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Armchair Engineering 2
Mar. 24th, 2011 07:28 pmThe situation is a lot better, but not out of the woods. Technicians and engineers are bringing more instrumentation back to get a better idea what's working, what's not, and what exactly the damage is. For all intents and purposes, reactors 1 - 3 are hazmat scrap metal. The site itself is pretty badly contaminated, but likely that can be cleaned up over the coming years.
My initial "expert" estimates were pretty badly off; it was pretty hard to fathom that restoring water (any water) flow to the reactors and pools would take so long. Meanwhile, the plant has been leaking the nasty decay products (Iodine and Caesium) into the environment. Pending more information on who knew what when, the governments actions as far as evacuations go (Here's a timeline -- I'm still trying to find a better one I saw earlier) seemed pretty brisk and reasonable. Had the situation been brought under control, that would still be the case. As it stands, you can tell people to stay indoors for only so long before it becomes patently undoable (running out of food, water etc.) and I do think when it began to look like this will be dragging on, and foreign governments expanded their evacuation zones to 80km and started to evacuate their citizens, the Japanese should have expanded their range and evacuated residents as well. Mind you, they already have hundreds of thousands of other evacuees to deal with. So, a bit of a mixed bag -- pretty solid and rapid initial reaction, not so much after a number of days of this.
I continue to be cranky at media; from what NHK shows of press conferences, plenty of information is being given out, but even NHK gets bored of all the numbers and technical talk, and goes into talking heads in the studio. That being said, things like the fuel pools came seemingly out of left field, and I hope that the US will learn some quick lessons from this.
As far as Q&A, random things I've run across:
Q) Why can't you build nuclear power plants somewhere remote?
A) Because you can't transport power particularly far without losing a significant portion of power into heat and other things along the high-voltage lines. That's what's hindering wind farms and solar power farms too. Maybe, eventually, superconductors change this but for now that's the technological limitation.
Q) Is it bad if spinach glows in the dark?
A) Yes. But this was expected, once we found out that fuel rods have been compromised and decay products are being released. Caesium and Iodine get blown by the wind, and settle on the ground either on their own or aided by rain (snow). Logically, plants (or laundry) in the open end up with this dust of radioactive contamination on them. This wouldn't have been that big of a deal, if it had just been one puff, but it's now been a steady stream for quite a while. I suspect that once someone figures out just how much material has been blown to the Pacific instead of inland, there'll be some pale faces. Anyhow, you throw the produce, milk and meat away. It'll take time to evaluate how much stuff ended up on the ground and what the long-term implications are, but my stock tip of the week is to not invest in agriculture within 50km of the power plants.
Q) Is it bad if tap water glows in the dark?
A) Yes. But if the tap water is surface water (reservoirs, rivers, lakes etc.) it's pretty much expected, as the Caesium/Iodine dust settles. That's rather short-term concern, and frankly, at the levels seen so far, not really that big of a deal. If it's seen in ground water (and I haven't seen any indication that it has yet) it becomes a pretty major problem, since that's probably not going to dilute nearly as much, and it can indicate some really nasty things about core melts / fuel melts at the plant having gotten out of containment (inasmuch as you can even talk about containment with the spent fuel pools in the first place...)
Q) Why are they piddling about with all these pumps and hoses and control rooms, just dump the whole mess in concrete!
A) It took quite a while to build the Chernobyl sarcophagus. It was only built after a bunch of people, many who died in the process, put tons of water and other stuff on the exposed mess to cool it down. And then they discovered that the first attempt wasn't so good, and are (AFAIK) still begging for money to fix it properly and maintain it. So, in short, chances are that in this case rebuilding/repairing a pumping system is faster than entombing the site. More importantly, if you manage to bury the mess, you now have no control over it. It continues to generate heat and melt, may go critical again, and will leech all the nasty stuff into the ground and ground water for a very long time. As far as total radiation released into the environment, I'd wager that fixing the cooling and taking this mess apart in a controlled matter and disposing of it in proper containers will be a lot less damaging. The latest data suggests that a lot of the containment is still solid (which also implies a lot of the nasty stuff came from one or more of the overheating pools instead) and we might as well make use of those containers.
Q) It could never happen here, right?
A) Sure it could, no matter the value of "here." Probably not an earthquake/tsunami, but a station blackout (plant loses all power) that prevents proper cooling of fuel pools or the core is eminently possible with a lot of plants. Not to mention the fuel pools themselves, or all the things nobody had even thought of that could go wrong (the unknown unknowns in Rummy-speak.) That being said, if engineers and regulators are doing due diligence, I'm confident in the ability of engineers to design a plant that's safe for all realistic scenarios. As long as the lessons learned will be applied into rapid corrective action, I'm not really worried.
Q) Radiation in seawater?
