Why don't they just seal up the Fukushima nuclear leak the same way as chernobyl?

[john44]

I was reading this article today Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe' - BBC News saying highly radioactive water is still leaking into the ocean and into the groundwater and soil from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Why didn’t they just deal with it the same way as Chernobyl by dropping bags of sand and concrete into the reactor by helicopter and then building a sarcophagus over it? If they had done that it would be over by now. The way they handled it from the start didn’t even make sense becasue they couldn’t get close enough to pump water in it so they just sprayed a mist onto it from far away which was not enough water to cover the rods, just enough for it to boil and then evaporate as highly radioactive steam and spread everywhere. Plus the reactors melted down so most of the water they put in will just leak out anyway because the reactor floor is melted way.

[aNewLeaf]

If the floor melted away and radiation is leaking into the ocean as you say… what good would a dome do?

[Hermitian]

Warning: Non-expert thoughts follow.

In the early days of the Chernobyl disaster, there was little regard for worker safety due to radiation. (Obviously there was some concern because the effort would be hampered if half of your workers keeled over on the first day)

Because of this, a lot of “clean up” was done that may have been effective, but obviously had implications for the clean up crews. Those helicopter missions you mentioned, they wore dosimeters but that was little use. The dosimeters were not capable of measuring the large amount of radiation that the pilots were receiving. People were pretty much told to do these things, and they did it.

The Fukushima clean up crews are a lot more cautious in what they do. This is a big hindrance to how effective you can be. They try to use robots and such, but that is no replacement for a human being.

[johnpost]

the Chernobyl enclosure has deteriorated and failed.

Fukushima is in a earthquake zone and any enclosure put together, under bad conditions, may not last.

[sevenwood]

@aNewLeaf

If the floor melted away and radiation is leaking into the ocean as you say… what good would a dome do?

The solution is simple. Put a dome over the Pacific ocean!

[john44]

@aNewLeaf

If the floor melted away and radiation is leaking into the ocean as you say… what good would a dome do?

Because they keep pumping in water to try to cool the rods, but it keeps leaking out. Instead of putting in water put in the sand and concrete and no water and there is nothing to leak out into the ocean.

[njtt]

@john44

Because they keep pumping in water to try to cool the rods, but it keeps leaking out. Instead of putting in water put in the sand and concrete and no water and there is nothing to leak out into the ocean.

And then, without coolant, the rods melt and all the material goes directly into the groundwater. They are not trying to cool them just for fun.

[aruvqan]

@Hermitian

. They try to use robots and such, but that is no replacement for a human being.

But they did use’robots’ in Cherynobl …

Sorry for the bad joke, the men assigned to work abatement called themselves ‘bio-robots’. I guess you would call it black humor at it’s best. <shrug> I did some jobs with Henze-Movats and Furmanite at several different nuke plants for refits, and we had some pretty black jokes ourselves.

[Fluffy_PickleSniffer]

I thought I remembered reading when this first happened that they wanted to be able to keep using the plant, or to use it again once the emergency was over. So sealing it like Chernobyl would make it unusable. ??

[AndrewL]

The intention with Fukushima is not to merely seal it up, but to disassemble it and clean up the site. The construction around the plant isn’t just for containment, but to facilitate the removal of the fuel and cleanup of the contamination on the site. They don’t want a huge, permanent sealed building like at Chernobyl, but a careful cleanup and removal of all the fuel as was eventually done at Three Mile Island.

[Chronos]

Another big difference is that unlike Chernobyl, Fukushima is on one of the most densely-populated islands on the planet. It’s simply not possible to abandon a 100-mile radius around it, or whatever the distance was for Chernobyl.

[tds1273]

I’ve been freaked out about Fukushima for a long time and have been a regular reader of enenews.com. I’ve been away from SDMB for a long time, but I’ve always, rightly or wrongly, had a bit of trust in the posters here.

Could someone expand upon what this means for us on the west coast (Seattle here), and the Pacific Ocean in general? What of many of the stories of the sea life- severely hemorrhaging herring and seals, mass reduction in salmon population. I don’t mean or want to be alarmist, but is this really the end of the Pacific? It’s nice that the mass media is beginning to acknowledge that things are far from over there, but at this point is there ever really any end?

[AndrewL]

@tds1273

Could someone expand upon what this means for us on the west coast (Seattle here), and the Pacific Ocean in general?

Nothing whatsoever. The amount of radiation being released diluted into the volume of the Pacific is tiny, and likely to be barely above the natural background level.

What of many of the stories of the sea life- severely hemorrhaging herring and seals, mass reduction in salmon population.

Completely unrelated, assuming this is even happening at all. What’s your source for this?

[AaronX]

@sevenwood

The solution is simple. Put a dome over the Pacific ocean!

No, it’s obviously to build giant robots and punch the… radiation back to where it came from!

[si_blakely]

@Chronos

Another big difference is that unlike Chernobyl, Fukushima is on one of the most densely-populated islands on the planet. It’s simply not possible to abandon a 100-mile radius around it, or whatever the distance was for Chernobyl.

That is true, but it is also the case that the Fukushima incident is nothing like Chernobyl in terms of damage and radiation release, so the responses are totally different. Chernobyl blew the containment and core, and then caught fire throwing radioactive particulates across Western Europe. Fukushima has blown secondary containment but the core is (relatively) intact. The amount of radiation released and scattered are also of different scale, and the monitoring and management are completely different as well. That isn’t to say the Fukushima isn’t serious - it was still a level 7 event, but the current leaking coolant issues only rate a Level 3.

[Zakalwe]

Well, I guess at this point, it’s only a matter of time until a giant mutated seal starts attacking Tokyo.

