Fukushima!

...apocalyptic:

Day to day events and the jobs' pressures, mainstream's constant bread and games irrigation, floods of hard to differentiate pseudo-news mixed with unbelievable acts under UK's terrorist laws easily help (us) to forget and avoid the real problems. One being Fukushima!

I came across the article in RT: Fukushima apocalypse:Years of `duct tape fixes` could result in `millions of deaths`:

- The racks inside the pool that contain this fuel were damaged by the explosion in the early days of the accident. 
- Zirconium cladding which encased the rods burned when water levels dropped, but to what extent the rods have been damaged is not known, and probably won't be until removal is attempted. 
- Saltwater cooling has caused corrosion of the pool walls, and probably the fuel rods and racks. 
- The building is sinking. 
- The cranes that normally lift the fuel were destroyed. 
- Computer-guided removal will not be possible; everything will have to be done manually. 
- TEPCO cannot attempt this process without humans, which will manage this enormous task while being bombarded with radiation during the extraction and casking. 
- The process of removing each rod will have to be repeated over 1,300 times without incident. 
- Moving damaged nuclear fuel under such complex conditions could result in a criticality if the rods come into close proximity to one another, which would then set off a chain reaction that cannot be stopped.

At Fukushima, they are dealing with massive amounts of groundwater that flow through the property, and the endless pouring that must be kept up 24/7/365 to keep things from getting worse. Recently there appears to be subsidence issues and liquefaction under the plant.

Liquefaction is explained here; just the same like pouring water into a sand-box when we were children. Only, in this case this is lots of water, contaminated, into grounds known to shake constantly and there are swimming pools full of nuclear fuel rods waiting to take a dip and melt back to where they came from... if not that one earthquake strikes first.

It would be interesting to hear and read from alternative sources about the situation in Fukushima. Fukushima Diary is one: a desperate voice.


Any more?

Carpe diem!

Math needs...

all numbers to make sense!

click on the picture: (c) Harm Bengen, www.harmbengen.de

Real and unreal ones.


Carpe diem!

the closer you get...

...the earlier you'll die!


Two brave Japanese driving towards Fukushima Power Plant.




We are damn close!


Carpe diem!

nuclear waste heritage!

source

A couple of weeks ago under the headline "Forever waste" I referred to problems of the salt mine ASSE in Germany used as a final storage for light and medium contaminated nuclear waste. The storage was used from 1965 until 1978; originally declared safe for at least 100,000 years to come soon penetrating humidity, then water questioned its reliability.

As usual all kinds of sources give you a wide range of choices to select your fears from; while BILD.de in October of 2009 - see photo below with a man filling his wee cup - reported that the daily volume of water penetrating certain areas of the salt mine and only such with no nuclear waste stored in had increased from 30 to 100 litres per day - which in buckets sounds not really threatening - other official sources report water volumes of up to 12m³ - avoiding to say "12,000 litres per day"; what a charming and calming difference?

source

Cleaning up in 420 days

Last week it was decided to clean up the place. Roundabout 126,000 barrels filled with nuclear waste, the majority not even labelled, and dumped in deep, now salt water flooded holes will need to be taken above ground (from 750m down) and precisely examined; not decided, yet, is what to do then with the historic waste the majority of which was dumped in 1976 and 1977 when the closure was imminent and all wanted to get rid of then most probably all kinds of nuclear waste; now the commission allows 4.8 minutes for each barrel for transport above ground and thorough examination.

Odd figures always make one sceptical: so they calculated 10,080 hours to do the complete job!? One year equals 8,760 hours, surely they can work in three shifts, so all will be cleaned up within one year and 55 days.

Besides the threat of the water the salt mine is obviously declared structurally unsafe; life spans of 3 to 10 years are given before the risk of collapse is declared acute; no worries, this time the scientists should be a wee more accurate and the tolerance in their guesses might be a bit closer to reality than 100,000 safe years compared to really only just some dozens of years. It remains to be seen whether the tolerances in guessing and throwing the dice will allow for 420 stress-free days for this 4.8 minute per barrel operation.

Would a € per barrel figure not be more interesting?

May be that tells you why the hurry...

source

Yes, this bracket was once straight.

The globe’s stories about finding appropriate sites for storing nuclear waste even on a minimum scale of sustainability are stories of failure, lies and in the best cases belittlement; never over the last fifty years was just one safe place found but billions have been spent and will now need to be invested into old waste – not to talk about the new one.

It is just another lie that alternative energy is expensive and the driver of cost when it comes to sustainable electricity generation and transport; the real cost for R&D and the waste problematic of nuclear power is dumped on us through separate balance positions. But what is cost against the threat of nuclear contamination? Would you like to own a house around Hanover/Germany and drink fresh water?

final storage sites near Hannover, Germany

Carpe 420 dies!