Pump
and pray: Tepco might have to pour water on Fukushima wreckage
forever
Chris
Busby
RT,
7
August
Roll
on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!
Ten
thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man
marks the earth with ruin – his control
Stops
with the shore; -- upon the watery plain
The
wrecks are all thy deed, nor does remain
A
shadow of man’s ravage, save his own
George
Gordon Byron, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II
Fukushima
is a nightmare disaster area, and no one has the slightest idea what
to do. The game is to prevent the crippled nuclear plant from turning
into an “open-air super reactor spectacular” which would result
in a hazardous, melted catastrophe.
On
April 25, 2011 – one month after the explosions at the Fukushima
nuclear plant and the anniversary of Chernobyl - I was interviewed by
RT and asked to compare Chernobyl and Fukushima. The clip, which you
can find on YouTube, was entitled, “Can’t seal Fukushima like
Chernobyl - it all goes into the sea.” Since then, huge amounts of
radioactivity have flowed from the wrecked reactors directly into the
Pacific Ocean. Attempts to stop the flow of contaminated water from
Fukushima into the sea were always unlikely to succeed. It is like
trying to push water uphill. Now they all seem to have woken up to
the issue and have begun to panic.
The
problem is this: the fission process in a reactor creates huge
amounts of heat. Of course, that is the whole point of the machine -
the heat makes steam which runs turbines. Water is pumped through
channels between the fuel rods and this cools them and heats the
water. If there is no water, or the channels are blocked, the heat
actually melts the fuel into a big blob which falls to the bottom of
the steel vessel in which all this occurs - the pressure vessel - and
then melts its way through the steel, into the ground, and down in
the direction of China. Well, not China in this case, but actually
Buenos Aires, Argentina (I figured out).
TEPCO's
Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru
Hashimoto)TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo /
Noboru Hashimoto)
I
have been keeping an eye on developments, and it is quite clear that
the reactors are no longer containing the molten fuel - some
proportion of which is now in the ground underneath them. Both this
material and the remaining material in what was the containment are
very hot and are fissioning. Tepco is quite aware - and so is
everyone else in the know - that the only hope of preventing what
could become an open-air super reactor spectacular is to cool the
fuel, the lumps of fuel distributed throughout the system, mainly in
the holed pressure vessels, and also in the spent fuel tanks and in
the ground under the reactors. That all this is fissioning away
merrily (though at a low level) is clear from the occasional reports
of short half life nuclides like the radioXenons. The game is to
prevent it all turning into the open air super reactor located
somewhere under the ground. To do this, they have to pump vast
amounts of water into the reactors, the fuel pond and generally all
over the area where they think the stuff is or might be. This means
seawater since luckily they are near the sea. But they are also
unluckily near the sea - since you cannot pump the sea onto the land
without it wanting to flow back into the sea.
Now
a good proportion of the radioactive elements, the radionuclides, are
soluble in water. The Caesiums 137 and 134, Strontiums 89 and 90,
Barium 140, Radium 226, Lead 210, Rutheniums and Rhodiums, Silvers
and Mercuries, Carbons and Tritiums, Iodines and noble gases Kryptons
and Xenons merrily dissolve in the hot seawater. There is also a
likelihood that the normally insoluble Uraniums, Plutoniums and
Neptuniums will dissolve in seawater to some extent, because of the
chloride ions. And if they don’t, the micron and nano-particles of
these materials will disperse in the water as colloidal suspensions.
So a lot of this stuff gets into the sea. Of course, most of the fuss
is being made by the Americans who are on the other side of the
Pacific Ocean. How unfair that the USA should suffer from the
Japanese affair, they think. And also feel a level of fear,
underneath all this. As perhaps they should since it is their crappy
reactors that blew up.
We
hear that 400 tons of highly radioactive water is now escaping the
barriers that Tepco erected and is reaching the sea. Japan’s prime
minister, Shinzo Abe, said on August 7 that “stabilizing Fukushima
is our challenge.” Tepco said, “This is extremely serious — we
are unable to control radioactive water seeping out of the Fukushima
plant.” CNN quoted “industry experts” saying that “Tepco has
failed to address the problem...[the experts] question Tepco’s
ability to safely decommission the plant.”
TEPCO's
Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru
Hashimoto)TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo /
Noboru Hashimoto)
There
are some things I want to say about all this. First is the inevitable
discourse manipulation - something that we have seen in the media
ever since this disaster occurred. “Decommission the plant”
suggests some calm and ordered scientific process akin to shutting
down and defueling an old reactor which has reached the end of its
design life. It sparks images of a wise nuclear engineer in a lab
coat consulting a document, discussing some issue with a worker in
brilliant white overalls with a Tepco logo, wearing a white hard-hat.
