Fukushima nuclear plant leaking contaminated water

[Turborama]

Source: ABC - Radio Australia

Updated 3 May 2013, 15:38 AEST

More than two years after the meltdowns at Fukushima, the plant's operator is dealing with a new crisis - millions of litres of contaminated water inside the complex.

TEPCO has confirmed that groundwater is flooding into the plant's reactor buildings at the astonishing rate of 285 litres a minute.

Once inside, the water quickly becomes highly contaminated and has to be stored in tanks which cover 17 hectares of the plant grounds.

But with those tanks close to full, TEPCO has started to chop down an adjoining forest to make more space to store the contaminated run-off.

Read more: http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/connect-asia/fukushima-nuclear-plant-leaking-contaminated-water/1125584

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Full transcript and audio of the report at the link.

[defacto7]

1. and just how long do they think

they can keep this up? A couple million years?

[Throckmorton]

2. No, until they decide to discharge it into the ocean

That day is coming, and it is inevitable. Hold, let decay for some period (most likely 3 or 4 years), discharge.

[Lonr]

3. Interesting that they describe this as a new crisis

Tepco has been trying to deal with the issue of groundwater flowing into ( and out of??? ) the damaged reactor buildings at Fukushima Daiichi since the catastrophe began over 2 years ago, although some time passed before they even realized that this was occurring.

I do hope they are successful in building an underground wall to stop the release of radioactive material into the Pacific, what's already been released is more than bad enough...

[Selatius]

4. I bet it will cost the Japanese government between 250 to 500 billion to clean it all up in the end.

We're talking not just removal of the entire soil down to the bedrock because of contamination but also the burying of all the failed reactors in a similar manner that the Soviet Union employed after the Chernobyl meltdown.

They trucked in and flew in thousands of tons of sand mixed with boron and poured it on top of what was left of the reactor to try to reduce the heat back to sub-critical levels and to prevent further environmental damage. To this day, vast swaths of territory around Chernobyl are still not suitable for habitation.

[davidpdx]

5. Yep

There was an article the other day about the Japanese nuclear reprocessing facility in northern Aomori prefecture. I have no idea about earthquakes in that area, but my assumption is it would be as dangerous of a place as Fukushima. It just seems to me after the accident two years ago why take a chance on an even bigger disaster.


Here is that thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=472095

[another_liberal]

8. Why not take a chance?

The people responsible for Fukushima have never had to face punishment, so why worry about the consequences?

It's the same as our situation with Wall Street investment banks: of course they've gone back to business as usual. No one has served a day in jail for causing the last crash. Why not return to selling worthless securities as fast as they can be "bundled?"

[wordpix]

18. meanwhile, our beloved nation's NRC just approved 4 new nukes to be built in GA and SC

The former chairman opposed the permits but of course the repukes made him resign with some trumped up charge.

[Downwinder]

6. I keep seeing figures on how much water is being pumped in.

Are there any figures on how much is being recovered?

[another_liberal]

7. The bastards are still just playing C. Y. A.

If the owners and operators of this plant ever admitted how badly they're fucking up that province (and the surrounding ocean waters) people would demand heads roll, and I mean that literally. This is a crime against humanity as awful as any committed by Serbian war criminals or al Qaeda terrorists, and its harm will last far, far longer. Those responsible for the lies and coverup should have to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

[drynberg]

9. And of course the Question Is:

What is the effect of this Fukishma Nightmare that Won't End on our current usage of nuclear reactors in the USA and the rest of the world? Can we afford to gamble the very survival of life on this shoddy nasty technology??? ACT.

[L0oniX]

10. ...helping the Pacific glow in the dark ....good for surfers.

[progree]

12. "From sea to SHINING sea" - whoever wrote that had incredible foresight

(Actually, Katharine Lee Bates wrote it - credit where credit is due)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_the_Beautiful

[DeSwiss]

11. K&R

Flow of Tainted Water Is Latest Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant


[font color=darkgray]Kyodo News, via Associated Press
Gray and silver storage tanks filled with radioactive wastewater are sprawling
over the grounds of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.[/font]

NYT
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: April 29, 2013

*snip*

Even many scientists who acknowledge the complexity of cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl fear that the water crisis is just the latest sign that Tepco is lurching from one problem to the next without a coherent strategy.

