It's the lowest operating rate ever, since the system went into full operation with highly contaminated water about a month ago.
The news was released one day after the announcement of the successful completion of the "step 1" in TEPCO/Japanese government's "roadmap" to somewhere (over the rainbow, way up high... it is not reality-based any more, if ever).
From Yomiuri Shinbun (7/20/2011):
Highly radioactive sludge that no one can touch. Or it could be rotten fish bits.東京電力は２０日、福島第一原子力発電所の汚染水処理システムの稼働率（１９日までの１週間）がこれまでで最低の５３％だったと発表した。
TEPCO announced on July 20 that the operating rate of the contaminated water treatment system at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant for the week ended on July 19 was 53%, the lowest ever since the system started the full operation.
東電は７月の目標稼働率を当初、８０％としていた。
TEPCO's target operating rate for July was 80%.
稼働率は、ほぼ１週間ごとに算出。稼働率が低迷しているは、システムに流せる汚染水量が毎時３７立方メートルと定格流量（毎時５０立方メートル）を大幅に下回っていることや、トラブルで停止したことが理由。流量がこのままでは、トラブルなしで連続運転できても稼働率は７４％にしかならず、東電は今後の処理目標の見直しもあるとしている。
The company calculates the operating rate every week. The reasons for the low operating rate are: low flow rate of 37 cubic meters (tonnes) per hour, instead of 50 cubic meters per hour as the system is designed, and stoppage due to various problems. At the current flow rate, even if there was no problem and the system could be run continuously, the operating rate would only be 74%. TEPCO says it is possible that the target for water treatment may be revised.
流量低下は、配管にたまった汚泥が原因と見られるが、現時点では原因を特定できていない。東電は今後、システムの改善を図り、２０日からの１週間で７０％、８月は９０％に稼働率を上げたいとしている。
The low flow rate may be caused by the sludge in the pipes, but at this point TEPCO hasn't been able to identify the cause. The company will try to improve the system somehow, and hopes to raise the operating rate to 70% during the week starting July 20, and to 90% in August.
TEPCO must be counting on Toshiba's SARRY, which is supposed to come online in early August. TEPCO had better hope SARRY will deliver.
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12 comments:
"roadmap" to somewhere (over the rainbow, way up high...
Highly radioactive sludge that no one can touch. Or it could be rotten fish bits.
It is, without a doubt, from the "smiling angels" taking dump after dump ..
The lower than expected performance is a disappointment, even though it is perhaps not unsurprising, given that this is a jury rig at best. Still, it is doing enough to keep the site from overflowing, so it is doing its basic job adequately.
Eventually there will be a better replacement designed and built such as the SARRY.
The second problem, where to put the contaminated filters and the process sludge, is a bear. Japan does not have an agreed nuclear depository afaik, nor has the US made good on its efforts to set one up at Yucca mountain, a site which afaik was expected to be available for the Japanese plants as well. It seems doubtful any prefecture will agree to take in the radioactive remains, so my guess is that these will stay at the site indefinitely. As the site will take decades to restore in any event, that is probably logical.
Anyone who has had a flooded basement or any other unwanted water intrusion has to be puzzled by the inability of TEPCO, with virtually unlimited resources, to move 'dirty' water from point A to point B without pumps breaking down, leaks appearing everywhere and so on.
Ancient civilisations were able to collect, store and move water over great distances with far less technology. Why is it that TEPCO cannot move some, admittedly polluted, water a few hundred meters and secure it?
This isn't just water... When people get close to this water, people die.
When this water is filtered, the filters have to be sequestered from human life - for 20,000 years.
This isn't just like cleaning a flooded basement.
Robbie001 sez:
Fukushima has absolutely become Japan's defacto waste storage facility three popped reactors saw to that long before the filter sludge fiasco. Chernobyl is 25 years old and it is still a defacto waste storage facility with no real clean up plan. If the current slipping standards and slap-dash construction efforts are applied to Japan's accelerated over all clean up of Fukushima I think most people can get a pretty good idea of the future. It is 4 months and they still don't have the water situation actually under control at best they are still treading water. Integrating Long Tall SARRY into the AREVA kludge might create more problems than it solves but even if all goes well it isn't anything to brag about. It is like bragging that you managed to re-inflate the tires on a car that just got demolished by a freight train. Who cares about the tires you're still a long way from driving.
