(from: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/12/135324541/cleaning-up-fukushima-a-challenge-to-the-core)

“Nuclear engineers working at the Japanese plant are dealing with two problems at the same time: They are working to fully stabilize the plant’s reactors, and they are trying to control the release of radioactive material.
It could take weeks or months to stabilize the reactors. And containing and cleaning up the radioactive material could take at least 10 years

In the case of Three Mile Island, we had about half a million gallons of very highly radioactive water in the basement of the containment building,” Barrett says. “It was about 10 feet deep. They’re facing the same situation in Fukushima, but they have three of these cores that have severe damage to them, so they probably have tens of millions of gallons of the same highly radioactive water that they’re dealing with.”

Once the energy, gas and water aspects of the nuclear crisis are under control, the most highly radioactive materials â?? the solids in the reactor cores â?? remain. Just getting to them is a problem.

After the Three Mile Island accident, the core was still intact, but overhead cranes that usually do the lifting work were damaged by fire. So workers first had to refurbish the cranes to lift the reactor’s lid. In fact, it was five years until they could look inside the reactor; only then did they discover that 30 percent of the nuclear core had melted.

Leo Lessard, a nuclear engineer at the French company Areva, says just getting to the cores at Fukushima Dai-ichi is going to be much more difficult than it was at Three Mile Island. For starters, the tops of two buildings have collapsed, so that debris will have to be cleared.

“A lot of that material is probably very radioactive, so there will have to be shielding and other precautions incorporated in order to protect workers who have to do some manual operations in those areas,” Lessard says.

Robots may be useful, he says, but don’t assume they can pick through all that debris. And if it turns out that some of the nuclear fuel has managed to leak through a hole in the reactor vessel â?? as some officials have speculated â?? it will be quite a challenge to scoop it up and put it into a shielded container.

“In that case, you have a tremendously high radiation field, as opposed to having it underwater, where the water is providing complete shielding,” Lessard says. He expects the cleanup to take more than a decade.”

Close– I did say in a prior comment that we can’t undo what has already been done. Wish we could. But what we can do is stop defending nuclear with spurious claims of safety, reliability and necessity.

Begin decommissioning immediately. This will take decades. And we’ll still be left with all sorts of hazardous materials. But we don’t have to keep producing electricity from a source that is inherently hazardous.

Because we don’t need it.

I thought that should have been evident when I posted the link about how either solar or wind alone can meet world energy needs.

The technology is there right now. And if we bother to invest in it, generation and distribution will become more efficient. All that’s lacking is political will. The misleading arguments about nuclear power’s relative safety compared to– what, jumping off a cliff in a trash bag?– serve to perpetuate the delusion. And create more health problems, more avoidable deaths.

As ususal, however, you aren’t really interested in having a real discussion.

Don’t think I don’t notice when I pose direct questions, and you decide the converstation is about something else.

Your simple solution for a nuclear catastrophe– encase the stuff in concrete and bury it. Agreed. We have no choice. I think entombment was mentioned repeatedly the first week of the accident (and by me, here). Glad you caught up.

Really, Daedalus– how do you get at the stuff to encase it and bury it? If you have the answer, why are you holding out? There are plenty of people at Fukushima that would love to hear it. Because the real answer is, you have no idea how to get at the stuff. Neither does anybody else, anywhere. That’s why they’re bulldozing over it. It’s an admission they have no other back-up plan. Time for you to acknowledge that to. The simple, textbook answers only work in textbooks. In the real world, people are being exposed, and many will die. That’s just how it is, and the exposed rods are no closer to being contained than on March 12.

So how do you propose to carry out your plan? And what happens to the people of Honshu in the meantime?

Since the Japanese government today acknowledged what reasonable people knew three weeks ago– that Daiichi is a 7 on the accident scale, as bad as (actually considerably worse than) Chernobyl, with “widespread health and environmental effects”, how about you do the same?

