Oh, I agree that they have a large clean-up job on their hand. A huge clean-up job, mostly because they have three reactors and a fuel pool to clean up, and the clean-up from the entire tsunami will, IMO, probably exceed $1T in costs, with Fukushima being a huge component of that.
TEPCO is toast, financially, because this isn’t the only nuke plant that is now shut down. Maybe in the aftermath, Japan can decide on one grid frequency for their nation.
A melted core is certainly not the situation one would want in any condition. My point is only that a) we’ve seen cores melt before, and b) the world didn’t end, and c) in the TMI situation, they had a huge amount of water down in the pit below the RPV.
I’m not trying to say that this is just hunky-dory. I’m trying to tell people to quit running in circles, screaming and shouting, rending their garments and carrying on in a higglty-pigglty manner, because we’ve had nuke accidents before. We’ve lived through them. We’ve had huge releases of radiation into the planet’s environment before. We’ve had reactors go prompt-critical and literally Launch. Off. Their. Foundation. That’s a neat trick. Killed three guys, and none of them from radiation either. One of them was impaled into the ceiling of the building by the reactor launching upwards.
We have places like Hanford that have much more contamination than Fukushima will likely ever cause, and we don’t see three-headed, red-haired stepchildren of the corn in eastern Washington.
Panic and hysteria don’t solve anything. The press loves to panic people, because it makes for sales and ratings. The green movement loves this because they get to stoke the fears of the ignorant. Neither the liberal arts majors in the press, nor the professional hucksters in the green movement are able to offer any credible idea where we’re going to get 10 to 15 quads of additional energy in the next 20 years. There are only three credible energy sources that can get us there: coal, natural gas (including CBM, shale gas and conventional NG) and nuclear. Wind, solar, biomass, et al simply won’t amount to anything other than footnotes in this discussion.
I actually think the press has been pretty good on this story, maybe in deference to the real disaster that was the earthquake.
It’s blogs, and ambulance-chasing lawyers and special-interest-groups, and anti-nuclear activists. And some willing and unwilling enablers. Oddly, the histerics are probably making it harder for people to understand the real problems with the site — there has been some over-reaction on the pro-nuclear side to the over-the-top fear-mongering of the left.
For the core melt, it seems at this point that the biggest problem is that they won’t be able to remove the fuel from the containment vessel because it melted to the floor, so the long-term storage is going to be complicated. When they thought it might just be partly melted, I think they still hoped they could pull the fuel rod assemblies out after they put up their tent, and get them into spent fuel pools which are much easier to manage.
But you can’t discuss the hundreds of real concerns with the cleanup, because instead we are talking about how terrible it is that the fuel melted 20 hours earlier than we thought. Or worse, we are arguing over whether the solid concrete slab is “tipping over”, or wasting time reading conspiracy theories about them opening the doors to the reactor in the middle of the night because the “greater temperature difference” would help “flush out the high radiation” in the building. Seriously, that was one of our overnight discussions.
I’ve appreciated this thread, because I was beginning to think a lot of sane people had given up on these threads. Maybe it was just they are avoiding the ones with the wierd headlines, or just the hour of the day something gets posted.