pool is to start in 2027 after a 10-year delay. Once all the spent fuel is removed the focus will turn in 2031 to taking melted debris out of the reactors.... The government has stuck to its initial 30-40 year target for completing the decommissioning, without defining what that means....
Some experts say it would be impossible to remove all the melted fuel debris by 2051.
Meanwhile, groundwater is creating 130 tons of contaminated water each day, according to the article. The tanks holding that water "are 96% full and expected to reach their capacity of 1.37 million tons in the fall."
smell the brain fart (Score:1)
'nuff said to change the Subject.
Where would they put it? (Score:1, Troll)
What would be the point of removing the melted fuel?
Where would they put it that would be better than where it is?
Even if there is a reason to move it, why do it now? Wait 30 years, and we will have better tech, better robots, and the fuel will be less radioactive.
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Somewhere not on the edge of the ocean and spread out a bit so it doesn't need as much water to cool it.
Re:Where would they put it? (Score:5, Informative)
What would be the point of removing the melted fuel?
The melted fuel is highly radioactive and uncontained. This means the melted fuel is mixing with water from the land. This radioactive water then has to be decontaminated.
Where would they put it that would be better than where it is?
Nuclear Fuel rods after use are kept in a cooling pond until the radioactivity drops to safer levels. I imagine the same will happen with the melted fuel.
Even if there is a reason to move it, why do it now? Wait 30 years, and we will have better tech, better robots, and the fuel will be less radioactive.
Well the problem with contaminated water and the Environment will only get worse and this could easily turn into a uninhabitable wasteland i.e Chernobyl.
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Chernobyl is not inhabitable, though. It is, in fact, inhabited.
Granted you shouldn't be pregnant there and have a Geiger counter on you but you can live there well enough.
I had the same thought, to be honest... after all these years, we still don't have terminal storage for spent fuel so yeah, removing the disaster sounds good but where does it go afterward?
And also can we even? Chernobyl is getting a new sarcophagus, AFAIK, not cleaned up either.
Re:Where would they put it? (Score:5, Informative)
Chernobyl is not inhabitable, though. It is, in fact, inhabited.
Granted you shouldn't be pregnant there and have a Geiger counter on you but you can live there well enough.
The land cannot be used for anything and the only people who live there are Old Farmers and Nuclear Scientists/Engineers.
I had the same thought, to be honest... after all these years, we still don't have terminal storage for spent fuel so yeah, removing the disaster sounds good but where does it go afterward?
At some point it will have buried in the ground.
And also can we even? Chernobyl is getting a new sarcophagus, AFAIK, not cleaned up either.
The problem with Chernobyl was the core was exposed in the explosion and part of the fuel was spread by this explosion all over the area. In Fukushima the buildings contained the explosion and as I understand it the core was not exposed.This means that once they get the problem of water leaking into the reactor solved they can clean-up the site.
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In Unit 1 the fuel (and rods... corium) is said to have only penetrated into the concrete of the containment vessel and cooled there, but unit 2 lost primary containment and that's where most of the radioactive releases came from. Even the fuel removal from the storage pond at unit 2 has been pushed back until 2026 (from 2017!)
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Chernobyl is not inhabitable, though. It is, in fact, inhabited.
Granted you shouldn't be pregnant there and have a Geiger counter on you but you can live there well enough.
The land cannot be used for anything and the only people who live there are Old Farmers and Nuclear Scientists/Engineers.
Well, he can ask the Russian army what happened when they drove trucks and armoured vehicles into the Chernobyl exclusion zone and then proceeded to dig trenches and bunkers: https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]. I know these nuclear fanboys will go to almost any lengths to promote nuclear as safer than a campfire but claiming you can safely live inside the Chernobyl radiation zone is beyond stupid.
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Where would they put it that would be better than where it is?
Nuclear Fuel rods after use are kept in a cooling pond until the radioactivity drops to safer levels.
