
Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project - sasvari
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/dismantling-fukushima-the-worlds-toughest-demolition-project
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chaffneue
On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be
planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of
public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and
ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The
fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched,
built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this
situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely
reactive to changes in the situation of the current site.

The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process,
which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this
and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be
worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take
apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into
chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost
feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous
radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment
and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown
variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they
truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think
that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.

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timr
_“At Fukushima you have wrecked infrastructure, three melted cores, and you
have some core on the floor, ex-vessel,” Barrett says. Nothing like Fukushima,
he declares, has ever happened before._

I distinctly remember the HN conversation at the time. The pro-nuclear crowd
was arguing, as it was happening, that this could _never_ occur. The cores
would _never_ breach the containment vessels, they said. Guess you folks got
that one wrong.

I bring this up only because a lot of pro-nuclear arguments comes down to bold
assertions from experts that certain things could _never_ happen. Yet, here we
are. A big helping of modesty seems like a good thing in this field.

~~~
jrockway
To be fair, a lot of the rhetoric from both sides tends to be extreme. The
other side of the argument is that this is clear proof we must never use
nuclear energy for anything ever again, and instead continue burning our
limitless supply of fossil fuels.

I think the reality is: we need to make nuclear energy didn't work. TEPCO
could't do it. Hopefully someone else can.

~~~
einhverfr
I do think that what Fukushima shows is that when you have a nuclear power
plant, you have the possibility of really big problems caused by natural
disasters well above what you planned for. The questions are what you can plan
for and what you do plan for?

Ideally we'd put nuclear reactors _way away_ from all natural disasters, _and_
design them to withstand magnitude 10 earthquakes, F-5 tornadoes, Category 5
hurricanes, and, say, bombing by massive conventional munitions during
wartime. And we'd have perfect, guaranteed safe forever storage of waste.
Practically, it isn't clear that this is possible.

 _I think the reality is: we need to make nuclear energy didn 't work. TEPCO
could't do it. Hopefully someone else can._

The question is, do we want these things to work until they don't? Or do we
want them to be guaranteed to work no matter what happens? I am not sure the
latter is possible.

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mpyne
Interestingly, Americans have a living President with hands-on experience
demolishing a destroyed nuclear reactor. Jimmy Carter helped dismantle a
Canadian reactor at Chalk River during his time as a Navy nuclear submariner.

~~~
dredmorbius
Interestingly, his former boss, US Navy Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who
pretty much created nuclear power as a thing, expressed severe regrets and
reservations at having relied on nuclear power for the navy and in its use for
civilian power generation:

"I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then
you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary
evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did
it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am
such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately
limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is
when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has
available.... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has
a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human
race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this
horrible force and try to eliminate it."

Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee,
Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982), via
Wikipedia

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_to_.22sink_them_all.22)

~~~
einhverfr
I think you have to understand nuclear powered ships in the context of WWII
history.

The critical loss for the Japanese navy was at Leyte Gulf, which was the
largest naval battle in the Pacific during the war (and possibly the largest
naval battle in history). The significance of the battle was that the
Americans secured Phillipine Sea against Japanese shipping and this cut the
Japanese off from the oil fields in Indonesia in terms of transporting oil
back home. it was only after Leyte Gulf that organized kamikaze attacks began,
and the Navy was largely put out of the war by that battle.

What that means is that Japan lost WWII when they lost access to oil. So the
issue with naval ships is diesel or nuclear. About 1/3 of the US navy is
nuclear-powered. The rest runs on diesel. Thats enough our navy (but not our
air force, army etc) can continue to run if oil is not available for a time.
Our military is still very dependent on oil but not like the Japanese were.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm well aware of this history, as well as the earlier transitions of the US
fleet from wind to coal (under Admiral Perry) and the British fleet from coal
to oil immediately prior to WWI under Churchill. Naval energy needs have
driven _several_ fuel transitions, and there's a considerable amount of
interesting work that continues to come from the US and other navies.

If you'll read further into Rickover's remarks, he makes clear that he pursued
nukes because he felt it was essential to national security. _But if there had
been an alternative_ he'd have avoided it. Possibly not even, given the
benefit of hindsight.

