Crews 'facing 100-year battle' at Fukushima

[defendandprotect]

Crews 'facing 100-year battle' at Fukushima

By David Mark, Mark Willacy, staff

Updated Fri Apr 1, 2011 9:33am AEDT

EXCERPT ONLY --

Water is still being poured into the damaged reactors to cool melting fuel rods.

But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed.

"As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on for ever," said Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/01/3179487.htm





The Rightwing Koch Bros. Funded the DLC --

http://www.democrats.com/node/7789

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x498414


If you knew about this, why didn't you tell us?

If you didn't know, pass it along -- !

:)

[RC]

1. Melted fuel rods? Eh, no.

The fuel rods are hollow tubes. The fuel itself is in the form of ceramic pellets inside the fuel rods. They can't melt at any temperature likely to be encountered in a reactor, no matter what happens.


The ABC story itself sound like more fear mongering written by someone who does not really understand nuclear power.

[Bluebear]

2. Yes, it's all fear mongering. Please continue shopping.

[TheWraith]

19. Actually, yes, it IS all fearmongering.

Actual scientists, the kind not mostly intent on getting their names in the papers, can tell you so.

[defendandprotect]

21. Evidently they were too busy to "tell us" about the potential for disaster we now have in Japan!!

[girl gone mad]

29. Actually, no..

you were also wrong. See below.

[Blues Heron]

4. so what melts then, the cladding?

the tubes? then the pellets spill out into a mass of molten zirconium?

[RC]

9. The tubes can melt. Then the pellets, depending on reactor design,

can fall to the bottom of the reactor.
There is no puddle of anything.

[girl gone mad]

26. It looks like a pretty good model of events..

based on the CATHARE security code has been leaked to the http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2">New York Times:

The presentation gave a blow-by-blow of the accident’s early hours and days. It said drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and that peak temperatures hit 2,700 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt steel and zirconium — the main ingredient in the metallic outer shell of a fuel rod, known as the cladding.

“Zirconium in the cladding starts to burn,” said the slide presentation. At the peak temperature, it continued, the core experienced “melting of uranium-zirconium eutectics,” a reactor alloy.

A slide with a cutaway illustration of a reactor featured a glowing hot mass of melted fuel rods in the middle of the core and noted “release of fission products” during meltdown. The products are radioactive fragments of split atoms that can result in cancer and other serious illnesses.

The molten mass likely stayed within the middle of the core and did not spill out onto the floor of the vessel. This result matches up with an earlier experiment done in France using a real reactor with a similar design.

Even so, the radiation and heat released during this partial meltdown have most certainly weakened the containment structures and are further complicating the efforts of the workers at Fukushima.

[Warren DeMontague]

12. Stephen Chu: Reactor #1 core damage likely "70%"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html

Are you saying he doesn't understand nuclear power?

If the ceramic pellets inside the hollow tubes can't melt- (they CAN'T!) then why the fuck is the water coming out of Reactor #2 100,000 times more radioactive than the water normally inside a nuclear reactor? Where is all that radioactive material coming from, if it is impossible for the fuel pellets to not stay intact?

[girl gone mad]

18. Actual physicists who actually studied BWR failure scenarios..

concluded that fragmentation and melting could occur.

ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp5-euratom/docs/09-sara.pdf (emphasis mine):

Concerning the energy deposition in the fuel during power excursions, the results of SARA analyses differ from other studies. While these studies found that the energy deposition in the fuel due to super-promt power excursion would be below the threshold for fuel fragmentation and dispersion, the SARA results indicate that for reflooding rates higher than about 500 kg/s these threshold values are approached or exceeded, in some cases with large margin. The threshold values referred to here are in the range 200 – 280 cal/g for low burn-up fuel and down to about 70 cal/g for high burn-up fuel [e.g. MOX -ggm], as observed experimentally. In this context it is important to consider that these threshold values have been obtained in tests with “normal” fuel rods, and are therefore likely to be lower for strongly overheated fuel rods under severe accident conditions. Thus, SARA results suggest that there might be a risk for fuel fragmentation and dispersal during a reflooding transient. The consequences of such a scenario were not investigated in the SARA project.

MELCOR calculations of long-term containment response to predicted quasi steady-state recriticality powers have shown that the containment would fail within a few hours after recriticality if the accident is not mitigated. This result and the risk for fuel fragmentation point out the importance of adequate accident management strategies to be used by reactor operators and emergency staff during recovery actions.

