'A very fragile situation': Leaks from Japan's wrecked nuke plant raise fears

[Junkdrawer]

Source: NBC News

TOKYO — Like the persistent tapping of a desperate SOS message, the updates keep coming. Day after day, the operators of the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have been detailing their struggles to contain leaks of radioactive water.

The leaks, power outages and other glitches have raised fears that the plant — devastated by a tsunami in March 2011 — could even start to break apart during a cleanup process expected to take years.

The situation has also attracted the attention of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which sent a team of experts to review the decommissioning effort last month. They warned Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to clean up the site. A full report is expected to be released later this month.

Journalists have been given a rare glimpse inside Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was crippled in the 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the country two years ago. NBC News' Arata Yamamoto reports. The discovery of a greenling fish near a water intake for the power station in February that contained some 7,400 times the recommended safe limit of radioactive cesium only served to heighten concern.

Read more: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/01/17813244-a-very-fragile-situation-leaks-from-japans-wrecked-nuke-plant-raise-fears?lite

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Surprising if you follow TEPCO and the Japanese gov't press releases.

Not surprising if you've been following the accident here:
http://fairewinds.org/video

Arnie has been begging TEPCO to get the spent fuel out of reactor 4's holding ponds faster.

[mountain grammy]

1. Just a "small" problem with nuclear power. What a nightmare!

[snooper2]

3. Correction, it's a problem with running a FISSION reactor

If we would get on the ball and start spending the 100's of billions we need to on FUSION research we got the gravy train


Fusion is the future---

Don't have to worry about meltdowns with a fusion reactor---


For those who have forgotten 10th grade science (not directed at you grammy)


Definition:
Fission is the splitting of a large atom into two or more smaller ones.
Fusion is the fusing of two or more lighter atoms into a larger one.


Natural occurrence of the process:
Fission reaction does not normally occur in nature.
Fusion occurs in stars, such as the sun.


Byproducts of the reaction:
Fission produces many highly radioactive particles. Few radioactive particles are produced by fusion reaction, but if a fission "trigger" is used, radioactive particles will result from that.


Conditions:
Fission, Critical mass of the substance and high-speed neutrons are required.
Fusion, High density, high temperature environment is required.


Energy Requirement:
Takes little energy to split two atoms in a fission reaction.
Fusion, Extremely high energy is required to bring two or more protons close enough that nuclear forces overcome their electrostatic repulsion.


Energy Released:
The energy released by fission is a million times greater than that released in chemical reactions; but lower than the energy released by nuclear fusion.
The energy released by fusion is three to four times greater than the energy released by fission.


Nuclear weapon:
One class of nuclear weapon is a fission bomb, also known as an atomic bomb or atom bomb.
One class of nuclear weapon is the hydrogen bomb, which uses a fission reaction to "trigger" a fusion reaction.

[JayhawkSD]

4. The problem is something called "breakthrough"

Controlled fusion reaction requires a "break through" in technology, and that is completely unpredictable. It could happen tomorrow, or we could spend hundreds of billions of dollars for centuries and never achieve it. It is, at this point a complete pipe dream, because so far we have not even come close. We have been trying for decades and are still not within an order of magnitude of achieving it.

I certainly do not advocate expansion of nuclear energy, or even the continued relaince on it, but to advocate against it based on the argument that we can replace it with fusion energy is simply wild eyed speculation. We cannot abandon what we have based on the hope for something that is extermely unlikely to happen.

[snooper2]

7. Closer than you think..and it is happening--- luckily our tax dollars are helping pay for it (9%)

JET – A European joint venture
The Joint European Torus (JET) investigates the potential of fusion power as a safe, clean, and virtually limitless energy source for future generations. The largest tokamak in the world, it is the only operational fusion experiment capable of producing fusion energy. As a joint venture, JET is collectively used by more than 40 laboratories of EURATOM Associations. The European Fusion Development Agreement, EFDA for short, provides the work platform to exploit JET in an efficient and focused way. As a consequence more than 350 scientists and engineers from all over Europe currently contribute to the JET programme.

