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Given the damage is already done, why not leave it in place? Encase it in concrete and come back in a decade or two when the worst products have decayed?
by fbdab103 2y ago
Given the damage is already done, why not leave it in place? Encase it in concrete and come back in a decade or two when the worst products have decayed?
- loeg 2y ago> an extremely important step to steadily carry out future decommissioning work > Better understanding the melted fuel debris from inside the reactors is key to their decommissioning It's not exactly clear to me how this benefits decommissioning either, but that's all I got from the article.
- Retric 2y agoPeople can’t safely work near the fuel(high level nuclear waste) because it’s really radioactive. They can work where high level nuclear waste (fuel) used to be.
- lazide 2y agoAlso, if they don’t know exactly how thoroughly it melted or the precise level of damage, it’s pretty hard to fix it. It isn’t the type of problem amenable to just bulldozing it into a hole, unless you’re Russian anyway.
- dylan604 2y agoFix it? Do you mean the design? Because there's not fixing this one. It seems to me the fix would be to not have your backup generators below the water line.
- Dalewyn 2y agoNo, the fix is to not have fucking politicians in charge of practical matters. Yes, I'm serious. TEPCO wanted to dump sea water into the reactors as a last resort so they wouldn't melt down, but the Japanese government at the time didn't allow it because the reactors would be rendered unusable. Of course, the reactors melted down and became unusable anyway. Fukushima #1 was a human failure and the only solution to that is a human solution. Any engineering solution will be foiled by a bigger human failure, as the saying goes.
- dylan604 2y agoI mean sure, but if the backup generators weren't submerged from failure to plan for flooding, then the politicians wouldn't be in that situation. That's an engineering solution that isn't like earth shattering. Maybe it was a human bean counter that said it would cost too much (ha!) to do that for the generators. This isn't the same situation of planning to use school buses as an evacuation plan not realizing their parking lot is likely to be flooded. This is a nuclear reactor and there's meant to be some really smart people involved.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>if the backup generators weren't submerged from failure to plan for flooding We need to be fair here: Plans for potential flooding were made, the issue was nobody expected a tsunami that fucking tall and reasonably so. Guidelines and such have been updated since so it (hopefully) won't happen again, but you can't fault engineers of the past for working with the data they had and coming to the conclusions they did.
- serf 2y ago>the issue was nobody expected a tsunami that fucking tall and reasonably so. that's less reasonable when you consider Japan's history with tsunami. The events in 1933,1896, and 1993 produced tsunamis with larger wave heights than the Tohoku event.
- lazide 2y agoAs in ‘fix the mess’ - you know, mitigate the melted down reactor catastrophe?
- loeg 2y agoYeah but why have people there at all? Upthread commenter is asking about just filling it with concrete and leaving it alone.
- Retric 2y agoThey need to freeze the ground to avoid water flowing into and out of the area. Covering in concrete alone wouldn’t safely contain it, they would need to add concrete beneath the fuel, which while physically possible would be unbelievably expensive and not actually last that long. Eventually tossing future generations an even more expensive problem. https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/decommision/planaction/landwardwall/index-e.html#:~:text=It%20is%20actually%20a%20frozen,its%20mixing%20with%20contaminated%20water https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/decommision/planaction/landwardwa....
- loeg 2y agoThanks.
- robertlagrant 2y agoThe article mentions a 30-40 year cleanup target; perhaps they're using these samples to analyse how best to proceed?
- Retric 2y agoIt’s contained, not stable. They are doing a bunch of things like freezing the ground to avoid water intrusion which have high ongoing costs. Remove high level waste to a more stable environment is the first step in reducing those ongoing costs.
- surfingdino 2y agoIt may not be that simple. Scientists want to know what's going on down there. As Chernobyl shows us, we don't really know when it's over https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/322755-chernobyl-is-heating-up-again-and-scientists-arent-sure-why https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/322755-chernobyl-is-heat...