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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

#111

Post by antongribok »

retromario wrote: post #92
harlanlewis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale of the New Safe Confinement is stunning. Here’s a 2min video of it being moved into place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7aMcKinrWY

Thank you for sharing this. I had read about it when they were still building it and marvelled at the scale and ambition of the project. That structure is so large it apparently has its own weather system inside.

You can also marvel at it from satellite photos:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3896400,30.0936300,707m/data...

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#112

Post by krallja »

discoursism wrote: post #106
inimino wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight. The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.

I don't think you can say, "hindsight," when the mitigation was actually recommended in reports that were made before the event. It's only hindsight when mitigations become obvious after a disaster.

The hindsight is in which mitigation would have been effective. In a different disaster, perhaps the generators would not have been the missing piece.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#113

Post by discoursism »

krallja wrote: post #112
discoursism wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can say, "hindsight," when the mitigation was actually recommended in reports that were made before the event. It's only hindsight when mitigations become obvious after a disaster.

The hindsight is in which mitigation would have been effective. In a different disaster, perhaps the generators would not have been the missing piece.

It's only really possible to make a determination about whether it was hindsight or not after seeing the prominence of the recommendation. Suppose I tell someone a thousand times, "you should wear seatbelts," and once to fix their taillight. Then they are killed in an accident after being flung from a vehicle while not wearing a seatbelt. It would not be hindsight for me to say, "they probably should have worn a seatbelt." Maybe it would be if they were killed in a freak accident involving an unfixed taillight.

Unfortunately, given I have only second-hand knowledge of these reports' existence, and given they are probably not in my native tongue, I'm not really in a position to validate what the situation was vis a vis the generators. However, generators positioned on the coast, behind a low seawall, in a country that is regularly inundated by tsunamis, appears to be an entirely predictable failure mode. Not quite to the degree of not bringing a parachute on a skydive, but in that direction.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#114

Post by narrator »

phkahler wrote: post #55
rtkwe wrote: post #8

Kind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.

I still think they should fight fire with for. A small tactical nuclear bomb just inland of the plant could blow it all into the ocean where the material would sink. ;-)

That would just end up like the Marshall Islands where they did the H-Bomb tests. They are still too contaminated to live on.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#115

Post by rtkwe »

jjoonathan wrote: post #20
rtkwe wrote: post #8

Kind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.

> 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.

True I’d forgotten how old Fukushima was.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#116

Post by jimktrains2 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #73
wiz21c wrote: post #38

https://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...

Most radiation kills are due to slow secondary effects, so it's relatively easy to get out of the way. I don't think anyone really argues that if people would move back before deconamination they would all be fine. Just for reference, the number of people worldwide who died due to contamination from atmospheric atom bomb testing is estimated to be 430 000 by the end of last century: "Radioactive Heaven and Earth, The…

Isn't that the same as attributed to burning coal in undera year world wide?

Those were also tests where the escape of massive amounts of radiation into the environment was a planned, even if indirectly, effect.

Also, as a sibling comment said, that numb is probably overstated by a large amount.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#117

Post by freehunter »

izacus wrote: post #48
dopamean wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh... your example is pretty far from reality, especially considering California was never part of the CSA. Ukraine was part of the USSR, and was part of the USSR when the meltdown happened.

If you want a better analogy, it's like referring to Massachusetts as England when discussing colonial America. Semi-accurate at the time, main difference being Massachusetts was part of the British Empire along with England, but was not actually owned by England itself. The fact that there was a long and bloody war that followed between the two doesn't change that mostly-accurate history.

Yes, Ukraine wasn't part of Russia. But it was part of the USSR, which split into several countries, the most powerful and influential of them being Russia. It's a colloquialism just as much as it is an inaccurate statement.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#118

Post by freehunter »

jonstewart wrote: post #28
dopamean wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're probably not Ukrainian, then. Or Belarussian or Georgian or Lithuanian or Latvian or...

It's almost like people from different countries have different names for other nations. Language is weird like that.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#120

Post by WalterBright »

inimino wrote: post #104
WalterBright wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who would have paid for it? The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.

Hindsight. The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.

> Hindsight

I disagree. Failure analysis does not start with "assume the seawall will never fail." It starts with "assume the seawall fails. What are the consequences?"

Given the location of those generators, it was obvious that a breach would take out CRITICAL generators, and it would have been cheap to remove that vulnerability.

Another cheap remedy would have moved the hydrogen vent pipe to vent outside, rather than INSIDE AN ENCLOSED SPACE FILLED WITH SPARKING ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT.

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