nuclear-news

• Abby Martin, host of RT’s ‘Breaking the Set’: I want to ask you, have you seen the VICE special on Fukushima? Oh my good god… Even though I study this sh*t every day I did not realize – until you see it, until you see that VICE special, and you see the tanks — how every day they’re filling this whole reactor up with fresh water, draining the radioactive water multiple times a day, storing it in hundreds of tanks. They’re going to run out of room. All the tanks are leaking. They’re spilling like 30,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean water every day [According to the Washington Post, “400 (metric) tons of toxic water is flowing daily into the Pacific”, equal to 105,669 gallons]. They have no idea what the f*ck they’re going to do… There’s no solution — and what are they going to f*cking do? … It’s a f*cking nightmare… Look at Chernobyl; they have this giant sarcophagus that’s cracking… Why are we dealing with an energy that we can’t harness properly? … Clearly we don’t what the f*ck we’re doing with it.
• Joe Rogan, host: You know all it does is make steam?
• Martin: Yeah, that’s what’s so crazy, when you see what it really just is.
• Rogan: Ithought that it did something like made electricity with the nuclear — splitting atoms, and it just goes through the wires. No, they’re making steam… Couldn’t they do that in a better way? Seems like a lot of waste to make steam… What are you a**holes doing? You guys are making some sh*t that you can never shut off… They’re all over the place, too. The really bizarre thing is when you drive down the California coast, and you realize that we are on a fault — California moves all the time — then you go on the way to San Diego, there’s a f*cking nuclear power plant that’s right there! … Once those things go bad, they’re bad forever. So you have, as of now there’s only two spots, but those two spots are toast. Chernobyl and Fukushima are f*cking toast. Those areas are f*cked for 100,000 years. Then you have the storage of the nuclear waste from all the other places that are still operational… What the f*ck. This is less than 100 years of splitting atoms… and you already have two spots that are broken. If you could look at the future and you look at potential spots to go wrong… we’re going to f*ck up a huge percentage of the world with this power source… Maybe that solar thing is something you guys want to look at?
  Martin: The thing is, it’s not working. I think that we really do need to shut down all the reactors… At the end of the day, is it worth the risk? To have this sh*t out there for a million years — is it worth it, when we do have other sources?
  Full interview here

Wall St. Journal, Aug 7, 2014(emphasis added): [Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority] said [Tepco] needs to get its priorities straight when it comes to work to decommission […] Fukushima Daiichi […] “The biggest risk is the trench water. Until that matter is addressed, it will be difficult to proceed with other decommissioning work,” [Tanaka] said on Wednesday at his weekly news conference. “It appears that they are getting off track,” he told reporters. Tepco has been trying to remove some 11,000 metric tons of water that contains dangerous radioactive materials such as uranium and plutonium from a trench that runs from the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s No.2 reactor building. […] “What if another tsunami hits the plant and the highly contaminated water in the trench is discharged…

NHK, July, 30, 2014: TEPCO initially planned to freeze radioactive wastewater that’s been flowing into underground utility tunnels [trenches] at the plant. It hoped the measure would prevent the wastewater from mixing with groundwater and flowing out to sea. But 3 months into the project, the water hasn’t frozen as planned.

Nuclear Engineering International,August 7, 2014: TEPCO has admitted that it has having problems with freezing contaminated water flowing in trenches  […] The water in the trenches is […] coming into contact with nuclear material[…]  because the water flows in and out of the trenches because of water pumping operations, it has proved ‘exceptionally difficult’ to freeze, TEPCO said. This was despite increasing the flow of coolant, adding ice and dry ice to the trench water[…]

Kyodo, Aug. 5, 2014: Tepco is racing to stop the buildup of radioactive cooling water in the trenches. […] Tepco inserted refrigeration rods in the trenches to try to freeze the water butabandoned the effort after more than three frustrating months. […] Though [Tepco has now put] 58 tons of ice in the trenches, the utility has “yet to see” whether it will work […] The new method was introduced after an increasingly alarmed Nuclear Regulation Authority urged the company last month to take additional steps as soon as possible […]