Nope. Nuclear fuel rods after use are kept in a cooling pond until the long-term nuclear waste storage facility is brought into existence, with the target of sequestering the waste for a minimum of 10,000 years.
The power plant operators have already paid for this. The long-term storage was blocked by Senator Harry Reid, and nothing has gone forward since 2012. The Trump administration and the Biden administration both announced a policy of not doing anything (actually, so far the Biden policy is "we're not
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Or not.
Radioactive, yes. "Highly radioactive", not so much.
Note that the more radioactive something is, the quicker it changes from "radioactive" to "not radioactive". A half-life of a day is really radioactive, but in a month it's 0.000000001x as radioactive as it was a month back. And it'll be another 0.000000001x as radioactive in another month. And again the following month, and every month thereafter....
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Only informative comment, one (weakly) interesting, and no funny or insightful. You'd think Slashdot could do better.
Anyway Japanese TV was full of stuff about the 3/11 quake and Fukushima. My summary would be that the entire region remains severely economically depressed and most of the people who left have no plans of returning. The city of Kobe recovered from the '95 quake, but I see no likelihood of a full recovery of the entire region around Fukushima. The taint of radioactivity will remain even if the
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The oceans "are infinite sinks,"
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Accounting for unforseen decomissioning costs? (Score:2)
When planning for a nuclear power plant, how are the _potential_ extra costs for decommissioning computed to account for rare events such as Fukushima?
Perhaps someone knows how this was done specifically for Fukushima, and how that analysis compares to current predictions of expected decommissioning costs?
I don't know any of the above, but I'm curious as it seems like a difficult analysis. By design such events are expected to be rare, but might be very expensive. So in my opinion it ought to somehow be fac
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They are incalculable. That's why private insurance companies won't reinsure decommissioning nuclear plants even tho they reinsure all kinds of crazy things.
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They are incalculable. That's why private insurance companies won't reinsure decommissioning nuclear plants even tho they reinsure all kinds of crazy things.
There are lots of things that are potentially incalculable. For example, if you are very very unlucky after a car accident you may survive and need a lifetime of very special disability treatment and in many countries the insurance company may be on the hook for that. There may, or may not, be a limit to their liability and they base that on past settlments. If there's a really big settlement then that might directly lead to insurance premiums going up. In the end they just reinsure the loss spread out thro
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There are lots of things that are potentially incalculable.
Risks are rarely incalculable for a reasonable purpose when broken down. Your example included. I can guarantee you insurance companies know precisely what percentage of drivers end up in a situation like how you describe. While you may want to know reasonably exactly something that happens frequently, for infrequent events being within an order of magnitude is sufficient.
If you can't trust the engineers that are responsible for understanding the systems then who can you trust?
But you can trust the engineers. In fact the engineers predicted precisely this outcome. When you calculate the risk of an event you don'
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That is why competent risk management is a holistic process. My guess is the engineers would even have managed to find and quantify the combined risk, but got shut down by the "management" scum that simply did not want to hear it and that at the same time had absolutely no clue what they refused to hear.
I have run into this effect as a security consultant (information often did not get reported upwards despite it being really critical) and as an IT auditor. Fortunately, as an auditor your reports go to the
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First, I agree there are many things that are incalculable (like floods). And the insurance company will simply go bankrupt and not pay off the claims or aggressively reject claims or be given forgiveness by the government so they don't fail.
But even simply decommissioning costs are so risky that insurance companies won't even offer it in the first place. When they are willing to do so, then we'll know nuclear power decommissioning costs are becoming predictable.
And that doesn't even start on the once
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Not true. Insurers would insure everything nuclear, including the full, unlimited accident risk. Tiny problem: They do realistic risk analysis. Turns out that this would make energy from nuclear reactors so ridiculously expensive that all the lies in the world could not hide the truth anymore: Nuclear power is an exceptionally bad idea. So for political reasons, nuclear power plants do not need to be insured against accidents.