The SARA studies have clearly shown the sensitivity of recriticality phenomena to thermal- hydraulic modelling, the specifics of accident scenario, such as system pressure and distribution of boron-carbide in the core, and the importance of multi-dimensional neutron kinetics for the determination of local power distributions in the core. With regard to the predicted risk for fuel fragmentation and melting, and prevailing uncertainties, it is recommended that systematic studies of reflooding and recriticality continue. The improved reflooding models should be validated against data from high temperature reflooding experiments. Equally important is the further improvement and testing of the codes capabilities to model the entire BWR primary system as realistically as possible in order to capture the reactor power – primary system behaviour feedback effects.

Reports from Fukushima appear to confirm that recriticalities did occur post shutdown, the fuel was displaced and partially melted and containment was breached.

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/03/30/has-fukushimas-reactor-no-1-gone-critical

Science.

[girl gone mad]

27. Just kicking..

so you and everyone else can see that the science shows you were dead wrong here.

[Octafish]

3. May they get control of the situations ASAFP.

People who think this is "less than Chernobyl" are in for a real surprise, it hurts to say.

[RC]

7. Chernobyl was literally a pile of graphic blocks.

The problems there were caused by gross incompetence and ignorance.

The problems at Fukushima were cause by a Tsunami, which in turn was cause by an earthquake. There can really be no comparison.

[Warren DeMontague]

11. The long-term poisoning of the environment doesn't give a shit how it happened.

It is going to be a reality.

There's also no comparison in the inventory of Chernobyl, and the inventory of radioactive material at Fukushima- the amounts at Fukushima dwarf Chernobyl many, many times over.

The MAIN "difference" we've been assured between Fukushima and Chernobyl is that, "oh, there was no containment at Chernobyl"... How are those Mark I containment structures holding up, over there? And doesn't the fact that you have at least as much deadly material sitting in pools outside containment make the concept of "containment" pretty much moot?

[intaglio]

14. Quake and tsunami initiated the Fukushima disaster

But the problems began with the same hubris, incompetence and ignorance that caused Chernobyl.

The back-ups generators were between the sea wall and the plant - in pits so they could not drain when flooded.

The shut down may have failed to properly shut down the on stream reactors possibly because of quake damage to the core.

A design that placed the storage pool above above the reactor head should never have been used in an earthquake prone area.

Catalytic agents to safely react Hydrogen before a catastrophic explosion were not fitted.

There is evidence, at present hearsay, that design standards and safety rules were flouted during construction and operation of these reactors.

[Warren DeMontague]

15. "It exceeded the specifications we built for in our worst case scenario"

Therefore, it's the Earthquake's fault for not adhering to our plans.

[marions ghost]

24. +++++

n/t

[defendandprotect]

22. PLUS Global Warming is increasing earthquakes and their severity .... and probably

volcanic activity, as well!

Ironic that the nation which suffered the most from nuclear weapons/atomic bombs

should have turned to nuclear reactors -- Must have been quite some salesman!!






The Rightwing Koch Bros. Funded the DLC --

http://www.democrats.com/node/7789

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x498414


If you knew about this, why didn't you tell us?

If you didn't know, pass it along -- !

:)

[Warren DeMontague]

25. No, it's not.

There's enough of a real shitstorm to deal with here without getting into woo.

[JVS]

28. Gaia is angry!

:scared:

[aquart]

8. Same contingency plan BP had for the Gulf?

[Warren DeMontague]

16. Somehow I think both "contingency plans" involved spending the first 72 hours shredding documents.

:shrug:

[Karenina]

30. They're not doing very well, are they?

I do get the sense that they have NO CLUE what to do next.

[ixion]

5. "As the water leaks out..."

it spreads radiation into the surrounding environment, and on. :(

[jwirr]

6. They have about 300 volunteers right now. Are they going to be able

to keep getting volunteers when these get sick? I would think that would be the problem. Not only that but they cannot just be any volunteer they have to know what they are doing.

[RC]

10. The Japanese have a different mindset than we do.

They work together to get the job done. More volunteers may not be a problem.

[Warren DeMontague]

17. Why would they need more volunteers? Sounds like the whole thing is a walk in the park!

Radiation is not dangerous, and only whiny, bed-wetting anti-nuke treehuggers think there's even a problem, over there.

Shit, the whole thing could be wrapped up by tomorrow, and people will be skinny dipping in the ocean right next to the plant by next week.

:eyes:

[jwirr]

20. It is a must of course. The world has no choice but to carry this out

to an acceptable conclusion.

[defendandprotect]

23. That's the really sad part ... especially that we have 103 nuclear reactors in America !!!

[KT2000]

13. Oh yes - let's leave it

for the next generation to figure out - along with all the rupturing nuclear storage facilities.
That alone makes this an immoral source of energy - we are deciding the fate of future generations in leaving a world made uninhabitable.