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A Detailed Look At The Spent Fuel Rod Containment Pools At Fukushima
With the latest headline from Reuters that TEPCO workers are preparing to spray water at the spent fuel pool in Reactor 3 which has been overheating and spreading radioactive steam into the atmosphere, it is time to present the details of how dry casks and spent fuel are contained at Fukuchima. For that we go to a presentation by TEPCO from November 2010 titled "Integrity Inspection of Dry Storage Casks and Spent Fuels at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station." It is no surprise that, as the introduction states, in Japan's 54 NPP, the strategy is "to store spent fuels safely until being reprocessed." Unfortunately for everyone involved, the existing spent fuel is store in a manner that is anything but "safe." Should these structures fail, the fallout that will enter the atmosphere will be unprecedented. So where and how are they stored? We find out, in detail, below.
Summary of storage capacity and utilization at the various TEPCO NPPs:
Probably the most important chart: this is the most recent status of spent fuel rods at Fukushima:
This is what a typical storage pool looks like. This is the area that supposedly has no water left in it in Reactor 3. Notable is that a spent fuel rods have a 19 month cooling life.
And below is the actual pool that is supposed to have water in it. It is now most likely empty in Reactor 4 and probably does not exist in the other ones.
And while irrelevant for the current discussion, below we present some details about Dry Cask storage facilities:
Below is the schematic of the containment pod.
On the chart below Alarm Monitor 4 would be going apeshit. If only it worked.
The charts above are very nice in theory. After all the conclusion of the presentation indicated there was no "significance of defect /degradation of the system." Until one of those magnitude 9 earthquakes that nobody tested for, and a 30 foot Tsunami that nobody predicted, destroyed everything. And now the only thing left is to spray water in hopes of refilling pools full of thousand of spent, and lethally radioactive, fuel rods. Surely, this will end great.
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Yes; there has been little said in the MSM about the differences between the Reactor 1 blast - a fairly typical, relatively low-pressure, gas explosion that only blew the roof off - and the truly massive blast deep inside Reactor 3 [in the drywell?] which shattered the whole building and threw up some very heavy sections; which must have caused serious damage wherever they fell.
The chances of any useful cooling plant still functioning in that building are remote.
I love this place, most other comments sections on the net are crawling with nuclear lobby "nothing is wrong" loosers. We have our own, but everytime Math man tries to sprout propaganda, you guys shut him down with such eloquence. Keep it up.
Math man, i hope you are right, but somehow i think your job is on the line and you cant see the forest from the trees, step back.
I don't believe in withholding information in order to prevent panic-- it is the dissemination of information that is critical in coming up with solutions. If they know of an impending disaster scenario then they should disclose it as it would most likely not be just a Japan concern at that point. We need to change the way our leaders go about disasters because from what I've seen (and there's been a lot in the past 3 years) no one deserves the position they currently hold.
Took them 5 years after TMI to learn what happened to the fuel rods (took that much time to gain access due to temperature, pressure, radiation). Best case they get the most damaged areas under control and have to entomb those areas like at Chernobly. Ironically, the anti-nuclear faction is partially to blame for making it necessary to store the spent fuel onsite in harm's way. What a mess this is.
This article is incorrect. The common pool, which contains 60% of the spent fuel is in a separate facility and is NOT the spent fuel at reactor #3 that is of concern, nor is it out of water. The spent fuel of concern is the amount that is inside the reactor. The figure to be concerned with is 1,760 (what they have stored on site as of Mar 2010) not the irrelevant 15,558 figure circled in the 2nd image.
edit: stupid japanese powerpoint and it's inconsistent use of units. 1760 ton-u=10,149 assemblies. There are 3,450 assemblies between the 6 reactor units or approximately 575 assemblies per unit.
I know this sounds psychotic, but if there is no big ugly 'grease fire' looking event in the next few days, they just might get away with under 100 dead and several thousand exposed civilians who will look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
Maybe not even that bad. I hear treatment for radiation is really good these days.
Please let that be so
I am looking at some videos of the air-drops on NHK. These guys are dropping water from so high that hardly any water seems to reach the reactors.
This seems to be a lousy idea, and given the radiation that's spewing out from the reactors, these guys can't go any lower too.
Well..in anycase...I guess some water is better than no water..
No. 5 is going to blow. I hope I'm wrong, but it's been officially announced that the pressure is rising, which means it's skyrocketing, and there's no cooling whatsoever.
CNN International just announced that 1 minute ago.
It's consistent with the major slam the U.S. launched on the Japanese response via the New York Times article I linked.
O.K, given all that - are the pools empty because of evaporation?, or do they no longer hold water because of leaks/cracks/holes in the tanks??
Given the latter (which I believe to be the case, looking at the photos), wouldn't it take just a *bit* longer to fill if the pool has a leak/crack/hole in it (if it could be filled at all)??
Just sayin.............
Nobody knows. A US drone is supposed to try to take pictures through the windows to see the bathing demons, or whatever the hell is going on in there.
It's been days since anyone on Earth has known what is happening on those floors of the buildings.
I estimate that it would take over 5 days to get 1 meter of water in that pool, assuming 2 heli's, 5% water 'hit rate', and no evaporation.
They better have one hell of a water truck on standby.
If they cancel Survivor Redemption Island , we are all fucked.
OK, a simple question, that I think I have the answer to correctly, but let me know if not -
They have no cooling capacity for the spent fuel rods lying exposed, all over the place, strewn about wherever, and they have lost cooling capacity for any core rods that are still in place in inserted positions in whatever containment facilities are left?
