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Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

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Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#81

Post by jborean93 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #74
teamonkey wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government was no more or less inept than any other organisation - government or private - anywhere in the world. When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line. The big problem wit…

You literally do not know what transpired. When the tsunami hit and Fukushima #1 lost power and was at risk of meltdown, TEPCO was ready to scuttle the reactors by dumping seawater in them. It would have rendered the reactors unusable, but meltdown would be prevented. The Japanese government at the time, coming from the Prime Minister (Naoto Kan) himself, denied TEPCO from scuttling them because the government wanted…

How does that refute what the parent comment was saying? Sounds like you are agreeing that the problem is not the technology but the people and processes in place.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#82

Post by bamboozled »

littlestymaar wrote: post #61
bamboozled wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were a Japanese tax payer, would it be a success ? The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.

And who do you think they will be paying it to? Subsidizing Japanese companies to develop technologies that may be exported elsewhere isn't that bad of a deal actually.

What technologies are Japanese companies developing here, and does the tax payer get any of that privately held revenue back in return?

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#83

Post by pfdietz »

polotics wrote: post #73
pfdietz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You provide excellent examples of the bogosity of the arguments. Let me demolish them in turn. 1) System cost Sure, it's high. That's because we spend huge amounts of money on energy. ANY system to replace fossil fuels will be expensive, in the trillions of dollars. But if this is an argument against renewables, it's an even bigger argument against nuclear. Because nuclear is much more expensive than renewables. 2) R…

1) it's not the money, it's the EROEI 2) at scale, panels recycling does become a very real issue 3) It's not the abundance, it's the mine-able ore at high enough concentration that matters 4) solar panels, read the docs please 5) again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3, early oil was in the hundreds, nuclear is at around 50 After having gotten 0/5 in terms of correctness on actual facts, maybe tone do…

EROEI of renewables is fine, some well-debunked garbage studies not withstanding.

No, at scale recycling doesn't become a "real issue" in the sense of being a showstopper. It would be nice if it could save some money (recover aluminum frames, say) but it's only a "nice to have".

"High enough concentration" is dependent on technology. Like other mineral resources, one can expect lithium extraction technology to keep ahead of demand. The doom and gloomers on this sort of thing are never right. Stationary storage doesn't even require lithium; there's a large variety of storage technologies that could be used instead (including some like pumped thermal that use nothing more than cheap materials like common steel.)

> solar panels, read the docs please

Empty nonsense. Solar panels are not toxic. Please stop making things up.

> again, it's the EROEI, maybe panels and wind scrap a 3

Completely wrong.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#84

Post by Kon5ole »

credit_guy wrote: post #59
Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Are the costs of this 13 years and counting expense tab added to the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power plants in any way? Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.

At least in the US such costs are factored in. First of all, after Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) performed a huge "Lessons learned" exercise, and asked all the power plants to do various upgrades. Here are some links [1], [2]. The ask was not "pretty please, can you do this if it's not much of a trouble for you", it was "you have to do this by this date if you want to continue to operate". Second…

>At least in the US such costs are factored in

According to [3] the industry is liable for 16b per reactor but the industry doesn’t have that much money to pay out. Entergy for example operates its nuclear plants in a subsidiary that generates about 100 million in revenue per year. They would have to raise the price of nuclear electricity by orders of magnitude to gave any chance of paying 16 bn, let alone the 10x more for a Fukushima-esque incident.

So when things go pearshaped the operators will undoubtedly go bankrupt, and since the cleanup is very mandatory the taxpayers end up paying basically everything.

Also consider who has paid for the decades long paperwork around Yucca mt, who pays the military that has had guards stationed at closed plants for decades (rancho seco) and so on and so forth.

In short, even in the US, the hidden costs of nuclear power are immense.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#85

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
legulere wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear was replaced by renewables, not by coal: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_generati... A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now. For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heati…

> coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise gone away. That was true for close to a decade. > gas use electricity production is just a minor And growing. Look at your own chart. The change in natural gas electrical generation is about as large as solar’s entire controbution.

