As seen as another HN thread, seemingly relevant here as well:
http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material-reduces-h...
Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
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Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#42> At the plant’s entrance, a sign warned: “Games like Pokemon GO are forbidden within the facility.” Was this a thing people were doing? Going to a nuclear disaster site as part of a game?
Probably nowhere near as dangerous but I think its interesting. https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-shadow-of-cherno...
A number of Russian middle class volunteers who fought in Donbass war treated it as kind of similar experience - an adventurous game/vacation, a "noble quest to defend 'Russian world' from dark forces of fascism and imperialism".
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#43https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...
So you extrapolated what will happen to the spent nuclear fuel that already began to leak in some places and did the math? I'd like to see it.
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#44https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...
I’m not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I’m worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven’t seen one on that scale yet, doesn’t mean we never will.
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.
Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.
Nuclear reactors need to be built next to a large body of water for cooling. So Japan didn't have a choice when they wanted to have nuclear power.
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#46https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...
And that's with incompetence and neglect.
http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/cause/
Personnel had an insufficiently detailed understanding of technical procedures involved with the nuclear reactor, and knowingly ignored regulations to speed test completion
And a Japanese reactor that didn't melt down:
https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant...
Before beginning construction, Tohoku Electric conducted surveys and simulations aimed at predicting tsunami levels. The initial predictions showed that tsunamis in the region historically had an average height of about 3 meters. Based on that, the company constructed its plant at 14.7 meters above sea level, almost five times that height. As more research was done, the estimated tsunami levels climbed higher, and Tohoku Electric conducted periodic checkups based on the new estimate.
There's just no good reason for either Chernobyl or Fukushima. Both were preventable by following simple safety procedures.
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#47"At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident." How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is m…
160k is around 0.15% of Japan's population, and there's plenty of space for them to move to since the countryside is rapidly depopulating. Of course, it's not quite that easy to forcibly migrate people in practice...
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm possibly nitpicking here, but Chernobyl is not in Russia.
Not but it was in the USSR at the time which many people incorrectly equate with Russia today. To me it's almost ok to say "Russia" when talking about things back then. So long as you don't say Chernobyl is in Russia today.
Ukraine and Russia were practically in a shooting war a few years ago. It's about as "ok" as walking around your Californian office calling people "Confederates"... if the civil war happened in 2014.
Don't insult people with ignorance.
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.
Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.
> improve the structure
The key question is: Who would have paid for it?
Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible.
They also couldn't just decommission it once they realized their errors and rebuilt another one somewhere else - again the costs would have been astronomical.
People are terrible at managing (what was then) theoretical risks. If you can't convince people and companies to move out of proven high-risk earthquake areas, imagine trying to convince tax payers to pay billions to upgrade or move a functional-but-theoretically-vulnerable power station.
Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel
#50Does anyone know how they extract the molten fuel? Sounds like they will use more robots, but if it's taken this long just to get a robot to see the target, how on earth does a robot retrieve this stuff? Must be a career defining experience for these robotists, doing something that can really help an awful situation
That's basically what they say at the end of the article:
“I’ve been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we’ve never faced anything as hard as this,” said Shinji Kawatsuma, director of research and development at the center. “This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers.”