7 ms·

Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project

57 points by sasvari 13y ago

subdane 13y ago
tl;dr Site's a shitshow, 40 year cleanup plan.
- cls59 13y ago
  On the bright side, Japanese engineers get a blank check to build some awesome robots.
iterationx 13y ago
This is the most interesting fukushima news I've heard in a while http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D3FAD58 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D...
- maxerickson 13y ago
  In her FAQ, she confuses a unit and overstates things 1000x (literally, 1000x). It's people scaring themselves with the numbers they get from magic boxes, not news.
- vegardx 13y ago
  This is mostly just quackery and non-science, they keep repeating the same old stuff that the government is keeping us in the dark, and that the health effects of Fukushima is far greater than it actually is.
  - iterationx 13y ago
    I don't think you watched it.
    - vegardx 13y ago
      I watched enough to know where it was heading.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  If you're going to drop a naked link to a poorly-edited 1h38m23s video involving a really crappy VOIP connection, you might want to provide some level of context as to who it is, why it's worth watching, and where, specifically, to pay attention.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
PythonicAlpha 13y ago
We can all only hope that now goes everything according to plans. I fear, a second Tsunami in the region would be a second (maybe bigger) disaster and free even more radioactive material. They still have enough problems. There is for example the trouble with huge quantities of radioactive water -- that is anything else than solved.
drdeadringer 13y ago
I remember "older" // "elderly" Japanese folks volunteering themselves as available to help deal with Fukushima, along the lines of "What to I care of radiation, I'm old and have already had children? I want to still contribute, call me up". I wonder about this as a source of labor for demolition.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Chance of cancer and/or sterility isn't the limit of the problem. Acute radiation sickness would put a damper on their enthusiasm real quick. Until you have this jumbled mess of radioactive debris thoroughly mapped, you don't want to send anyone in there, and once you do, there are going to be a lot of places they just can't go. Cleanup workers lying on the ground vomiting their guts out aren't helping anyone.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet. Certainly, if one person could sacrifice themselves to save 100,000,000 from certain doom, then it's an easy calculation. (Not me or my family, though, please.) The current situation is more like "this is expensive to keep cool". No need to kill anyone else.
    - tsotha 13y ago
      >I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet. Yet? The odds it ever will be are infinitesimal.
- keeshawn 13y ago
  There are nuclear engineers, doctors, highly trained technicians, government agencies and regulatory bodies who handle cleaning up nuclear accidents. Untrained elderly people would not help at all. Remember the tsunami killed 20,000 people that day and Fukushima never killed anyone. Might be some cancers years down the road but the idea of sacrificing the elderly to save the world from some nuclear disaster belongs in a comic book, not reality.
Spittie 13y ago
This rises a question in me: What did we do for Chernobyl? It was decades ago, so most of this technology didn't exists yet. Or it was not nearly as bad as Fukushima?
- ori_b 13y ago
  Basically, we just covered Chernobyl with concrete and left it alone. As long as nobody goes near it, it's not doing any harm. According to the article, for political reasons, Japan wants to dismantle Fukushima, instead of simply neutralizing it, covering it up with concrete, and walling it off for a few decades before the cleanup happens. This is where the challenge comes from.
  - snom380 13y ago
    Regardless of their plans, they still need to handle the leaking groundwater, which AFAIK wasn't a big problem at Chernobyl.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Also, the region around Chernobyl isn't exactly known for the frequency of major natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunami, and typhoons.
    - ori_b 13y ago
      Chernobyl definitely had concerns with groundwater contamination. There were significant amounts of strontium within the exclusion zone, and the core had melted down into the earth, although I don't think it reached the water table. However, from everything I can find, the migration through the soil tended to be extremely slow, making it a fairly local phenomenon. In the end, cleanup efforts were abandoned since they had low impact on human health or radioactivity outside of the exclusion zone, and were worse for the environment than simply leaving things. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the journal subscriptions, so I don't have the full text of this, but I think this is the paper you want to read for an overview: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96WR03963/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96WR03963/abstrac... The conditions are very different at Fukushima, mainly due to the proximity to the ocean, so I can't really give an educated summary of the challenges with that. One thing that you have to keep in mind, though, is that water is an excellent radiation absorber, and it's actually safe to go diving in active reactor pools as long as you're more than a couple of meters away from the core. I'd expect that the radiation in the ocean would disperse quickly and harmlessly. https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
chaffneue 13y ago
On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched, built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely reactive to changes in the situation of the current site. The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process, which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.
timr 13y ago
“At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima, he declares, has ever happened before. I distinctly remember the HN conversation at the time. The pro-nuclear crowd was arguing, as it was happening, that this could never occur. The cores would never breach the containment vessels, they said. Guess you folks got that one wrong. I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold assertions from experts that certain things could never happen. Yet, here we are. A big helping of modesty seems like a good thing in this field.
- sdrothrock 13y ago
  > I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold assertions from experts that certain things could never happen. Heinlein said (in Glory Road, I believe), that "Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen." It seems to me that this is a double-edged sword -- not only can people accomplish things that experts claimed were "impossible," but things can happen that experts claim are "impossible." Most people are limited by our own views of the impossible and never change their views until proven wrong. Some never do change their views.
- jrockway 13y ago
  To be fair, a lot of the rhetoric from both sides tends to be extreme. The other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our limitless supply of fossil fuels. I think the reality is: we need to make nuclear energy didn't work. TEPCO could't do it. Hopefully someone else can.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    The other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our limitless supply of fossil fuels. Well, that's a false dichotomy and representation right there. It's possible to believe both that nuclear power isn't desirable and that fossil fuels are limited. Which from my experience a fair number of those opposed to nuclear do in fact believe. Which rather undercuts your own credibility.
mpyne 13y ago
Interestingly, Americans have a living President with hands-on experience demolishing a destroyed nuclear reactor. Jimmy Carter helped dismantle a Canadian reactor at Chalk River during his time as a Navy nuclear submariner.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Interestingly, his former boss, US Navy Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who pretty much created nuclear power as a thing, expressed severe regrets and reservations at having relied on nuclear power for the navy and in its use for civilian power generation: "I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it." Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982), via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_to_.22sink_them_all.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Yes, those most familiar with war are usually the ones most interested in stopping it. Only the sociopaths in the military go to war hoping for there to be another one they can participate in. And so Adm. Rickover's message: 'I couldn't stop war – what I could do is make it less destructive to us, so I did, grudgingly.' So it is with civilian power. Nuclear power proponents don't say that nuclear should be used at the exclusion of all other sources of power. They say it should be used to the exclusion of worse sources of power. You could paraphrase Rickover's entire excerpt here for coal, and oil, and even gas generation; all of which produce horrible things that will wreck the human race (via climate change). On that beautiful day when it's actually achievable to power the whole world by renewable energy and energy storage that doesn't involve widespread chemical waste and destruction of entire areas then you'll find nuclear power advocates telling Congress to "sink them all" too. In the meantime, we generate electrical power with the means we have available, not the means we thought we'd have, or wished we'd have.

