The Global Nuclear Technical Fix for Fukushima – “Pump and Pray” : TEPCO. HT:
Paul Langley's Nuclear History
Blog.
A technical fix for inherent nuclear reactor faults have been called for
repeatedly since the 1960s. In the 1970s the American and world public were
hoodwinked in stacked public hearings by the very authorities which identified
the issues with reactor cooling and plumbing. Construction of Fukushma Diiachi
commenced. AEC, Nuclear regulatory and AEC staff, as well as independent
scientists all called for a technical fix to the inherent fix. People who knew
the truth and spoke lost their jobs. Fukushima was built.
For 2.5 years we have been told repeatedly that Fukushima was fine. A former
head of the Australian Nuclear Technology and Scientifc Organisation claimed no
significant radioactive build up would occur. The multiple explosions were
labelled “normal” by a “nuclear expert” based at the Australian National
University. Journalists such as Andrew Bolt ridiculed the risks attendent with
the multiple reactor failures. Adelaide University claimed the NPP would be back
on line by Christmas 2011.
World media ignored the plight of farmers and
fisherman, the thousands of nuclear refugees who still cannot return home.
Flinders University claimed the radiation was like “vitamins” and needed to
supplement the radiological needs of people and evolution, as paid agents under
contract from the US DOE. One such contractor deliberately tried to censor and
control a public meeting at Uni SA without declaring his financial interests.
As a large swathe of Japan’s prime agricultural land remains laid waste and
excluded, the battle for the truth has finally begun to turn as world media
finally confirms from multiple sources that which intelligent academics,
researchers and the general public have found from TEPCO and government
information repositories.
Meanwhile the reactors continue to steam and vent, the rate of water leakage
per day since March 2011 is now admitted by the Japanese government to be in the
order of 300 tons per day into the Pacific Ocean.
Here’s the latest technical fix, the best world nuclear technology has been
able to come up with since the Meltdown report commissioned by the AEC in its
foresight in 1969. The approval to export this flawed technology to Japan went
ahead shortly thereafter:
http://rt.com/op-edge/tepco-fukushima-sea-water-reactor-194/
Pump and pray: Tepco might have to pour water on Fukushima wreckage
forever
Published time: August 07, 2013 20:30
Fukushima is a nightmare disaster area, and no one has the slightest idea
what to do. The game is to prevent the crippled nuclear plant from turning into
an “open-air super reactor spectacular” which would result in a hazardous,
melted catastrophe.
On April 25, 2011 – one month after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear
plant and the anniversary of Chernobyl – I was interviewed by RT and asked to
compare Chernobyl and Fukushima.
The clip, which you can find on YouTube, was
entitled, “Can’t seal Fukushima like Chernobyl – it all goes into the sea.”
Since then, huge amounts of radioactivity have flowed from the wrecked reactors
directly into the Pacific Ocean.
Attempts to stop the flow of contaminated water
from Fukushima into the sea were always unlikely to succeed. It is like trying
to push water uphill. Now they all seem to have woken up to the issue and have
begun to panic.
The problem is this: the fission process in a reactor creates huge amounts of
heat. Of course, that is the whole point of the machine – the heat makes steam
which runs turbines. Water is pumped through channels between the fuel rods and
this cools them and heats the water.
If there is no water, or the channels are
blocked, the heat actually melts the fuel into a big blob which falls to the
bottom of the steel vessel in which all this occurs – the pressure vessel – and
then melts its way through the steel, into the ground, and down in the direction
of China. Well, not China in this case, but actually Buenos Aires, Argentina (I
figured out).
I have been keeping an eye on developments, and it is quite clear that the
reactors are no longer containing the molten fuel – some proportion of which is
now in the ground underneath them. Both this material and the remaining material
in what was the containment are very hot and are fissioning. Tepco is quite
aware – and so is everyone else in the know – that the only hope of preventing
what could become an open-air super reactor spectacular is to cool the fuel, the
lumps of fuel distributed throughout the system, mainly in the holed pressure
vessels, and also in the spent fuel tanks and in the ground under the reactors.
That all this is fissioning away merrily (though at a low level) is clear
from the occasional reports of short half life nuclides like the radioXenons.
The game is to prevent it all turning into the open air super reactor located
somewhere under the ground. To do this, they have to pump vast amounts of water
into the reactors, the fuel pond and generally all over the area where they
think the stuff is or might be. This means seawater since luckily they are near
the sea. But they are also unluckily near the sea – since you cannot pump the
sea onto the land without it wanting to flow back into the sea.
Now a good proportion of the radioactive elements, the radionuclides, are
soluble in water. The Caesiums 137 and 134, Strontiums 89 and 90, Barium 140,
Radium 226, Lead 210, Rutheniums and Rhodiums, Silvers and Mercuries, Carbons
and Tritiums, Iodines and noble gases Kryptons and Xenons merrily dissolve in
the hot seawater. There is also a likelihood that the normally insoluble
Uraniums, Plutoniums and Neptuniums will dissolve in seawater to some extent,
because of the chloride ions. And if they don’t, the micron and nano-particles
of these materials will disperse in the water as colloidal suspensions.
So a lot
of this stuff gets into the sea. Of course, most of the fuss is being made by
the Americans who are on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. How unfair that
the USA should suffer from the Japanese affair, they think. And also feel a
level of fear, underneath all this. As perhaps they should since it is their
crappy reactors that blew up.
We hear that 400 tons of highly radioactive water is now escaping the
barriers that Tepco erected and is reaching the sea. Japan’s prime minister,
Shinzo Abe, said on August 7 that “stabilizing Fukushima is our challenge.”
