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A Visual Tour of the Fuel Pools of Fukushima
You already know that Fukushima’s fuel pool number 4 may be the single greatest threat, but that pool number 3 is very dangerous as well.
You’ve heard that unit 3′s fuel pool contains less radioactive material than unit 4 … but still a tremendous amount of radiation. Scientific American reported last year:
The pools at each reactor are thought to have contained the following amounts of spent fuel, according to The Mainichi Daily News:
• Reactor No. 1: 50 tons of nuclear fuel
• Reactor No. 2: 81 tons
• Reactor No. 3: 88 tons
• Reactor No. 4: 135 tons
• Reactor No. 5: 142 tons
• Reactor No. 6: 151 tons
• Also, a separate ground-level fuel pool contains 1,097 tons of fuel; and some 70 tons of nuclear materials are kept on the grounds in dry storage.
You’ve learned that unit 3′s reactor was the only one at Fukushima which burned plutonium. As Japan Times notes:
Reactor 3 … uses highly dangerous mixed oxide fuel, Tokyo Electric has reported.
***
No. 3 reactor is the only one at the crippled power station that was powered by the plutonium-uranium MOX
You’ve gotten the fact that – if the water drains out for any reason – it will cause a fire in the fuel rods, as the zirconium metal jacket on the outside of the fuel rods could very well catch fire within hours or days after being exposed to air. See this, this, this and this. (And that even a large solar flare could knock out the water-circulation systemsfor the pools.)
You’ve listened to experts say that – unless the rods are removed from the fuel pools before a major earthquake strikes (using special equipment which keeps the rods submerged in water the whole time) – they will likely catch fire and release huge amounts of radioactivity. See this and this – starting at 4 minutes into the video.
You’ve read that – after reviewing photos from several different angles – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s initial impressions were that spent fuel pool number 3 might not be there at all, and that nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen said a couple of days ago:
Unit 3 is worse [than No. 4]. It’s mechanically its rubble, the pool is rubble. It’s got less fuel in it. It faces the same problem. Structurally the pool has been dramatically weakened. And, god nobody has even gotten near it yet.
And you may caught the recent headline that a 35-ton machine fell into spent fuel pool 3. As Kyodo News reports:
The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Friday found that a 35-ton machine had dropped inside the spent fuel pool of the No. 3 unit, possibly because of a hydrogen explosion that occurred in the early stage of plant’s nuclear accident last year.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., commonly known as TEPCO, reported the finding after placing a camera inside the water-filled pool the same day to prepare for removing, as part of the decommissioning process, the nuclear fuel stored there.
One photo showed part of the machine, originally located above the pool and used to insert and remove fuel, appeared to have dropped onto the nuclear fuel storage racks.
But – until you see pictures – it is hard to get a sense of what all this means.
Here’s a picture just released by Tepco of the giant machine in the fuel pool :

And another new Tepco photo showing other tangled wreckage inside the pool:

The following graphics from Ashai news show how the crane is normally used to move spent fuel rods in and out of the pool. Here’s the crane bringing in a special container to hold the rods:
Loading spent fuel rods into the container:
The crane then lifts the rod-carrying container up:
And then away from the pool:
Keep in mind that the machine which fell into pool number 3 was part of the crane “used to insert and remove fuel”, and so now there is no easy way to remove the fuel from the fuel pool. And the crane at unit 4 is also broken:
Still confused?
Let’s look at some more pictures …
Before the Quake
Here is where the fuel pools are located in the Fukushima reactors:

Here are pictures Unit 3′s fuel pool before the earthquake, and the fuel pool crane:





This shot is during repairs at reactor 4 before the earthquake – but gives a sense of scale:

After the Quake
Here is the green fuel pool crane at unit 4 after the earthquake:



The view from above the crane at fuel pool 4:

(“SFP” in these photos refers to the spent fuel pool.)
Former fuel pool nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen notes that – for at least some period after the earthquake – the fuel pool had insufficient water, and the nuclear rods were sticking out into the air:
Here is water later being poured into fuel pool 4:

Reactor 3 is a mess:
HouseofOust notes of this picture:
Oval is the reactor well location. Lines on the left side of the image outline the crane that seems to have fallen over or been crushed. Spent fuel pool outlined in the foreground.

And of this picture:
Perspective lines are drawn to show where the deck should be and how much is gone. A circle shows the beam apex to appoximate the reactor well. Spent fuel pool is again seen off to the right and outlined. Marked structure in the foreground is the end of the refueling crane.