57 points by sasvari 13y ago

subdane 13y ago

tl;dr Site's a shitshow, 40 year cleanup plan.

cls59 13y ago
On the bright side, Japanese engineers get a blank check to build some awesome robots.

iterationx 13y ago

This is the most interesting fukushima news I've heard in a while http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D3FAD58 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D...

maxerickson 13y ago
In her FAQ, she confuses a unit and overstates things 1000x (literally, 1000x). It's people scaring themselves with the numbers they get from magic boxes, not news.
vegardx 13y ago
This is mostly just quackery and non-science, they keep repeating the same old stuff that the government is keeping us in the dark, and that the health effects of Fukushima is far greater than it actually is.
- iterationx 13y ago
  I don't think you watched it.
  - vegardx 13y ago
    I watched enough to know where it was heading.
dredmorbius 13y ago
If you're going to drop a naked link to a poorly-edited 1h38m23s video involving a really crappy VOIP connection, you might want to provide some level of context as to who it is, why it's worth watching, and where, specifically, to pay attention.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

PythonicAlpha 13y ago

We can all only hope that now goes everything according to plans. I fear, a second Tsunami in the region would be a second (maybe bigger) disaster and free even more radioactive material. They still have enough problems. There is for example the trouble with huge quantities of radioactive water -- that is anything else than solved.

drdeadringer 13y ago

I remember "older" // "elderly" Japanese folks volunteering themselves as available to help deal with Fukushima, along the lines of "What to I care of radiation, I'm old and have already had children? I want to still contribute, call me up". I wonder about this as a source of labor for demolition.

nknighthb 13y ago
Chance of cancer and/or sterility isn't the limit of the problem. Acute radiation sickness would put a damper on their enthusiasm real quick. Until you have this jumbled mess of radioactive debris thoroughly mapped, you don't want to send anyone in there, and once you do, there are going to be a lot of places they just can't go. Cleanup workers lying on the ground vomiting their guts out aren't helping anyone.
- jrockway 13y ago
  I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet. Certainly, if one person could sacrifice themselves to save 100,000,000 from certain doom, then it's an easy calculation. (Not me or my family, though, please.) The current situation is more like "this is expensive to keep cool". No need to kill anyone else.
  - tsotha 13y ago
    >I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human health, yet. Yet? The odds it ever will be are infinitesimal.
keeshawn 13y ago
There are nuclear engineers, doctors, highly trained technicians, government agencies and regulatory bodies who handle cleaning up nuclear accidents. Untrained elderly people would not help at all. Remember the tsunami killed 20,000 people that day and Fukushima never killed anyone. Might be some cancers years down the road but the idea of sacrificing the elderly to save the world from some nuclear disaster belongs in a comic book, not reality.

