Well, Frezeing the ground and or nuclear facilty is still the best idea. As nitrogen should do just fine for feezeing the ground to a depth of 250 feet or so, before some complicated inventive system would be required. 250 feet should be a sufficent to reach below the nuclear facility, and to form a wall around or in front of the nuclear facilty. Nitrogen is simply a vastly abundant resource, that has good properties for trouble shooting, if problems occur. Regardless of the type of radiation souce material, to gain control on radiation emmission the tempiture of the material has to be 10 degrees celsius, meaning control and reduction of radiation emission will not begin untill the tempiture reaches 10 degrees C. . for saftey reason, inproved working conditions in the area such a tempiture should be reached in the minimum. On all accounts the tempiture should below 10 degrees celsius, Niitrogen allows the ablity to achivie even colder tempitures which allows more controll on radiation and its harmful effects. Distribution of material allows sepration of dosage and lower radiation emission to a given location. Using both Seperation and Temipture create the ideal condition. I also still support the jello idea DwayneD.L.Rabon
Well, in the latest news report in my area of the world, Japan has announced that the goverment will take over some aspects of handling material at the nuclear site, as opposed to Tepco and group handling of the diaster at the site. Apperantly they plan to freeze the soil around the nuclear facility, after some preliminary test, regarding how best to freeze the ground at depth. So freezing the ground looks to be a good idea, it is a idea that is workable, in that the earth has many regions and locations that are frozen to a great depth, for example the largest permfrost record, or frozen ground record is frozen ground to a depth of 4,500 ft. It demonstrates that the ground can be frozen to a depth of 250 ft or better with assurances. Japan in addition to having large amounts of nitrogen and natural resources of aluminium, also has a feezer guy specialist by the name of Norio Owada who has done ground breaking work in freezer technology, he apparantly also has a background in permafrost formation and the nessacary conditions. So then with his background the govermant of japan would seem to be in a good position with the idea of freezeing the Nuclear facility. Certainly Permafrost Land created in nature is a condition of the effects of Nitrogen,and Nitrogens effective transmission of thermal heat. I do not know if they plan to use nitrogen but nitrogen has a proven tract record in creating frozen ground. DwayneD.L.Rabon
I read that they intend to use a calcium carbonate coolant. Not sure what that is. Personally, I still like the idea of pumping out the uphill ground water and dumping it. Perhaps some can be injected along the shore-line to back-flush what contamination there is away from the ocean.
Well I refuse to believe that they are using calcium carbonate to freeze the ground at the nuclear facility. Perhaps they might ionize the entire area and they need a calcium carbonate filament anode to create a postive charge for transfer of the electron charges from the ground. I have no idea about the calcium carbonate. One thing is for certain people keep complaining about what has happened and the effects on the region. But still the OLYMPIC games will be plaed there,as Tokyo was picked for the next olympic games yesterday. so at least that was not ruined by the nuclear accident or tusami. Calcium Carbonate might ruin the facility, perhaps it is some gas form or liquid they will pump into the ground to create a soild barrier???. At any rate it certainly appears that the radioactive material in its mass tonage will stay where it is at, as opposed to be being handled, seperated, treated, and stored at cold tempitures. DwayneD.L.Rabon
Oops, seems I mis-read or miss remembered it. Or maybe that site had it wrong... who knows. But... So, a concentrated brine solution, which DOES make sense. http://ens-newswire.com/2013/09/05/japans-government-plans-ice-wall-to-control-fukushima-radiation/ Oh, and by the way, the article also says something about treating the stored water. AFAICT, a simple high-reflux distillation unit would take care of that. (Everything but the tritium).
The wall is going to be in the neighborhood of a mile long, and will be maintained by constant refrigeration for the indefinite future - many, many years of uninterrupted power supply to many miles of tubing. It might or might not work. The immediate problem is doing something about the tanks, which were stop-gap responses to the unanticipated (by the nuke folks) groundwater contamination, and are not adequate. A tank is about as simple as engineering gets. For nuke waste handled by nuke folks, they aren't simple enough.
The power supply needn't be "uninterrupted" except on a long term basis. Outages for periods of days or even weeks might be acceptable given that the entire ground will be at near freezing so the heat gain (melt potential) in the wall would be quite small. The water is from their valiant work to keep the contamination INSIDE the system rather than leaking out into the groundwater. So they pump about 400 tonnes of water out of the basements every day to keep the basement level BELOW the ground water level and keep the water flowing in. After a quick treatment for cesium, they store that water in the tanks. As I stated before, what I have read suggests a simple high reflux distillation unit would remove enough of all isotopes (except tritium) to allow it to be dumped. The tritium would still be a potential issue. If it turns out to be one, freezing into a stable glacier would sequester the tritiated water for long enough to decay away.