Tepco said, “This is extremely serious — we are unable to control radioactive
water seeping out of the Fukushima plant.” CNN quoted “industry experts” saying
that “Tepco has failed to address the problem…[the experts] question Tepco’s
ability to safely decommission the plant.”
There are some things I want to say about all this. First is the inevitable
discourse manipulation – something that we have seen in the media ever since
this disaster occurred. “Decommission the plant” suggests some calm and ordered
scientific process akin to shutting down and defueling an old reactor which has
reached the end of its design life. It sparks images of a wise nuclear engineer
in a lab coat consulting a document, discussing some issue with a worker in
brilliant white overalls with a Tepco logo, wearing a white hard-hat. The
reality is that this is a nightmare disaster area where no one has the slightest
idea what to do and which has always been out of control.
All that they can do
is continue to pump in the seawater to hope that the various lumps of molten
fuel will not increase their rate of fissioning. And pray. The water will then
pick up the radionuclides and flow downhill back to the sea. Of course, they can
put up a barrier; surround the plant with a wall.
But eventually the water will
fill up the pond and flow over the wall. All that water will create a soggy
marsh and destabilize the foundations of the reactor buildings which will then
collapse and prevent further cooling. Then the Spectacular. All this is
predictable enough.
Let us look at some numbers. Four hundred tons of seawater a day are flowing
into the sea. That is 400 cubic meters. In one year, that is 146,000 cubic
meters. That is a pond 10 meters deep and 120 meters square. This will have to
go on forever, a new pond every year, unless they can get the radioactive
material out. But here is the other problem. They can’t get close enough because
the radiation levels are too high. The water itself is lethally radioactive.
Gamma radiation levels tens of meters from the water are enormously high. No one
can approach without being fried.
‘
Anyone living within 1km of the coast near Fukushima should get out’
But I want to make two other points.
The first is that the Pacific Ocean is
big enough for this level of release not to represent the global catastrophe
that some are predicting.
Let’s get some scoping perspective on this. The volume
of the North Pacific is 300 million cubic kilometers. The total inventory of the
four Fukushima Daiichi reactors, including their spent fuel pools, is 732 tons
of Uranium and Plutonium fuel which is largely insoluble in sea water. The
inventory in terms of the medium half-life nuclides of radiological significance
Cs-137, Cs-134 and Strontium-90, is 3 x 1018 becquerels (Bq) each. Adding these
up gives about 1019 Bq.
If we dissolve that entire amount into the Pacific, we
get a mean concentration of 33 Bq per cubic meter – not great, but not lethal.
Of course this is ridiculous since the catastrophe released less than 1017 Bq of
these combined nuclides and even if all of this ends up in the sea (which it may
do), the overall dilution will result in a concentration of 1 Bq per cubic
meter.
So the people in California can relax. In fact, the contamination of
California and indeed the rest of the planet from the global weapons test
fallout of 1959-1962 was far worse, and resulted in the cancer epidemic which
began in 1980. The atmospheric megaton explosions drove the radioactivity into
the stratosphere and the rain brought it back to earth to get into the milk, the
food, the air, and our children’s bones. Kennedy and Kruschev called a halt in
1963, saving millions.
What we have here in Fukushima is more local, but still very deadly and
certainly worse than Chernobyl since the populations are so large.
And this
brings me to my second point, and a warning to the Japanese people. The
contamination of the sea results in adsorption of the radionuclides by the sand
and silt on the coast and river estuaries.
The east coast of Japan, the sediment
and sand on the shores, will now be horribly radioactive. This material is
re-suspended into the air through a process called sea-to-land transfer. The
coastal air they inhale is laden with radioactive particles.
I know about this
since I was asked in 1998 by the Irish State to carry out a two-year study of
the cancer effects of releases into the Irish Sea by the nuclear reprocessing
plant at Sellafield. We looked at small area data leaked to us by the Welsh
Cancer Registry covering the period of 1974-1989, when Sellafield was releasing
significant amounts of radio-Caesium, radio-Strontium, and Plutonium. Results
showed a remarkable and sharp 30 per cent increase in cancer rates in those
living within 1km of the coast. The effect was very local and dropped away
sharply at 2km. In trying to discover the cause, we came across measurements
made by the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Using special cloth
filters, they had measured Plutonium in the air by distance from the
contaminated coast.
The trend was the same as the cancer trend, increasing
sharply in the 1km strip near the coast. We later examined cancer rates in a
higher resolution questionnaire study in Carlingford, Ireland. This clearly
showed the effect increasing inside the 1km radius in the same way.
The results
were never published in scientific literature but were presented to the UK
CERRIE committee and eventually made it into a book which I wrote in 2007
entitled, “Wolves of Water.”
Make no mistake, this is a deadly effect. By 2003,
we had found 20-fold excess risk of leukemia and brain tumours in the population
of children on the north Wales coast. The children were denied of course by the
Welsh Cancer Intelligence Unit that supplanted the old Welsh Cancer Registry –
which had been shut down immediately after the data was released to us. We did
publish this in scientific literature.
Nevertheless, the sea-to-land effect is real. And anyone living within 1km of
the coast to at least 200km north or south of Fukushima should get out. They
should evacuate inland. It is not eating the fish and shellfish that gets you –
it’s breathing.
And what about the future? The future is bleak. I see no way of resolving the
catastrophe. They will either have to pour water on the wreckage forever, and
thus continue to contaminate the local sea, or find some more drastic immediate
solution.
I was told that US experts had the idea at the beginning of bombing
the reactors into the harbour. Not so stupid in my opinion. That at least may
enable them to get sufficiently close to the pieces to pick them up, and should
also solve the cooling problem.
Apparently (my contact said) the French argued
them out of it because of the negative effect on nuclear energy (and Uranium
shares).
Professor Christopher Busby from the European Committee on Radiation Risks
for RT
