Tuesday, June 21, 2011

#Contaminated Water Processing at #Fukushima: TEPCO Is Ready for Full Run Again

Kyodo News Japanese (7:21PM JST 6/21/2011) says TEPCO successfully treated the highly contaminated water at a rate of 50 tonnes per hour, after adjusting the water pumps at AREVA's subsystem.

No information on how long TEPCO ran the system at the 50 tonnes/hour rate, or when the full run resumes.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just released in English-French with stunning close pictures of Fort Calhoun nuclear plant’s dams:

http://www.cartoradiations.fr/Fort_Calhoun.php

Dominique Guillet

Anonymous said...

Robbie001 sez:

So now everything is hunky dory and running at full speed even though the radiation level of the effluent is supposed to be way higher than expected. That sounds unlikely but I guess we'll have to take their word for it. For all we know it ran for 10 minutes at 50T/hr I would have expected the full run to resume immediately if everything was coming up roses. BTW do the fluctuations in the reactor trench water levels reflect new storage coming online or something more nefarious?

If you live in the US Fort Calhoun is still just an "unusual event". I'd like to see web cam footage of their sub-basement. 2011 may be the year that the waters of the world rose up to humble the ignorant.

netudiant said...

The only goal for now is to keep the site from overflowing. Unfortunately, mother nature may make that hard to achieve, if the rainy season drops enough water on the site. So we can only watch and pray.

Still, if the decontamination process works reasonably steadily even at half the rated level, it should be enough. It is perhaps good news that there have been no bad results reported, just operating glitches.

The Ft Calhoun plant is certainly very close to being flooded, but the various disaster reports appear very implausible. The site was shut down some weeks ago and there is the entire Mississippi available to provide makeup water for the spent fuel pool.

Anonymous said...

Not a moment too late. From what I understand, Tohoku has entered the rainy season yesterday/today.

Agreed that the 50t/h without further details is a little fishy. They must be desperate to get some positive news out on the system after all the start/stop news.

Anonymous said...

Robbie001 sez:

The future rain is going to percolate all that shattered buried fuel and contamination into a local groundwater delight. If the rains are heavy enough it won't matter if they managed to stabilize the surface soils with Kuricoat the water will find a way. Kuircoat is designed to minimize particulate resuspension on construction sites I doubt it is totally impermeable to water ingress if it were it could cause flash flooding on the job site and or nuclear disaster site.

I found this little blurb in an article that might explain why they haven't lined up a bunch of empty ships for wastewater storage. It indicates the water is just too hot to handle in every respect. Like I said eariler if you want to make an omelet ya gotta be willing to break some eggs. TEPCO and J/GOV are really desperate to claim "nobody died" the nuclear industry needs this to be a happy ending too. Chernobyl gave more than one man a nuclear tan and many other a harsh lingering death and 25 years later it is still a mess in progress.

"The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry said it had considered dispatching port-use tankers to collect the contaminated water and then shuttle it via Maritime Self-Defense Force vessels to tankers anchored offshore. But the Defense Ministry deemed the plan too risky.

"We don't have the ability to completely isolate the radiation-contaminated water, so that would've put SDF personnel at too much risk," a ministry official said."

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110330005470.htm

In Chernobyl it wasn't too much of a risk for soldiers to pickup deadly hot reactor parts and toss them back into the smoking hole in short 3 minute bursts. At Fukushima they were afraid of a little water after all it didn't hurt anybody, right. Nor was it out of the question at Chernobyl to walk through the shattered reactor basement searching for deadly loose fuel with nothing but a survey meter and a long stick. Remember how TEPCO wanted to abandon the facility early on and call it good.

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