Remember originally they needed access to the basements to make important electrical connections that is a pipe dream now. Four months of salt water immersion has ruined every connection not to mention the high level of contamination will remain long after the water is gone. This situation isn't going to get better after operation pup tent starts. They have already proven they can't filter the air with off the shelf components so now they will need to build a super radioactive Rube Goldberg air filter kludge to match the water filter kludge. Let's keep in mind all that pesky robo blinding humidity that operation pup tent will probably retain without a super radioactive Rube Goldberg dehumidifier/AC facility for the tented reactor hulks. Without dehumidification most air filter system will lose efficiency pretty quick and eventually stop working.
While the US has stored small amounts of foreign waste in the early days of the "Peaceful Atom" (@ INEEL, SRS Barnwell) AFAIK Yucca Mountain isn't open to foreign waste. Even if it ever opens it doesn't have the space to store the current commercial US inventory without major expansion. Yucca Mt. isn't anything but an experimental 5 mile U shaped tunnel it will take 40 miles of undug tunnels just to store the current US fuel load. This is probably why Japan and the US are looking to Mongolia for a repository and Australia is also looking into setting up an International repository. Japan currently reprocesses its waste but counter to the popular lie reprocessing creates more waste not less. HLW canisters that were generated by reprocessing in Europe are being shipped to Aomori Prefecture for temporary above ground storage for 30-50 years. Japan still has to engineer a way to move and store unconventional fuel configurations at Fukushima and they can't even clean up the water they spilled.
http://www.greenaction-japan.org/modules/english0/index.php?id=8
"The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), which regulates the energy sector, admitted that it had covered up a 1994 report on the costs of using recycled fuel to power some reactors. The report said that reprocessing the spent fuel would cost four times as much as simply burying it. So the ministry, which is keen on the reprocessing plan, buried the report instead."
http://www.economist.com/node/3093606
"Italian or other foreign radioactive waste could be burned in Tennessee, but the company handling it says the ash and other remains will be sent back to the country of origin.
A federal court ruling prohibits any of it from going to a Utah landfill."
http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=146652
At Chernobyl, reactors 1 and 3 are still fully loaded with fuel in cold shutdown.
.. while keeping 2000 personnel onsite to maintain the disaster area.
http://www.nirs.org/c20/chernobyllargereportfinal.pdf
page 3
Operation Pup Tent,
"Efforts to continue work at Unit 2 have also run into trouble because of extremely high humidity (99.9%) inside the reactor building that makes working in the building virtually impossible. Tepco had thought the source was the heat from the fuel pool, but now that the pool is cooling, it has realized the source is heat from the molten reactor core in the suppression pool under the building — .."
Corium could not be in the Suppression Torus, but the point is made it is in the basement, flooded.
UPDATE, Tuesday, June 14, 2011
http://www.nirs.org/fukushima/crisis.htm
".. they will need to build .."
"Although presented then as generous altruism from the international community to the people of the Ukraine and its neighbours, the joint venture activities now seem to be so highly commercialised one might [be] drawn into the observation that, as one Ukrainian commentator wryly put it “. . . the Chernobyl project overall seems to have developed into little more than a money laundering facility for countless millions of Euro . . .” ."
http://www.nirs.org/c20/chernobyllargereportfinal.pdf
page 4
Good Neighbors Again
Uranium Hexafluoride Leak at Honeywell Nuclear Plant
December 22, 2003
"If we've got some issues that we need to clean up here at the site, we'll definitely do that and ensure that we are good neighbors again," McPhee said.
"Police cars actually drove through the neighborhood with loudspeakers telling people to evacuate at 2:30 in the morning."