“Tepco is clearly just hanging on day by day, with no time to think about tomorrow, much less next year,” said Tadashi Inoue, an expert in nuclear power who served on a committee that drew up the road map for cleaning up the plant.

But the concerns extend well beyond Tepco. While doing a more rigorous job of policing Japan’s nuclear industry than regulators before the accident, the Nuclear Regulation Authority has a team of just nine inspectors to oversee the more than 3,000 workers at Fukushima.

And a separate committee created by the government to oversee the cleanup is loaded with industry insiders, including from the Ministry of Trade, in charge of promoting nuclear energy, and nuclear reactor manufacturers like Toshiba and Hitachi. The story of how the Fukushima plant ended up swamped with water, critics say, is a cautionary tale about the continued dangers of leaving decisions about nuclear safety to industry insiders.

MORE

[progree]

13. Oh, that's just 108,000 gallons /day (or 2580 barrels/day or 942,000 barrels a year)

TEPCO has confirmed that groundwater is flooding into the plant's reactor buildings at the astonishing rate of 285 litres a minute.

285 liters/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 0.264 gallon / liters = 108,346 gallons/day
Using the 42 gallon barrels that oil is stored in:
108,345 gallons / day * ( 1 barrel / 42 gallon ) = 2580 barrels / day.
Over the course of a year -- 941,600 barrels.

But with those tanks close to full, TEPCO has started to chop down an adjoining forest to make more space to store the contaminated run-off.

Dang forests.

[sofa king]

14. Can someone explain "contaminated" water to me?

It can't simply be water that has an overabundance of deuterium or tritium, because that would be heavy water which is of value to these guys.

So is the water contaminated by picking up other radioactive material? And if that is so, why can't the water be vaporized, leaving the contaminants behind?

Thanks in advance!

[firenewt]

15. I've wondered about that as well. I thought radiation contamination was caused by radioactive

particles in or on the contaminated material. Radiation cannot cause something to be radioactive simply by exposure. Take away the radiation source and the material is no longer
radioactive. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[progree]

16. Some thoughts on contaminated water, FWIW

Deuterium isn't radioactive -- it is naturally occuring in water and is stable (doesn't decay radioactively or any other way). Tritium is radioactive, with a half-life if 12.32 years (a trace amount occurs in nature when cosmic rays interact with water).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium

As for your other question about why not just vaporize the water - I'd guess that with this much water involved it would take a long time and require a huge (contaminated) area that has to be cleaned up eventually, or sacrificed. Or if it is boiled away, a lot of equipment is contaminated. Maybe quite expensive to do so in a way that doesn't contaminate the air, dunno (though ought to be less expensive than storing all that volume in tanks-that-will-eventually-leak for who knows how many decades / centuries? ).

I know that at Hanford, Washington state, they are storing gazillions of gallons of highly contaminated liquid and there are leaks and all that, and a big problem. I've heard talk for decades of solidifying the waste and packing it in inert glass-like material .... but apparently too difficult and expensive and so on. Google: {liquid radioactive waste Hanford}

Anyway, that's all I "think" I "know" about this.

[bananas]

19. Cesium in fish off Fukushima not declining

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10500622

Cesium in fish off Fukushima not declining
AP foreign, Thursday October 25 2012
MALCOLM FOSTER

Associated Press= TOKYO (AP) — Radioactive cesium levels in most kinds of fish caught off the coast of Fukushima haven't declined in the year following Japan's nuclear disaster, a signal that the seafloor or leakage from the damaged reactors must be continuing to contaminate the waters — possibly threatening fisheries for decades, a researcher says.

<snip>

"The (radioactivity) numbers aren't going down. Oceans usually cause the concentrations to decrease if the spigot is turned off," Buesseler told The Associated Press in an interview. "There has to be somewhere they're picking up the cesium."

<snip>

Hideo Yamazaki, a marine biologist at Kinki University, agrees with Buesseler's theory that the cesium is leaking from the Fukushima nuclear plant and that it will contaminate seafood for more than a decade.

<snip>

[bananas]

20. Why the frak would you think it's only deuterium or tritium?

Water is known as the "Universal Solvent" - it will dissolve almost anything.