Now can you see what’s going on?
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I pity the poor people who venture into that unholy mess as they are committing a slow suicide.
Not to mention the people who live and work anywhere near it.
What a mess, what a sad mess.
"BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD THERE GO I "
There are many other people who live and work around similar facilities.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/AKWs_Weltkarte.png
But in this case, "God" had "nothing" to do with it, the hubris of mankind never ceases to amaze me.
Something really funky happened with the formatting here.
You can say that again.
Got a pop ad in the middle for "affordable pool service" in Fla.
Don't think they are into this kind of pool service!
GE...We Bring Good Things To Life! (and then we irradiate and annihilate it...because we're doing God's work here, now move along)
GE CAP (project finance) the "lenders of last resort", bunch of S&M whores.......
Gundersen also says that this might collapse and "end life on this planet as we know it." Well, if that happens, no point in owning any gold, food, property or guns... Send them all to me. I'll hold onto them for you guys.
Do you take old issues of National Geographic and discarded toys?
Lord, deliver us from Evil!
Lord, deliver us from Evil!
./.. how's that working out so far?
You might have left your run a little bit late Stycho.
Indeed SK. We may scoff at the ancients for revering the 'gods' - even the avenging gods, thinks Mars, Kali & Zeus, or even the strict Abrahamic Jewish/Christian/Muslim god of the Old Testament. You simply didn't mess with these gods - not and get away with it anyway.
The sun god - RA could blind & still can of course. Gaia, mother of all Hindu gods & (latterly co-opted into the Pagan neo-Chrsitian pantheon too..) will take remedial steps to 'fix' this. Fixing it does not necessarily mean happy ever after for the current top predator incumbents either.
The seething earth gods bide their time, in Fukushima Pool No. 4.
A lot has happened in the past 50 years in our understanding of the 'Gods'.' To get beyond the priestly blather and rehypothecating of the planetary events of just a few thousand years ago you might start here : http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/02/25/seeking-the-third-story/
Pope, I watched the entire "Thunderbolts" video and offer an explaining theory that is disprovable. Rather than trying to figure out how planets could defy Newtownian physics within human history and cause huge plasma discharges between them, how about considering the effect of a solar event MUCH larger than the Carrington Event? I'm thinking that looking at ice cores of the period of the Carrington Event, and comparing them to cores encompassing the period discussed in the video, would either support or disprove my simpler explanation.
Your belief (and I use that word advisedly) in 'science' is touching PC. I happen to know quite a bit of 'science' myself - that being my background in fact - I'm not a crystal-wearing muesli-eating fairy.
I would go into the allegoricial nature of both tradtional belief (the avowedly metaphysical) & modern scientific belief (metaphysical in all but its own perception of itself) , if I had the time or inclination (and the audience..), but I can't really be bothered.
Suffice it to say, not only is 'scientific' discovery and/or'fact' subjective & a function of time (compare & contrast the Newtonian & Einsteinian views of reality), but that temporal functional aspect (i.e. how long a given belief system is useful, in the societal sense) is rationally true by the same token.
The philosophical mistake often made by 1-dimensional 'scientific' minds is to assume rationality itself doesn't evolve to suit the facts or society it exists in.
My original comment was an attempt to merely short circuit the above & compare both allegorical interpretations - and both are probably true, even if the priestly robes look different.
The article you link, to my mind, is rather simplistic - but perhaps a good starting point for beginners.
Hurry up and invent the Star Trek beaming technology. Any other solution is cost prohibitive for the Japanese government which is moving people back into radioactive areas so as to reduce compensation claims and signal to the world that Japan is back in business. And, of course, the nuclear industry is ready to bet that this whole situation will quietly solve itself without damaging its ability to build more reactors all over the world.
I don't get it? What's these pictures have to do with a Nuclear Reactor? Looks like small destroyed small buildings.
I don't get it?
Correct.
Did you forget to indicate that the comment was intended as scarasm?
IF your comment is for real, than what are you doing on ZH?
Or maybe you are just trolling? lol
Ooh....ahh....
Duct tape ... lots of it.
FUBAR. Wow. Scary. Engineers out there, could they pump in some kind of a concrete-graphite slurry around the rods? Maybe they could mix other moderators into the concrete too? Get the whole thing into a solid stable chunk and then section it up and bury it somewhere? The USA could focus national attention on helping fix this. Looking at how they mitigated Chernobyl would probably help.
Chernobyl Elephant's foot. It melted down and mixed with concrete..stopped itself. To get a sample of this, they shot it with an AK to chip it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z82GkhcqDKw
