Fukushima To Become Nuclear Dump? 255
mdsolar writes "Japan's atomic energy specialists are discussing a plan to make the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant a storage site for radioactive waste from the crippled station run by Tokyo Electric Power Co."
Words (Score:4, Insightful)
Words are fun.
"Dump" vs "Storage Site" or "Spent Fuel Storage" or "Waste Storage".
You can tell when someone is trying to sensationalize a story by the words they choose.
Re:Words (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Words (Score:4, Insightful)
So, is TFA using strong words, or is the nuclear industry generally using euphemisms for their problems? You can't deny either of them. And the truth lies in the middle.
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And the truth lies in the middle.
Not in this case. Far too often,the truth is far, far, far, far, far, far closer to what physicist and the industry has to say on the subject. Sadly, public knowledge seems to be closer to the middle or completely on the other side.
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Or maybe they are just calling a spade a spade. What does one do at a dump? They store waste. Its a correct word. I bet your local municipality calls their "dump" a "waste management facility" or something similar. I guess the connotations are less negative so the people who live near or work at it don't feel as bad?
"dump" has an undesirable connotation and I think that its fair use of the term, this is objectively not something you want in your back yard; so I don't "dump" is pejorative here.
Re:Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Except spent fuel can be recycled in a breeder reactor. It is only "waste" if you give up on using it!
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Mod parent up!
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No, not all of it, but as long as something can be reused, it is not "waste". It becomes waste only when nothing can be gotten out of it. "Recycling" is not "Reusing". Reading comes before nuclear engineering, so I guess it is back to small school for you?
Also, pet peeve of mine about rabidly anti-nuclear people who are against any and all storage facility for nuclear waste:
- Even if the world decided to shut down all plants tomorrow, long term storage would still be needed (in fact, especially if t
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Interesting dictionary you have there.
What is it with this weird argument technique of pretending to be very stupid so that people think you are not mentally competent enough to be found responsible for a lie? Do you think people will fall for it or are you just happy if they go away in disgust?
Also try reading some material on nuclear power written AFTER 1970 and see wha
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By definition, waste is what you do not use, otherwise, it is not waste. Obviously. As for the closure of Super-Phoenix, it was a purely political decision, brought about by the necessity of keeping the ecologists on board the then coalition.
"OMG Nuclear power sucks! we are afraid!! OK says the politician, see, I closed the plant, happy, now? See! he closed the plant, it proves it was dangerous!"
I dislike this world where political expediency is taking the place of reality. This goes as much for Republican
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If you want to have this debate don't start by trying to paint people not in favour of nuclear as extremists. I personally think we should be building more renewable power generation facilities, and while in the mean time we need nuclear power we should look at it as something we want to get away from because there is a cheaper, greener and safer alternative now.
I'm perfectly happy to benefit from radiation, in fact my mother is only alive because of it. Obviously it produces waste that has to be dealt with
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The point is that the difference in the amount of waste is not significant -- not in the sense that it reduces the number of storage location you need. Waste is not really relevant in the discussion of nuclear. Because if waste were relevant, only wind, hydraulic and solar thermal would qualify as clean energies. And they are not enough. One day, we will have fusion power. Fusion, not renewable, is the long-term future.
What comes between now and the first fusion plants, I don't know. I hope lots of nuclear
Re:Words (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the theory. In the practice there are currently only three breeding reactors online, one in India, one in Russia and one in Japan (that one had a previous sodium leak and fire). What makes things even worse, two of these three are research reactors, only the russian one is the real deal.
Breeding reactors are very expensive and complicated to operate, it is far cheaper to dump spent fuel somewhere. So yes, it is waste.
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Only while supplies last. It also depends on the state of the technology. Also, as pretty much no one has found a dumping ground for their "waste", it might well be that it is in fact a losing proposition to try to store the spent fuel, in the long run.
Not so much because of technical problems, but because everywhere is someone's backyard.
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I was under the impression that France reprocessed their waste/fuel.
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That's only because the USA and japan and Europe has banned all new reactors of safe designs and decided to extend the life of the old reactors by 2-3 times their original design lifetimes.
That's like taking your pickup truck to 500,000 miles because you like the color. It makes no sense.
I am not saying to not build safely, but to actually build the new safe designs before we need them to be built in a hurry, and thus under specced.
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And in fact they have re-processing facilities on site already.
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Don't lie.
Tell them we have a new method for sucking all the radiation out of the uranium and turn it into water.
Then use the power from the breeder reactor to break down sea water to fresh water for drinking.