The reality is that this is a nightmare disaster area where no one
has the slightest idea what to do and which has always been out of
control. All that they can do is continue to pump in the seawater to
hope that the various lumps of molten fuel will not increase their
rate of fissioning. And pray. The water will then pick up the
radionuclides and flow downhill back to the sea. Of course, they can
put up a barrier; surround the plant with a wall. But eventually the
water will fill up the pond and flow over the wall. All that water
will create a soggy marsh and destabilize the foundations of the
reactor buildings which will then collapse and prevent further
cooling. Then the Spectacular. All this is predictable enough.
Let
us look at some numbers. Four hundred tons of seawater a day are
flowing into the sea. That is 400 cubic meters. In one year, that is
146,000 cubic meters. That is a pond 10 meters deep and 120 meters
square. This will have to go on forever, a new pond every year,
unless they can get the radioactive material out. But here is the
other problem. They can’t get close enough because the radiation
levels are too high. The water itself is lethally radioactive. Gamma
radiation levels tens of meters from the water are enormously high.
No one can approach without being fried.
'Anyone
living within 1km of the coast near Fukushima should get out'
But
I want to make two other points. The first is that the Pacific Ocean
is big enough for this level of release not to represent the global
catastrophe that some are predicting. Let’s get some scoping
perspective on this. The volume of the North Pacific is 300 million
cubic kilometers. The total inventory of the four Fukushima Daiichi
reactors, including their spent fuel pools, is 732 tons of Uranium
and Plutonium fuel which is largely insoluble in sea water. The
inventory in terms of the medium half-life nuclides of radiological
significance Cs-137, Cs-134 and Strontium-90, is 3 x 1018 becquerels
(Bq) each. Adding these up gives about 1019 Bq. If we dissolve that
entire amount into the Pacific, we get a mean concentration of 33 Bq
per cubic meter - not great, but not lethal. Of course this is
ridiculous since the catastrophe released less than 1017 Bq of these
combined nuclides and even if all of this ends up in the sea (which
it may do), the overall dilution will result in a concentration of 1
Bq per cubic meter. So the people in California can relax. In fact,
the contamination of California and indeed the rest of the planet
from the global weapons test fallout of 1959-1962 was far worse, and
resulted in the cancer epidemic which began in 1980. The atmospheric
megaton explosions drove the radioactivity into the stratosphere and
the rain brought it back to earth to get into the milk, the food, the
air, and our children’s bones. Kennedy and Kruschev called a halt
in 1963, saving millions.
TEPCO's
Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru
Hashimoto)TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo /
Noboru Hashimoto)
What
we have here in Fukushima is more local, but still very deadly and
certainly worse than Chernobyl since the populations are so large.
And this brings me to my second point, and a warning to the Japanese
people. The contamination of the sea results in adsorption of the
radionuclides by the sand and silt on the coast and river estuaries.
The east coast of Japan, the sediment and sand on the shores, will
now be horribly radioactive. This material is re-suspended into the
air through a process called sea-to-land transfer. The coastal air
they inhale is laden with radioactive particles. I know about this
since I was asked in 1998 by the Irish State to carry out a two-year
study of the cancer effects of releases into the Irish Sea by the
nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield. We looked at small area
data leaked to us by the Welsh Cancer Registry covering the period of
1974-1989, when Sellafield was releasing significant amounts of
radio-Caesium, radio-Strontium, and Plutonium. Results showed a
remarkable and sharp 30 per cent increase in cancer rates in those
living within 1km of the coast. The effect was very local and dropped
away sharply at 2km. In trying to discover the cause, we came across
measurements made by the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment.
Using special cloth filters, they had measured Plutonium in the air
by distance from the contaminated coast. The trend was the same as
the cancer trend, increasing sharply in the 1km strip near the coast.
We later examined cancer rates in a higher resolution questionnaire
study in Carlingford, Ireland. This clearly showed the effect
increasing inside the 1km radius in the same way. The results were
never published in scientific literature but were presented to the UK
CERRIE committee and eventually made it into a book which I wrote in
2007 entitled, “Wolves of Water.” Make no mistake, this is a
deadly effect. By 2003, we had found 20-fold excess risk of leukemia
and brain tumours in the population of children on the north Wales
coast. The children were denied of course by the Welsh Cancer
Intelligence Unit that supplanted the old Welsh Cancer Registry -
which had been shut down immediately after the data was released to
us. We did publish this in scientific literature.
Nevertheless,
the sea-to-land effect is real. And anyone living within 1km of the
coast to at least 200km north or south of Fukushima should get out.
They should evacuate inland. It is not eating the fish and shellfish
that gets you - it’s breathing.
And
what about the future? The future is bleak. I see no way of resolving
the catastrophe. They will either have to pour water on the wreckage
forever, and thus continue to contaminate the local sea, or find some
more drastic immediate solution. I was told that US experts had the
idea at the beginning of bombing the reactors into the harbour. Not
so stupid in my opinion. That at least may enable them to get
sufficiently close to the pieces to pick them up, and should also
solve the cooling problem. Apparently (my contact said) the French
argued them out of it because of the negative effect on nuclear
energy (and Uranium shares).
Busby:
Can't seal Fukushima like Chernobyl - it all goes into sea
April 25, 2011
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