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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

#121

Post by WalterBright »

discoursism wrote: post #113
krallja wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seat…

I agree, I think that the language barrier is not a problem when you see those generators sitting right behind the seawall.

It's like in New Orleans, where the emergency generators were located in the basements below sea level. There's nothing subtle about that. Sorry, but how daft can one get?

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

#122

Post by an_account »

JonoW wrote: post #16

Does 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

The article says they’ve built a $100 million research center for the purpose of building radiation hardened robots for this environment.

I’m sure as they learn techniques and technology for building these robots it will progress quicker. A small robot with a camera is the first step.

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

#123

Post by trhway »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #85
nl wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few people who are anti-nuclear power who are pro-coal. Even ignoring renewables, gas solves many of the worst problems with coal.

Sure, but even natural gas and rooftop solar have higher rates of death per year than nuclear. (In my second link above.) In a world in which we must choose the lesser of evils for energy, nuclear is among the least evils, yet faces the greatest overall public resistance to new installations.

>even natural gas and rooftop solar have higher rates of death per year than nuclear.

the difference here is that no event can significantly change the death rate from gas or solar whereis one wrong cough by nuclear power plant worker and we have Chernobyl with thousands of deaths (in particular in Belarus which took the majority of the Chernobyl hit - about 5000 extra thyroid cancer cases (normally a rare cancer) in the people who were children at the time plus doubling (and in some areas tripling) of the rate of the most frequent cancer - breast cancer (typically 1 in 7 women would get it during lifetime, so doubling means additional 15% of all the women in the affected area would get it) in the areas close to Chernobyl like the Gomel and Mogilev regions plus very significant increase in other frequent cancers of internal organs like colon,etc.)

Or counting it the other way - Russia and Ukraine both have the same - 0.0034 - incidence rate of cancer per year (despite the war and economic differences it is the same people with the same behavior/habits :), while Belarus where people are basically the same as in Ukraine and Russia and drink and smoke and eat the same - has 0.0052 incidence rate, ie. 50000 new cases per year instead of 34000 if they were to have the same incidence as Russia and Ukraine. 16000 extra cancer cases per year for several decades with mortality higher than 50% ...

>nuclear is among the least evils,

hardly so, giving the numbers i referenced above (compare it to coal - the coal's 700K/year deaths means "only" 1K/year for Belarus) and potential of any nuclear power plant to repeat Chernobyl - i'm aware about technical improvements of modern reactors, yet "stupidity will find a way"...

> yet faces the greatest overall public resistance to new installations.

still wondering why ? :)

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

#124

Post by franklin_cobb »

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 think they tried, but the radiation was too hot and melted through the steel and concrete below. This was an old facility, so it was probably built with that idea in mind. It just failed.

On a related note, I live in Chiba, which is a fair distance south of Fukushima. The rain and wind drove the radiation into my area after the accident. I still have interesting radiation readings in my rain gutters and spouts.

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

#125

Post by prebrov »

jenga22 wrote: post #105

I wonder what they do once the robot sees the uranium? I mean the robot itself is now heavily contaminated. Do they just leave the robot down there? Or do they somehow decontaminate it so they can use it again?

Robots just kept dying in there all those years [1]. I reckon they are disposable, in effect.

[1]: http://mashable.com/2017/03/03/fukushima-robots-fail/

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

#126

Post by nv-vn »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #108
nv-vn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being anti-nuclear is pretty much accepting the status quo though. Modern nuclear power is much, much more sustainable than coal, scales very well, and is very safe. If you believe in a quick solution for energy issues then you shouldn't halt all nuclear development and leave fossil fuels for the next couple decades.

Nuclear will never be able to compete with renewables on cost or deployment speed. It’s dead tech for anything other than space probes and military uses.

How? Nuclear tech is already much more developed than other renewables and it's incredibly efficient. The cost of solar is much higher than the cost of nuclear. Hydroelectric and wind are both lower, but they also require certain geography and can't be used anywhere. Nuclear is not dead tech at all, most of France's power comes from nuclear.

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

#128

Post by petre »

cocoablazing wrote: post #91
jjoonathan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Every industry makes severe mistakes early on and eventually irons them out with time. Are you arguing that's not the case? > However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. Economically retrofitting an old reactor with safety mechanisms is a much more challenging task than designing new reactors correctl…

Moving several EDGs and support system a couple kilometers is a small task in comparison to the design, qualification, construction, and training associated with a new power reactor design. There’s nothing very complicated about the EDG buses that supply safety-system components.

The cables from the diesel generators a couple of kilometers away could have been destroyed by the tsunami or another earthquake.

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

#129

Post by frik »

sschueller wrote: post #39
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.

Wasn't something like that poured under Chernobyl after the accident which prevented the radioactive slurry from entering deep into the ground?

The Russians handled the catastrophe better and faster. International help sender them low tech robots, Russians poured tunnels below within days/weeks with lot of human contractors. But Japan is doing little. Contaminated fluids leak into the sea that swaps to Hawaii and west coast ever since 2011. It's the local culture of loosing face that seems to be at odds with handling it and a major corruption problem. After 6 years Japan has done so little, compared to the Chernobyl Sarcophagus and all the handling inside and ever since. Why is there not more international pressure to Japan to do more and do it faster? They have to do it no matter what the costs are or if the have the resources, it doesn't matter - the rest of the world population will thank you for less pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...

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

#130

Post by themodelplumber »

robinwassen wrote: post #127

The YouTube video with images of the core that nytimes linked, is one of those spam news videos using text-to-speech.

I was wondering about that. Was about to adjust my false-positive filter for YouTube click spam. I mean, if the NYT links to it...
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