Plutonium is Forever
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Plutonium is Forever
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Re: Plutonium is Forever
#2No the whole point of radioisoptopes is that they aren't forever. The mercury and cadmium that will be released by all the new coal stations that will replace the nukes is forever. But unlike plutonium which is heavy, insoluble, doesn't spread very far and is only a danger if you breath in the dust - the mercury compounds injected into the atmosphere will still be poisoning life on the planet when the sun goes out.
And just for fun - the coal will also release lots of uranium (with a much longer half life) than all the reactors and bombs every built.
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#3The plutonium was only found in trace amounts comparable to the amounts left behind by nearby nuclear weapons tests: http://mitnse.com/2011/03/30/news-updates/
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#4The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could have been prevented.
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#5The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could have been prevented.
Good plan Dr Evil - the reason you need the generators is that a shut-down reactor still generates typically a few percent of it's power output for a while. Covering this in concrete is rather like deciding to deal with a burning car by sealing it in a large cast iron box, painting "pipe-bomb" on the side and then putting that in an infant school.
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#6The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could have been prevented.
You cant dismantle a plant that still generates residual heat while a used fuel pool is on fire nearby. Its just too dangerous a place for humans to be. What should they have done? Sent Asimo?
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#7The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could have been prevented.
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It is simply not possible to dismantle a nuclear reactor that close after shutdown -- the power produced by radioactive decay heat right after shutdown is in the order of 10MW, and the core is incredibly hot for weeks. If they had done everything as well as they possibly could, they would not be any closer to dismantling the plants than they are today. The best course would have been to maintain cooling so that nothing would have been damaged -- they tried this and failed. The failures in their actions are not asking for more help earlier, not in the basic course of action they took. The idea that the reactors should have been buried with 24 hours of the emergency generators going down betrays basic lack of knowledge of the facts of the situation. Should you have tried to bury a core that has been active less than a day before without considerable active cooling, it would have simply melted it's way to the water table.
The total amount of plutonium that has been released into the environment so far is minuscule. It is significant because it serves as an unmistakable indicator that the cladding for the rods has melted, meaning that should any containment fail now, the results would be catastrophic. But we knew that -- TEPCO said that the cladding was melting on 14th of March. Still, unless something unexpected and catastrophic happens now, the nuclear side of this disaster will still kill more people in Germany than Japan.
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#8The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could have been prevented.
You cant dismantle a plant that still generates residual heat while a used fuel pool is on fire nearby. Its just too dangerous a place for humans to be. What should they have done? Sent Asimo?
Just note that robots don't work either, because particle radiation has a nasty way of flipping bits stored in memory. In the presence of a strong beta ray source, you can treat sram and dram as good sources of truly random data. :)
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#9Some interesting insights into the culture of Japan (and corporations both Japanese and American). Is there a way we could help that would be more amenable to the Japanese culture and way of handling things?
Saving face is an important aspect of Asian cultures and if we are truly trying to help them on humanitarian grounds, we should try to become more effective rather than bemoan the fact that they have pride in their culture.
It is an interesting test these days to think how would America respond to foreign help/intervention - I didn't follow what happened post-Katrina but it seems like we also downplayed foreign aid and focused on American rescue efforts.
Re: Plutonium is Forever
#10The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could have been prevented.
You can't just 'dismantle' a plant that still has residual heat being generated.
Additionally, if you're suggesting burying it in reference to the solution at Chernoby, that also doesn't work so well. At Chernobyl the plant was effectively destroyed, so there was no harm in simply filling it with concrete and placing the sarcophagus over it. At Fukushima the plant is still largely intact. Unless you can submerge the plant in concrete in one fell swoop (not possible), the damage done by the piecemeal burying of the plant would undoubtedly create even more damage and result in more radiation leakage than we currently see.