http://www.efda.org/JET/

Some really cool pictures of JET here----

http://www.efda.org/multimedia/photo-gallery/


At least our government is smart enough to contribute to the ITER project--

ITER (originally an acronym of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and Latin for the way or the road) is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering project, which is currently building the world's largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor at the Cadarache facility in the south of France.[1] The ITER project aims to make the long-awaited transition from experimental studies of plasma physics to full-scale electricity-producing fusion power plants. The project is funded and run by seven member entities — the European Union (EU), India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The EU, as host party for the ITER complex, is contributing 45% of the cost, with the other six parties contributing 9% each.[2][3][4]

ITER SITE 2013

Assembly Hall of the Tokamak Complex _ Basemat close to be ready – March 2013



Overflow network - pipes’ backfilling



Tokamak Pit_ Implementation of the cantilevered work platform for galleries – March 2013

The ITER fusion reactor itself has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power for 50 megawatts of input power, or ten times the amount of energy put in.[5] The machine is expected to demonstrate the principle of producing more energy from the fusion process than is used to initiate it, something that has not yet been achieved with previous fusion reactors. Construction of the facility began in 2007, and the first plasma is expected to be produced in 2020.[6] When ITER becomes operational, it will become the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use, surpassing the Joint European Torus. The first commercial demonstration fusion power plant, named DEMO, is proposed to follow on from the ITER project to bring fusion energy to the commercial market.[7]

Run by--

Fusion for Energy

The European Union's Joint Undertaking for ITER and the Development of Fusion Energy or Fusion for Energy (F4E) is a European Union (EU) organisation known as a Joint Undertaking created under the Euratom Treaty by decision of the Council of the European Union. Its headquarters are in Barcelona, in Spain, and it is responsible for the EU's contributions to the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, in Cadarache, France) project.

http://www.f4e.europa.eu/

[Overseas]

2. K&R. Our media wants us to believe environmental crises are over.

Even as the problems persist for years.

[GliderGuider]

5. These are the sorts of problems that will follow us into the aftermath of industrial civilization.

There's a muttering of malcontents that are raising the alarm about the possible impact of climate change on the future of the globalized industrial experiment. Some people are even saying that the world system could begin to lose big chunks of its structural integrity over the next two decades, as food and energy prices rise, social instability worsens, and the world financial system crumbles.

If that happens, then having a nuclear accident that would take 40 years to clean up under the best of conditions is close to a nightmare scenario. Not to mention that if things begin to fall apart as badly as I suspect they could, the probability of other Fukushimas springing up around the world begins to rise. The consequences of humanity's technological and thermodynamic hubris may be coming home to roost.

[heaven05]

6. slooooowly

the news comes out of an, since fubar day, on going situation that is poisoning EVERYTHING around it for thousands of years.. Land and ocean. Who in the hell are they trying to protect??? I hate big business and the grief it has brought to this planet.

[Gregorian]

8. Big business is doing what big population asks for.

Let me put it this way- Add a billion more people, and there will be bigger and more corporations doing bigger things.

I wish we could all start focusing on the real problem. I mean, even if we have 100% renewable energy, that doesn't address deforestation, depletion of fisheries, ocean acidification, and the list goes on and on. All population related.

It's the population, which annoys almost everyone for some reason. We've got to get over it, and start working on the real problem. Stabilize world population, and then start bringing it down.

[Moostache]

10. What do you think is happening already?

The idea of reducing the population is part and parcel of the current atmosphere of climate denialists. The gist of it is this - the people who will most immediately feel the effects of climate change are the poorest on the planet anyway....so, since they do not have any economic value, they are surplus population that can be sacrificed and everything goes back to "normal".

I'm not suggesting this thinking is right in anyway, just pointing out that there seems to be a lot of people who internalized this kind of thought a long time ago and will not be shaken from it until the impacts of global climate change (and everything else) is on their own doorstep.

[PearliePoo2]

9. If you'd like to educate yourself re: Fukushima

go to fairewinds.org as the OP suggests, and look at the latest videos from March and listen to the latest podcasts from April.
Might not want to do so before breakfast however...
K&R

[marions ghost]

11. If Arnie Gunderson's worried about the time frame

for removing spent fuel from reactor 4............................

Then I am.