A) Yup. And of all the places they can dump the glow-in-the-dark stuff presently the sea is the second best after proper nuclear waste disposal. It's not a good thing, but it's immensely better (for humans, that is) than letting it into the atmosphere, ground water, or the ground. I'd be surprised if the measured quantities further afield are concerning, the current readings were taken right by the plant.
My initial "expert" estimates were pretty badly off; it was pretty hard to fathom that restoring water (any water) flow to the reactors and pools would take so long. Meanwhile, the plant has been leaking the nasty decay products (Iodine and Caesium) into the environment. Pending more information on who knew what when, the governments actions as far as evacuations go (Here's a timeline -- I'm still trying to find a better one I saw earlier) seemed pretty brisk and reasonable. Had the situation been brought under control, that would still be the case. As it stands, you can tell people to stay indoors for only so long before it becomes patently undoable (running out of food, water etc.) and I do think when it began to look like this will be dragging on, and foreign governments expanded their evacuation zones to 80km and started to evacuate their citizens, the Japanese should have expanded their range and evacuated residents as well. Mind you, they already have hundreds of thousands of other evacuees to deal with. So, a bit of a mixed bag -- pretty solid and rapid initial reaction, not so much after a number of days of this.
I continue to be cranky at media; from what NHK shows of press conferences, plenty of information is being given out, but even NHK gets bored of all the numbers and technical talk, and goes into talking heads in the studio. That being said, things like the fuel pools came seemingly out of left field, and I hope that the US will learn some quick lessons from this.
As far as Q&A, random things I've run across:
Q) Why can't you build nuclear power plants somewhere remote?
A) Because you can't transport power particularly far without losing a significant portion of power into heat and other things along the high-voltage lines. That's what's hindering wind farms and solar power farms too. Maybe, eventually, superconductors change this but for now that's the technological limitation.
Q) Is it bad if spinach glows in the dark?
A) Yes. But this was expected, once we found out that fuel rods have been compromised and decay products are being released. Caesium and Iodine get blown by the wind, and settle on the ground either on their own or aided by rain (snow). Logically, plants (or laundry) in the open end up with this dust of radioactive contamination on them. This wouldn't have been that big of a deal, if it had just been one puff, but it's now been a steady stream for quite a while. I suspect that once someone figures out just how much material has been blown to the Pacific instead of inland, there'll be some pale faces. Anyhow, you throw the produce, milk and meat away. It'll take time to evaluate how much stuff ended up on the ground and what the long-term implications are, but my stock tip of the week is to not invest in agriculture within 50km of the power plants.
Q) Is it bad if tap water glows in the dark?
A) Yes. But if the tap water is surface water (reservoirs, rivers, lakes etc.) it's pretty much expected, as the Caesium/Iodine dust settles. That's rather short-term concern, and frankly, at the levels seen so far, not really that big of a deal. If it's seen in ground water (and I haven't seen any indication that it has yet) it becomes a pretty major problem, since that's probably not going to dilute nearly as much, and it can indicate some really nasty things about core melts / fuel melts at the plant having gotten out of containment (inasmuch as you can even talk about containment with the spent fuel pools in the first place...)
Q) Why are they piddling about with all these pumps and hoses and control rooms, just dump the whole mess in concrete!
A) It took quite a while to build the Chernobyl sarcophagus. It was only built after a bunch of people, many who died in the process, put tons of water and other stuff on the exposed mess to cool it down. And then they discovered that the first attempt wasn't so good, and are (AFAIK) still begging for money to fix it properly and maintain it. So, in short, chances are that in this case rebuilding/repairing a pumping system is faster than entombing the site. More importantly, if you manage to bury the mess, you now have no control over it. It continues to generate heat and melt, may go critical again, and will leech all the nasty stuff into the ground and ground water for a very long time. As far as total radiation released into the environment, I'd wager that fixing the cooling and taking this mess apart in a controlled matter and disposing of it in proper containers will be a lot less damaging. The latest data suggests that a lot of the containment is still solid (which also implies a lot of the nasty stuff came from one or more of the overheating pools instead) and we might as well make use of those containers.
Q) It could never happen here, right?
A) Sure it could, no matter the value of "here." Probably not an earthquake/tsunami, but a station blackout (plant loses all power) that prevents proper cooling of fuel pools or the core is eminently possible with a lot of plants. Not to mention the fuel pools themselves, or all the things nobody had even thought of that could go wrong (the unknown unknowns in Rummy-speak.) That being said, if engineers and regulators are doing due diligence, I'm confident in the ability of engineers to design a plant that's safe for all realistic scenarios. As long as the lessons learned will be applied into rapid corrective action, I'm not really worried.
Q) Radiation in seawater?
A) Yup. And of all the places they can dump the glow-in-the-dark stuff presently the sea is the second best after proper nuclear waste disposal. It's not a good thing, but it's immensely better (for humans, that is) than letting it into the atmosphere, ground water, or the ground. I'd be surprised if the measured quantities further afield are concerning, the current readings were taken right by the plant.
