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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

#161

Post by Sharlin »

freehunter wrote: post #117
izacus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apropos England, you'd better not go to Scotland and refer to it as "England" either... people will be justifiably mad at you. And those two countries are currently united.

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

#162

Post by imtringued »

adekok wrote: post #46
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...

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 Ele…

That is the fundamental problem with nuclear power. You can trust the technology but you can't trust the humans.

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

#163

Post by Cthulhu_ »

petepete wrote: post #139
geon wrote: post #138

> https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE This has to be the worst possible way of sharing information; a video of 2 still images and a computer voice reading a text. Right up there with images inside a word document, inside an email.

YouTube really should be detecting and pushing them to the bottom of search results. Downvoting doesn't appear to have much of an effect.

Won't matter much in this case as it's heavily linked to by all kinds of news outlets.

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

#164

Post by Cthulhu_ »

eric-hu wrote: post #151

I long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power. Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nucl…

An accident with spent fuel rods / nuclear waste will happen in our lifetimes, and probably in the US; the US does not have proper nuclear waste disposal because nobody wants to host it. Earlier they'd just dump it in the ocean, but now, it's stashed in the nuclear plants' spent fuel rod basins, waiting (for decades now) for the country to build a proper disposal facility. IIRC the last one was a huge project inside a mountain somewhere.

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

#165

Post by Cthulhu_ »

StreamBright wrote: post #145
jpatokal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You gonna move their jobs as well? There is a reason why they were living at the area at the first place.

Moving jobs to the countryside does not sound like a bad idea TBF. I want to move to a small town and be able to take a bike to work (and I prefer a workplace, remote working doesn't work for me), but all of the employers are in the big city so I'm forced to sit in traffic for over an hour both ways every day.

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

#166

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Rapzid wrote: post #34
jjoonathan wrote: post #20

Earlier 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.

Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..

But but but beer is healthy! It's what people drank all the time in the middle ages etc, it was better than the water.

[/excuses]

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

#167

Post by Cthulhu_ »

petre wrote: post #131
philipkglass wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of some newer reactor designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher

Expensive. The concrete can also crack in the event of an earthquake.

Not as expensive as having to clean up three reactors worth of nuclear meltdown and a few exploded reactors.

I'm sure they can prevent the concrete from cracking in an earthquake.

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

#168

Post by RobAley »

gizmo wrote: post #154
eric-hu wrote: post #151

I long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power. Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nucl…

I agree that renewables are a very good alternative to nuclear power, but in practice moving away from nuclear means doubling down on coal. The problems with nuclear are political, but the alternatives to nuclear power are mired in political conflict as well. As for your dam bursting scenario, something like that actually happened in the 70s when the Banqiao Dam burst. Nearly 200.000 people died. Fukushima had 0 radi…

You can't really say 0 deaths, because no one knows. We don't have good epidemiological models for wide-spread low-level dispersal such as was seen at Fukushima, we already know incidences of cancer and gene mutation don't scale linearly with exposure at low levels. There are also associated deaths from psychological factors of those who were evacuated, lost land / business etc. which will only become apparent in years to come.

Dams do have the potential for massive loss of life as you say, and they also suffer from the problem of massive centralisation of capacity (unlike e.g. solar or wind). On the smaller upside, the models related to fatalities are pretty well understood.

Perhaps an instant move away from nuclear may need coal, although here in the UK it's gas that has been taking up the slack while the government dilly-dally on whether to build out new nuclear or invest in renewables research (successfully doing neither).

I see over the longer term renewables coming up as nuclear is naturally retired at the end of the current plant's lifespan. Solar is now cheaper than coal to built-out in many places, there are other impediments but (generally) lack of public support isn't one of them (compared to coal/nuclear).

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

#170

Post by beached_whale »

rurounijones wrote: post #140
beached_whale wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, from what I understand, they ignored the reports that recommended to put the backup generators on higher ground and to make the sea wall higher. Fukashima is the worst case for that design I think.

https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant... A great article about another plant, closer to the epicenter, owned by another company that did things right. It breaks my heart that these guys also have to be in a shutdown state. TEPCO should be forced to hand over all undamaged nuclear plants and responsibility (minus financial) to this company.

It seems like the regulators really failed. Short sighted actions and failure to fix past mistakes shouldn’t be allowed. The other sad thing is that, this is the worst case scenario for that plant and it pales in magnitude, but it is overshadowing the sorrow and lost due to the flooding and earthquake.
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