Posted on 08/23/2013 7:02:38 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Insight: In Fukushima end-game, radiated water has nowhere to go
Photo
7:59am EDT
By Mari Saito and Antoni Slodkowski
TOKYO (Reuters) - In the weeks after the Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed by a triple meltdown in March 2011, the plant's owner turned to three of Japan's largest construction companies for a quick fix to store radiated water that was pooling in the disaster zone.
The result was a rush order for steel tanks supplied by Taisei Corp, Shimizu Corp and Hazama Ando that were relatively cheap and could be put together quickly, according to the utility and three people involved in the project.
The tanks, which stand as tall as a three-storey building, were shipped in pieces and bolted together as makeshift repository for the cascade of water being pumped through the reactors of Fukushima every day to keep fuel in the melted cores from overheating.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Ping!
I don’t eat fish anymore.
Not being a nuclear physicist how long does it take for the rods to cool down or become stable? Hasn’t the plant been offline since the event?
(suns magnetic field declining....no sunspots ....last time it lasted 400 years...1350 to 1750)
Well, most of the spent fuel is Cesium 137, which has a half-life of 30 years. Meaning, half of it will still be radioactive in 30 years, and there are something like 135 tons of it sitting there now.
Pump it into storage tanks, ship the tanks to the Senkaku islands, and dump it there.
LOL Winner!
The contaminated water was used for cooling and then subsequently stored in these tanks. Why on earth would they not recycle it and use the already contaminated water again once it had cooled?
I have a stupid question. Let’s say you have a pan of water that is ‘irradiated”. You let it evaporate. Obviously anything that remained would likely be radioactive, but would the water vapor that had evaporated be radioactive as well? I’d think not, but I’m probably missing something.
That was my thinking too. I’m picturing enormous fans.
It appears the place is leaking water from everywhere into the ground where it is moving through all the underground pipes that are underneath the plant.
The ground is so saturated it is “floating” buildings in some area. From there it drains downhill into the sea.
I sure would like to know what would have happened if they did not pump water and just let it overheat.
No more Tokyo.
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