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Fukushima Daiichi latest - hows the clear up going?


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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk0WzCtF0yY

Basically they haven't got a f+*>ing clue what they are doing and are just messing things up more and more and refusing proper international help. By the time this problem is sorted I will be abou

  • 2 weeks later...

Radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank into the ground at Japan's Fukushima plant, its operator says.

 

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said the leak of at least 300 tonnes of the highly radioactive water was discovered on Monday.

 

The plant, crippled by the earthquake and tsunami in 2011, has seen a series of water leaks and power failures.

 

The tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors, three of which melted down.

 

An employee discovered the leak on Monday morning, Tepco said in a statement.

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Basically they haven't got a f+*>ing clue what they are doing and are just messing things up more and more and refusing proper international help.

By the time this problem is sorted I will be about 500 years old, Fukushima will no longer be inhabitable and the Japanese staple diet will have changed from fish to chicken as all the fish will have died of radiation pollution, that and a quarter of the population of Japan!

 

Other than that it is going great!

 

TEPCO = Totally Erratic Pathetic Clueless Organization

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Well....the good thing is.....they have endless acreages of surrounding land to keep erecting the leaky storage tanks.... :rolleyes:

 

News this morning said of around 210,000 Fukushima people tested.. 18 children were found to have thyroid cancer. I'm not sure if that is statistically significant or not though.

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Thyroid cancer doesn't sound like a natural disease for young children to have does it.

 

Some of Arnies reports of late talk of scary scenarios if a quake hits over the next x years when they're removing those rods.

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Scientists at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant are preparing for their toughest clean-up operation yet – two and a half years after three of the plant’s reactors suffered a meltdown in Japan’s worst-ever nuclear power disaster.

The operation, to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel beneath the plant’s damaged Reactor No. 4, could set off a catastrophe greater than any we have ever seen, independent experts warn. An operation of this scale, says plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company, has never been attempted before, and is wrought with danger.

An uncontrolled leak of nuclear fuel could cause more radiation than the March 2011 disaster or the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, say consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt. “Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date,” the scientists say in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013.

The operation has been tried before – but only with the aid of computers. This time it will be a painstaking manual process.

Here’s what needs to be done: more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies, packing radiation 14,000 times the equivalent of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, need to carefully be removed from their cooling pool.

Arnie Gunderson, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, told Reuters that “they are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” especially given their close proximity to each other, which risks breakage and the release of radiation.

Gundersen told Reuters of an incredibly dangerous “criticality” that would result if a chain reaction takes place at any point, if the rods break or even so much as collide with each other in the wrong way. The resulting radiation is too great for the cooling pool to absorb – it simply has not been designed to do so.

“The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no control rods to control it,”Gundsersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”

The base of the pool where the fuel assemblies are situated is 18 meters above the ground. The pool itself is 10 by 12 meters, and the rods are seven meters under the surface of the water. One problem with that pool is it has been exposed to air in the 2011 catastrophe, when its roof was blown off by the explosion.

The operation is urgent – because even a minor earthquake could trigger an uncontrolled fuel leak.

The removal process is due to begin in November, with TEPCO predicting it will take approximately a year. Although TEPCO is confident the operation will be a success, some experts are more skeptical. TEPCO is currently failing to contain radioactive water seepage in another part of the facility.

Two empty fuel rods were removed as part of a test operation some time ago, but “to jump to the conclusion that it is going to work just fine for the rest of them is quite a leap of logic,” Reuters quoted Gundersen, of Fairewinds Energy Education as saying.

A giant steel frame currently towers over Unit 4, soon to be tasked with the extraction of the fuel assemblies. Each fuel rod weighs at around 300 kilograms and is 4.5 meters long. They also contain plutonium, one of the most radioactive substances known to man. The radiation builds up during the later stages of a core’s operation.

Toshio Kimura, a former TEPCO technician, told Reuters that the operation would normally be assisted by computers, but that luxury is gone. “Previously it was a computer-controlled process that memorized the exact locations of the rods down to the millimeter and now they don’t have that. It has to be done manually so there is a high risk that they will drop and break one of the fuel rods,” he said.

He is also expecting many issues for TEPCO ahead, as the process is estimated to take years. The scientists’ task is not made easier by the fact that the building is also prone to corrosion from salt water.

Removing the fuel rods is just one part of the cleanup operation, itself expected to take around four decades – according to the IAEA – during which any number of other problems could arise.

The fuel rod scare comes as TEPCO is currently failing to contain radioactive water seepage in another part of the facility – itself a growing issue with no concrete solution, apart from building a special underground wall. But with water quantity building up at an alarming rate, the most likely version of events is that the radioactive water will simply have to be released into the Pacific at some point. According to TEPCO, there are still “no perfect solutions.”

“If you build a wall, of course the water is going to accumulate there. And there is no other way for the water to go but up or sideways and eventually lead to the ocean,” Masashi Goto, a nuclear engineer who has worked at several TEPCO plants, told Reuters. “So now, the question is how long do we have?”

This situation is not made easier by the fact that Japan is a seismically active island. Earthquakes keep striking at random, and even a small tremor could set in motion a catastrophic chain of events.

 

Catastrophic is never a good word!

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The how of radiation baffles me......if they touch in the wrong way it could set of a reaction.....bloody hell!! Who the f##k ever thought this tech a good idea.....especially in an earthquake probe country?!

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The how of radiation baffles me......if they touch in the wrong way it could set of a reaction.....bloody hell!! Who the f##k ever thought this tech a good idea.....especially in an earthquake prone country?!

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How have these leaks affected the rest of Japan's pacific coast? Presumably 300 tons of water is quite literally a drop in the ocean but those particles have end up somewhere....if they get onto beaches, they could be inhaled by people and that's them proper f###ed

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Japan is to issue its gravest warning about the state of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant since the facility suffered a triple meltdown almost two and a half years ago.

 

The new warning, expected on Wednesday, comes only a day after the nuclear watchdog assigned a much lower ranking when the plant's operator, Tepco, admitted about 300 tonnes of highly toxic water had leaked from a storage tank at the site.

 

The Nuclear Regulation Authority has now said it will dramatically raise the incident's severity level from one to three on the eight-point scale used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for radiation releases. Each single-digit increase in the scale actually represents a tenfold increase in the severity of a radiological release, according to the IAEA.

 

The NRA on Tuesday classified the leakage only as an "anomaly" on the IAEA scale but now considers it a "serious incident".

 

The leak is the single most dangerous failure at the plant since the 2011 meltdown, which warranted the maximum level of seven on the severity scale, putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster 25 years earlier.

 

"Judging from the amount and the density of the radiation in the contaminated water that leaked ... a level three assessment is appropriate", the NRA said in a document posted on its website on Wednesday.

 

Tepco has admitted it has yet to identify the cause of the leak, in which highly radioactive water appears to have breached a steel storage tank and seeped into the ground. The leak from the tank, which can hold up to 1,000 tonnes of water, has yet to be stemmed, according to Japanese media reports.

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Reuters: Crisis deepening at Fukushima nuclear plant; Upgraded to ‘Level 3 Serious Incident’ — Represents a 100-fold increase in “severity of a radiological release” — Tepco says highly radioactive leakage continues, but unknown where from

 

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They should really try to find out, I reckon.

I have sent them an email suggesting this.

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