Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/dismantling-fukushima-the-worlds-toughest-demolition-project

by sasvari • 12 years ago

57 52 12 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

subdane• 12 years ago

tl;dr Site's a shitshow, 40 year cleanup plan.

cls59• 12 years ago

On the bright side, Japanese engineers get a blank check to build some awesome robots.

iterationx3• 12 years ago

This is the most interesting fukushima news I've heard in a while http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D...

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

In her FAQ, she confuses a unit and overstates things 1000x (literally, 1000x). It's people scaring themselves with the numbers they get from magic boxes, not news.

vegardx2• 12 years ago

This is mostly just quackery and non-science, they keep repeating the same old stuff that the government is keeping us in the dark, and that the health effects of Fukushima is far greater than it actually is.

iterationx3• 12 years ago

I don't think you watched it.

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

If you're going to drop a naked link to a poorly-edited 1h38m23s video involving a really crappy VOIP connection, you might want to provide some level of context as to who it is, why it's worth watching, and where, specifically, to pay attention.

PythonicAlpha2• 12 years ago

We can all only hope that now goes everything according to plans.

I fear, a second Tsunami in the region would be a second (maybe bigger) disaster and free even more radioactive material.

They still have enough problems. There is for example the trouble with huge quantities of radioactive water -- that is anything else than solved.

drdeadringer• 12 years ago

I remember "older" // "elderly" Japanese folks volunteering themselves as available to help deal with Fukushima, along the lines of "What to I care of radiation, I'm old and have already had children? I want to still contribute, call me up". I wonder about this as a source of labor for demolition.

nknighthb2• 12 years ago

Chance of cancer and/or sterility isn't the limit of the problem. Acute radiation sickness would put a damper on their enthusiasm real quick.

Until you have this jumbled mess of radioactive debris thoroughly mapped, you don't want to send anyone in there, and once you do, there are going to be a lot of places they just can't go. Cleanup workers lying on the ground vomiting their guts out aren't helping anyone.

jrockway2• 12 years ago

I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet. Certainly, if one person could sacrifice themselves to save 100,000,000 from certain doom, then it's an easy calculation. (Not me or my family, though, please.) The current situation is more like "this is expensive to keep cool". No need to kill anyone else.

keeshawn• 12 years ago

There are nuclear engineers, doctors, highly trained technicians, government agencies and regulatory bodies who handle cleaning up nuclear accidents. Untrained elderly people would not help at all.

Remember the tsunami killed 20,000 people that day and Fukushima never killed anyone. Might be some cancers years down the road but the idea of sacrificing the elderly to save the world from some nuclear disaster belongs in a comic book, not reality.

Spittie• 12 years ago

This rises a question in me: What did we do for Chernobyl? It was decades ago, so most of this technology didn't exists yet. Or it was not nearly as bad as Fukushima?

ori_b2• 12 years ago

Basically, we just covered Chernobyl with concrete and left it alone. As long as nobody goes near it, it's not doing any harm.

According to the article, for political reasons, Japan wants to dismantle Fukushima, instead of simply neutralizing it, covering it up with concrete, and walling it off for a few decades before the cleanup happens. This is where the challenge comes from.

snom3803• 12 years ago

Regardless of their plans, they still need to handle the leaking groundwater, which AFAIK wasn't a big problem at Chernobyl.

iterationx3• 12 years ago

It's not easy to entomb the cores, since they have melted into the earth, and it is too radioactive for people or robots to go near.

nicktelford• 12 years ago

The two incidents are completely different: Chernobyl's reactor exploded (iirc, the graphite moderator caught fire); Fukushima melted down, which is essentially when the fuel gets so hot (due to lack of cooling, which the Tsunami took out) that it melts through the bottom of the reactor containment vessel.

snom3803• 12 years ago

The core in Chernobyl melted down into the basement as well, fortunately it stopped there.

snom3803• 12 years ago

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant...

The accident itself was worse and spread more radioactive material (the core exploded, the graphite ignited and spread a huge plume of smoke). But the cleanup effort if Fukushima will probably be worse because they are dealing with three reactors that still need cooling, leaking water etc.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

They erected a half-assed containment structure around the area and evacuated a huge exclusion zone around Chernobyl. For the record, it was much worse than Fukushima.

tsotha2• 12 years ago

Chernobyl was much worse than Fukushima, for a lot of reasons. The reactor got away from the Soviets in a way the reactors never got away from the Japanese, though admittedly it was touch and go for a bit.

