What's up with Fukushima?

[Perd Hapley]

A friend of mine seems to be worried about the Fukushima plant, and the fact that "you don't hear anything about it anymore."

But the articles I read don't mean much to me, since I don’t speak nucular. So what’s going on?

[AJ Dual]

Radioactive leakage and contamination is still present, however while it's "significant" by industry and .gov regulatory standards, it's not significant in terms of what will measurably sicken people, or shorten their lives, so it's dropped out of the news cycle.

There are a few hot spots near the reactor buildings and inside the reactor vessels that would kill a human within just a few minutes of exposure. That will require robots, or very careful work with cables, or long reaching dredge buckets or something to clean up. I'm sure birdman has better ideas of how they'll do that. or possibly entomb them in place.

It'll be a long slow grind to clean the reactor vessels up, years...

[Tallpine]

A friend of mine seems to be worried about the Fukushima plant, and the fact that "you don't hear anything about it anymore."

But the articles I read don't mean much to me, since I don’t speak nucular. So what’s going on?

The last I heard was that it was all your fault.

[RoadKingLarry]

So what’s going on?

Ever hear of a thing called China Syndrome?

 

[Fitz]

Paging Birdman

[gunsmith]

I'm not worried about it, my friends that believe in haaarp & 911 truthisms and think they are pro gun but never actually carry or own or shoot seem to think we are all doomed. If I had the money I would be eating seaweed because of the naturally occurring salts take some radioactive iodide with them as the exit your body , but frankly I'm not concerned about it at all, no male in my family ever lives past 65 anyway, I've quit smoking and drinking but I don't think its gonna make a difference, I guess I have about ten more yrs of being able to work & enjoy myself with 5 yrs of lingering illness of some kind, or instant death in the next yr or two

[MechAg94]

Ever hear of a thing called China Syndrome?

 

So they are going to dump the stuff in China?

[birdman]

Basically, they can't sensationalize the fact that, well, there isn't anything to report.  There are some areas of the damaged pants that have significant contamination (of course, those areas are no more radioactive than other areas of the plant DURING NORMAL OPERATION.  Other than that, the overall contamination is not only small (on a "high enough to hurt people" scale AND on a "regulatory scale"), but the eventually related death toll will likely be...wait for it....ZERO.  Thus, nothing to report.  Your friend can worry about it, but if the reason is "because you don't hear anything" he should be worrying about the greater danger...that the same level of intelligence behind that reasoning could result in him looking at a running wood chipper and thinking "oooh, cool! A stargate!  I want to meet aliens!", and jumping in.

All of us in the actual industry look at fukushima and think--wow, that is really a worst case--massive (beyond design basis accident) earthquake, tsunami (at beyond design basis accident levels), on an older, not yet upgraded plant, COMBINED with annihilation of external infrastructure--and still, minimal release, and extremely limited exposure in other words, the safety measures/responses did what they were supposed to.

[AmbulanceDriver]

But...  But....

IT'S RADIATION!!!!  OMG!!!!!111!!1ELEVENTY!!!!

I had a coworker start spouting off about how we needed to buy anti-radiation kits with iodine, etc, and that we needed to shut down all the nuke plants NOW!!!! I lit into her for about 5 minutes solid about what a ridiculously *stupid* course of action both decisions were....   The "anti-radiation" kit she was talking about was a Tyvek suit, a dust mask, and some (allegedly) iodine tablets...  Granted, those are good things to have,*IF* you're in an immediate danger zone.  But the suit was a cheap "one size fits all" kind of deal that wasn't really Tyvek...  More like a painters paper cover-up type suit.  The dust mask was pretty much the same.  And the iodine tablets were "iodine replacement supplements" on the listing.  I really wish I still had the print out she gave me.  It was pathetic. 

[Physics]

Basically, they can't sensationalize the fact that, well, there isn't anything to report.  There are some areas of the damaged pants that have significant contamination (of course, those areas are no more radioactive than other areas of the plant DURING NORMAL OPERATION.  Other than that, the overall contamination is not only small (on a "high enough to hurt people" scale AND on a "regulatory scale"), but the eventually related death toll will likely be...wait for it....ZERO.  Thus, nothing to report.  Your friend can worry about it, but if the reason is "because you don't hear anything" he should be worrying about the greater danger...that the same level of intelligence behind that reasoning could result in him looking at a running wood chipper and thinking "oooh, cool! A stargate!  I want to meet aliens!", and jumping in.

