I watched the longer versions, and still couldn't figure out what it was that I was seeing. It looks like yellowish substance is being scraped by the camera or the tube.
Longer versions are at TEPCO's page: http://photo.tepco.co.jp/en/date/2012/201203-e/120327-01e.html
For more on this 2nd probe, see my post here (for March 26 operation) and here (for March 27 operation).
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18 comments:
LaPrimavera, do you mean this scraping which is very well visible in minute 30 to 34 of the longest video?
You even can notice the streaks of finest dust when the sludge precipitate falls down and settles like lava or an underwater avalanche.
The rust, paint remains and whatever else, all this is probably highly porous and loose at the surfaces, slowly dissolving into sludge.
Corium, too, becomes porous and sludgy over time, as Chernobyl observations show.
Hope they find a way to fixate the corium soon and stop the water flow, before substantial part of it dissolved into the groundwater and then the ocean.
Imagining a porous-sludgy water moderated corium pile going critical, maybe even oscillate :)
@Atomfritz, yes. I think this short version used that particular part of the longest video.
Total waste of hundreds of millions of yen and workers' lives ... camera lens has water drops on it and cannot focus on anything. How amateurish.
Fillmore West: watch the vid, smoke some weed and listen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltyjNjsz8UU
In the past, I have used nitric acid to mainly study Ca & Al concentrations. I do believe there is a good possibility to use this same technique here.
The corium as evidenced here in the video is already in a sludge state. To change the water out for nitric acid and finish dissolving the corium will allow for it's removal through simple vacuum tubes into a safe storage configuration which will greatly cut the radiation levels and allow for the encapsulation of the material into a feldspar based glass structure.
Samples would be best to predetermine the concentration of acid needed and if perhaps a different acid would be more appropriate it may be chosen.
OhGawwddd... I was hoping Google Spam filter was working. I was so wrong.
Brackett, there is no corium here. TEPCO hasn't found the corium. Why don't you jump into the reactor 2 water with your nitric acid?
(Please dear Google God, I'll be good, just remove this woman from the blog.)
Anon @9:29 You are missing the point. Although I see your point. The sludge state may be a pre-corium? If you only think of corium as in the elephant foot context of Chernoybl? Still, I stand behind a acid reduction solution to the problem at hand in the video.
Of course, naturally it did occur to me that any nitrogen gas used to date may have caused a precipitant. Either way, this will work.
Do you even know what corium is? If you're going pass yourself as "expert", go join some consultancy that peddles service to the Japanese. They will welcome anyone who sort of speaks English.
laprimavera, there is grey metal visible beneath the yellow layer at 10:06 in your video, but also at other times. I'd say it is either paint as Atomfritz suggested (hi, Atomfritz! too bad about the PF mods being assholes) or just (you're going to hate me for this) sludge.
Ferrous chlorate is yellow. Limonite (hydrated ferric oxide) is also creamy-yellow. There is plenty of chlorine and oxygen in seawater.
Karen Sherry Brackett said...
...The corium as evidenced here in the video is already in a sludge state.
Could you point me to where the evidence in the video is that the corium is in a sludge state?
praying to google spam filter god.... remove this woman.... remove .... remove...
Yellow cake (UO2) looks like this powdery stuff on the walls of the primary containment.
If we assume it is yellow cake, the main question is how did it get there? One possibility is, that it sprayed there and than slowly corroded to UO2 due to the water running over it.
So how could it have spayed there? If you imagine, when the meltdown started, the rods overheat and melt forming a hot blob on the bottom of the reactor vessel (RV). This blob slowly melts through the control rod mounting (the holes at the bottom of the RV). At the same time there is high pressure inside the RV. Once the hot blob starts to get out of the RV it will not just drop down. This blob is so hot, it is quite liquid. This liquidity together with the pressure in the RV will make it spay. [Imagine a plastic bottle of sparkling water. If you punch a whole into the bottle, will the water come out of the pressurized bottle or will it spay out of the hole in all directions? Same should happen with the hot blob]. Of course not all spays around, but enough to cover the wall with a thin layer of formerly molten blob. It solidifies and than slowly corrodes to the yellow stuff.
Just an assumption of course
@ KSB
Please can you explain me what "pre-corium" is?
@ 11:08
*waving* :)
@ 12:02
If the corium has sprayed from the orifice in the RPV, I doubt it would have distributed that evenly.
Even taking one sample could be insufficient, as the potential mix of different yellowish-brownish metal oxides could differ very much depending on sampling location.
Anyway, I'd advocate containment vessel surveillance cameras for all reactors still operating.
It's amazing that nobody cared to implement such, as it would not cost much (just some glass fiber optics and a cam).
A corium spouting RPV would be a Youtube evergreen, surely not something the nuclear mafia would like people to see :)
"waving back"
The conventional thinking is you don't really need to see inside the PCV and anyway this reactor design is older than fiber optics.
But then, the conventional thinking never got as far as "we might need to scrape corium slag off the PCV floor someday".
12:02 again-
Two things about iron chloride:
1. I do not see how the chloride in the salt water will convert iron into iron chloride. From a chemical point of view this will not happen. You will get tons of iron hydroxides and oxides. They tend to be more brown/red (rust).
2. If iron chloride gets in contact with water it will immediately convert to iron hydroxide (a brown fluffy insoluble stuff, not granular and not anywhere near yellow) and at the same time the chloride will be release to the water as HCl. (A standard procedure in today's sewage treatment systems)
In conclusion, there is no way that there is any kind of iron chloride there. You will only find hydroxides, oxides or carbonates of the metals nothing else.
Another possibility to get the yellow cake sprayed on the wall is when the hot stuff gets in contact with water. The water will evaporate and bursts out as steam, which might pull some of the yellow cake with it. Over a relatively moderate period of time, most of the wall would get sprayed this way. Just think about what happens when a drop of water creeps under the oil in your frying pan.
On thing I am not sure about is where did the zirconium go? It also converted to oxide (when all the hydrogen was released, remember). But zirconium oxide is grey, and I can not see much grey in this yellow stuff. This is actually a point that does not support the yellow cake theory.
Although some splattering of fuel is well possible, I don't believe a scenario where it gets caked all over the walls tends to feature in nuclear accident analysis.
For a start there are only one or two openings in the pedestal area under the reactor vessel. Accident analysis research that looks at corium coming out from the pedestal area suggests that under certain conditions the corium can flow or splash out from these openings, and attack lower parts of the drywall wall. The temperature has to be right and enough of the fuel has to fully drop down to make this possible, and it would happen over a huge area of the wall.
In my opinion attempts to figure out what is happening based largely on colour are doomed to fail, especially when you don't know what colour the drywell walls were painted before the disaster. And I seriously doubt that the term yellow cake has any place in Fukushima discussions at all.
Argh another mistake by me when writing, last post was supposed to say that 'it would NOT happen over a huge area of the wall'
There is good probability that the corium exited from the RPV side, at about the surface level of the corium sea, where the RPV metal gets hotter than on its bottom/pedestal.
And I think elbows is right, you cannot determine what the yellowish-brownish stuff is just by judging of the colors in the videos. You'd need a spectrometer instead of a camera/light with unknown color temperature/spectrum.
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