Caveat: Friend of mine was a risk-modelled for a back-insurer for a long time and
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The way I put it is... there appears to be a 1 in 100 to 1 in 50 per year chance of a nuclear problem that might cost over a trillion dollars.
Which means the real cost will always fall on citizens as higher taxes and condemned property.
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Well, by definition you don't account for unforeseen costs. If you did, then you foresaw them. Insurance companies like things they can do math on. Insurance is only as good as the financial health of the insurer. I'm thinking that either the premium would make the whole prospect of running the plant completely economically infeasible, or the insurer folds if the thing goes south like Fukushima did.
Not sure what insurance would help anybody in this situation anyway. I doubt it's lack of money that has the p
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Well actually you do. The thing is you don't put money aside for it. Rather you engineer the now foreseen risk away. Calculating disaster cost and likelihood feeds directly into how you design systems to avoid them.
Yeah dictionary definition of "unforeseen" aside, but let's assume the OP was talking about abnormal rather than unforeseen incidents.
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I didn't pay enough attention to the title, I should've used a different word - not sure which though.
I checked my SE books to see if I could find a definition of e.g. 'abnormal event' but no luck in my books. However, I e.g. don't have books on 'Process systems engineering' which might be using that term.
PS.
I did however stumble upon a quote in the INCOSE SE handbook (4th edition, 2015) under a brief section related to resilience engineering:
For example, in reference to Fukushima, data exist on earthquakes and tsunamis to make a quantitative prediction. Moreover, data are available on cooling system configuration and probability of failure under earthquake and tsunami conditions, making it possible to evaluate these events on a probabilistic basis.
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Indeed. But did the books also cover that TEPCO was warned that the probabilistic event was higher than originally thought making the seawall protection insufficient?
There's a difference between calculating something and acting on it, unfortunately the failure here was on the latter. Incidentally the failure of the cooling system was one thing that was taken into consideration. The plant had the facility for not only backup generators, but also a connection to external powersupply should the generators fail
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Maybe I should've used "unplanned" costs rather than unforeseen. It's not as if Fukushima was the first incident, so we do know that nuclear mishaps occur. And I'd expect it should be possible to at least roughly estimate known costs associated with previous incidents. That'd at least provide historical examples.
Thinking about it, I guess I'd like these aspects to be taken into account when deciding about planning power production systems.
My interest is partly because do systems engineering and work with fu
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I doubt it's lack of money that has the problem lingering.
The mess is so bad it literally can't be cleaned up yet. Every year it gets a little cooler, so they are highly motivated to kick the can down the road as long as possible. If at any point they get forced to shit or get off the pot, they have to admit that the situation is much worse than they have described so far.
mess is so bad it literally can't be cleaned yet (Score:2)
This seems true.
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When planning for a nuclear power plant, how are the _potential_ extra costs for decommissioning computed to account for rare events such as Fukushima?
I have that answer for you: It they aren't. At least not directly. Cost for "unforeseen" events such as this are computed as commercial and safety risks. IEC 61513 then defines how to close those risk gaps. At no point is money put aside, rather engineering decisions are made to prevent the unforeseen even from occurring in the first place.
But as we know that requires competent engineering.
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It was the usual story. "We'll figure it out later", with the assumption that they government will bail them out in any case.
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Kinda like what you are doing with coal and fossil fuels pollution.
Research shows that fossil fuels pollution (coal & natgas mainly) are responsible for 8.7 million premature deaths in 2018 alone. Isn't that the real problem?
Re:Accounting for unforseen decomissioning costs? (Score:4, Insightful)
When planning for a nuclear power plant, how are the _potential_ extra costs for decommissioning computed to account for rare events such as Fukushima?
The nuclear industry doesn't even take into account potential extra costs for decommissioning from expected, scheduled decommissioning. It always winds up costing more than projected, and The People always wind up paying for it.