All of us in the actual industry look at fukushima and think--wow, that is really a worst case--massive (beyond design basis accident) earthquake, tsunami (at beyond design basis accident levels), on an older, not yet upgraded plant, COMBINED with annihilation of external infrastructure--and still, minimal release, and extremely limited exposure in other words, the safety measures/responses did what they were supposed to.

Pretty much exactly what I was telling people when everyone was freaking out.  Fukushima to me actually says that we have done a damn good job engineering reactors and that we should be building more!  I've heard reports that low levels of radiation have hit the U.S. west coast.  This is not a big deal.  Which is interesting, considering this was the second most devastating nuclear disaster (of course discluding nuclear weapons) in history.  Which leads me to believe that all these anti-nuclear organizations are either really dumb or really dishonest.  Maybe I should go troll some greenpeace fools on the street to see which it is. 

As to Fukushima itself, I am mostly curious on how they will go about cleaning up the hot spots in the complex.  Wouldn't the radiation play hell with the electronics in any robotic vehicles? 

[birdman]

As to Fukushima itself, I am mostly curious on how they will go about cleaning up the hot spots in the complex.  Wouldn't the radiation play hell with the electronics in any robotic vehicles? 

Yes and no, High tech small feature CMOS, yes, good ol' fashion low tech analog devices and power electronics, not as much.  For high dose areas, typically, the "robot" is direct controlled servos, with as mich of the electronics back at the other end of the umbilical.  However, that's for REALLY high dose areas (fuel reprocessing)...even your run-of-the mill consumer electronics can handle 20-30krad without issues, (40-60x prompt human lethal dose), and even a thin (0.1") steel box can offer enough shielding to make this even greater.   Once you go to rad hard parts...it's amazing, when I was consulting for NASA and JPL on the (now cancelled) Europa orbiter mission, we had to get electronics to survive on a mission where the external dose environment was 3 BILLION rads...in ONE MONTH (that's 100 million rad/day...or about 1000 rad/second...or a lethal dose in less than 0.5 seconds of exposure)...and with a combination of shielding (10-20mm of aluminum and some small tungsten shields over really sensitive stuff) and mega-rad hard electronics, it's possible...and that's a dose thousands of times greater than anything a nuclear robot would encounter.

(as a note, you wouldn't actually die in 0.5 seconds, it would take you a few minutes...turns out, the survival time vs radiation exposure reaches a plateau--since there are only about 4 ways to die (lack of food, water, oxygen, and cellular function...all of the first three lead to the latter), and all but the latter take at least 10's of seconds to render you unconscious and then dead (lack of oxygen to brain either through lung damage or blood loss), and radiation can't cause mechanical (e.g. Bullet) damage to the brain, if you wanted to kill someone in less than a second with radiation, you need to deliver a dose of at least 5-10 million rad, and do so in less than 10 seconds...at that point, you will effectively damage every enzyme in the body, AMD every protein...not to mention heat them up 25-30 degC...so death would occur in however long it took.

Eventually I was able to make a plot (log-log scale) of time to die (horizontal axis) vs total dose (vertical axis)...from <1 second to 3 billion seconds (about 90 years)...and it looks like a U---with a minimum of a few hundred in the 30-100 million (1-3 year) range.  Ironically, you could probably get exposed to 2500 rem over 90 years and live, however if you got even 10% of that in a single year...you would die.  It really shows some interesting factors, I'll have to scan it. 

[Perd Hapley]

Main Entry:      disclude
Part of Speech:      v
Definition:      to disclose, make known
Etymology:      Latin discludere 'to shut apart'

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disclude

[AJ Dual]

Not the same particle mix as the Jovian environment, nor the intensity, but I thought the point of the neutron bomb was to render Soviet armor crews unconscious within seconds as they poured through the Fulda Gap.

My understanding was that the neutron flux would denature neurotransmitters and cause nearly immediate blindness/unconsciousness, and then if they woke up, to massive radiation sickness as all their cells malfunctioned from the more traditional protien/lipid/enzyme denaturing due to ionization.

Also, other than the loss of the cool show, and geological (iological?) knowledge on tidal induced heating of planetary cores and vulcanisim in near vacuum, I wonder what would happen to the Jovian radiation environment if we could just "dissapear" Io?  I'm sure there's the Van Allen style toriodal belts of trapped solar particles etc. but AFAIK Io is the main source of garbage that Jupiter's magnetic field traps and accelerates. So getting rid of Io might make the inner Jovian orbits more suitable for human colonization.

[Perd Hapley]

Thanks for all the replies.

[Physics]

Main Entry:      disclude
Part of Speech:      v
Definition:      to disclose, make known
Etymology:      Latin discludere 'to shut apart'

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disclude

Why are you correcting me?  It's your fault even if I were wrong.