The ground in the freeze wall will be of course substantially below freezing, The wall will be in constant contact with plumes and channels and concentrations of contaminated flowing groundwater, which will have at times quite high "melt potential" as well as physical pressure to force leaks. And I have mocked that, reasonably gently I hope, in the past. The "stable glacier" scene is particularly amusing, but the obliviousness regarding the necessary engineering and physical situation behind this "simple" distillation setup, coupled with the amnesia concerning the distillate itself, is right up there with the most exemplary nuke proponent "thinking".
You and I apparently have very different visions of what is proposed. Your description of the issues make zero sense as I envision it. I am not sure why you would find a stable glacier amusing. There are thousands of square miles of them in Antarctica. I am quite familiar with distillation and a high reflux still is quite simple to build. Amnesia? What are you babbling about? Your insults just demean your credibility. If you have a specific objection, voice it, otherwise you reveal yourself to be a troll.
How simple and convenient, for your converted oil tankers full of radioactive water to unload unto. And I am quite familiar with freezing water in my refrigerator - but I don't mistake that for dealing with Fukushima's many tons of bad stuff.
Oh? Where did I ever claim either simple or easy? Just doable. And what would be the difference other than scale?
I'm getting feed up with all the radiophobia this has brought up. Especially with the foreigners living in japan crowed (whom I follow because it fun to watch mostly white people complain about racism against them). Those people in particular have taken up japanese mishandling of the melt down as something that will cause noticeable medical harm to everyone living in japan sometime in the future. The amount of radiation and radiotoxins leaked and diluted into the ocean is such that there will likely be no statistical increase in cancer rates among the Japanese population or anyone living in japan (With exception for the Liquidators that are cleaning up the mess, those people are going to have problems medically and certainly politically in the coming years when they start demanding special medical care) The fukushima area it's self will have to be quarantined to pedestrians for a very long time or at least no one allowed to return can grow edibles their for decades. All in all though this is not going to kill or physically harm many people, but the psychological harm that R word brings is very significant.
That harm should be charged against its source, the anti-nukes. Sue Greenfarce and Fiends of the Earth and those folks, not TEPCO.
No TEPCO needs to be sued, it just many members of 'Greenpeace' and 'Friends of the Earth' need to be put up against a wall and shot, the rest need extensive de-brainwashing.
That is not true. Why do nuke proponents have so much trouble representing the opposing arguments accurately? You do realize that's a major factor in your inability to get anyone to trust you, right? The prevention of harm is going to cost billions of dollars, and may or may not be as successful as you presume. That expenditure and all devoted resources are and will be subtracted directly from Japan's ability to respond to the aftermath of the tsunami and the economic stagnation of the country. Meanwhile, the psychological harm of being lied to by their officials and authorities, of having to make serious and onerous decisions without being able to trust the public sources of information, is probably the greatest source of that kind of damage - as it has been at all the major nuke disasters. People fear radiation irrationally, for example, largely because they can't trust anyone to protect them from it or inform them about it or even track it and accurately assess it. When you have officials dismissing the risks of exposure by averaging the total release they admit to (which they have been repeatedly caught lying about) over some large area of arbitrary concern, your only protection for your children is uninformed paranoia and guesswork and rumors. For example: The psychological and medical and economic effects of dislocation and dispossession are not small, and those are the measures necessary to prevent the radiation harms etc, and this is well known - so trying to limit the assessments of even just medical harm to the stats of certain cancers directly launched by radiation damage is dishonest, deceptive, and obviously so. You can't blame Greenpeace for that kind of self-trashing of one's credibility.
"Is going to", and "needs to", are two WILDLY different things. The clean-up of the prefecture is being delayed and made hideously more expensive by the silliness brought out by the anti-nuke farces. People are not allowed to go home and clean up in places that have lower radiation levels than other areas of the world where people live without health issues at all. This is another place where Greenfarce and Fiends of the Earth should be sued.
Oh? Who has been lied to by their "officials and authorities" and specifically in what manner? As far as I can tell, the only lies being spread are from the "Greenfarces" and their ilk.