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Won't happen. Breeder reactors have already been smeared as potential sources of 'nucular wepins', what with all that concentrated plutonium they produce.
You'll never get the public behind that with anything short of "But Jack Bauer is guarding the place."
Re:Words (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nuts! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, make a nuclear waste dump on a site known to be hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and Tsunamis. Great idea that shows how safety conscious the nuclear industry is.
Sea level rise (Score:5, Informative)
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Probably not. Even under the worst case scenario the sea levels aren't going to rise that much. At the end of the day they'll just build a dike if need be.
Re:Sea level rise (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hmm.. I think both of your figures are two orders of magnitude higher than reality. As an aside to the current conversation, could you link for me where those come from?
Re:Sea level rise (Score:4, Informative)
For the maximum possible sea level rise (expected under BAU carbon dioxide emissions eventually) 80 meters is calculated here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/ [usgs.gov]
see level (Score:2)
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Here is a calculation for maximum possible sea level rise: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/ [usgs.gov]
100.000 years (Score:5, Insightful)
The comments here once again show that people only look for the duration of their own lifespans (or perhaps a little more) regarding the storage of nuclear waste.
Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe. Which is safe without human intervention in the next decades/centuries/millenia.
You can't dump it somewhere and make a plan to "build a dike if need be". Who will guarantee that a dike will be built if need be in 250 years from now? Or 2500 years from now?
Re:100.000 years (Score:4, Insightful)
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In such a post-apocalyptical world no ones going to care about a little nuclear waste winding up in the ocean when there's a zombie ripping their face off to get to their delicious brains.
Exactly what I said then: we're only looking at our own life spans and a little bit more. After that, we don't care.
I for one am happy that the ancient Roman empire hasn't left a couple of nuclear or toxic dumps across Europe... even though the Dark Ages may be considered a post-apocalyptical era, compared to the organization or the Romans.
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Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe.
While that is the sane approach, the only place within human reach that would meet the criteria would be the surface of the Moon. For although there are regions in the Earth's crust that are isolated enough from any ecosystem in their undisturbed state, building the necessary tunnels and shafts for moving stuff into storage in those regions would permanently break that isolation. Also, those regions are proving to be much harder to identify and much smaller in potential storage capacity than we used to thin
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Which would be incredibly expensive. A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Geologic_disposal [wikipedia.org]
Nuclear waste - like so much else in our world - has become a political, not technical, problem.
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A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust.
That only seems to be an option because we are so ignorant about the processes of plate tectonics. Dumping the casks into regions that now appear to be involved in Richter 9+ quakes every so often does not sound reasonable.
Consider that three decades ago one candidate for long term storage was dropping the vitrified waste into mid ocean rifts where it would take millons of years for ocean floor spreading to bring them back into the biosphere, But then we learned about black smokers and that these places we
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bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust.
A novel idea.
An issue that I see is that the containers of the waste need to be strong enough to resist geologic forces. Otherwise as it starts its journey down the waste is released and may come back up with the water and magma vents common to such subduction zones.
But otherwise seems somewhat feasible.
Wouldn't drilling a 'really deep' whole in a non-geologic zone work just as well? If it's 15 miles down in the middle of a plate with no seismic activity, seems a reasonable risk to me.
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The sea level won't rise to dangerous levels overnight. There would be plenty of time to move the material to another site. The positive aspect of this site (if there's anything positive about the whole situation) is that it's already contaminated, will have no civilian occupation, and will be swarming with trained staff.
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That all depends on how much there is to start with and what it is. If you ha
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Hot seal food (Score:2)
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It's funny that you dismiss a scientific argument as a hoax, but claim a 2000 year old bedtime story as the truth.
Or...
whoooooooooooosh. I very much hope whoooooooooooosh.
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radiation would not spread as far as long as the plant wasn't near a major current
Well except for the fact that the radiation is *hot* and the nearby water would be heated and, like, RISE. Oops.
Response to the voice of common sense... (Score:2)
I'm sure most posts that show up in this thread are going to be very similar in nature to the parent, but don't jump to conclusions so quickly. When the industry talks about long-term storage, here's what they're referring to... (from the article):
The disposal of high-level waste is more complicated since it needs to be solidified into borosilicate glass and placed inside heavy stainless steel cylinders about 1.3 meters high, the World Nuclear Association said. The casks are then usually transferred to in
Dry casks (Score:2)
Safest (Score:4, Interesting)
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Common sense, but wrong.
There is an inherent risk in all power generation technologies -- just about the truly safe power generation method is solar, but that's not practical everywhere, and has only been cost-effective recently.
