Japan Studies Ice Wall to Halt Radioactive Water..

[buster]

Link


Quote:
At least 300 tons of water laced with radioactive particles of cesium, strontium linked to bone cancer, and tritium flow each day into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled atomic station in Japan. The plan to contain the health threat is to build an underground containment wall made of ice.

 

[simple_gifts]

That is one unfortunate situation;it seems to have unravelled the country's confidence in their own engineering.

 

[440Magnum]

And worse still, stopped the US just as we were about to finally come to our senses and return to building new nuclear plants. Near unlimited electrical power would solve SO many problems- carbon pollution, water shortages (cheap power for massive scale desalination and distribution), no worries about massive increases in the number of electric vehicles tapped into the grid, etc.


No, you don't put nuke plants on the coastline in a tsunami-prone country. But because one country made that mistake, we all pay due to irrational fear.

 

[JethroBodine]

There is a doomsday scenario for every nuclear reactor station. They built the Perry Nuclear plant on a tectonic fault in NE Ohio. We may have an earthquake in 3 days or 679 years. Who knows? Most plants need to be near large bodies of water for cooling tower water recycling. Davis Bessie in Port Clinton, Ohio almost melted down because of lack of maintenance or serious blunders. Look at the history of a Power Plant that would poison all of Lake Erie and maybe Lake Ontario...scary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station

 

[mongo161]

+1

Originally Posted By: 440Magnum
And worse still, stopped the US just as we were about to finally come to our senses and return to building new nuclear plants. Near unlimited electrical power would solve SO many problems- carbon pollution, water shortages (cheap power for massive scale desalination and distribution), no worries about massive increases in the number of electric vehicles tapped into the grid, etc.


No, you don't put nuke plants on the coastline in a tsunami-prone country. But because one country made that mistake, we all pay due to irrational fear.

 

[Merkava_4]

That leaking nuclear plant is gonna poison all the sea water in the whole world eventually.

 

[oldhp]

Until the U.S. can find a place to safely store the used rods we should NOT build anymore nuclear power plants. The used rods pose much greater threat.

 

[Shannow]

You don't need to store the used rods...really...

The "used" rods, are absolutely chock full of FUEL that can feed the next generation of reactors.

Take the fuel and use it, and there aren't rods waiting to cause a disaster.

Days like this I wish Al was still around here.

 

[buster]

Surprised a country like Japan dropped the ball on something like this. I don't know much about nuclear power at all and how it's handled/regulated but from what I read I was a bit surprised.

 

[Nick R]

Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
That leaking nuclear plant is gonna poison all the sea water in the whole world eventually.



Do you realize the amount of radioactive material actually coming out of that plant? It sounds like a lot of water- but it's very misleading. It's actually only very slightly radioactive. A tiny bit. And then you are diluting it in the ocean. Honestly people are such alarmists. You receive far more radiation by spending a day outside mowing the yard than you would swimming for years in the ocean with this going on.

 

[Nick R]

Originally Posted By: Shannow
You don't need to store the used rods...really...

The "used" rods, are absolutely chock full of FUEL that can feed the next generation of reactors.

Take the fuel and use it, and there aren't rods waiting to cause a disaster.

Days like this I wish Al was still around here.


Most cases yes, but you need a different type of reactor to use them- a "breeder" reactor.

 

[440Magnum]

Originally Posted By: oldhp
Until the U.S. can find a place to safely store the used rods we should NOT build anymore nuclear power plants. The used rods pose much greater threat.


Nuclear plant "rods" (waste fuel) is definitely a nasty, nasty thing. It would be blind to say "its not a problem to deal with it."

But think of it this way: coal and even natural gas burning plants across the nation spew thousands of TONS of waste into the air every DAY, most of it CO2 but some of it low-level radioactive in the case of coal. Even with scrubbers, the byproduct is gypsum and it is very low-level radioactive. The millions of TONS of gaseous waste scatter worldwide. The nuclear industry doesn't produce an equivalent weight of waste for years, and its very compact, solid, and doesn't blow around in the wind. Stuff it away in a deep, stable, desert cavern, bottom of a mid-ocean trench in a subduction zone where it'll get pulled back into the mantle of the earth, etc. There are ways to deal with it more safely, IMO, than there are with gaseous waste from all those coal plants.

