The small boat that can, fitted with video camera and dosimeter, boldly going where no humans can ever go (ambient air dose of 1.8 SIEVERT/hour max).
The boat was lowered from a hole (510mm in diameter) drilled on the floor of the 1st floor of Reactor 1 into the torus room which is flooded with highly contaminated water leaking from the dry well.
The surface boat, by Hitachi Nuclear Energy (from TEPCO's Photos and Videos Library 11/13/2013):
The route of the surface boat (red for November 13 expedition, blue for November 14):
Leak 1: the upper part of the S/C facing side of the vent pipe at the location [4] (S/C = Suppression Chamber):
Leak 2: The sand cushion drain pipe at the location [1]:
The video taken by the boat:
(Oh my goodness, what are they capturing in the lower left screen? It looks like some organic materials growing on the metal surface...)
The boat looks to be tethered, meaning human workers from Hitachi Nuclear Energy were operating it from the 1st floor of the Reactor 1 building which has rather high air dose levels (unlike Reactor 4, the levels in Reactor 1 is in millisievert/hour, with several locations in sievert/hour). There is no information as to the radiation exposure for the workers who operated the boat.
Now, we need a little submarine that could to dive under the water in the torus room and check the damage on the Suppression Chamber and the surrounding walls.
And a swarm of self-organizing, self-propelled small flying robots for the upper floor surveys, and an army of soldier ant robots to eat away the irradiated concrete debris on the operating floors and inside the Spent Fuel Pools of Reactor 3 and Reactor 4.
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13 comments:
Nightmare. Thank you for posting this information so succinctly and clearly. I like to keep up to date, even though every update is apocalyptic.
It's all in vain, just to keep us busy. Nothing more than PR, just to keep our attention away from the horrible truth, which we will hear drib by drib in the next 1000 years or so. If we are lucky and stil alive as a specy
The comments in the last 2 paragraphs are probably not far off the actual plan.
With radiation levels at 2 Sv/hr, no human intervention will be possible for centuries. So robotic systems will be required, which will first need to be developed. The 50 year clean up plan is looking fairly reasonable, from an optimistic perspective.
This is nothing, because all-knowing soothsayer Wade Allison has been using his crystal ball to claim some nonsense like "as expected, there has not been and never will be any ill health effects from Fukushima", and his friends are saying they know he is right because they already knew the same.
Wade apparently believes current safety levels for radiation exposure are wrong because we obviously aren't taking our body's natural healing into consideration. All sorts of sites refer to his bullshit, so it must be true!
....Self-deluded senile old farts will be the death of the rest of us.
netudiant ...What are the total costs involved with this cleanup? Appears to be a complete waste of time, energy and resources. Excellent opportunity for assessing how much propaganda the masses can absorb. Health issues are still incubating as cancers rates will begin to climb for some invisible reasons.
Only a nuclear apologist would see (3) meltdowns on a hundred year cleanup schedule as being successful while overlooking spent fuel storage/waste costs and nuclear trash incineration. Raise the electric rates, everything will be fine...
I am glad the toy boat found the leaking 1" drain pipe and accounts for that 400 tons of radioactive water flowing daily into the sea, plug it and have toy boats begin removing the melted fuel.
@ anon 7:09,
Wade would have us know that 'twere he a young man again he'd show the young bucks how to do a proper nuke cleanup, probably some dribble about safe enough to be done in his pajamas & slippers.
Anonymous@10:23, the costs are indeed going to be horrendous, several billion/yr for decades.
Plus in a real sense you are quite right, this part of the work is a waste of time, the fuel is quite safe in the SFP 4 and it is pointless to move it, other than to demonstrate 'progress' to the body politic.
For the next decade, the only tangible progress that can be achieved is solving the water management problem. The radioactivity of the plant water has been cut to about 1% of its initial level and the reactor fuel is gradually decaying enough to cut down on the water injections. The ALPS system entering service seems effective at cleaning up all but the tritium from the water. It is not implausible that in another couple of years, the site will be entirely self contained hydraulically, recycling the site water for cooling. At that point, Fukushima will probably fade from the headlines, because very little will happen on the site until methods are worked out to deal with the deadly radiation environment.
netudiant...Yep, TEPCO is a bunch of miracle workers. Things are going great. 50 so or Japanese nuke generating plants shut down and I hope they never fire back up.
Better 30-40 tons of radioactive water flushes to the Pacific everyday because where else would TEPCO put it?
Unit 4 pool has a crutch under it so why bother unloading it? What are the chances 6.0 or 7.0 quake striking underneath it during the next 100 years?
Down to 1% of peak levels of plutonium releases, why take the time to build an ice wall underground? A little plutonium and uranium never hurt anybody. Nor does ongoing noble gases and tritium releases bother anybody important, way to expensive to capture that fallout as they try to keep the total cleanup bill under a trillion (US$).
I don't understand why anyone has to be onsite any longer, they should all pack up and go home...nothing can be done about the melted cores even if they spent 2 trillion on it.
Why bother unloading it? Well isn't that what famous nuclear "experts" like Gundersen and Alvarez have been saying, whom famous newspapers like NYTimes quoted anonymously when it comes to "danger" of Unit 4? That pressure was imported to Japan, freaking out many Japanese, who in turn screamed loud enough for the politicians who decided to "accelerate" things.
Bagging on the netudiant-affect has been good in the past, so here goes another,
Netudiant's "progress" team member Lewis Page has further insights on who is to blame.
British nuclear establishment lapdog Lewis Page would have us believe that "an advanced, developed human civilisation" chock-full of looting bankster-types is preferable to responsible living with renewables.
Lapdog Page throws down the gauntlet and lets us know that it's either his patrons' nukes or we'll be getting what we deserve: " = economic misery".
The nuclear industry's version of Operation Sea Lion.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/15/fukushima_fearmongers_its_your_fault_japan_has_dumped_co2_targets/
http://www.operationsealion.com/
My impression is that the "acceleration" thing is a mix of Abe propaganda and bamboo spear thinking. I am not aware of pressure from the public to "accelerate" the decommissioning.
Beppe
Further bagging on netudiant, lol,
Netudiant, your use of the terms "to demonstrate 'progress' to the body politic" in concert with your assumed affect of minimizing the dangers of Fukushima has triggered alarms at the NRC and Exelon. You are now on the Watch List for "Behaviors Observed".
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/18/21463506-nuclear-plant-workers-in-hot-water-after-alleged-plot-to-rob-armored-car-goes-awry?lite=
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