Decades from now the cores will have been safely removed from the Fukushima reactors, the reactor vessels cut up and all of it will be safely stored in a nuclear waste dump.

Chernobyl won't be in noticeably better shape than it is today. It will still be a concrete lid over a still-active meltdown.

chaffneue• 12 years ago

On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched, built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely reactive to changes in the situation of the current site.

The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process, which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.

timr3• 12 years ago

“At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima, he declares, has ever happened before.

I distinctly remember the HN conversation at the time. The pro-nuclear crowd was arguing, as it was happening, that this could never occur. The cores would never breach the containment vessels, they said. Guess you folks got that one wrong.

I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold assertions from experts that certain things could never happen. Yet, here we are. A big helping of modesty seems like a good thing in this field.

sdrothrock• 12 years ago

I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold assertions from experts that certain things could never happen.

Heinlein said (in Glory Road, I believe), that "Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen."

It seems to me that this is a double-edged sword -- not only can people accomplish things that experts claimed were "impossible," but things can happen that experts claim are "impossible."

Most people are limited by our own views of the impossible and never change their views until proven wrong. Some never do change their views.

jrockway2• 12 years ago

To be fair, a lot of the rhetoric from both sides tends to be extreme. The other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our limitless supply of fossil fuels.

I think the reality is: we need to make nuclear energy didn't work. TEPCO could't do it. Hopefully someone else can.

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

The other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our limitless supply of fossil fuels.

Well, that's a false dichotomy and representation right there.

It's possible to believe both that nuclear power isn't desirable and that fossil fuels are limited. Which from my experience a fair number of those opposed to nuclear do in fact believe.

Which rather undercuts your own credibility.

einhverfr6• 12 years ago

I do think that what Fukushima shows is that when you have a nuclear power plant, you have the possibility of really big problems caused by natural disasters well above what you planned for. The questions are what you can plan for and what you do plan for?

Ideally we'd put nuclear reactors way away from all natural disasters, and design them to withstand magnitude 10 earthquakes, F-5 tornadoes, Category 5 hurricanes, and, say, bombing by massive conventional munitions during wartime. And we'd have perfect, guaranteed safe forever storage of waste. Practically, it isn't clear that this is possible.

I think the reality is: we need to make nuclear energy didn't work. TEPCO could't do it. Hopefully someone else can.

The question is, do we want these things to work until they don't? Or do we want them to be guaranteed to work no matter what happens? I am not sure the latter is possible.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

He's talking about the pressure vessels there.

The previous sentence is "At Three Mile Island the buildings were intact, and the one melted nuclear core remained inside its pressure vessel."

The containment is outside of that:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety...

specifically:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedImages/org/info/BWR%203...

As I understand it, a lot of the environmental contamination was carried out by the cooling water they were injecting.

einhverfr6• 12 years ago

From what I was following at the time, it was looking very much like containment in one of the reactors was lost (I generally assumed from earthquake damage). This may not be all the contamination or even most of it. As the crisis unfolded you had a huge number of really big problems arise.

The thing to remember is that a massive earthquake caused this crisis. When you are dealing with seismic activity on that scale, ensuring that structures remain intact requires making assumptions which just are not readily testable.

mpyne4• 12 years ago

The pro-nuclear crowd was arguing, as it was happening, that this could never occur. The cores would never breach the containment vessels, they said.

As mentioned in the other comment, the cores breached the reactor vessels, which is what didn't happen at TMI.

On the other hand, that did happen at Chernobyl (and explosively, to boot), so I'm not sure why people would be arguing that it's impossible or that it has never happened before. Unless possibly they mean that such a thing had never happened at a Western-style BWR or PWR reactor, which is at least closer to the truth.

But either way, this is all part of the problem with these debates. Pro-nuclear advocates generally say stuff which is true in a very precise, jargonistic way, which then gets either immediately mis-interpreted, or mis-interpreted 3 years later in a way which makes them out to be liars.