Too many myths surround nuke power also. The fuel used in reactors won't cause a nuclear explosion, no matter what you do to it- it isn't the same ratio of isotopes as what's needed to explode. It would be like trying to make asphalt explode- it will burn slowly, but never blow up. Nor do the byproducts of the reactors we use in the US create bomb material- they aren't breeder reactors, they're BWR and PWR reactors, which have a superb safety record, too. Think of all the navy ships and submarines that use PWRs every day for the past 60 years.

Anyway, the disaster in Japan is real and no one should downplay that fact- but it was caused by foolish placement of the plant in the first place. Not by anything inherent to nuclear power.

 

[Drew99GT]

What do they do now with the waste??? I read they keep the rods in cooling pools on site at most facilities, and that used nuclear fuel rods are infinitely more radioactive than new fuel. That is the problem at Fukushima; all the spent fuel stored on site. You can say we should stick it here, jam it in this underwater trench etc., but they don't have the technology to do that now. There is no political or environmental policy as it is now for what to do with the used fuel.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
That leaking nuclear plant is gonna poison all the sea water in the whole world eventually.


No, the radioactive stuff diluted over the entire world's ocean water will be below background noise, undetectable.

Originally Posted By: Drew99GT
What do they do now with the waste??? I read they keep the rods in cooling pools on site at most facilities, and that used nuclear fuel rods are infinitely more radioactive than new fuel. That is the problem at Fukushima; all the spent fuel stored on site. You can say we should stick it here, jam it in this underwater trench etc., but they don't have the technology to do that now. There is no political or environmental policy as it is now for what to do with the used fuel.


You need to cool it down enough before you can reprocess it or bury it underground, takes a few years.

Originally Posted By: Shannow
You don't need to store the used rods...really...

The "used" rods, are absolutely chock full of FUEL that can feed the next generation of reactors.

Take the fuel and use it, and there aren't rods waiting to cause a disaster.

Days like this I wish Al was still around here.


They becomes more radioactive after you use the fuel again in a new generation of reactor (i.e. fast breeder type) or reprocess it. There will be higher concentration of short and med half life fission product instead of U235/U238/P239.

But when you generate heat (which is what nuclear reactor really is doing, boil water), you will generate fission product, and that takes some short / med term storage. Next gen reactor makes them more concentrated and radiate faster, rather than a lot more low concentration (still concentrate enough) of low half life junks.

Originally Posted By: 440Magnum
Near unlimited electrical power would solve SO many problems- carbon pollution, water shortages (cheap power for massive scale desalination and distribution), no worries about massive increases in the number of electric vehicles tapped into the grid, etc.


No, you don't put nuke plants on the coastline in a tsunami-prone country. But because one country made that mistake, we all pay due to irrational fear.

It MAY be unlimited, but it is definitely not free, therefore it will be limited by the cost (of regulation, of safety mechanism, of politics, of risk and insurance, etc).

EV will still be limited by the battery cost and the grid size. We have no problem with power plant output now for EV, it is the expensive battery and the bottleneck in grid that cause problems.

 

[440Magnum]

Originally Posted By: Drew99GT
What do they do now with the waste??? I read they keep the rods in cooling pools on site at most facilities, and that used nuclear fuel rods are infinitely more radioactive than new fuel. That is the problem at Fukushima; all the spent fuel stored on site. You can say we should stick it here, jam it in this underwater trench etc., but they don't have the technology to do that now. There is no political or environmental policy as it is now for what to do with the used fuel.


The technology could CERTAINLY be developed... but as long as we're content with living in hysterical fear of nuclear plants and letting the number of them dwindle away to zero all the while breathing coal fumes, it won't be developed either. If we hadn't let the inmates run the asylum in the 60s, we'd have put about 30% less carbon in the atmosphere that we have to this point.

Imagine if all the resources applied to building hybrid cars had been put to solving nuclear waste? Or if equal resources had been applied as those needed to develop smart phones?

Again- not to downplay the seriousness of spent fuel. Its seriously nasty, evil, ugly stuff... but we simply haven't even BEGUN to apply resources to solving the problem, we are CHOOSING to let it accumulate! Its sort of the opposite of "if you build it they will come." "If deliberately avoid solving it, they won't build plants." Its all fear based on hysteria, not engineering.

As for the concern that the Fukushima plant will "poison the whole ocean," Uh... all that radioactive material came out of the earth's crust in the first place and was concentrated and processed. If it could instantaneously be diluted throughout the oceans of the world, it would be below the detectable background radiation of seawater. The problem is that it IS so concentrated and hangs around in local ocean currents at levels far above the background for a long time. If there had been safe off-site storage, the problem there would be FAR smaller.