All other methods kill people. Coal kills thousands a year directly, tens of thousands indirectly. Oil kills people -- think oil rig fires, accidents, wars over oil, etc... Natural gas isn't fantastic either, producing it is just as dangerous as drilling for oil, it just pollutes so
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I don't think it would be that hard; stream ecologists, for instance, might have something to say about it.
The people against it are probably in the vast minority, though.
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Tsunami stones (Score:2)
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The problem with your analogy is the place is subject to all sorts of earthquakes. Yes, not all of them are 9.0 but they are subject to regular earthquakes. It would be like if the trade centers had to weather a plane (of varying sizes) crashing into it monthly.
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First of all, the geological record in Japan contains proof of previous tsunamis of the same height as the most recent one and presumably caused by an earthquake of similar strength. So your decision to only count earthquakes of which there is a seismological record while excluding other data is somewhat arbitrary.
Secondly, the 1952 Kamchatka earthquake [wikipedia.org], although it occurred north of Japan, was also a 9.0-magnitude quake, did result in a tsunami, and most importantly, was caused by the same fault line that
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However, I don't see adding additional waste to the site from other locations as a very good idea, so hopefully they a
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They have waste lying around onsite as well, as do many (most?) nuclear reactors in operation. So they might as well stuff that in there, too.
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The entire island is surrounded by faults and oceans and they have no such thing as "un-used" land. No matter where they put it, it will be near a site that will eventually be earthquake active. About every place they could put it would fall under "hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and Tsunamis", just probably not on record.
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But is trying to move all the nuclear waste of multiple melted down nuclear plants going to be more risky than just making it a nuclear waste dump in place in a not so optimal location?
Both choices have risks.
Do you really know enough about both sets to declare it nuts already?
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Although you're right that we should be worried about Yellowstone (personally, I vacillate between wanting to go see it before it blows up and wanting to stay the Hell away in case it blew up while I was visiting!), your post is somewhat off-topic. Also, you really do sound confused. I see no conflict between the idea of two geological models, if both are useful but in different ways from each other. What the geologists are saying is simply that they know something will happen eventually, but they don't kno
How to choose a site? (Score:2)
do they choose it based on the assumption that there will be no big natural desasters close to this place?
pfft (Score:2)
i've been saying this from day-1 "they're going to have to scrap the whole thing, it'll never function properly or safely ever again, and you watch, it'll be more than just encased, they're going to completely fill it with materials that slow radiation".
like ocean mud. three to one, place a bet with me, grimy mud from the bottom of the deepest oceans will be involved because it was discovered that more than any other substance including lead and ceramics, mud from the bottom of the ocean is the best barrier
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You are angry because you misunderstood what they were doing.
The second they injected seawater into each of reactors 1, 2 and 3, they knew they were abandoning the investment in those reactors. Since then, their efforts have been to restore active cooling, which is the best long term solution to the problem (they can bring the fuel under control, remove it and store it properly).
Trying to bury it would have been foolish.
It is all a big cover up. (Score:5, Funny)
(read quickly because this comment will deleted soon by those in power)
Since Nuclear power is statisticstically safe, and the power plants would have shutdown in the earthquake it is very unlikely that such a disaster really happened there. All that we can see is that real news is censored [alexanderhiggins.com], everybody in a wide area was moved away [bbc.co.uk], A No fly zone was erected [centreforaviation.com], even as radiation at high altitudes is completely neglect able,and independand research are kept a great distance [greenpeace.org].
All that surely must point to something more serious and it can only lead to the conclusion that the tjunamis was caused aliens landing and that they came to land close to fukushima, or that the hatching eggs of godzilla caused the tsunami and now they are researching Godzilla at that location, or whatever, this region was filled with old folklore [fishpond.com.au] that either came to life or is now lost for the next decades.
By making a storage there it is a sure thing that they can keep the peopla away for some more decades, while they at the same time have a good excuse to build some huge buildings that can hide the cover-up. And since no more people live there, there is no-one who can protest.
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cool story bro
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Not sure if serious, so can't mod funny. >
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You should have modded funny. It doesn't matter whether the poster believes it or not.
Like joy, you should take your humor wherever you find it.
Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down? (Score:2)
Proposals for 'passive' cooling systems involve putting a big tank of water over the plant. If the plant shuts dow
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i just found this article in bloomberg, it's a play-by-play analysis. the tone is fairly apologetic and tends to put the people responsible into a heroic light, but wtfe. after you read this you'll know why all the different shit happened. it's fairly in-depth.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/japan-s-terrifying-day-saw-unprecedented-exposed-fuel-rods.html [bloomberg.com]
Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down? (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been repeated many times here on slashdot. The reaction stopped, but the core is still VERY hot and has to be cooled for a while. This is what failed. When the core gets hot enough, the fuel melts the containment and falls to the bottom, and might start reacting again.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wonder if we could come up with some sort of design that would allow the fuel rods to mechanically fall in different directions to spread out the heat.. ideally without any extra power needed.
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They already have designs that self cool and the nuclear reaction actually has a negative feedback, which needs to be blocked.
The newer core designs, aka not 60 years old, would have kept the cores cool even without power and the rods would have went into a negative feedback cycle which would have cooled them down faster.
The newer, safer, less-waste designs are much more expensive, so here's hoping to actually putting money into new plants.
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ESBWR is close - the core stays in the same place, but there are heatpipes going to large cooling pools at the roof of the building.
Worst-case, you need a fire truck at the 72 hour mark.
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Hello nuclear engineers, can someone explain why it takes so long to shut down a nuclear power plant?
I am not a nuclear engineer, but my understanding of the problem is that the fission byproducts decay very fast and release a lot of heat in the process, so until those byproducts are gone the rods need to be cooled.
Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down? (Score:4)
The splitting of atoms stops the moment you drop in the control rods ( i.e in a second or two ), but the waste products are still intensely radioactive, generating megawatts of heat. This is still a lot better than having the reactor running, because the heat generation from the waste is very predictable and stable, and it is also less than 10% of the full reactor power, dropping to less than 1% within a day or two.
The reason passive cooling is believed to be safer is pretty much that it does not rely on any machinery, electric power or moving parts. In this particular situation the problem was that all the water from the tsunami short-circuited the electronics of the plant, so the cooling pumps ceased to work. It is possible to build a nuclear plant in such a way that pumps are not needed at all. As an example in the ESBWR design by Hitachi the reactor is tall and positioned further down than the turbines and heat exchangers. Thus the hot steam rises upwards while the colder water flows down, with no need for pumps.
You are correct that if the water itself is lost then a meltdown is very likely to occur unless it can be replaced quickly. However if the reactor's containment structure is solid enough then most of the radioactive fallout would still be contained without contaminating the environment. One of the problems with the Fukushima Daiichi power plant was that its containment is of a poor design and was unable to withstand the pressure. Contrast this with the three mile island plant where the containment dome kept almost all of the radioactive gases inside.
Another issue is that many reactors have teh nuclear fuel in zirconium tubes. This is good in one way because zirconium does not absorb very many neutrons so you don't need to enrich the uranium so much. However, if the zirconium overheats then it can react with the cooling water to form explosive hydrogen gas. This need not cause a problem if the containment is strong enough to contain a hydrogen explosion, or if the plant has the ability to safely vent the hydrogen to the atmosphere. Neither of this was the case at Fukushima, and it is strongly suspected that hydrogen explosions were involved in damaging the containment.
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Google "decay heat".
It's toughest to manage in the first couple of hours after reactor shutdown. Had they kept the cooling systems going just a bit longer, there would likely have been significantly less damage.
"Proposals for 'passive' cooling systems involve putting a big tank of water over the plant. If the plant shuts down you let gravity feed the cooling system. If a major incident happens, such as an earthquake or tsunami, it is likely to damage the tank and let all of the water out. What good is a pa
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it's like when you burn coal/wood (mechanics aside) - when you put out the fire, the leftovers still generate decay heat. So now imagine that the coal you burn is several orders of magnitude more potent and generates so much decay heat that it can melt itself and everything it touches with no problem, destroy the containment and initiate tons of chemical reactions thanks to plentiful energy. You need to cool it for months if not years - that's how much decay heat it produces.
Nuclear fuel has enormous energy
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sigh....
The chain reaction will stop as soon as the rods are dropped. There is left over heat from decay product that is that must be removed by the coolant or else the core can get hot enough to melt. I keep hearing people talk about the reaction going on after that but the fuel in a standard reactor requires a moderator like water for the reaction to continue even without the control rods. Now this does not apply for graphite moderated reactors like the one at Chernobyl but a modern western power plant re
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The root issue is that fission is a messy process. You smash one reasonablly stable nuclius into multiple peices but these peices are not always stable (i'm not sure if any of them are stable) which have varying half lives. As those decay they produce heat and decay products which themselves have varying half lives. As these elements decay they produce heat.
