Japan's nuclear cleanup stymied by water woes

Yahoo ^

[Java4Jay]

More than three years into the massive cleanup of Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant, nearly all the workers at the Fukushima plant are devoted to the still-growing amount of contaminated water.

[Java4Jay]

The comments section is a good read

[ClearCase_guy]

I was talking to someone, who may be in a position to know a few things, who indicated that the impact of this is much worse than anyone wants to admit. He said that California would slowly come to realize that their coast has been seriously damaged.

But perhaps he was just an alarmist.

[UCANSEE2]

Godzilla would probably like to swim in that water.

[UCANSEE2]

How many nuclear weapons have we set off all over the Pacific, and all along the West Coast of the US ?

[ransomnote]

Many. But they don’t compare to washing nuclear fuel into the ocean at the present rate indefinitely. Nuclear blasts are “efficient” and leave less radioactive waste behind compared with Fukushima.

[ransomnote]

I’ve heard the same.

And because there are politicians who DO know about it, the food for 2012 political conventions was tested extensively.

http://laboratorysciences.wadsworth.org/node/136

Oh yes, there are people that know about it. Could be why there’s sudden interest in reducing screening for thyroid cancer and portrayal of it as a problem extending over 20 years instead of a recent concern as of 2011 (Fukushima)

Here’s a deactivated link (I put the word ‘dot” instead of ‘.”) from the Slimes:
http://www.nytimesDOTcom/2014/11/06/health/study-warns-against-overdiagnosis-of-thyroid-cancer.html?_r=0

[UCANSEE2]

Nuclear blasts are “efficient” and leave less radioactive waste behind compared with Fukushima.

OK. But the nuclear blasts were much closer to the coast, and there were many on land.

BTW, by 'many', do you mean 5, dozens, hundreds ?

[Rodamala]

The solution to pollution is dillution.

[Boogieman]

Just cover the entire site with a mountain of molten lead already and be done with it.

[laplata]

Many. But they don’t compare to washing nuclear fuel into the ocean at the present rate indefinitely. Nuclear blasts are “efficient” and leave less radioactive waste behind compared with Fukushima.

---

That’s right. Fukushima is a serious situation.

[justa-hairyape]

There is no melted core cleanup possible at Fukushima. They have no idea were the melted cores are and they lack the technology to clean them up. What they are doing is slowly allowing the melted cores to be washed out to sea via the under water aquifer the plant was built on. Will take a few decades. The only cleanup possible is removing some of the destroyed reactor building infrastructure.

[ZOOKER]

Three years wasted.

By now everyone should know pumping water into the reactors is not fixing anything. They avoided a full meltdown/release but the leaks will continue or get worse. Contaminated water will get into groundwater and the sea.

The reactor cores have to be disassembled and nuclear fuel removed to halt nuclear reaction. A ticklish task even in the best of conditions, it now has to be done in a high radiation environment, on unstable ground obstructed by debris, underwater by remote control. I don't know if it's even possible but if anyone can design robots capable of doing this, it's the Japanese. Have they made any progress in three years?

If not, what's their Plan B?

[musicman]

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[Norski]

www.enenews.com will give you LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of information which will scare the sox off of you.

[Carriage Hill]

Bookmark.

[ransomnote]

Those nuclear blasts resulted in the US paying “downwinders” for illnesses and loss of livestock decades later. The strategy for the US and other nuclear govs is to deny while the litigants or people who would hold them accountable are still living. But eventually, the truth comes out and it’s counted as a “success” because few are around to collect. On one of these threads, a spouse of a “Downwinder” (people downwind of nuclear testing in US and she was the only surviving member of her highschool class - all others had died. He chimed in to say that nuclear testing back then had real effects that the US gov denied. SO I went looking for information and found financial settlements etc. and sad tales of entire herds of cattle down from radiation and the US wouldn’t allow local veterinarians to testify at trials - only gov veterinarians who said nothing was wrong - just a herd of cattle dead....move along.
Justa-Hairy-Ape went back and read up on nuclear blasts in the US and offshore and did the calculations and to get an equivalent “dose” of radioactive waste from those blasts to some level of Fukushima, you’d have to detonate 40 blasts a day. And that was a year or two ago - the radioactive waste load Fukushima has been dispensing into the environment has been continuous during that time.
Re your question about number of nuclear blasts, “The United States conducted 1,032 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992: at the Nevada Test Site, at sites in the Pacific Ocean, in Amchitka Island of the Alaska Peninsula, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.”
http://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/the-united-states-nuclear-testing-programme/

[UCANSEE2]

Good morning. Thank you for the informative response.

Here is something that might interest you.

A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto

Make sure you have the sound on. It really gets interesting about halfway through. Sounds like a popcorn machine.

[ransomnote]

Thanks for the link. I’ll have to wait until the weekend to check it out.