Posted on 10/20/2013 6:46:51 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Fukushima situation calls for international emergency work – expert
Sharp radiation growth was registered in ground water samples throughout just one day, October 18th, in the area of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant. Tritium concentrations, for example, exceeded the admissible values 6,500 times. This is the gravest situation since the 2011 Fukushima accident.
The area of the nuclear meltdown remains open and is being cooled by flowing water, says an expert in nuclear physics and nuclear power generation, Igor Ostretsov.
"Radioactive water keeps coming and should be stored somewhere, Igor Ostretsov says. They have deployed a great number of tanks there and keep bringing more. There must be no place left by now for still more tanks to store radioactive water in. A lot of water has been naturally spilled out, since the tanks just cannot hold all the water. Workers have recently done something wrong, causing massive water discharge. They’ve built a border dyke 100 metres deep, but subterranean waters are deeper still. This way the radioactive water makes it to the ocean. I can’t make out just why the Japanese are reluctant to take strong measures. Japan is clearly unable to cope with the situation on its own, so what’s needed is an international emergency effort."
The Fukushima plant operator, - the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, is incapable of regulating or controlling the processes under way at the nuclear plant, says the co-chairman of the Ekozashchita, or ecological protection, international ecological group, Vladimir Slivyak.
"The Company is actually reacting to emergencies as they occur, Vladimir Slivyak says. When something happens, they start considering the situation. In other words, they are absolutely unable to control the situation. By far graver problems may arise at the Fukushima plant than the ones we now know of. Now, Friday’s jump in radiation levels most likely means fresh leaks."
TEPCO is going to go ahead with its effort to decontaminate soil, to prevent more radioactive leaks from seeping into ground water. Igor Ostretsov again.
"The only method to be used is evaporation, but this is not a radical decision, since it is not 100% efficient. In other words, we don’t have absolute technologies."
Scientists believe thorium power engineering could be a solution. This means any heavy elements are burned down through the use of accelerator. The future of nuclear power production, as well as the doing away with the aftermath of the Fukushima plant accident are due to be addressed by an international conference at the European Nuclear Research Organization, CERN, later this month.
P!
I’m amused on how silent the usual doom & gloom anti-nuke dupes have become under this entitled ‘administration’.
This is not good (understatement). and CERN taking it up next MONTH??? What is the shielding on those tankers? This thing actually scares the crap out of me.
My understanding of physics and chemistry is not spectacular, but I don’t think “water” becomes radioactive.
It can contain radioactive materials, but the water molecules themselves are not radioactive.
Why do they have to store vast quantities of “radioactive” water? Why can’t they distill it and separate the water itself from the radioactive contaminants?
Water has never stopped escaping the contaminated plant since the day of the accident so instead of continuing to dump hundreds of tons of safe water daily to cool the reactors why not recycle the used radioactive water ?
That would reduce the amount of additional water tanks needed to store the increasing amount of contaminated overflow.
Been wondering that myself.
Yes post 6.
Evaporation and distillation also.
Rod removal from core is underway.
Negating the nation-state is not an answer.
I would think that the right kind of subatomic glue could be used to gum up the radioactive nuclides. They have pretty good glue at Harbor Freight. I also think they are making a big deal out of this, and that we armchair physicists could do a much better job. Keep those amateur ideas coming boys!
The primary thing to do is get those fuel cores removed to a secur place so they’ll quit irradiating the water- and this is proceeding or about to start. it’s difficult to get good information out of the media.
Meanwhile, sand is an excellent filter medium. There’s lots of sand in the mideast.
And plenty of empty tankers leaving Japan for there...
Put a glass under the faucet and let it run for two years. There's no way to build enough tanks. That faucet is going to run a thousand years to eternity. Mankind and all the fishes in the sea will be killed off. Once upon a time there was a pretty blue marble floating in space.
I’ve been saying this for months. This is too important to leave to the incompetent doddering assholes of TEPCO. The entire world has a stake in what is happening, so the entire world needs to be able to get in and help as much as possible.
If the they can't store enough T2O in artificial tanks to ride out the 'problem', then dilution is the solution. Store it in the much larger oceanic 'tank' God provided. Dispose of any protesting environmentalists in the same place; they are more toxic. Alternatively, sell some of that tritium. It's needed for H-bombs and our supply was getting low after libs shut down production. Lib heads would explode if Obama bought some, but perhaps the Chicons, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakisitanis or the Indians would buy some.
I had forgotten about the deuterium/tritium issue (”heavy water”).
Do you know if that’s the actual problem, rather than the water of concern being contaminated with cesium, strontium, etc?
Ya know, these people are going to keep fooling around
until they find out just how bad a nuclear accident
can be. We have not seen it as yet.
Obligatory.
The whole situation is frustrating as both the "world is going it end" anti-nuke types and the "everything is under control" TEPCO types exaggerate and report things out of context. Tritium isn't a problem unless you inhale or ingest it as the outer layer of our skin blocks its weak beta radiation and one human lifetime will decay tritium to irrelevance. Still dumping it into the ocean is bound to be an emotional issue with the sea food heavy diet of the Japanese and their WWII history.
Still the very well followed atomic survivors have had much less long term cancer problems than most would think. And those hit by Chernobyl have had MUCH less cancer mortality than was predicted. IIRC, in Russia there were about 4000 early cases of thyroid cancer in children, but only about 10 died. Environmentalists like to present the former, but never the latter number. And since that thyroid cancer surge the best reported data shows NO further cancer of any kind above the expected baseline. Certainly not the large predicted spike, which should have been too large to cover up. There certainly was plenty radioactive cesium and strontium there, but Chernobyl makes me wonder if their toxicity is overstated. For the Japanese sake I hope that is so.