[kferr]

There’s a calmer and more rational report of the latest leak here.

@The Register

The melted-down cores at the damaged reactors (the site is not “crippled”, two reactors were undamaged and will return to service) are still hot - though much less hot than they were two years ago - and need to be cooled. This is done by pumping water through their buildings, then sucking it out again and putting it into holding tanks before purifying it to remove the radiation it picks up from the cores. Then it gets used again.

What has happened is that one of the holding tanks, containing water that had only been through one stage of purification, has sprung a leak and about 300,000 litres of water has got out. Almost all of this was contained by a backup dam which had been built around the tanks when they were set up (this is the nuclear industry, there is always a backup). However, “two shallow puddles” of the water got out of the dam via a rainwater drain valve which has since been sealed off.

The water is quite radioactive, and dose rates measured next to the puddles were 100 milliSieverts per hour. Nuclear powerplant workers, whose cancer rate is somewhat lower than in the general population (probably because they don’t smoke so much) are allowed to sustain 50 millisievert in any one year in normal times and average doses across five years of 20 millisievert/yr.

However what Reuters haven’t picked up on is that the high 100 milliSievert reading is for beta radiation only. The reading for gamma rays is only 1.5 milliSieverts per hour.

As we no doubt all recall from skool, beta radiation is not very penetrating: it can’t get through human skin and it only travels a few feet through air. So you’d have to stand very close indeed to the two puddles, in them probably, for their beta rays even to reach you. A sturdy pair of wellingtons would have a good protective effect, if you should do this. As far as beta radiation is concerned, the only ways to seriously harm yourself with that water would be to get it on your exposed skin and leave it there for some time, or to drink it. This is also true of many domestic cleaning products.

[tds1273]

@AndrewL

Nothing whatsoever. The amount of radiation being released diluted into the volume of the Pacific is tiny, and likely to be barely above the natural background level.

Completely unrelated, assuming this is even happening at all. What’s your source for this?

NY Times - Fukushima’s Contamination Produces Some Surprises at Sea

Diseased Alaska seals tested for radiation have abnormal brain growths, undersized lymph nodes — Environmental cause indicated — Also found in Russia, Canada

Sun News - Bloody BC herring alarms marine biologist
Additional links contained here.

Edit to add:
AP - Lake Babine sockeye fishery at risk of unprecedented closure

The SoCal sea lion problem…
Reuters
Malibue Times
CBS Los Angeles

Additionally- if you’ve been a regular reader at Enenews, the amount and duration of the leaks that are now just starting to be reported by the major media sources, would come as no surprise what so ever. In fact it still seems as though it is being under sold.

[tds1273]

@kferr

There’s a calmer and more rational report of the latest leak here.

What has happened is that one of the holding tanks, containing water that had only been through one stage of purification, has sprung a leak and about 300,000 litres of water has got out. Almost all of this was contained by a backup dam which had been built around the tanks when they were set up (this is the nuclear industry, there is always a backup).

The above article with is oh-so eloquent chat speak, intentional misspellings (skool?), lack of cites or numbers, and a clear pro-nuclear slant; is contradicted by the following AP report. I don’t think I would characterize 0.0125% of the water being recovered as being “almost all contained”.

I think that since we are struggling this bad with this still years later, that the line “there is always a backup” is also proven false.

Fukushima Tank Leaks 300 Tons Of ‘Highly Radioactive’ Water At Nuclear Plant
emphasis mine…

The operator of Japan’s tsunami-crippled nuclear power plant said Tuesday that about 300 tons (300,000 liters, 80,000 gallons) of highly radioactive water have leaked from one of the hundreds of storage tanks there – its worst leak yet from such a vessel.

TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono said the leaked **water seeped into the ground after largely escaping piles of sandbags added to a concrete barrier **around the tank.

Workers were pumping out the puddle and the remaining water in the tank and will transfer it to other containers, in a desperate effort to prevent it from escaping into the sea ahead of heavy rain predicted later in the day around Fukushima. By Tuesday afternoon they had captured only about 4 tons (4,000 liters, 1,000 gallons), Ono said.

[si_blakely]

@tds1273

NY Times - Fukushima’s Contamination Produces Some Surprises at Sea

From that article:

The good news is that researchers found the entire region 20 to 400 miles offshore had radiation levels too low to be an immediate threat to humans.

So, there was a surprise in that the distribution of radiation was slower than expected and there may have been ongoing leaks - but that is about all.

@tds1273

Diseased Alaska seals tested for radiation have abnormal brain growths, undersized lymph nodes — Environmental cause indicated — Also found in Russia, Canada

These articles note that testing for Fukushima nucleotides was negative, and many of these cases (from the map) were on the Northern coast - making this more likely to be an environmental issue of the Arctic Ocean, and not related to Fukushima

@tds1273

Sun News - Bloody BC herring alarms marine biologist
Additional links contained here.

The marine biologist attributes the bleeding to a known viral haemorrhagic disease, and just wants somebody to test and confirm - what has this to do with Fukushima?

@tds1273

Edit to add:
AP - Lake Babine sockeye fishery at risk of unprecedented closure

No link with Fukushima implied - given past experiences with the rapid rate of fisheries collapse, this seems like a logical case of over-exploitation.

@tds1273

The SoCal sea lion problem…
Reuters
Malibue Times
CBS Los Angeles.

And again, no suggestion of a link with radioactivity (which would be easy to determine). So, another unspecified environmental cause which could well be a disease.

Nothing in these links even suggests a widescale problem with radiation from Fukushima - in fact, most of them suggest that there are not, and one finds that most of the radiation leaking into the sea remained close to the Japanese coast.