Stopping fission reactions is relatively easy (just kill off the neutron flux with control rods) but there is no way of stopping the fission products th
One problem is (Score:3)
that while common logic dictates long term storage in bedrock that is highly stable, there is no such place in Japan. Well, there is plenty of bedrock, but being situated pretty much on top of an active fault line, there is little in the way of truly stable bedrock. There is plenty of better places to build deep geological repositories, most nations don't really want to have somebody elses nuclear waste transported along their coasts to reach those places - if the were even willing to accept the waste in the first place, which is far from likely.
It may be that using a broken power plant is the best option for Japan right now. If that is the cause, I just found another reason why I'm glad I don't live in Japan (earthquakes and tsunamis are near the top on that list).
Waste (Score:2)
About 90 percent of the world's 270,000 tons in used nuclear fuel is stored at reactor sites, mostly in ponds of seven meters deep, such as those exposed at the Fukushima site when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off reactor buildings.
- Tell me this doesn't you cringe. The only kind of nuclear power I'd ever accept is that which doesn't leave behind nuclear waste and doesn't have the potential to explode.
Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
then you want breeder reactors, which leave 1/10th the amount of waste, generate 10x more power, and have less harmful radioactive waste byproducts with halflives of a century rather than 10,000 years
problem is, breeder reactors make plutonium. nobody wants anyone making plutonium
nuclear power is over, it's a historical, ostracized energy source as of march 11, 2011. all serious nations are moving away from nuclear. nuclear is a wonderful power source in all regards except for the waste nightmare and the fact that althought hings rarely go wrong, when they do, they REALLY go wrong
if you deny nuclear power is an endangered species, you indeed are living in denial, and you just remind me of baghdad bob:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf [wikipedia.org]
To add a bit more about fast breeders (Score:4, Insightful)
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Go and read mine - notice the AND after the word you :)
Now do you see that I'm not calling you a weird cargo cult nuclear fanboy? I'm most definitely insulting them since they appear to love technology but hate the underlying science, and I'm definitely insulting the major parts of the nuclear lobby that have spent more money on hookers for Senators than their companies have spent on R&D. It's either TMI painted green or imported technology with development paid for by t
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oops
i'm a hypocrite
apologies
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no, i shot my mouth off and got a shaming i deserved, to your credit you weren't even mean about it and i would have been. i shall endeavour to be a better person
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Re:Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the above, but want to point out that the ultimate failure of the nuclear power industry has nothing to do with a lack of foresight by engineering or science.
The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs. Early accounting systems were developed to manage costs of feedstocks, production, and moving product to market. Waste was not accounted for, which led to the incredible pollution problems of the last century. Handling the accounting of waste management or post-production costs continues to be a kind of correction tacked on to the basic bookkeeping systems in current use, rather than an integral part of any accounting system.
If it had been otherwise, it is doubtful that any business would have ventured into nuclear power generation. It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.
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well said
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no, no, no
it's JIGAwatts
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thank you, nuclear baghdad bob
Hey, guys, dump it all over here! (Score:2)
What could go wrong?
Japan: I meant to do that! (Score:2)
Better wording: (Score:2)
When life gives you lemons . . . (Score:2)
Make poison lemonade!
Wee little problem (Score:2)
Ouch! (Score:2)
Maybe they could call it population control. Storing a hazardous waste product in an areas proven to be vulnerable to tidal waves and severe earthquakes sounds like one way to kill of millions of citizens of their nation. If this were any more twisted I would think the Tea Party has a branch in Japan.
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There are tons of articles if you do a google. From what I've seen, it boils down to: Chernobyl rating, but not Chernobyl bad.
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The scale is not based on the consequences. Not directly as in "level x means y people died/ z km^2 became unusable". It is more of a statement on how much the plant was damaged/can be repaired/(mis-)operated.
So you could have a accident at the maximum level completely confined in the plant, and a low-level incident killing people (typically because large turbines are dangerous/small radioactive releases can be really badly placed and timed).
Of course there is a moderately strong correlation between the two
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Actually the scale is not about damage to the plant either. The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) considers three factors [iaea.org] [PDF]. The first factor refers to the effects on people and the release of radioactive materials, the second to the plant itself and the third to the failure of safety systems.
Obviously, the Fukushima accident (that's a INES term, by the way) is very high on the second and third factors, and it remains to be seen how high on the first factor.
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I have Fukushima in my pants.
Ah, I understand: You weren't able to keep your containment closed, and now your pants are contaminated. :-)
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I can't parse those sentences. Are you a script of some sort?