(I didn't even know that SARRY had a vent line.)
The cause of the leak seems to be elementary (yet again). They had a plug in the drain line, so the contaminated water that should have gone to the drain line went up and out of the vent line instead.
What has happened to "attention to detail" which has been a hallmark of Japanese processes? (Or "was" a hallmark?)
Fukushima I Nuke Plant is entering the second winter since the nuclear accident, and many, many more winters to come until the plant is decommissioned. Well beyond the attention span of most Japanese.
From TEPCO (11/20/2012):
30-Day free trial by following the link.
Tokyo Time
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
10 comments:
You still believe this plant will be decommissioned?
It's impossible and they know it, but forgot to tell you ( yet ).
The only thing they are doing now, is dammage control in a lousy way, otherwise it costs too much money.
They know how to play this out. Let's see after 5-7 more years, what kind of progress is made? I predict: hardly anything, but by that time the Japanese have a vague memory about Fukushima.
All the signs are clearly pointing in that way.
It's nothing to do with my belief. That's what they say.
Anon at the top, you think too highly of the Japanese. As if they are able to think 5 years ahead. Get real.
La Prima Vera,
No offence, i took it that you still were thinking they can decommission the plant. Situation looks pretty hopeless to me.
Anon at 12:57. If you have some understanding of the Japanese culture, than you know they plan everything very well. They have to, as most of them can not improvise, which is exactly the reason why it became so messy.
Is there any information on how much water they have cleaned and how much is left to be cleaned? I seem to remember the initial estimate was the waste water would be cleaned up in about a year.
The AREVA company blog claimed it would take a few months to clean up, their treatment system didn't last a few months before it was replaced. I sure hope the Japanese didn't pay AREVA very much for their failed efforts. Let's not forget AREVA's nonchalant claims before shit got real.
"Cleaning up all this water is likely to take a couple of months. If the water is clean enough, Japanese officials could decide to dump some of it into the ocean. But in the short term, they plan to run it back into the plant. That will keep the cores relatively cool. And as long as they stay cool, they won’t ooze more radioactive cesium into the water."
"Following a request from TEPCO, AREVA proposed a solution to treat most of the contaminated water at the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. Backed by a network of support teams in France, Germany and the United States, AREVA’s experts on the ground in Japan proposed a solution based on the concept of co-precipitation within 10 days.
Developed by AREVA and implemented in partnership with Veolia Water in less than 10 weeks, the process uses special chemical reagents to separate and recover the radioactive elements. The operating facility has been successful in treating more than 77,000 cubic meters of highly radioactive water thanks to the large-capacity of the treatment plant."
http://us.arevablog.com/2011/06/16/areva-part-of-the-water-treatment-solution-at-fukushima/
Anon at 8:36AM, I can find the latest info for you, but the amount of contaminated water hasn't decreased much. They keep circulating the treated water back into the reactors, and the decon process is repeated. I think they treat more water than necessary to cool the reactors.
As to AREVA's decon system, they stopped using it a long time ago, maybe a year ago or more. Too many troubles (leaks, adding back more radioactivity after the treatment, facility too radioactive to conduct maintenance (and manual in French and Italian), running out of storage space for extremely radioactive sludge, etc.). If it is any comfort, they stopped using Kurion's cesium towers also.
President Sarkosy himself came to Japan as AREVA's salesman in March last year. Kurion's deal seems to be the US DOE promo.
This type of incident is definitely a result of neglect.
A waste water hose had to be replaced.
Instead of replacing the damaged hose, the waste water outlet was just closed with a stopper plug.
And then they were so attentive to forget to get and attach a new hose until some worker noticed radioactive water flowing out of the vent.
I guess Tepco will be too incurious to investigate how long this "forgotten temporary patch" lasted until the leak appeared.
>If you have some understanding of the Japanese culture, than you know they plan everything very well.
Well, if the past 20 months are any indication, they clearly don't, unless their plan was to cause a nuclear accident when M9 hits.
@ anon 8:36
For a description of the SARRY system and its performance please look here:
http://www.uop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/UOP-Fukushima-case-study.pdf
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR_Fukushima_water_treatment_stepping_up_1503121.html
On the other hand, please note that SARRY is way more selective to Caesium. It removes most of the gamma radiation from the water, which in turn improves the radiation situation for workers.
But doesn't clean up strontium from the treated water.
Thus the "puddle" of vent effluent is only medium gamma-radioactive, but extremely beta-radioactive.
Thus in the long run they have to implement a second stage that cleans the water from beta stuff (strontium and the like).
Until such a second stage has been developed, the water cannot be released into the ocean and will continue to accumulate on the site.
It will accumulate as long as groundwater constantly flows into the reactor and turbine hall basements and gets contaminated there.
370 Bq/cc is 370 Million BQ/Cubic Meter.
THat's pretty radioactive, it's about 37,000 Bq/Liter.
Post a Comment