That will look like this:
(From TEPCO's handout for the press, Japanese, on 11/14/2012)
It will be made of steel frames that will weigh 1,500 tonnes, but the structure will not be fixed to the reactor building itself which has been badly damaged. Radiation levels are too high for the human workers. Instead, the structure will be supported on the ground on the west side, and against the turbine building on the east side, with points in the middle across the reactor building top floor (English labels are mine):
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17 comments:
I wonder how far TEPd'oh can make this lid fly,
or will it just glow in the dark (black-body radiation = infrared)? :o
WHO CARES!!!!
Why are you not reporting on the real stories, like the 30 billion bq per day leaking into the ocean, from Tepco, the company you feel sorry for?
Gaimusho paid you off?
@Anon 3:18
Why aren't you reporting the details of the ocean leak on your own blog? If you haven't noticed this is a FREE personal blog that the owner is nice enough to share with the world. If you don't feel you're getting your money's worth start your own blog so people can rip you a new one when you neglect to mention their pet peeve.
You could have made you comment about your claim but instead you act like a horses ass.
Anon at 3:18AM, I'm beyond tired of "getting paid off" by one government entity or another, completely baseless accusation, I'm beyond being insulted by that any more.
Keep up the good fight, Primavera. I've followed you for a long time, lobbed a few stink bombs your way when I thought you (or your posters) were off target, but you've done a lot of really valuable work. Thanks to you my understanding of this whole tragedy is far deeper, far more comprehensive than it otherwise would have been.
Living in Tokyo.
# anon 3:18,
this steel hull project is a crucial thing to be realized soon.
It will prevent much radiation washout by rain.
This is important to reduce the daily curie of radiation Fuku-I releases that you complain about.
On the other hand, I wonder what Tepco will do if there are problems with the fuel pool and access from crane/concrete pump is blocked by the steel frame.
Thank you LaPrimavera again for reporting about this new detail of Tepco's plans that isn't shown to Westerners!
It's looking more and more like a (pardon the pun) cover-up job.
By which I mean, Chernobyl-type sarcophagi. Out of sight, out of mind.
Some 13000 people from Fukushima are suing Tepco for damages.
Also, Tepco top managers are being sued by shareholders who are seeking 5.5 trillion yen of damages on the basis that Tepco could have prevented the flooding of Fuku 1.
In court Tepco had the face to state that its own calculations, based on the 1896 earthquake data, which anticipated the possibility of a 15.7m flooding could not be used to design the plant flooding protective measures. (souce Jiji news, in Japanese)
Beppe
Chernobyl's should be called matryoshka, not sarcophagus: after less than 30yrs they already need to build a new one around the first. What if the egyptians had to build a pyramid around Cheops' every 30yrs for the last 4500 years?
Chernobyl still employs 3000 people, without producing a single watt of electricity.
This will be nice now the smashed reactor will look like an upscale department store maybe they can rent some floor space to a company like Mitsukoshi.
Either way I'd avoid the food court!
1500 tons of steel isn't really all that much. This frame looks more like scaffolding to me.
Notice that the dome shaped portion of the building is there to enable a "fuel recovery machine" and a crane - shown in blue - below the "bubble". Notice also that it is designed to carry the fuel beyond the end of the building and drop through a hole and into the back of some kind of vehicle that is backed in at ground level .
But the curious thing - not so curious if you have been following the truth, rather than the smokescreen of misinformation - is that they only intend to recover fuel from the spent fuel pool.
This tells you two things: 1. There must still be fuel in the SFP3, which means it was not the source of the explosion on March 14, 2011. and 2. There is nothing recoverable from the core - because they have not made any provision to recover it.
@ Anon 8:00am
The Chernobyl “sarcophagus” was only designed to last 5 years it was an emergency stopgap measure that started collapsing before they finished building it. The thousands of people still working at Chernobyl spend their time patching the patches on the patches of the sarcophagus and changing the zeolite in the hundreds of dams and filter beds they hope will slow contamination of the local water table.
The Egyptians didn’t have to build the Pyramids over a highly radioactive smoking hole in the ground as fast as they could manage. The USSR fell apart soon after the accident killing funding for anything but the most basic of cleanup operations. The Ukraine and Belarus have both pleaded to the world for help but have been largely ignored because initial funding was misappropriated or just plain stolen.
@Anon 8:00am. I get your point that they will empty SFP3 (a reasonable thing to do). But why do you arrive at the conclusion that they won't recover the remains of the core? It will certainly be more difficult (google on the TMI accident - Fuku will be much worse), but a sarcophagus fitted with cranes and the like will also help in this case...
Perhaps you don't know the layout of the building, but all you have to do is look at the rendering and compare it to the blueprints.
The cranes will only access the Spent fuel pool - not the core.
They obviously have no intention of working on the core - probably because it doesn't exist anymore. Another confirmation of what most intelligent folks knew all along - and the nuclear industry has been hiding for 21 months - that the Unit 3 core ruptured in the explosion.
I am amazed how many people still seem to believe that a core cleanup was ever intended.
@ anon 4:31
Remember the fuel at TMI wasn't pickled in saltwater brine for months nor did it melt out of the RPV. Most of TMI's damaged fuel assemblies were partially intact and all of it remained in the RPV. There is every indication that the fuel at Fukushima is considerably more damaged and may not even be in the RPV's. For all we know most of the fuel might be a splattered, corroded mess of brittle spall scattered below the RPV's. This isn't the kind of mess that lends itself to removal by remote crane or robots.
There was a lot of big talk early in the Chernobyl disaster about designing world class clean up methods to remove melted fuel deposits like the famous "Elephant's foot" but financial reality put those operations on indefinite hold. Moving loose melted spent fuel that has migrated outside the RPV is a major expensive undertaking that can cause unforeseen problems. Fuel assemblies have a specific geometric configuration and density that keeps them from unwanted criticality issues. If Fukushima experienced RPV meltouts the fuel may have become fluid enough to separated by density and concentrated fissionable material unevenly throughout the mass. Moving the spall around might start an unwanted reaction that releases further contamination inside the enclosure. Even if the melted fuel is relatively benign and contained there is still a huge amount of work to do to remove it. How do you retrieve all the splatters and hunks if they aren't in a nice near pile? Where and how do you store it? How do you transport it?
@12:45 Money being stolen like in, for example, risk compensation money not reaching the workers or reconstruction money used to fight Greenpeace or refurbish tax offices countrywide? Country collapse like in having a huge debt, working hard to pile up even more through useless public works and a rapidly shrinking productive population? 3000 workers to add patches as opposed to just let remnants of nuclear fuel leak into the ocean? 4 reactors damaged rather than 1?
Fuku 1 will grant plenty of employment opportunities in the upcoming 4500 years.
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