Your off-hand ‘collect and bury it’ statement glosses over just how much material has been released, the technical barriers to containing it, and you still haven’t shown much grasp of just how dangerous the release is, and will be for centuries.

Another direct question: What do you think the direct health effects of “10,000 terabecqurels per hour” released from the plant might be? (source: New York Times wire services)

Still suggesting we avoid bananas?

I’m becoming less convinced over time that you really have an understanding of the basic aspects of what is happening at and around Daiichi. Maybe I’m too easily suckered into debates, as BKS suggested.

So your solution is to find a time machine, go back in time and tell FDR to not do the Manhattan Project because in 30 years Japan will purchase BWRs from GE, and then in 70 years there will be a earthquake and tsunami that will damage those 6 reactors and cause some radioactivity to leak out. In Japan. The same Japan that just bombed Pearl Harbor. But it is ok, by then Japan will be a really good ally.

When you do that, be sure to tell FDR that he should spend the $2 billion on conventional weapons instead because he is going to need them. After the two atomic bombs from the Manhattan Project, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally, without an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Without those atomic bombs, Japan might have to be invaded. He needs to be prepared to do that, because as good an ally as Japan will be in 70 years, in the next 5, they will be a pretty serious adversary.

“Experts like Michio Kaku mentioned that Plutonium could be released from the MOX fuel, and then when the explosions began occurring so often (beginning on March 12), many nuclear experts stated that plutonium is a byproduct of the nuclear fission process. The explosions, whether hydrogen in origin or not, occurred at least five times over the month long course of the disaster.

Apparently TEPCO knew about Plutonium isotopes on 3/21 and 3/22. It was discovered in the soil around #1 and around several parts of #1â??s infrastructure…

The 3/26 NRC document details neutron sources being thrown up to 1 mile and bulldozing of very high dose rate material being bulldozed between units 3 and 4.”

(from: http://nuclear-news.net/)

“Plutonium is a manmade element created in nuclear reactors. Plutonium is fiendishly toxic. A speck of it the size of a pollen grain, if caught in the lungs after inhalation or in bone after ingestion, can cause cancer. A severe reactor accident with plutonium-based MOX fuel in one-third of the core will result in 100% more latent cancer fatalities than if the core was made up entirely of conventional uranium fuel. Such an accident with an all-MOX core would kill 300% more people than with an all-uranium coreâ?¦”

See, I actually got that– your solution is so simple, why hasn’t anyone thought of it before?

That’s why I answered you with this:

‘how do we get at it? Daiichi is dangerous even without considering the radiation– it’s a bombed out mass of steel and broken concrete, on unstable ground. Add in radiation levels burning out the detectors, and I’m not sure how you get at at it, transport it (to where?).’

Your ‘solution’, Daedalus, is, once again, an idealized abstraction. What prevents you from factoring in the conditions at Daiichi as they actually are? It really is a recurring blind spot with you.

Nobody can get near the materials that need to be contained. So they remain uncontainable.

To put it bluntly, there are rods in three reactor cores and a few spent fuel ponds that are naked to the environment. Containment has been lost for almost a month. There is no evidence of consistent control over the decay of the materials. There is eveidence of periodic re-initiation of criticality.

This is likely to continue for several months. Your solution may not even begin for a year or more.

How much radioactive material gets released over that time?

“Putting up impossible demands simply makes the status quo the default. That is why there are many thousands of tons of spent fuel accumulating in storage pools at reactor sites and not at a central radioactive waste depository.It is people wanting perfect solutions NIMBY and using the absence of a perfect solution NIMBY as the reason to do nothing.”

I ain’t looking for perfection; let’s start with accepting the reality of the situation first. It is this reality that, if acknowledged, leads me to conclude nuclear power never was worth whatever benefits it is purported to provide.

If nobody getting cancer, no miscarriages, no birth defects, and no deaths is an ‘impossible’ standard for nuclear to meet, then maybe you need to revisit your notion of what constitutes reasonable safety, rather than me reconsidering what is pragmatic at the moment.