Disclude:
(third-person singular simple present discludes, present participle discluding, simple past and past participle discluded)
(nonstandard) To disclose, make known.
(nonstandard) To exclude, not include; to remove from inclusion.
Please disclude me from further discussions on this topic.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disclude

[birdman]

True, Jovian flux tube is mainly protons, but the actual mix doesn't matter, only the biological effectiveness--it all ends up as ion pairs anyway.  The amount of neutrons emitted Is going to be vanishingly small--the reactor isn't operating, all the delayed neutrons in the short lived fusion products have been emitted, and most of the contamination is from longer lived fusion products whose emissions are dominantly beta and gamma--biological effectiveness 1. The protons in the Jovian environment are actually worse, energy to energy, than neutrons, gammas, or betas. 

As for the neutron bomb, the dose they were aiming for was 500-1000 rem...the goal was to kill the crews not in seconds, but in days (of course, they would be sick as hell in the meantime).  Denaturing neurotransmitters is just as hard as denaturing every enzyme in the body at once, it means you literally have to hit each and every molecule with enough enegy to cause a structural change--that's why the dose I calculated is so high.

[Perd Hapley]

Exclude. 

[geronimotwo]

Pretty much exactly what I was telling people when everyone was freaking out.  Fukushima to me actually says that we have done a damn good job engineering reactors and that we should be building more! 

i would think it could be made even safer if the reactors were built below sea level.  then as long as there is power the pumps operate to keep it cool/dry/functional. if power is disrupted, open the floodgates and cool it with immersion.  maybe even use a float system to withdraw the rods?

[RoadKingLarry]

open the floodgates and cool it with immersion.  maybe even use a float system to withdraw the rods?

Even on subs we didn't have that sort of set up, too much risk of a steam explosion blowing out containment vessels scattering contamination.
As to withdrawing the rods, that is exactly the opposite of what you would want to do. The control rods are inserted to damp the reaction.

[geronimotwo]

so much for my career in nuclear design. 

[birdman]

Even on subs we didn't have that sort of set up, too much risk of a steam explosion blowing out containment vessels scattering contamination.
As to withdrawing the rods, that is exactly the opposite of what you would want to do. The control rods are inserted to damp the reaction.

This.  And also, flooding an active core with water when you have lost reactivity control is really bad, what RKL describes is a "cold water accident"--which can under certain conditions go prompt critical and release a large amount of power quickly (not a "nuclear bomb" but the release can create a steam explosion similar to large conventional bombs).

Also, one important part about Fukushima--ALL of the immediate safety (SCRAM) systems operated as designed...the reactors were IMMEDIATELY shut down when the quake hit, all the damage was due to decay heat and loss of infrastructure--the batteries worked (as designed, which really took the edge off the heat and prevented even worse damage) but both the primary (grid power) and secondary (on site diesels) were destroyed, leaving only the batteries (modern systems also have passive cooling systems that work even better to prevent a release)...so the system still worked!  It had two simultaneous, worst case, environmental triggers, lost primary and secondary safety systems, survived total destruction of local infrastructure resulting in delays in fixing it (which was the number one bad thing that caused any problems)...and still had minimal release...I call that a win, no other industrial system other than nuke plants could have endured that with as little result as what actually happened.

As for radiation being detected on the west coast, those levels are about a billion times lower than what could even possibly matter....it's just our ability to DETECT specific radiation is so sensitive, that "detection" really doesn't mean anything...and the media is stupid.  Hell, we can detect parts per trillion of toxins in water...and ALL potable water sources have toxins at that level..,but no one makes a big deal out of that!

[Fitz]

Birdman, clearly you're just a rich guy allied with the special interests. As penalty, I am quitting my job, and i expect you to subsidize me.

Thanks

[birdman]

Birdman, clearly you're just a rich guy allied with the special interests. As penalty, I am quitting my job, and i expect you to subsidize me.

Thanks

Hmm.  No way, doing so would only encourage you to have more children and not look for work!

On the other hand, can you wear a pink tutu and pull a chariot?  It would be way cool to commute that way.  No, wait, that's a job...so you want me to pay you to do nothing?  That doesn't make any sense, I have to do something to earn the money, why do I have to give it away so you don't work?

[AJ Dual]

Hell, we can detect parts per trillion of toxins in water...and ALL potable water sources have toxins at that level..,but no one makes a big deal out of that!

Don't give them ideas! 

[Perd Hapley]

On the other hand, can you wear a pink tutu and pull a chariot?  It would be way cool to commute that way.  No, wait, that's a job...

Mabs just mentioned that he has a job. You're not his employer, are you?