Your 1/3 of the US naval fleet being nuclear powered doesn't jibe with stats I
can find. Nuclear propulsion is presently limited to aircraft carriers (10)
and submarines (82 total), or 21%. A number of cruiser and destroyer nuclear
ships were commissioned but all have been decommissioned to the best of my
knowledge. Wikipedia cites a total of 80 nuclear powered ships operated by the
US navy, since 1954, and 430 ships presently active, on reserve, or under
construction. If you limit your concern to _commissioned_ ships, then you'd
have 33% nuclear propulsion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_ships_of_the_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_ships_of_the_United_States_Navy)

As for oil: with most effective naval power being projected via aircraft, the
reliance on oil remains rather high. Yes, the US would be able to launch nukes
or float a flattop off someones shores (given them opportunity for target
practice), but if you want to launch aircraft ... somewhere other than into
the drink ... you've got to top them off every so often.

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PythonicAlpha
We can all only hope that now goes everything according to plans.

I fear, a second Tsunami in the region would be a second (maybe bigger)
disaster and free even more radioactive material.

They still have enough problems. There is for example the trouble with huge
quantities of radioactive water -- that is anything else than solved.

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Spittie
This rises a question in me: What did we do for Chernobyl? It was decades ago,
so most of this technology didn't exists yet. Or it was not nearly as bad as
Fukushima?

~~~
ori_b
Basically, we just covered Chernobyl with concrete and left it alone. As long
as nobody goes near it, it's not doing any harm.

According to the article, for political reasons, Japan wants to dismantle
Fukushima, instead of simply neutralizing it, covering it up with concrete,
and walling it off for a few decades before the cleanup happens. This is where
the challenge comes from.

~~~
snom380
Regardless of their plans, they still need to handle the leaking groundwater,
which AFAIK wasn't a big problem at Chernobyl.

~~~
ori_b
Chernobyl definitely had concerns with groundwater contamination. There were
significant amounts of strontium within the exclusion zone, and the core had
melted down into the earth, although I don't think it reached the water table.
However, from everything I can find, the migration through the soil tended to
be extremely slow, making it a fairly local phenomenon. In the end, cleanup
efforts were abandoned since they had low impact on human health or
radioactivity outside of the exclusion zone, and were worse for the
environment than simply leaving things.

Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the journal subscriptions, so I
don't have the full text of this, but I _think_ this is the paper you want to
read for an overview:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96WR03963/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/96WR03963/abstract)

The conditions are very different at Fukushima, mainly due to the proximity to
the ocean, so I can't really give an educated summary of the challenges with
that. One thing that you have to keep in mind, though, is that water is an
_excellent_ radiation absorber, and it's actually safe to go diving in active
reactor pools as long as you're more than a couple of meters away from the
core. I'd expect that the radiation in the ocean would disperse quickly and
harmlessly.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

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drdeadringer
I remember "older" // "elderly" Japanese folks volunteering themselves as
available to help deal with Fukushima, along the lines of "What to I care of
radiation, I'm old and have already had children? I want to still contribute,
call me up". I wonder about this as a source of labor for demolition.

~~~
nknighthb
Chance of cancer and/or sterility isn't the limit of the problem. Acute
radiation sickness would put a damper on their enthusiasm real quick.

Until you have this jumbled mess of radioactive debris thoroughly mapped, you
don't want to send anyone in there, and once you do, there are going to be a
lot of places they just can't go. Cleanup workers lying on the ground vomiting
their guts out aren't helping anyone.

~~~
jrockway
I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human
health, yet. Certainly, if one person could sacrifice themselves to save
100,000,000 from certain doom, then it's an easy calculation. (Not me or my
family, though, please.) The current situation is more like "this is expensive
to keep cool". No need to kill anyone else.

~~~
tsotha
>I also don't think that the situation is grave enough to sacrifice human
health, yet.

Yet? The odds it ever will be are infinitesimal.

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subdane
tl;dr Site's a shitshow, 40 year cleanup plan.

~~~
cls59
On the bright side, Japanese engineers get a blank check to build some awesome
robots.

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iterationx
This is the most interesting fukushima news I've heard in a while
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtxx7zpyz0&list=WL8CB60B177D3FAD58)

~~~
vegardx
This is mostly just quackery and non-science, they keep repeating the same old
stuff that the government is keeping us in the dark, and that the health
effects of Fukushima is far greater than it actually is.

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iterationx
I don't think you watched it.

~~~
vegardx
I watched enough to know where it was heading.