Free X-Ray's in this room. Bring your own film.
You just flunked Nuke Engineering 101. Graphite is a neutron moderator that will increase the likeliood of an unintended criticality. Concrete will not conduct the heat away. Guaranteeing a worse china-sydrome corium blob than they already have.
I didn't take Nuke Engineering 101. I truly don't understand this aspect of things. Are you saying that the individual rods are hot and generate heat in their individual capacity? I thought you only had reaction/heat when the fuel is brought into proximity with one another? You have a hot reactor with the fuel sections near each other and the control rods (moderator) are inserted to stop or control the reaction. The coolant is used to carry away and use the energy from said reaction.
I would not think they would ever store fuel rods in a situation where they weren't (physically separated) far enough away from one another to keep any reaction from happening. Is there still a reaction going on in the spent fuel pools or do you just have a bunch of fuel pieces that needs to be kept separate from other pieces of fuel? If there is no heat being generated by each individual piece of fuel then what is wrong with isolating it or encasing it? If I have a non critical sized piece of fuel and I bury it in a block of concrete, it will still be non-critical right?
This documentary shows a small reactor being assembled. That is where I get most of my understanding. I know they are not all built like this but at least similar in idea? or not?
http://archive.org/details/gov.dod.dimoc.26064
Well, OK then. To be fair, I had this vague idea that the spent fuel would take a few days to cool off, before last year's meltdown made it clear that I was uninformed.
What I learned from news reports and Wikipedia articles is that when a reactor is shut down, the fuel elements still produce heat at ~6% of the running reactor. The rate drops off to less than 1% after a few days, but the fuel rods typically spend several years in the cooling pool before they can be moved into long term dry storage. And 0.1% of a gigawatt is still quite a bit of heat energy. If the decay heat (from the decay of fission products) is not removed from the fuel rods, they will simply get hotter and hotter until the heat finds a way to escape.
Unreacted fuel rods do not emit any measurable heat because the fissionable Uranium or Plutonium in them has an extremely long half life. This means that not very many atoms are disintegrating at any given time. Atoms are small, so a few fissions here and there are barely noticed against the ever present background radiation.
But once they have been in a reactor and participated in a chain reaction, the rods have significant amounts of nuclei weighing about 1/3 - 2/3 as much as a U235 nucleus, and because fission is a random process, most of the daughter nuclei are unstable and highly radioactive. They do not undergo further fission, but they do emit a lot of beta and gamma rays as they work their way back to stability.
It is because of all this radioactive decay that the spent fuel rods emit lethal amounts of radiation and heat, and must be kept in the cooling pools.
That would add an insulating jacket that could cause it to overheat, crack the matrix, oxidise and volatilise. A free flowing liquid coolant is the way to go.
Using an air-forced refrigerant means you would have to drain the pools, but you'd get a highly radioactive mud that turned airbourne as hot-particle dust once it dried out.
So they'll will have to remain in water.
1. clear away the concrete structure and debris.
2. lift-out the big stuff.
3. electro-magnet and grapple system for the medium size stuff.
4. suck-up the smaller stuff with a vacuum system.
5. continuously filter the water, dilute the salt contamination.
6. build big-ass gantry that can traverse all four reactors.
7. lift racks out in a water jacket.
Of course the stuctures and floors are also heavily contaminated.
They need to get moving because if contamination seepage from melted fuel rods enters ground waters (which it more or less is to some extent) and comes to the surface during rains, it may make it too toxic to remain working in the area.
Too toxic to remain working in the area
Isn't that the real problem? Japan has a limited number of trained nuclear power plant personel. They have maximum allowable cumulative dose restrictions. Some have already exceeded the limit. Many more are approaching it. 53 of 54 Japanese nuclear reactors are shut down. The 54th will shut down shortly. Few, if any, will be restarted any time soon. This is not a growth industry in Japan.
With Fukushima being a 30 year plus clean up project where is Japan to get the qualified people to do this work? You might think Tepco could draw on the nuclear qualified workers at other utilities whose plants are shut down but how many of these folks are going to be willing to go work at Fukushima even if you offer premium pay. If you are a 40 year old nuclear power plant worker in Kyushu is a 50 or even 100% pay increase incentive enough to go and max out your cumulative lifetime radiation exposure working for a year or two at Fukushima? If you are a young person in Japan is working at Fukushima a career opportunity you'd want to take advantage of?
We need a new kind of nuclear PhD degree program...Perhaps a new univertity as well...All focused on remediation.