Spittie 13y ago

This rises a question in me: What did we do for Chernobyl? It was decades ago, so most of this technology didn't exists yet. Or it was not nearly as bad as Fukushima?

ori_b 13y ago
Basically, we just covered Chernobyl with concrete and left it alone. As long as nobody goes near it, it's not doing any harm. According to the article, for political reasons, Japan wants to dismantle Fukushima, instead of simply neutralizing it, covering it up with concrete, and walling it off for a few decades before the cleanup happens. This is where the challenge comes from.
- snom380 13y ago
  Regardless of their plans, they still need to handle the leaking groundwater, which AFAIK wasn't a big problem at Chernobyl.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Also, the region around Chernobyl isn't exactly known for the frequency of major natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunami, and typhoons.
  - ori_b 13y ago
    Chernobyl definitely had concerns with groundwater contamination. There were significant amounts of strontium within the exclusion zone, and the core had melted down into the earth, although I don't think it reached the water table. However, from everything I can find, the migration through the soil tended to be extremely slow, making it a fairly local phenomenon. In the end, cleanup efforts were abandoned since they had low impact on human health or radioactivity outside of the exclusion zone, and were worse for the environment than simply leaving things. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the journal subscriptions, so I don't have the full text of this, but I think this is the paper you want to read for an overview: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96WR03963/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96WR03963/abstrac... The conditions are very different at Fukushima, mainly due to the proximity to the ocean, so I can't really give an educated summary of the challenges with that. One thing that you have to keep in mind, though, is that water is an excellent radiation absorber, and it's actually safe to go diving in active reactor pools as long as you're more than a couple of meters away from the core. I'd expect that the radiation in the ocean would disperse quickly and harmlessly. https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

chaffneue 13y ago

On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched, built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely reactive to changes in the situation of the current site. The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process, which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.

timr 13y ago

“At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima, he declares, has ever happened before. I distinctly remember the HN conversation at the time. The pro-nuclear crowd was arguing, as it was happening, that this could never occur. The cores would never breach the containment vessels, they said. Guess you folks got that one wrong. I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold assertions from experts that certain things could never happen. Yet, here we are. A big helping of modesty seems like a good thing in this field.

sdrothrock 13y ago
> I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold assertions from experts that certain things could never happen. Heinlein said (in Glory Road, I believe), that "Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen." It seems to me that this is a double-edged sword -- not only can people accomplish things that experts claimed were "impossible," but things can happen that experts claim are "impossible." Most people are limited by our own views of the impossible and never change their views until proven wrong. Some never do change their views.
jrockway 13y ago
To be fair, a lot of the rhetoric from both sides tends to be extreme. The other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our limitless supply of fossil fuels. I think the reality is: we need to make nuclear energy didn't work. TEPCO could't do it. Hopefully someone else can.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  The other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our limitless supply of fossil fuels. Well, that's a false dichotomy and representation right there. It's possible to believe both that nuclear power isn't desirable and that fossil fuels are limited. Which from my experience a fair number of those opposed to nuclear do in fact believe. Which rather undercuts your own credibility.

mpyne 13y ago

Interestingly, Americans have a living President with hands-on experience demolishing a destroyed nuclear reactor. Jimmy Carter helped dismantle a Canadian reactor at Chalk River during his time as a Navy nuclear submariner.

dredmorbius 13y ago
Interestingly, his former boss, US Navy Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who pretty much created nuclear power as a thing, expressed severe regrets and reservations at having relied on nuclear power for the navy and in its use for civilian power generation: "I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it." Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982), via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_to_.22sink_them_all.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...
- mpyne 13y ago
  Yes, those most familiar with war are usually the ones most interested in stopping it. Only the sociopaths in the military go to war hoping for there to be another one they can participate in. And so Adm. Rickover's message: 'I couldn't stop war – what I could do is make it less destructive to us, so I did, grudgingly.' So it is with civilian power. Nuclear power proponents don't say that nuclear should be used at the exclusion of all other sources of power. They say it should be used to the exclusion of worse sources of power. You could paraphrase Rickover's entire excerpt here for coal, and oil, and even gas generation; all of which produce horrible things that will wreck the human race (via climate change). On that beautiful day when it's actually achievable to power the whole world by renewable energy and energy storage that doesn't involve widespread chemical waste and destruction of entire areas then you'll find nuclear power advocates telling Congress to "sink them all" too. In the meantime, we generate electrical power with the means we have available, not the means we thought we'd have, or wished we'd have.