Tepco To Flood Damaged Reactors With Water

[Octafish]

Source: NIKKEI.com / Dow Jones

TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Recovery workers at Japan's quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex are preparing to flood damaged reactors with thousands of tons of additional water in an extraordinary step to cool them, despite worries that leaks could result and exacerbate dangerous conditions at the site.

SNIP...

Tepco warned that the new cooling effort puts recovery workers in uncharted territory, though it believes new data show it is safe enough to allow stronger cooling measures. Workers plan to conduct a test run Wednesday on the plant's No. 1 reactor before proceeding, which could happen as soon as later that day if the test is successful.

Tepco is preparing to inject additional water into each reactor's pressure vessel, the thick steel cylinder that houses the nuclear fuel. Under the plan by Tepco and government officials, the water will overflow each pressure vessel and then fill up the containment vessel, the beaker-shaped metal container that surrounds it, as it pours through open valves near the top.

The goal is to completely submerge the nuclear fuel inside. Currently, Tepco and government officials believe somewhat less than half of the fuel in each reactor is exposed, though details are difficult to confirm because of high radiation.



Read more: http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20110426D26JF238.htm

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Has everyone gone nuts or is the situation absolutely nuts? Flooding reactors already damaged by explosions to keep the fuel inside them cooled sounds even crazier.

EDIT: reactors, not buildings, are to be flooded. Still...

[bananas]

1. ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=290499&mesg_id=290553

[Octafish]

10. Great Forum, Environment-Energy.

Plutonium-238 in the Northern Hemisphere detected by U.S. EPA in March 2011 - What it means

[buddysmellgood]

2. Remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor.

[nonperson]

3. But you can put too much nuclear reactor in water

And too much is really very little.

[defendandprotect]

12. 1000% ---

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. apparently not!

[Festivito]

4. Yet, water oxidizes the fuel container making it brittle, then broken pieces fall, then...

... loose fuel falls,
then they make holes,
then they fall into the same holes which makes them hotter and more excited,
then the bottom of the building deteriorates further and further, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, nucleus by nucleus (for what doesn't blow away with the extreme temperatures, making things sink deeper, ... while that again makes them hotter.

on it goes.

FUBAR

Not worth the discussion.

Up in the air, vaporized Plutonium beside us and in our food, vaporized Iodine that our body thinks it needs, ...

Water, separated back into Hydrogen and Oxygen, and BOMBING the vapor into the air.

And, the water, the water itself, carrying those elements for decades, centuries and millennia into our food chain, changing DNA, starting quiet cancers.

I've been quiet on this issue.

What can be said?

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. again?

[Sirveri]

7. All they're saying that they're doing is going solid, and then increasing losses to ambient.

Basically you generally don't like to take your reactor solid because it makes pressure control more difficult. But it sounds like they basically said screw it, they'll open the primary vents and then keep the system at ambient pressure. Once they collapse all the steam pockets in the system the effluent will spill out and fill up the dry well. Since water is better at removing heat than air, filling up the dry well will promote losses to ambient. It would be nice if they could get some guys in there to strip the insulation from the piping to further promote it, but rad levels are probably too high currently for that. If they're shooting pure water in then it shouldn't be a really significant corrosion concern. I do however have concerns that the nuclear instrumentation is hardened against water damage however, if it's not there's a chance that they'll short out all their instruments and then be blinded for the rest of the recovery. However, I suspect that they are hardened since steam leaks inside the containment are possible and they'd want to protect the nuclear instrumentation during a standard loss of coolant casualty.

[TacticalPeek]

8. That's just crazy talk.

:shrug:

[nc4bo]

9. Crazy talk's all they got left. Make it so.

What else can you expect when an uncontrollable monster is on the loose. No one would ever expect something like this to happen.

I suspect somewhere in a Japanese underground bunker, there's an ass machine from which ideas can be quickly pulled out at a moments notice.

[defendandprotect]

11. They're stalling for time -- obviously don't have a clue what to do --

except one thing we can be sure of, more radiated water going into the

Pacific isn't going to help any of us!!

Don't think they can shut this down as Chernobyl was -- i.e., "buried" --

Think I just saw a report somewhere here that this thing just runs into the sea!!

Unlike Chernobyl --