Is that correct?
They have two helicopters that could probably contain a 1-acre brush fire (in May).
Additionally, they plated the helicopters with lead.
Everything is fine. Please move your entire 401k into stocks ASAP.
No. The dry cask and common pool are not an issue (or at least there has been ZERO mention of there being any possible issue with them). That's nearly 70% of the spent fuel. The spent fuel rods in question are those that are inside the reactors. As I said before above, there are 3,450 assemblies between the 6 reactor units or approximately 575 assemblies per unit.
Sorry if this dupes anyone else
********
Water drop approach summary from NHK coverage
They've dropped 4 loads of 15,000 pounds of seawater each, total of 60,000 pounds on reactors 3. The video shows the water dispersing over a wide area when released.
Let's put this in terms you can use. Every time they drop a load of water - it is equal to 6 inches of water depth in a twenty foot in diameter above ground pool. If every drop went into the spent rod holding pool (only one mission was considered successful, air drop operations have been suspended) it is massively insufficient to refill the 8.5 million pounds of water in one of the storage ponds. One done, 284 successful missions required to half fill the storage pool.
This is completely for media consumption. Hopefully, the average Japanese citizen is educated enough to work this out.
barliman
So Tom Joad
If you posted yesterday I have to imagine you are wondering how the information in this post (obviously from you r post) got attributed to T Durden. For now I will assume that you are an unnamed co-contributor. thanks you.
Ok, well I think the following is alarmist but still:
NYTIMES: A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/science/17plume.html
Ok so I have a beautiful little girl and a pregnant wife, so even if this is all conjecture I really don't fucking appreciate it being published at this point.
Are you saying you would rather not be informed of negative news potentially impacting the health of your family????
If 700 spent fuel assemblies are generated each year and there are 6 reactors, that would work out to about 10 assemblies/month for each reactor. So perhaps there might only be 10 assemblies that are less than a month old in the reactor's pool. As the fuel assemblies age, radioactivity and heat output decrease until at some point it would not be sufficient to melt the assembly. I have no idea how much aging is necessary to reach that stage. Let us hope that they can find some way to get water into the cooling area.
And let us also hope that similar problems do not show up at the other reactors.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem.
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software-agents-surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite. The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was time to take some serious decisions.
It relaxed.
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen hole must be.
Hmm... sounds like something written by Doug Adams, but I dont think is from Hitchhiker's Guide... where is ti form?
The fifth of trilogy, Mostly Harmless
Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
Where are the spy satellite pictures of the reactors? Don't tell me the US hasn't used them to get a better look. Given the capability of the satellites they could see inside if the roofs are blown off.
Do you seriously believe that the US government would provide proof that an economic panic is warranted???
Are you a newbie to this site?
T.E.I.N. everyone.
Exactly, the spent (but still radioactive) fuel rods are stored on site. Japan doesn't have a Yucca Mountain so they took a bad short cut. I think they even store the spent fuel rods above the core reactor. Now they sit there, waiting to multiply the radioactivity and meltdown problem, assumiing they weren't already blown into the ocean by the hydrogen blasts.
...so says a Fukushima co-designer tonight in an interview who walked off the job 30 years ago in a dispute over such safety issues.
The top of the spent fuel pool is level with the shield plug over the reactor vessel. 20 some-odd plants in the US are identical to this one...same GE Mark 1 boiler.
25 operating US GE Mark 1 BWRs
12 more operating US BWRs of slightly later design but with equivalent defects.
Where's that MIT or whatever PhD clown who said in cock-sure, condescending tone that this is all safe?
Exactly, those arrogant F's
Damn this plant is like something out of Dr Strangelove. It's a doomsday machine. Soon our fearless leaders will be filing into their hidy holes while we all suffer the radioactive shroud. Cs167, U235, Pu239, all floating around, F-ing great.
Why Fukushima’s “spent” fuel rods will continue to catch fire http://my.firedoglake.com/kirkmurphy/2011/03/15/why-fukushimas-spent-fuel-rods-will-continue-to-catch-fire/
Daiichi Reactor Design http://www.anengineerindc.com/2011/03/daiichi-reactor-design.html
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=33&filename=51.pdf
FEPC Information Sheet for Fukushima Daiichi on March 16 2011 http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2011/03/fepc-information-sheet-for-fukushima.html
Here is the latest technical publication from JAIF: http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_1300273535P.pdf
NEWS RELEASE: Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, March 16, 2011 http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/files/en20110317-1.pdf
MANY EXTRA DANGERS IN USING PLUTONIUM IN MOX FUEL REACTORS http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/mox/puupdat4.txt
Japanese reactor fallout : MOX fuel rods conversion of Fukushima .#I http://atomicnewsreview.org/2011/03/13/japanese-reactor-fallout-mox-fuel-rods-conversion-of-fukushima-i/
Fuel - Spent Fuel On Top BWR Reactor System http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v393/youricarma/Fukushima%20-%20Daiichi%20Reactor%20Design/005bOysterCreekReactorFuel-SpentFuelOnTopBWRReactorSystem.jpg
Source PDF - http://econtent.unm.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/nuceng&CISOPTR=33&filename=51.pdf
FROM - http://www.anengineerindc.com/2011/03/daiichi-reactor-design.html
It will all be a mute point once they get this bugger online!
https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/