The New York Times reports on increasing water problems at the nuclear reactors that melted down at Fukushima Daiichi:
Flow of Tainted Water Is Latest Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant
Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.
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“The water keeps increasing every minute, no matter whether we eat, sleep or work,” said Masayuki Ono, a general manager with Tepco who acts as a company spokesman. “It feels like we are constantly being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front.”While the company has managed to stay ahead, the constant threat of running out of storage space has turned into what Tepco itself called an emergency, with the sheer volume of water raising fears of future leaks at the seaside plant that could reach the Pacific Ocean.
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“We were so focused on the fuel rods and melted reactor cores that we underestimated the water problem,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, a government body that helped draw up Tepco’s original cleanup plan. “Someone from outside the industry might have foreseen the water problem.”
“Might have foreseen” the water problem?
No. Not “might have”. We did foresee this problem two years ago and we even suggested a solution:
While TEPCO is saying little about what it is doing at Daiichi it seems that their plan is to continue this “feed and bleed” cooling for the several month the nuclear fuel will need to cool below boiling temperature.
I believe that this is not sustainable. So far more than 60,000 tons of water were fed into the complex, got highly radiated and flowed out uncontrolled through various leaks. The turbine buildings with needed equipment are flooded. Some highly radiated water did flow into the sea. The measures to stop leaking to the sea are unconvincing. Groundwater radiation at the site has increased tenfold which suggests other additional leaks.
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Feeding, contaminating and leaking additional hundreds of tons of water per day over several month is not a viable plan. TEPCO urgently needs to come up with a different cooling strategy. I stand by my suggestion to push a slurry of sand/boron/lead into the reactors which eventually will dry and form a solid mass preventing further leakage. Cooling would then take place through convection just like in Chernobyl.While this would certainly make future disassembling more difficult, it would also prevent further leakage and radiation releases.
It is sad to see that the Japanese regulators and professional nuclear engineers could not see the problem, and a solution to it, when an amateur like me clearly could. It is still not too late to try a more permanent solution at Fukushima Daiichi. But with the incest between Japanese nuclear industry, politics and bureaucracy elites the more likely solution will be to pump the radioactive water into the sea. Have fun eating those glowing fish …