To call other things dirty doesn’t make it clean. Say it another hundred times, and you’d still be peddling the same false comparison, and the same Hobson’s choice.

Adela: “The total capacity you have to replace if you take away nuclear is beyond renewables reach”

Oops! You might want to consider data before offering suppostions:

(from:http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/october19/jacobson-energy-study-102009.html)

“The Scientific American article provides a quantification of global solar and wind resources based on new research by Jacobson and Delucchi.

Analyzing only on-land locations with a high potential for producing power, they found that even if wind were the only method used to generate power, the potential for wind energy production is 5 to 15 times greater than what is needed to power the entire world. For solar energy, the comparable calculation found that solar could produce about 30 times the amount needed.

If the world built just enough wind and solar installations to meet the projected demand for the scenario outlined in the article, an area smaller than the borough of Manhattan would be sufficient for the wind turbines themselves. Allowing for the required amount of space between the turbines boosts the needed acreage up to 1 percent of Earth’s land area, but the spaces between could be used for crops or grazing. The various non-rooftop solar power installations would need about a third of 1 percent of the world’s land, so altogether about 1.3 percent of the land surface would suffice.”

It could grow much more quickly, but only if we were willing to spend the same money on renewables that we do on coal, nuclear, and petroleum. That is, if they weren’t so heavily subsidized, none of the dirty energy sources would be cost effective.

â??The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no level of radiation that is so low that it is without health risks,â? Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

So why do you demand that nuclear power be â??without health riskâ? when that isn’t the standard for any other human activity?

You do appreciate that is what you are doing when you demand storage of all radioactive materials for multiple times their half life don’t you?

You do appreciate that stance is inconsistent with not treating K40 containing materials the same way?

What standard do you want to apply?

Aldo wants to put radioactive waste into the Sun? That is complete nonsense. It costs something like $10k to put 1 kg into LEL orbit using launch technology that fails catastrophically maybe once per thousand launches.

Putting up impossible demands simply makes the status quo the default. That is why there are many thousands of tons of spent fuel accumulating in storage pools at reactor sites and not at a central radioactive waste depository. It is people wanting perfect solutions NIMBY and using the absence of a perfect solution NIMBY as the reason to do nothing.

What standard do you want to apply?

I have said what they should do, they need to get all the radioactive materials in containers and off site so that workers can have access to the site and remove all the radioactive crap. Excavate tunnels a km underground in granite or basalt and put the stuff there.

Good that we agree– how do we get at it?

Daiichi is dangerous even without considering the radiation– it’s a bombed out mass of steel and broken concrete, on unstable ground. Add in radiation levels burning out the detectors, and I’m not sure how you get at at it, transport it (to where?). That’s if the conditions don’t deteriorate further.

“K40 has a half life of over a billion years. Why isn’t K40 a problem?”

Tell me again how that makes Daiichi less hazardous. That’s what I mean when I emphasize the false comparisons– the materials dispersed( dispersing) from Daiichi aren’t less dangerous because you can look up elements with long half-lives in a textbook. How does that help the situation at hand? It really does imply minimization on your part. If that’s not your intention, focus on the materials known to be at the reactor site, and dispersing in the environment.

I have never said â??renewables aren’t realâ?. Having renewables doesn’t make spent fuel magically disappear. We do need to transition to renewables and away from coal, oil and gas. I have never said otherwise.

The mechanism by which radioactive materials injure people is by the ionizing radiation they produce hitting cells and damaging them. If the radiation doesn’t hit a person, the person cannot be injured by it. If you take spent fuel and wait 700 years, it becomes less radioactive than the ore from which the uranium was mined. Build a building to put it in a km underground and wait.

5,000 years ago, Egyptians built the Pyramids. They are still standing. Why do you think we can’t do better?

K40 has a half life of over a billion years. Why isn’t K40 a problem?