Posted on 09/01/2013 7:10:12 AM PDT by winoneforthegipper
At the time of last week’s discovered leak the plant operator said the radioactivity of the puddles was around 100 millisieverts per hour.
Jiji news agency said the highest reading of 1,800 millisieverts per hour was found at one of the tanks, adding that exposure to that level for four hours would be fatal to humans. The other readings measured between 70 and 230 millisieverts, the agency added.
A TEPCO official said the operator could not rule out the possibility of new leaks of radioactive water at the four sites, the agency reported, adding that the operator had not noticed a decline in water levels inside the tanks.
(Excerpt) Read more at japantoday.com ...
I think I’ve read 666,000 spent rods.
I really am thinking of getting a geiger counter.
How much water is there?
What is the half-life of the material?
I thought Japan was the premier developer in robotics. What have they done in that regard?
Many on here know much more about them than I.
Even hardened electronics have issues in that kind of a high radiation environment. Seems their efforts are mostly geared toward containment, and I’m sure they know much more than me, but I’d look at remotely controlled demolition and removal/distribution, while the ability to do so still exists.
Is NERC even taking water samples and publishing them?
I don’t know. Most everything I’ve seen is data from the power company in Becquerels and hard for most everyone to convert to better understood Sieverts - for a reason, I assume.
Having watched the Deepwater Horizon activities live, it seems they could do certain remote control actions with radio or cable controlled normal equipment...like Bobcats and other tractors fitted with specialized gripping equipment.
I’m sure there are overhead cranes etc, and they probably have the best engineers in the world there working on it, but why is nothing happening?
If ever there were a serious threat to the environment...this is it.
In the same regard, why are we trying to blow ourselves up over the ME?
It's like we've lost the ability to work together and put our differences aside in order to accomplish a common good, lately.
"...see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass..."
Btw, wasn't that something! The thread is still here on FR, I'm sure. We never did learn who the heroes behind the controls were.
Sitting in the counting-house counting all their carbon footprint money?
Leni
By the way they handled that gear (which already existed) it appeared they were old hands at it.
Maybe they do it every day...somewhere else.
What amazed me, when they were placing the control head on, and the oil was gushing everywhere blinding the cameras, the ROVs were still perfectly able to remain on station. Maybe they also have some kind of sonar imaging or other stabilization method?
Regarding what you said about "hardened electronics":
I'm not sure if there is a lot of electromagnetic wave activity around such intense radiation (if so, I always wondered why they bothered to make steam instead of harnessing the radiation to make power) or if the radiation actually damages the chips etc by changing their atomic structure.
It's pretty likely that "hardening" would probably entail quite a bit of lead shielding in the form of cases for the controls, and maybe the cable too.
If cables are not needed, that would make life a lot simpler for the engineers.
It works something like that. Radiation hardening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening.
If the Mythbusters can drive a Plymouth Fury by remote control, and considering the DWH folks, these world class engineers should be able to remotely be in there to git-er done.
Maybe the Japanese aren’t allowing Americans and other foreigners in there to help.
γ radiation is high frequency photons, or radio waves above 10 exahertz (1019 Hz.) So there is a lot of EM waves around a γ source.
or if the radiation actually damages the chips etc by changing their atomic structure.
Yes. Ionizing radiation is directly affecting atoms, and it causes electronics to fail. Per Wikipedia:
Environments with high levels of ionizing radiation create special design challenges. A single charged particle can knock thousands of electrons loose, causing electronic noise and signal spikes. In the case of digital circuits, this can cause results which are inaccurate or unintelligible.
In that case (back to my musing)....Why don't they just put an "antenna" around a radioactive source and pull current out of it, instead of messing around with an archaic boiler and steam-punk engine?
ie convert radiation directly to current.
Reagan used to offer up the scenario of aliens attacking as a reason to unite the world. Here we have an actual threat to us all and still can't unite to solve it. We have to go create even more danger. Are we stupid or what?
They kinda do. However what is the wavelength of 10 exahertz? It is 1.18 microinches. That's twice the length of the antenna that you need. Care to build one or two for me, along with rectifier diodes? :-)
This is subatomic scale, and this is why the radiation can affect atoms. Electrons themselves are antennas for the energy. A single atom of Hydrogen (one proton, one electron) has diameter of 2 microinches. The smallest atom is larger than the wavelength of gamma radiation!
You still can convert energy of gamma radiation into thermal energy. But it's about the same as boiling a cup of tea by harvesting kinetic energy from a hail of bullets on a battlefield. Each gamma photon is so destructive that you will be awash in radioactive products of collisions. Sure, eventually they all decay into something more or less stable, and thermal energy will be released. But it will be a dirty business, not unlike what happens inside of a nuclear reactor.
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