The Fukushima melt-down has been described as a "melt-through",
the cooling waters flow directly over the melted reactor cores.

[sofa king]

23. I did not think that.

In fact I thought it out well enough to know that there are no long-lasting radioisotopes of oxygen, either, so the water itself is not "contaminated" to any important degree. The beta particle that tritium releases cannot penetrate a milimeter of the water in which it is contained.

So again I ask, if the water itself isn't contaminated, then why cannot it be separated from the contaminants it has dissolved? The goddamned stuff has a vapor pressure differential inside of the storage tanks they are already in--why isn't that vapor being drawn off and condensed into distilled water, to reclaim storage space and to concentrate the contaminants for later removal?

Why save all of the water when virtually none of the water itself is radioactive, and only the crap it has picked up is truly dangerous?

I think the answer is that running forty feet of aquarium tubing into a tank is too expensive compared to waiting until people aren't paying attention and dumping it all into the sea. That's what I'm starting to think.

[daleo]

28. Evaporating the water would concentrate the radioactive pollutants

That may be worse than keeping it dissolved or suspended, I suppose.

[sofa king]

29. greatlaurel explains below

You are correct about the concentration issue. If not heavily diluted the contaminants in solution can potentially go critical. So that answers that!

[daleo]

30. The concentrated wastes would also literally be hot and corrosive, weakening containment

Plus, it would concentrate the neutron bombardment, weakening the containment vessel that way too. Lots of reasons you want to careful.

[Trillo]

17. membrane separations can remove some types of radioactivity from some types of waste water streams.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3QaUuTg6L1cC&pg=PA919

see: 32.2.3, or 32.3.2.4

[Octafish]

21. TEPCO is a very truthful corporate citizen not.

''We never meant to conceal the information, but it never occurred to us to make it public.''

[greatlaurel]

22. Why they cannot just evaporate the water.

The water cannot be evaporated because of the radioactive isotopes that are dissolved in the water. If the water were evaporated then any of the radioactive isotopes would be concentrated. These isotopes could cause a "blue flash". In other words, the residue could go critical. The radioactive isotopes have to be kept at a low enough concentrations (and in geometrically correct configurations) to prevent them from going critical. No one has come out and flat out admitted it, but those reactor cores melted down and the water that is flowing through those reactors are in direct contact with the remnants of the melted down reactor cores, thus the water is contaminated with every type of isotope found in nuclear reactor spent fuel rods. Plus we need to include all the water that is coming from the severely damaged fuel rod storage pools adding to the levels of contamination.

This is a nightmare of mind boggling proportions. It does not get the news media coverage that it needs. The clean up of this disaster should be a world wide effort and not left to the fools running TEPCO. Unfortunately, no one has the ability to really do anything about it. The only thing anyone knows to do is collect the contaminated water. There is no technology to actually clean this mess up. For example, France is not any better off than the rest of us. They reprocess their fuels thus creating lots of wastes, dumping some crap in the English Channel and making lots of plutonium and other goodies that they are storing at sites around their country hoping to come up with a solution in a hundred years or so. Great plan.

Same thing is going on at Hanford. We can only store the radioactive isotope contaminated oils, solvents, and water that are in the storage tanks at Hanford (and many other places). To treat the wastes that are stored would further concentrate the isotopes. We can create this stuff, but we have no way to clean it up afterwards. The vitrification process will store some solid wastes successfully, but how we get the isotopes out of millions of gallons of water and hazardous oils and solvents without blowing ourselves up has not been figured out yet. Someone will surely recommend reprocessing which only concentrates the plutonium and other goodies and still leaves massive quantities of wastes. Not a good answer, either.

[sofa king]

24. Thank you!

Thank you for that answer to my question above.

[greatlaurel]

25. You are welcome.

[Generic Other]

27. No matter how little we know about nuclear waste

we should all know what you have told us. It is a real threat to those who live near it and ultimately to us all.

I feel doubly cursed sandwiched between the two -- Fukushima (glad to have the Pacific between us) and Hanford (glad to have the Cascades between us).

[Sunlei]

26. Is there any way they can treat the building to keep the groundwater out?

The complex is pretty much at sea level, groundwater will always be an issue.