Posted on 02/15/2022 10:18:28 AM PST by BenLurkin
As part of the clean-operations at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, engineers sent down a remotely operated submarine into the bowels of Unit 1 on February 9, according to plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO).
When the catastrophe struck, Units 1, 2, and 3 were busy working and had fuel in their reactors. The tsunami knocked down the power sources and cooling systems used to control the temperature of the fuel, which resulted in a colossal amount of heat to melt the fuel and the reactor. Eventually, this melting slurry of radioactive fuel and equipment cooled down and solidified into the radioactive debris that the engineers are currently figuring out how to remove.
With the help of the robot submarine's camera, the team installed special guide rings around the building, which will help steer the path for future probes. The camera also managed to capture some snaps of nuclear fuel that melted and fell to the bottom of the damaged reactor.
(Excerpt) Read more at iflscience.com ...
Tons of lethally radioactive fuel and debris and they are talking about how to remove it?
And they are going to do what with it?
Why not just let the thing like and keep people away from it?
Can’t they just put mounds of earth over it? I’m a layman, so what do I know?
No less than what they know.
Although I'm not a physicist nor a nuclear expert, I believed THAT energy source can still be controlled especially after 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Yes, nuclear fusion would be great, but it's still a ways off and nuclear fission works right now.
If you don't agree, you're probably a totalitarian Nazi or an intolerant deplorable right wing Facist.
Tell me I'm wrong for those who follow this site.
Nuclear power plant building costs have gone up too much. Nuclear is not currently cost competitive with other technologies. Most nuke investors got nuked, and few new ones are lining up. Then there is that problem of where to send the spent fuel sitting in onsite cooling ponds everywhere. Pay low-bidder China to take it? The nuclear industry needs to first solve that political puzzle. Good luck!
I was gonna say, that’s what they basically did at Chernobyl. Albeit in a highly technical way.
CC
The engineers who designed the plant had the forethought to build it over an underground river. Water literally fills/floods the containment and is the reason there’s millions of gallons of water in tanks on the property.
There has been teams of specialists on the site continuously since 2011 ‘mitigating’ the water problem in the melted down containment.
It’s also the reason they are repeatedly releasing on a regular basis thousands of TONS of highly contaminated water into the ocean (they run out of storage, plus the entire system leaks like a sieve).
Hence why I no longer eat Pacific seafood (I miss crab badly).
Note: Despite TRILLIONS of dollars of so-called ‘stimulus’ since 2008, not a single one of the SAME type of plants here in the US has been either taken offline or been replaced.
“Oh no, there goes Tokyo, go go Godzilla.”
5.56mm
Fairly easy retrofits, alterations, or additions to on-site backup power generation solve almost all the potential problems in any areas where potential for flooding (by any means) exists.
Pretty good, non-hysterical report on the situation:
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/fukushima-ten-years-lessons-learned
Water didn’t meltdown Fukushima. Rather, it was lack thereof.
Due to NO POWER.
It is, but still doesn’t answer the how they re going to deal with that massive amount of contaminated waste and where they are going to put it.
The flooding caused the failure of the backup generators.
And citing the plant at that location is what allowed the flooding to occur.
The story of how that plant came to be cited there is quite revealing.
The flooding caused the failure of the backup generators. Fairly simple / easy solution: Place backup generators above possible flooding. Their location is NOT critical to the design - until it floods, that is.
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