 

[440Magnum]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear

EV will still be limited by the battery cost and the grid size. We have no problem with power plant output now for EV, it is the expensive battery and the bottleneck in grid that cause problems.


We don't have a grid problem now because EVs still have a battery problem... true. You DO realize that's hiding one problem with another problem, right? Heaven forbid that the battery problem actually BE solved in the next few years! The electric grid generating capacity margins are alarmingly low these days just to account for heat waves and normal equipment downtime (thank you economic de-regulation and environmental over-regulation that have combined to prevent construction of enough new generation capacity for a couple of decades). And adding large amounts of renewable power brings its own grid problems- I was reading a presentation on the power grid on the Big Island of Hawaii a while back- it's an interesting case study because its small, isolated, and has a HUGE percentage of renewable power compared to the three mainland grid systems. Because the HI grid has got so much wind power, the entire grid has teetered on the edge of frequency-instability a few times. The conventional plants (oil-fired steam plants, a few gas turbines, and a lot of medium-speed diesels in this case) don't have enough rotational inertia to stabilize the frequency when the wind output rises or drops or demand changes sharply. But back to EVs- If we get 20% 30% or more market penetration of EVs and all those people get home, flip the AC down to 72 and plug in the EV at the same time... the margin will be negative.

When you look at electricity and water in the US, there are a number of BIG problems currently being masked by other problems, and it's typical political short-sightedness that's preventing them from being solved. Engineers should be allowed to run the mechanisms of the world and everyone else should stand back and shut up.

 

[badtlc]

Electric generation is not an issue and won't be anytime soon. Like it has already been said, it is the distribution grid that is the problem. You can't easily deliver all the available power to where it needs to be. You can produce 100 MW of power, but if your distribution grid can only pump out 50 MW, you can only provide 50 MW.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: Nick R
Originally Posted By: Shannow
You don't need to store the used rods...really...

The "used" rods, are absolutely chock full of FUEL that can feed the next generation of reactors.

Take the fuel and use it, and there aren't rods waiting to cause a disaster.

Days like this I wish Al was still around here.


Nah, breeder is a different answer to a different question...and still a question that needs asking.

You just can't reprocess fuel in the US, due to industry and political pressures. Doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done.

Most cases yes, but you need a different type of reactor to use them- a "breeder" reactor.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: 440Magnum
But back to EVs- If we get 20% 30% or more market penetration of EVs and all those people get home, flip the AC down to 72 and plug in the EV at the same time... the margin will be negative.

When you look at electricity and water in the US, there are a number of BIG problems currently being masked by other problems, and it's typical political short-sightedness that's preventing them from being solved. Engineers should be allowed to run the mechanisms of the world and everyone else should stand back and shut up.



The surges is easy to resolve. We already have smart meter and smart controller that the utility can turn on / off based on load to prevent blowing circuits. I have a SmartAC controller on my AC that would throttle it off every 15 mins during peak heat days to avoid drawing too much current. By the time we have that many EV on the road, there would be enough technology to have tiered rate that would let the owner charge the EV when it is not the most expensive time (i.e. midnight) unless it is dangerously low in charge (i.e. less than 10 miles).

Think unlimited night and weekend calls for cell phone rate plan, the same would hold for non critical electrical usage like electric dryers, EV, AC etc at peak time.

People were concerned about not able to control these things in 1993, but in 2013 we have wireless network, internet, and cheap computer chips that can make these problems go away, for as low as $50.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: Nick R
Originally Posted By: Shannow
You don't need to store the used rods...really...

The "used" rods, are absolutely chock full of FUEL that can feed the next generation of reactors.

Take the fuel and use it, and there aren't rods waiting to cause a disaster.

Days like this I wish Al was still around here.


Most cases yes, but you need a different type of reactor to use them- a "breeder" reactor.


Try again (messed up last one)...breeders are a different answer to a different question than fuel reprocessing, which can use "standard" reactors. Breeders take "other" materials like thorium and U238 and make fuel out of them.

Industry and Govt prevent that reprocessing from taking place in the US, which would reduce the "waste" inventory markedly, and reduce the profits on new fuel rods in expensive old reactors.

France, England, and Japan use their fuel again, no reason for the US not to...I'd support Australia taking their stuff back and reprocessing it for profit.