Oh no do explain. The amount of harm that will come will be psychological not medical, its harm the people do to themselves out of irrational fear and not harm radiation actually causes. This is a problem of politicians not nuclear power. Nuclear powers problem is due to the irrationality of humans. For example coal power kills more people world wide then nuclear power by many orders of magnitude, yet far less people are scare of coal power then nuclear power because the little deaths of statistical increases in lung disease just don't frighten people like the big deaths of radiation poisoning, even though the latter is far less likely to happen. People fear airflight much more then car riding even though one is more likely to die by car then by plane: humans don't not fear the mundane over the exception even if the mundane kills more! This is due to people's inability to understand statistics and due to the imagery nuclear power has been present with, with mushroom clouds and children carbonized under a light of a millions suns. In japan people fear foreigners irrationally, this is not simply because the goverment scapegoats them but because people are irrational. Dosimeters are cheap to make and accurate, people could purchase those, and test for radiation themselves and research about the science of radiation. The harm cause by the radiation its self is minor, in fact it is the fear that exacerbates dislocation and dispossession! Most of the exclusions zone has radiation levels of 1-10 mSv/yr over background radiation, background radiation is ~2.4 mSv a year, so that a few times background radiation. For comparison the people of Ramsar, Iran are exposed to as high as 260 mSv/yr and have been for generations! Much of that from Radon! And yet no increase rates of cancer or other diseases have been found in these people. The problem is almost all of our data on radiation and health is based on exposure to sudden high levels of radiation, levels above 100 mSv in exposures over only hours or far far less, not years. That data was used to calculate cancers risks which is then extrapolated to mean any exposure to radiation increases cancer, yet examples like Ramsar and Airline pilots and flight personnel (exposed to X2 background) and many other studies of low levels of chronic radiation fail to correlate with the standard no-threshold model. We lack any evidence the no-threshold model holds at low levels of chronic amounts of time and significant evidence it does not yet the international community and fearmongers continue to uphold the no-threshold model. By reason alone most of the exclusion zone is unnecessary now and the people could return, yet polling has found that most of the people evacuated don't want to return: they are to afraid of the boggy radiation! Look at this study: www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/49 "Results: The mortality risk to populations exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident may be no higher than that for other more common risk factors such as air pollution or passive smoking. Radiation exposures experienced by the most exposed group of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to an average loss of life expectancy significantly lower than that caused by severe obesity or active smoking. " Translated to fukushima and even counting with the no-threshold model, removing the people from the rural fukushima areas and moving them into polluted cities like Tokyo actually increases their chances of disease and illness, in fact moving people FROM tokyo and TO the exclusion zone would but them in less harm!
The harm caused by evacuations, economic dislocations, rational rather than irrational wariness of radiation exposure, and all the rest of the response to a nuclear mishap (including some of the irrational fear, if any) is honestly credited to the nuclear mishap. The damage and expense of avoiding radiation effects is part of the damage and expense of dealing with radiation. You might as well argue that people should fear taking baths more than they fear coal mining, because far more people die in bathtub accidents than coal mines. The attempt to limit the consideration of risk to actual heavy radiation poisoning is dishonest, btw. The problems and stresses of evacuating Chernobyl probably killed ten times as many people as were killed directly by heavy radiation poisoning, and so what? Bullshit. If a Chernobyl-scale meltdown cloud from Fukushima had blown over Tokyo, it would have killed tens of thousands of people in a matter of months. Bullshit. The results of ongoing studies in Ramsar, while preliminary (and thus completely non-supportive of your assertion there) show high levels of chromosome abnormalities and abnormal gene expression; surveys indicate high levels of female infertility and other health problems, the population is too low for cancer epidemiology, the population is known to have been inbreeding in the vicinity for many generations and thus be selected for radiation damage resistance, and local health authorities have recommended relocation of the entire population based on their professional observations. Your problem with the data base being dominated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the spotty survey data collected around Chernobyl is that such data does not support the assertions of safety that nuke proponents keep making from it. My problem with that data domination is that it does not inform the topic at all, but I can't persuade the nuke apologists to quit referring to it. They are forever complaining about risk models based too naively on it, a matter in which I concur (the total health risks from Chernobyl are often estimated solely from mortality data from small number of cancers among a biased sampling of the exposed, for example) and then spinning around to say things like this: In the first place, note that even an exposure regime limited to what the authors of that study found "reasonable" from a single event (apparently based on the same bullshit landscape averaging we see throughout the nuke apologist literature) outright kills people at rates similar to lifelong moderate obesity, living many years amid serious air pollution, or moderate level addiction to cigarettes. That is damn significant risk - worse than a car accident. Second: They don't even bother to consider the non-lethal health effects. That does not follow. The comparison was with people who were evacuated, suffered "reasonable" exposure regimes, etc. The comparison you would be making would be between people choosing whether to live in a place where they were certain to suffer a nuclear mishap and "reasonable exposure" once in their lives but guaranteed safe evacuation etc, or living their lives in the air pollution of Tokyo, all else equal.