I still think it is reasonable try extracting what's already semi-contained in that water and parking it someplace safer for a few hundred years. Just don't let perfection there get in the way of doing "good enough." Getting the spent fuel somewhere safer than the damaged pools and then dismantling the reactors and recovering their escaped cores is more important. Don't let the reactions restart.
“Store it in the much larger oceanic ‘tank’ God provided. “
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Uh, no, the ocean is not a storage tank for radioactive waste. We store living things in the ocean which will not thrive if we store radioactive waste in the ocean. And we eat many ocean based products. The world is not the obligatory toilet for the nuke industry, no matter how often the nuclear industry treats it like a latrine.
Tritium isn’t a problem unless you inhale or ingest it as the outer layer of our skin blocks its weak beta radiation and one human lifetime will decay tritium to irrelevance. Still dumping it into the ocean is bound to be an emotional issue with the sea food heavy diet of the Japanese and their WWII history.
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Ah the sweet sound of insanity....The food chain takes up tritium whether we like it or not so yes, plants, fish, humans are all going to ingest tritium. That whole “one human lifetime” is a farce since ingesting radioactive waste has negative effect on lifespan and quality of life. EMOTIONAL issue? State of the art, peer reviewed medical science has documented the hazards of exposure to radiation for decades. I recommend the BEIR VII for light reading to begin educating yourself.
It’s not just the Japanese, we all eat products from the sea. Heard of carageenan? It’s in everything. We like eating fish, don’t we? 6 months after the explosion in Fukushima, 15 out of 15 sampled food fish in San Diego had traces of Fukushima radioactive wastes in their flesh. Now, dumping of nuclear wastes has continued for two more years so we can project that concentration is increasing in the foodweb and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
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Still the very well followed atomic survivors have had much less long term cancer problems than most would think.
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Not true and really an irrelevant comparison. The bombs had less radiation and were not detonated over and over and over and over for years to continue release of radiation as is happening with the cores. The bombs didn’t deliver their payload to the water table, as is happening in Fukushima.
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And those hit by Chernobyl have had MUCH less cancer mortality than was predicted.
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You do know that the Soviets made it illegal for physicians to report deaths and illnesses as radiation related for 3 years after the Chernobyl disaster right? People were dropping like flies (for example, physicians in the hospital where the firemen who responded to the explosion were taken - simply no radiologic measures in place, hauling heavily contaminated people out of contaminated ambulances and right through the hospital etc.)
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IIRC, in Russia there were about 4000 early cases of thyroid cancer in children, but only about 10 died.
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Uhmmm....if you don’t count those sickened in the years when it was illegal to report illnesses from radiation, you might have a shoddy estimate at best.
The people who lived through it tell of their experiences in books like “Voices of Chernobyl” and others. The Soviets knocked down a heavily irradiated cloud heading for Moscow with old fashioned cloud seeding. The region ‘rained on’ was rural but populated. People “died in place” where the heavy contamination came down and the SOviets barred entry into the region, preventing people from retrieving or looking for family members (talked to a woman whose husband died within 4 months of Chernobyl and she talked about the rural village where her aunt lived - everyone “down” and no entry including bringing water/food to any potential survivors. Nope - just a scrub operation.
The Ukraine was a region where “all children are ill” for a long time. Many many people are still forced to live in contaminated regions (no place else for them) and contend with raising their families in contaminated zones and all the medical problems that entails. The radioactive waste that sickened and killed 25 years ago is hard at work, sickening and killing today.
The reality doesn’t resemble your happy talk.
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Environmentalists like to present the former, but never the latter number. And since that thyroid cancer surge the best reported data shows NO further cancer of any kind above the expected baseline.
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Pathetic lies. Even the IAEA grudgingly admitted to 40thousand deaths and that number is low. The area is still heavily contaminated and people are still getting cancer and other illnesses today.
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Certainly not the large predicted spike, which should have been too large to cover up. There certainly was plenty radioactive cesium and strontium there, but Chernobyl makes me wonder if their toxicity is overstated. For the Japanese sake I hope that is so.
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No. Do some reading. And you leave out quality of life. What’s it like to be reared in an area known for it’s leukemia among children? What’s it like to be pregnant in that zone? Happy? Yeah I get to raise my whole family in a contaminated zone. It’s hell and it’s not overstated - there’s a real effort on the part of the nuke industry to act as if Chernobyl was over 25 years ago and Fukushima was over 3 years ago. No. They will be with us for many many years. Haven’t you read of wild mushrooms being imported from the Ukraine being flagged as far over the safety level for contamination? Wild boar is illegal game in those regions, too contaminated. It’s indecent to hear the destruction of quality of life portrayed as “not so bad afterall.”
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I still think it is reasonable try extracting what’s already semi-contained in that water and parking it someplace safer for a few hundred years. Just don’t let perfection there get in the way of doing “good enough.” Getting the spent fuel somewhere safer than the damaged pools and then dismantling the reactors and recovering their escaped cores is more important. Don’t let the reactions restart.
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The Japanese have other ideas. They are burning radioactive wastes and flushing contamination into the waterways - I believe it isn’t entirely accidental that they have erected flimsy short term tanks to hold contaminated waste long therm through typhoons. I believe these efforts are intended to transfer radioactive wastes off the island nation into other waterways and nations, leaving Japan cleaner and the rest of the world dirtier.
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