"Ted Holder, chief deputy for the Massac County Sheriff's Department, said his department will meet with Honeywell, as well as area fire departments and the state police, next week to review the emergency plan used during Monday's leak."
"We (evacuated people) for about an hour, and then somewhere around 4 o'clock we were notified by Honeywell that we needed to keep people inside their residences instead of take them outside," Holder said. "So we just stopped notifying people."
".. the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said there have been other leaks in recent months. Leaks of gaseous hydrogen fluoride on Sept. 9 and uranium hexaflouride on Sept. 30 were contained on-site; a Sept. 12 leak of antimony pentafluoride, unrelated to the uranium processing, did escape the property."
http://www2.fluoridealert.org/Pollution/Nuclear-Industry/Uranium-Hexafluoride-Leak-at-Honeywell-Nuclear-Plant
good neighbors, again
roadmap in hand
Have you read this amazing article about the water treatment system:
http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffmcmahon/2011/04/25/french-plan-to-clean-fukushimas-radioactive-water-detailed-including-risks/
from a site linked to in the mcmahon forbes link,
"-- In a plant for fabricating Mox, there is a higher level of neutron and gamma activity around the materials and equipment, in particular because of the presence of plutonium 238 and americium 241. Production must be carried out as soon as possible after reprocessing to avoid the formation of americium to the extent possible; and rigorous measures must be taken to protect workers, the public, and the environment."
http://www.francenuc.org/en_chn/fabricationpl_e.htm
for insight into the handling of Reactor 3
So there is probably a higher neutron count near Reactor 3 remains.
MOX rods had to be immersed in water during shipment to Daiichi, don't know if that is standard procedure for uranium rods.
"Plutonium 239 with a half-life of 24,400 years, has a specific activity about 200,000 times greater than that of uranium 238 and about 30,000 times greater than that of uranium 235.
The alpha particles emitted in the disintegration of plutonium 239 are about 25% more energetic than those emitted by the disintegration of uranium 238 and of uranium 235.
Therefore, plutonium 239 is about 250,000 times more harmful per gram than uranium 238 and about 39,000 times more harmful per gram from the radiological point of view than uranium 235."
Robbie001 sez:
@ Anon 2:15
Pu 238 is about 250 times as "hot" as Pu 239 with a half-life of 87.7 years.
"However, Pu 238 spits out radiation at least 250 times faster than bomb-grade plutonium. As the atom falls apart, it emits alpha particles--small clumps of nuclear particles--with enormous energy. That energy provides heat and electricity for the instruments on Cassini, as well as the Mars Pathfinder, the Apollo moon flights and other NASA missions. Cassini carries more plutonium than NASA has ever lofted into space.
But although Pu 238 is the "workhorse of the space program," as its discoverer, Glenn Seaborg, calls it, the alpha particles it emits are extremely dangerous to living tissue and DNA. Lodged in the lungs or bone, Pu 238 continues to emit alpha particles for decades, wrecking havoc with the delicate machinery within cells."
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/sep/22/news/mn-35079
"Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 88 years, much shorter than the more familiar “bomb-grade” Pu-239’s half-life of 24,000 years. The flip side is that Pu-238 is much more radioactive and can do a lot more biological damage a lot faster than the same amount of Pu-239."
http://www.snakeriveralliance.org/OurWork/Plutonium238/tabid/159/Default.aspx
Pu 239 health effects:
http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-3/puhealth.html
And so the calculation, once again, 10 half-lives to be 'safe',
"Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 88 years" x 10 = 880 years until 'safety' comes 'round.
I really can't think of a better way for the species to destroy itself than these materials.
So there we have another way TEPCO keeps the lid on, no reporting of neutron measures near 3 ?
"Plutonium 238 has commercial and military applications, because it is an exceptionally strong emitter of alpha radiation."
"Because of its high level of alpha activity, it is used as a source of neutrons (by alpha reaction with light elements),"
http://www.francenuc.org/en_mat/plutonium_e.htm
You'll recall what makes criticality events so dangerous is the neutron emission. So Plutonium-238 is so radioactive it's always in a state of pre-criticality.
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