Here’s a Reuters article re effort to remove spent fuel rods –
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUSBRE97D00M20130814
That article is highly sensationalist. Yeah, the rods contain a lot of radioactive material-- That’s kind of the point of them. But they’re solid. If you drop one, you just pick it up again. Worst-case scenario, one of them breaks and releases radioactive dust, but that’d only be a tiny, tiny fraction of the total mass of the rod. There’s no conceivable scenario where an entire rod’s mass (much less the mass of all of them) gets released as a contaminant.
seems like a challenge to do with all the limitations of damaged storage and building.
the company also has problems with water. the nuclear agency wants to put it at a level 3 now.
“Japan nuke watchdog may raise leak to ‘serious’”
http://news.yahoo.com/japan-nuke-watchdog-may-raise-leak-serious-082659490.html
The article is sensationalist, and doesn’t do a good job at all of keeping straight what risks are associated with leaving the rods in place, and which ones are due to the recovery efforts.
I tend to think that the risk of leaving them as-is must outweigh the risk of trying to move them.
The big risk (I suspect) of leaving them in place is that through collapse or corrosion, they might attain a critical configuration and become very problematic.
And if they’re left in and start to corrode, doesn’t that make it more difficult to remove them in the future, if that becomes necessary later on?
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/08/22-8
Published August 22, 2013
As Fukushima Crisis Spirals, Expert Warns ‘It’s Much Worse’ Than Claimed
The trail of disasters continued on Thursday with the discovery of radiation “hotspots”
Wow, if this keeps up, it’s conceivable that it might even eventually reach a double-digit death toll. But probably not.
It would have to reach a single-digit death toll first. Although I suppose that technically 0 is a single digit.
You have to remember that there were not damaged reactors, but two full scale nuclear explosions in Japan around 70 years ago, and everyone seemed to get by just fine. Don’t lose a lot of sleep over this.
Oh thank god. I thought maybe someone had caught wind of my project to import Gila Monsters and Kimodo Dragons and let them roam the grounds. Purely as a ‘science experiment’, of course. No chance it would get out of hand.
To be fair, there were five fatalities from things like falling concrete.
11 billion dollars so far, with no end in site. How many lives have been disrupted? What’s the toll on the local, as well as national economy?
And how does that compare to the rest of the cost of the tsunami? Or, heck, to the tsunami-related cost of any other individual piece of infrastructure?
Infrastructure? I thought it was a private, for-profit venture, sold to the public as safe, because their risk analysts said so.
I haven’t heard anyone complaining about the cost of the tsunami. I believe Japan has largely recovered from that act of nature, which they are prepared for.
A nuclear disaster caused by corporate lies? Yeah, still there. I think they’re saying it’ll take 50 years now maybe to control the disaster. If ever. The whole world’s oceans are being irradiated. Oh well. Microwaves use radiation. No one hates microwaves, right? Right? And the sun gives nice sun tans. Nothing wrong there. Oh, and bananas have radiation. Who hates bananas? I guess we should just keep this in perspective and think of the whole radiological disaster as a big bunch of bananas. Break out the whipcream folks, it’s like a Godzilla-sized banana-rama!
What does that have to do with anything? The fact that it’s a piece of infrastructure is unrelated to its ownership status.
And what on Earth makes you think that the rest of the effects of the tsunami were all hunky-dory? Did you hear about the vast damage to (and due to) oil refineries? The dam that burst? The lives that were lost?
While your post started off with a good point, the subsequent hyperbole just distracts from what could have been a good discussion. While radiation leakage is indeed occurring, statements like “[t]he whole world’s oceans are being irradiated” is sensationalist at best and do not reflect the actual, practical effectsof the incident in Fukushima, especially considering the large volume of water contained in the oceans.
I think part of the problem is that radiation is so misunderstood by individuals without a science background. Admittedly, the Fukushima incident involves a number of other radioisotopes, but do you know how radioactive tritium in disposed of in research labs under standard operating procedures? You dilute the samples and simply discharge into your sink drain.
If you’d like to spread awareness of those things you’re welcome to in another thread. Claiming those things minimize the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is beyond besides the point.
The point is that you can’t say that “well, it failed in a huge earthquake and tsunami, so it’s dangerous”. By that standard, everything is dangerous.