World Nuclear News, July 24, 2014: New approaches to removing the contaminated water from trenches […] after attempts to freeze it failed. […] The trenches contain highly-contaminated water that has flowed from the main power plant buildings […] Tepco said that, despite the success of early experiments, “it has proved exceptionally difficult” to freeze the trench water. This, it said, is due to the constant flow of water into and out of the trench […]

See also: TV: Nuclear waste “flowing out to sea” from underground tunnels at Fukushima — 950 Billion Bq/m³ of cesium in Unit 2 shaft next to ocean — 11,000 tons estimated in tunnels — Gov’t regulators ‘urgently assessing’ problems (VIDEO)

Evaluation of the Fukushima Accident Source Term through the fast running code RASCAL 4.2(pdf),ENEA Bologna Research Centre, May 23, 2014: This Report presents the results of the application of the fast-running US-NRC direct code RASCAL 4.2 to the estimation of the Fukushima Source Term. […] it is plausible that the ventings that TEPCO announced during the accident as being conducted from the wetwell were, as a matter of fact and because of the degraded conditions of the plants, conducted actually from the drywell. […] wetwell properties imply releases which can be several oder of magnitudes lower than those from the drywell […] it can clearly be seen that the most probable path is the combination of Drywell+Direct option […] the true venting path, i.e. from Drywell instead of from Wetwell, is an extremely important issue. […] in several instances when TEPCO tried to operate venting, in order to release pressure outside the building through the stack, it proved impossible […] there are many indications that probably the radioactive material escaped from the drywell; this may have occurred without TEPCO’s immediate knowledge and because of several factors; for example: structural damages to the pipings connecting drywell to torus room (vent piping bellows), due either to the earthquake, and/or to the too violent pressure and temperature increase in the D/W; leakages through the top head manhole, the top head flange, the piping penetrations, the electrical wiring penetrations, the personal airlocks, the S/C manholes, the machine hatches, etc. […] The value of 1%/h was chosen by ENEA because of the possible highly damaged conditions of the Fukushima NPPs due to the BDB [Beyond Design Basis] earthquake.

> Table 7. Cumulative Source Term (Bq) TEPCO MELCOR

• Pu-241 Total = 1.2E+12 (1,200,000,000,000 Bq)

> Table 7. Cumulative Source Term (Bq) ENEA RASCAL 4.2

• Pu-241 Unit 1 = 6.52E+13 (65,200,000,000,000 Bq)
• Pu-241 Unit 2 = 1.86E+14 (186,000,000,000,000 Bq)
• Pu-241 Unit 3 = 2.67E+13 (26,700,000,000,000 Bq)
• Pu-241 Total = 2.78E+14 (278,000,000,000,000 Bq)

Environmental Science & Technology (American Chemical Society), July 11, 2014: [S]tandard alpha spectrometry techniques […] are not able […] to measure 241Pu.

Boreal Environment Research (pdf), Feb. 28, 2014: The 241Pu isotope was introduced into the environment from […] accidents that released nuclear reactor fuel, such as […] the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe. As compared with other Pu isotopes in the environment that are alpha-emitting and long-lived, 241Pu is a short-lived isotope with a half-life of 14.35 years […] 241Pu decays to the alpha emitter 241Am, that has a much longer half-life (432.2 years) and is highly radiotoxic when it is incorporated into either the human or animal body. […] The 241Pu isotope has been studied less extensively than the α-emitting Pu isotopes for several reasons. Activity concentration of 241Pu cannot be determined from the same alpha spectrum as the Pu isotopes 238, 239, and 240, and extra effort is needed in order to analyze 241Pu concentration of a sample. Actually, 241Pu emits alpha particles, but they have so low probability (0.002%) that 241Pu cannot be measured directly by α-spectrometry […]

See also: Japan TV: Radiation release during ‘venting’ was up to 500 times larger than thought for Fukushima reactor — Surprising surge in radioactivity before explosions (VIDEO)