Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#41

Post by aluhut » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

marze wrote: post #37

jdubs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complex problems often require complex solutions. I imagine that your suggestion works for some situations but not all. The cynical side of me thinks that one of the few benefits of the disaster will be new technology and robots that will help prevent future disasters. I imagine there's a very high priced market for these kinds of hardened robots.

If a solution does the job, it does the job. In the six years since the meltdowns, they've been building these robots, which up until this year, have all failed. With an electronics-free periscope, they could have saved five years. And keep in mind, the radioisotopes are still flowing into the ocean this whole time.

I'm pretty sure the accident in Fukushima accelerated the development in this niche. Especially in Japan.

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#42

Post by eternauta3k » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

QAPereo wrote: post #19

marze wrote: post #6

I still don't see why they are spending years trying to make rad hard robots. A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. They'd need to burn a few holes, but none of the reactor vessels are intact so that wouldn't allow additional radioactive material to escape. I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium…

>A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal and I'm having trouble thinking of any tested fiber in the range of a molten reactor core. The flux is really crazy near that thing, and not just photons, but relativistic electrons and some very angry helium nuclei.

> That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal

Could you go into more detail?

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#43

Post by Boothroid » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:39 PM UTC

A common response from defenders of nuclear when concerns are raised is to point to the impact of other energy sources, and say that nuclear is better in those terms. But I just cannot get away from the thought that whilst in aggregate those other forms of energy (fossil fuels, etc) might be provably worse than well managed nuclear within a particular analysis, humanity does not seem capable of this good management of nuclear, and when things do go wrong with fossil fuels they don't have the same potential to go quite so spectacularly bad. Yes an oil spill can affect a large area, but you don't get harmful particles washing up on the coast of the US from a spill in Japan in the same way, for example.

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#44

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

jdubs wrote: post #16

marze wrote: post #6

I still don't see why they are spending years trying to make rad hard robots. A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. They'd need to burn a few holes, but none of the reactor vessels are intact so that wouldn't allow additional radioactive material to escape. I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium…

Complex problems often require complex solutions. I imagine that your suggestion works for some situations but not all. The cynical side of me thinks that one of the few benefits of the disaster will be new technology and robots that will help prevent future disasters. I imagine there's a very high priced market for these kinds of hardened robots.

[deleted]

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#45

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

eternauta3k wrote: post #42

QAPereo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal and I'm having trouble thinking of any tested fiber in the range of a molten reactor core. The flux is really crazy near that thing, and not just photons, but relativistic electrons and some very angry helium nuclei.

> That seems likely to degrade the fiber, or the signal Could you go into more detail?

[deleted]

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#46

Post by bduerst » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

21 wrote: post #11

krapp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've seen pictures of the melted core of Chernobyl too (the "Elephant's Foot") havent' we?

How do you think those photos were taken? https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KxRuWaD0sXg/U7MHoNyBuiI/AAAAAAAAJ...

They used makeshift robots when photographing elephant's foot. Unfortunately for the worker in the picture, they didn't use it then.

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#47

Post by stephengillie » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

mercurysmessage wrote: post #2

I was going to say, I thought computers can't normally operate in those conditions > Because of the high radioactivity levels inside the reactor, only specially designed robots can probe the unit There must be some sort of really powerful shielding on the robot. Cool stuff.

Edit - Dragon blog post describes "software radiation mitigation" better than I can: http://aviationweek.com/blog/dragons-radiation-tolerant-desi...

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#48

Post by dasil003 » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #28

agumonkey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a documentary about Tchernobyl surrounding forest few years ago. Most of the vegetation grew back, healthily for my naked eye. Anyways, the most surprising part is that mammals were back too; even though the radiation level was higher than average. I concluded that only a few generation of darwinian selection is needed to breed radiation hardened humans.

Animals that die within 5 years probably don't have enough time to succumb to the effects of radiation. That's just a guess though.

It's also quite random, they may live there and the background radiation isn't bad enough on average to kill them, but then if they accidentally ingest a few hot particles it could be game over pretty quickly. For most animals this might not even register in the top 10 existential threats, but for humans the psychological stress would be debilitating.

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#49

Post by gotchange » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

atomwaffel wrote: post #3

As I feel incompetent to comment on the article's content, I'll be glad to start a thread on the linguistics of that car crash of a headline. It took me three or four fresh starts to parse it correctly. The linguistic term for this is garden path sentence[1][2] and it's such a good one that it makes me wonder if it's deliberate. Even just some small adjustments would make it more readable: "Japanese pictures may show…

When you usually write headlines, you go for the most concise or compact version possible to conserve space.

Even though I'm a non native speaker, I haven't experienced any difficulties parsing and processing this headline. I am not sure what part of it that got you off balance.

Re: Japan Pictures Likely Show Melted Fukushima Fuel for First Time

#50

Post by frik » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

marze wrote: post #6

I still don't see why they are spending years trying to make rad hard robots. A long steel tube with fiber optics to pipe in light, mirrors and optics to transmit an image down the tube would be infinitely easier. They'd need to burn a few holes, but none of the reactor vessels are intact so that wouldn't allow additional radioactive material to escape. I'm surprised the Japanese decision to dump the all the tritium…

Well written, fully agree with your points. An bigger size endoscope with fiber cable would be best solution - low tech is better in such use case. And dumping contaminated water is really bad, unfortunately news gets censored everywhere in 2017.