FixUpFukUp U
I'm not joking.
someone only made a sign that says "Tepco"
There is no company by that name that actually exist's
What does actually exist is a huge disaster created by a bunch of asshole bankers that printed a bunch of paper and gave it to some contractors to build a bunch of nuclear power plants
How much longer before people see the real problem and cut all their heads off?
It's amazing, they always have the money to build it and get it operational but they never have the money to clean up their mess.
There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again.
Yet another example of "The Tragedy of the Commons".....
what a shambles
so not only was the nuclear plant not earthquake proof, but even the fucking crane un-hinged itself and went for a kamakazi dive into the pool
another public-private toxic failure ...genius
The crane may have been designed to take a earth quake but I doubt the structural engineers could have cost effectively designed the crane structure to with stand this.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdHbp-tU5O0
(while you watch this keep in mind the location of the crane with respect to the explosion/detonation).....
I didn't junk you because your comment made me laugh (the visual of trying to design a crane structure to survive, NOT "un-hinged itself" during that detonation).... and it brought to the fore the lack of understanding of the events and of the forces in play in.
Hardcleareye - from what i can make of the photos i conclude
1). the walls have fallen in
2). the internal mechanics have fallen in
3). there is no nuclear safety system/s when accidents occur
4). the plant's not 'fail-safe' or earthhquake proof
5). the nuclear plant was built in an active earthquake zone
(stop me if any 5 of the above are untrue or inaccurate)
which brings me to my conclusion:
the plant is situatted by clowns, built by clowns, has the safety standards of clowns and is now a toxic circus with, 1 year on, all the clowns being totally clueless how to fix it
this is Govt worldwide: it compunds stupid decisions (going nuclear) on top of stupid decisions (building in an earthquake zone) on top of more stupid decisions (not being earthquake proof or having fail-safe systems).
So here we are, yet another fuking Govt (public-private) farce, this one highly toxic for Centuries to come
Shut down Govt... the institution is an expensive tragedy in everything it does or touches
bad code
How recent are these pics?
it doesn't matter, it doesn't get any better than this
I keep on hoping these guys are going to pull a rabbit out of the hat.... like watching the ECB deal with sovereign debt risk........ you know, kinda like watching a hail Mary pass....
I had the same question myself, I could not find any newer pics that were not published in Reuters or in GW's post above. Many of the Pics in this post are over a year old, the newer ones have the red cranes in them.
Fukushima has further reaching consequences than Chernobyl, and this is how the USSR dealt with Chernobyl....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o and yes many died.......
Compare that to the "western/free world's" response to Fukushima..... what is wrong with this picture?
Went out and wandered about in the (radioactive) central Calif. rain yesterday. What's the big deal? I'm still here, and in glowing good health.
The rainfall at the trailing edge of yesterday's thunderstorm (swiped from a car hood) measured 49x background radiation. I live in the Midwest.
Glow-in-the-dark urine ain't nothin' for concern. Man up, walk it off.
I see the pictures, but I don't want to get too close to the screen because of the radiation.
i feel contaminated just loookin over the piccies
Good thing all those rods are only forty feet up in the air.
If they had any further to fall when the building collapses, it would make a real mess..
I am afraid that I could only see the first two pictures. The link seemed to largely resolve it. Great job as always.
I am afraid that I could only see the first two pictures. The link seemed to largely resolve it. Great job as always.
Yes I can. Thanks for more details.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-fuel-fukushima
"The Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Crisis On March 11, a powerful, magnitude 9.0 quake hit northeastern Japan, triggering a tsunami with 10-meter-high waves that reached the U.S. west coast. Here's the science behind the disaster » March 11, 2011"
BLAH BLAH BLAH. "scientificamerican" / "sciam" / "science" ...sucks corperate dick!!!
"The pools at each reactor are thought to have contained the following amounts of spent fuel, according to The Mainichi Daily News:"
"thought" <-speculating on the amounts of spent fuel in the pools is not science!!! "..., according to" <-just makes it worse, heresay2
"You already know that Fukushima’s fuel pool number 4 may be the single greatest threat, but that pool number 3 is very dangerous as well."
so, i read that too. but, i'm not sure if i actually know anything more than i did before. (is that a good way to start a post?)
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Great pics Georgy. Lots of questions,,, few answers.
"Now can you see what’s going on?" <-see yes / read no
Can you guys see all the photos, or are you getting bad code?
It's supposed to look like this:
A Visual Tour of the Fuel Pools of Fukushima