The insurance industry does take the specific potential costs you're talking about into account, which is why you cannot get private insurance for a nuclear reactor. None of them are dumb enough to underwrite that. Only The People are that.
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Not true. You can insure nuclear reactors privately. The problem is that the back-insurers involved will do a realistic risk-cost evaluation and then nuclear power becomes so massively expensive it is politically dead. So politics exempt nuclear power from insurance requirements. Friend of mine was a senior risk modeller for a back-insurer for a decade or so. Apparently it is well-known there that nuclear power is a really, really bad idea. They jsut do not talk about it publicly.
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When planning for a nuclear power plant, how are the _potential_ extra costs for decommissioning computed to account for rare events such as Fukushima?
If we go that route, we should alsocount carbon capture costs for coal power plants.
Prediction: They never will. (Score:3)
Cleanup with be expensive, not revenue generating at a future date, and risky. Three things corporations hate. This will become a can TEPCO kicks down to "the new generation of leadership" continuously until the government, and by extension the tax payers, take over and start working on it. Those truly responsible will have long passed on, getting away with it.
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The per gigawatt cost of the clear up is not huge. It is one of the reasons why nuclear is expensive. But it is manageable.
What is not manageable. In an older industry like coal mining in the US, about 30 people die directly, and about 5,000 die from cancer contracted due to their job. This s a manageable risk.
Obviously, part of this clean up is goin
Re:Prediction: They never will. (Score:4, Interesting)
In an older industry like coal mining in the US, about 30 people die directly, and about 5,000 die from cancer contracted due to their job. This s a manageable risk.
You are failing to account for the 8.7 million premature deaths in 2018 [sciencedirect.com] alone. Funny how the coal plants industry is not responsible for cleaning up the hugh amount of pollution they put in the atmosphere, and doesn't account for it. I guess it is easier to let the tax payers and the next generations suffer the price of it.
It is also interesting to see that Japan is envisionning a future with nuclear as part of the green transformation [reuters.com], despite their nuclear history (Hiroshima/Nagasaki in 1945, even though it is not related to civil nuclear power, and Fukushima in 2011). That part usually really triggers the anti-nuclear self-declared pundits, as it goes right against their narrative.
On the topic of releasing the waste water of Fukushima, I know the summary has been written to make it look alarming. Reading the actual article (I know, this is slashdot, not a lot of people can be bothered to do that) makes it look almost like a non-event though:
- Gradual and controlled release so that tritium concentration will not exceed the plant's pre-accident levels (tritium is unharmful in small amounts by the way, you are routinely exposed to small doses of it; and it's radioactive period is quite small too, about 12.3 years)
- TEPCO experimented the release dilution by keeping two groups of flounders & abalones (one group in normal seawater, one group in the diluted treated water). The resulting data showed minimal effect on marine life from tritium
Mind me, I am not saying the situation is ideal, far from it. Just putting it into perspective with the huge amounts of CO2 we keep emitting without any real solution (every year of the last 50 years, except COVID year, has seen an increase in CO2 emitted), and far more impact on environment and human lives. At least for Fukushima, solutions are being actively worked on...
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Those truly responsible will have long passed on
In this case though, if anyone is at fault for what was a major natural disaster, surely the Japanese government has some significant share of the blame for not prioritising getting generators to the site to enable the cooling to continue? It was an entirely understandable decision given the huge numbers of people who needed help but nevertheless it lead to the nuclear disaster.
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I meant those responsible for the reactor cleanup. The executives who haven't done anything because they don't want to be the ones seen as responsible for the massive losses it would incur.
TEPCO was privately owned at the time of the accident. Why is it the Japanese government's job to provide generators for emergency cooling power? At my job we have a diesel generator on-site and maintained to provide backup power to keep our critical systems up. Is there some reason a literal electric company can't fathom
It took 9 years to decommission a coal plant (Score:2)