[deleted]

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#86

Post by rtpg »

duskwuff wrote: post #65
accrual wrote: post #13

> TEPCO speculates that radiation passing through camera semiconductor elements caused electrical charge to build up, and that the charge will drain if the cameras are left on in a relatively low-dose environment. It was the latest setback in a very long project. I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with the hope they'll last for t…

As I understand it, part of the problem is that the vast majority of components simply don't exist in rad-hardened versions. The cost of having a hardened part manufactured and qualified is high, and demand is low; only a few manufacturers bother.

This information is definitely dated and I might be misremembering (but it was given to me right next to the clean room where ICs for satelites were being prepped), but for ICs from a certain manufacturer "rad-hardened" was basically "we take ICs from our normal production batch, and do even more tests on them".

The idea being that failure is bimodal: most stuff fails very quickly, _or_ after a long time, but rarely in the middle. So they just do 100 test cycles in a messy test environment.

ICs for "normal use" also got tests like this, but generally the test suite was a bit nicer. The rad-hardened ones got way nastier tests done to them, and the yield was (of course) much lower. So you charge way more for them.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#87

Post by credit_guy »

Kon5ole wrote: post #84
credit_guy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the US such costs are factored in. First of all, after Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) performed a huge "Lessons learned" exercise, and asked all the power plants to do various upgrades. Here are some links [1], [2]. The ask was not "pretty please, can you do this if it's not much of a trouble for you", it was "you have to do this by this date if you want to continue to operate". Second…

>At least in the US such costs are factored in According to [3] the industry is liable for 16b per reactor but the industry doesn’t have that much money to pay out. Entergy for example operates its nuclear plants in a subsidiary that generates about 100 million in revenue per year. They would have to raise the price of nuclear electricity by orders of magnitude to gave any chance of paying 16 bn, let alone the 10x mo…

> the operators will undoubtedly go bankrupt

I think you are under the impression that if a company files for bankruptcy they can discharge debts they owe to the government. Good luck with that. They will get their power plants sold to the highest bidder, and the proceeds will be used to pay whatever cleanup cost they owe under the Price-Anderson act.

Here's a link to a story that BP paid more than $60 BN for the cleanup related to the Deepwater Horizon spill [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/bp-deepwater-horizon-c...

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#88

Post by MoreSEMI »

Krasnol wrote: post #19
baq wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.

Oh, sure they are reaping. 61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely. The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation…

While this is true they are among the worst polluters in the EU. England, Spain, France, even italy has a better CO2 balance than Germany per kWH. The amount of energy that comes from renewables is a meaningless number. The only thing that matters is how much CO2 they emit per kWH and due to their coal power plants, the number is quite bad. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#89

Post by duskwuff »

rtpg wrote: post #86
duskwuff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, part of the problem is that the vast majority of components simply don't exist in rad-hardened versions. The cost of having a hardened part manufactured and qualified is high, and demand is low; only a few manufacturers bother.

This information is definitely dated and I might be misremembering (but it was given to me right next to the clean room where ICs for satelites were being prepped), but for ICs from a certain manufacturer "rad-hardened" was basically "we take ICs from our normal production batch, and do even more tests on them". The idea being that failure is bimodal: most stuff fails very quickly, _or_ after a long time, but rarely…

You might be thinking of temperature ratings, which are indeed just based on more stringent testing.

Radiation hardening is, well, harder. It typically means some combination of different semiconductor processes (often silicon-on-sapphire and/or larger feature sizes) and added internal redundancy (ECC memory, TMR, watchdogs, etc). All of these require that the rad-hard parts be manufactured separately from the commercial ones; some require that the part be designed separately as well.

Re: Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel

#90

Post by BurningFrog »

wkat4242 wrote: post #60
polotics wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl with its totally mad graphite design is not representative of safe designs like Fukushima, or French plants, or even Chinese plants...

Yet we've had Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and many others (military ones too). Unforeseen accidents happen. Wars too, which tend to destroy safety equipment. Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blow…

Chernobyl was an actual disaster.

The others created big headlines, but the real human casualties were smaller than a bad traffic accident.

The core argument here is "you never know!". And that argument is always true. But people only apply it to things they're afraid of.

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