It would be like a computer hacker saying that it's impossible to get a security vulnerability from buffer overflow if you use a language that always manages memory, and then that managed language suffers a vuln from memory corruption instead. Laymen three years later would only remember "impossible to get security vulnerability from managed memory"...

timr3• 12 years ago

"It would be like a computer hacker saying that it's impossible to get a security vulnerability from buffer overflow if you use a language that always manages memory, and then that managed language suffers a vuln from memory corruption instead. Laymen three years later would only remember "impossible to get security vulnerability from managed memory"..."

Ehh. The flip side of this is that most of the "experts" use this kind of language to hide their uncertainties, while also overplaying their hand. It wouldn't be unreasonable for the layman to remember the phrase "impossible to get a security vulnerability from managed memory", because that's the strongest part of the statement -- the part of the statement that's intended to sell a technology. People don't remember the long strings of caveats that come later, nor should they.

My point still stands: we aren't very good at predicting failure cases, so it doesn't serve us well to focus on the caveats of a statement that begins with "this can never happen". Any statement that begins with an absolute like that is almost assuredly incorrect.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

The idea that the most strident and extreme argument is a valid summation of an entire position is a very common form of straw man. Just because someone said it (even if that someone was famous, even if what was said got a lot of coverage) doesn't not make it the strongest argument for that position. And as with all straw men refuting one argument for a position hardly classifies as refuting the position entirely.

timr3• 12 years ago

I'm not attempting to "refute" all pro-nuclear arguments. I'm just pointing out that we're not very good at predicting what might go wrong, so it's good to be modest about our reach.

(But yes, let's talk about straw-man arguments.)

prawn2• 12 years ago

From what I remember reading those comments at the time, I think a lot pertained to the differences between the older reactors and newer facilities? Fukushima started up 42 years ago. I'd hope that our methods and safeguards have improved in four decades!

einhverfr6• 12 years ago

How much real-life testing do those newer designs have in conditions similar to what happened at Fukushima?

mpyne4• 12 years ago

Interestingly, Americans have a living President with hands-on experience demolishing a destroyed nuclear reactor. Jimmy Carter helped dismantle a Canadian reactor at Chalk River during his time as a Navy nuclear submariner.

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

Interestingly, his former boss, US Navy Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who pretty much created nuclear power as a thing, expressed severe regrets and reservations at having relied on nuclear power for the navy and in its use for civilian power generation:

"I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it."

Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982), via Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...

mpyne4• 12 years ago

Yes, those most familiar with war are usually the ones most interested in stopping it. Only the sociopaths in the military go to war hoping for there to be another one they can participate in.

And so Adm. Rickover's message: 'I couldn't stop war – what I could do is make it less destructive to us, so I did, grudgingly.'

So it is with civilian power. Nuclear power proponents don't say that nuclear should be used at the exclusion of all other sources of power. They say it should be used to the exclusion of worse sources of power.

You could paraphrase Rickover's entire excerpt here for coal, and oil, and even gas generation; all of which produce horrible things that will wreck the human race (via climate change).

On that beautiful day when it's actually achievable to power the whole world by renewable energy and energy storage that doesn't involve widespread chemical waste and destruction of entire areas then you'll find nuclear power advocates telling Congress to "sink them all" too.

In the meantime, we generate electrical power with the means we have available, not the means we thought we'd have, or wished we'd have.

einhverfr6• 12 years ago

I think you have to understand nuclear powered ships in the context of WWII history.

The critical loss for the Japanese navy was at Leyte Gulf, which was the largest naval battle in the Pacific during the war (and possibly the largest naval battle in history). The significance of the battle was that the Americans secured Phillipine Sea against Japanese shipping and this cut the Japanese off from the oil fields in Indonesia in terms of transporting oil back home. it was only after Leyte Gulf that organized kamikaze attacks began, and the Navy was largely put out of the war by that battle.

What that means is that Japan lost WWII when they lost access to oil. So the issue with naval ships is diesel or nuclear. About 1/3 of the US navy is nuclear-powered. The rest runs on diesel. Thats enough our navy (but not our air force, army etc) can continue to run if oil is not available for a time. Our military is still very dependent on oil but not like the Japanese were.

Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project

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