Published: October 9th, 2012 at 1:52 am ET
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Title: Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Daily Report
Source: Tepco Press Release
Date: Oct 8, 2012
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-At 10:20 AM on September 28, we started transferring the accumulated water from Unit 4 Turbine Building basement to the Central Radioactive Waste Treatment Facility (Process Main Building). At 9:58 AM on October 8, the transfer was stopped.
-At 10:20 AM on October 8, we started transferring the accumulated water from Unit 4 Turbine Building basement to the Central Radioactive Waste Treatment Facility (Miscellaneous Solid Waste Volume Reduction Treatment Building [High Temperature Incinerator Building]).
Published: October 9th, 2012 at 1:52 am ET
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sending...
Can someone please clarify this information? I gather water was transferred as of Sept 28th to a location within the Radioactive Waste Treatment Facility – and on Oct 8 the transfer destination was changed to a different location within the same facility? (The second location an incinerator? for water??)
What is accomplished in any case – is there a way to 'clean' the water of radioactive contaminants? Why did they make the change?
Thanks!!
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Maggie:
I have been following the nuclear mess for over 40 years now.
So here are my answers for you (also based on college physics and engr degree).
No way to clean any of it.
If there was, some one (corp) would be making a ton of money off the situation. Same with Chernobyl and TMI and Sellefield etc.
There is no feasible way to make this nuclear crap go away.
Boiling the contaminated water has a chance of being able to condense the waste by many orders of magnitude.
Water boils at 100C
U238 boils at 4131C
Pu 239 boils at 3229C
Pu 244 boils at 3228C
Americium 243 boils at 2011C
The point here being that the water will go to vapor phase long before the nuclear metals ever do. At least the ones I have mentioned here. Not sure about Iodine 131 though.
They are likely trying to get rid of the bulk of the water in the mess. And then hope some future generation will figure how to deal with the rest to the dirtiest of all diapers.
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would you drink the boiled off (osmosis?) water, fireguyjeff ? once, daily, weekly?
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probably is better than just drop it in the pacific, sad anyway because surely some of the radioactive material will escape in the vapor.
dirty bastards, justice only if god send the death ones from heaven to hell and we force the others to work in the cleanup, the living responsible for installing over 50 Nuclear reactors in this shaker, country I meant country.
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richard:
Good point!
Personally, no, I would not drink the boiled off water.
Yet part of me says why not.
Multiple "boil offs" could leave the water with undetectable levels of isotopes.
Which is a lot better than the fallout I have been breathing in for the last 19 months here in western Oregon.
And that does not mean that I am casual about undetectable levels either.
Yet all of the food I am eating today has been rained on via Fuku and Chernobyl fallout. And those levels are detectable.
I am confident that the boil off, if done properly, could wind up cleaner than the rain water I get here, in terms of drinking.
And all of the latter is simply conjecture.
The very idea that they use the term incinerator brings to mind a whole different agenda than simply boiling off water.
There is no way TEPCO will spend any money on a true clean up effort.
As if trying would actually do anything either.
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Thank you fireguyjeff! Hmm … good question, Richard – would the water vapor carry radioactive particles at all? What an absolutely complete horror! But that's not a new observation to any of us!
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YES, would think the evaporated water would carry radioactive particles. Out of sight..out of mind.
Nothing to see here..go on down the road..smile. Nothing to worry about. (sarcasm)
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Actually, the cesium starts evaporating before the water. Not all of the radioactive materials are heavy either. Even in regular distillation what comes off is not pure but relatively pure. For purity distillation is either mixed with other filtration or done multiple times.
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Total Fukushima Radiation Released Into Ocean, Air, Groundwater, Storage Tanks; via A Green Road http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/02/total-fukushima-radiation-released-into.html
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Nothing new here, just another in a long list of minor incidents, with no effect on health, as the pro nukes say…
Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents; via A Green Road http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/04/lists-of-nuclear-disasters-and.html
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I had to develop water purification facilities that could handle nuclear waste. The water can be cleaned but the cost goes up as the water gets cleaner and the removed waste get more concentrated as the water that is removed gets cleaner.
The first stage is not boiling but sand filters to remove heavy solids. The sand filters are backwashed with water when they load up so depending on how much much that there is there will be a significant amount of water in the waste still. There will be several stages of sand prior to reverse osmosis filtration which will pass 25 to 50% of the water through with the waste. That wasteflow may go back around for further filtering. Then the water will go through ion exchange tanks. We had 42 exchange tanks "polishing the water" after our main ion exchange systems.
For water that has been sitting in the reactor remains for over a year, there will be some radioactive nobles that may make it through. The bad isotopes of oxygen do not last long and the isotopes of hydrogen beyond tritium last only a blink. The remaining water will have some tritium and deuterium in it that are tricky to separate even in centrifuges. But, the concentration can be shifted a bit with centrifuges depending on how long the centrifuges are run.
Concentrating the waste has issues because some of the materials are going to be far more fissile than plutonium. Even a water softener could remove some of the contaminants before dumping to the…
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Thanks SnorkY2K, great description of the process.
It sounds like a lot of energy and time is required.
Did you ever have any cost per litre or time per litre stats?
And the waste extracted sounds (as expected) like it's very nasty stuff, with all the usual issues as discussed re waste disposal.
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Seems from the limited information, 'volume reducing' that they are boiling away radioactive water to steam away the amount of water stored ?
I hope not , holy crap !!
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Cindy:
The fundamental physics/chemistry implies that the water would evaporate and leave the nasty stuff behind.
To a first order, this technique behaves as expected.
Not all that much different than desalination of ocean water for drinking H2O.
Or for making moonshine (ethyl alcohol, aka ethanol) from the alcohol in a crude wine from fermented fruits and veggies.
This process is also done as a major industrial process referred to as cracking in the petroleum industry.
All sorts of chemical compounds are extracted from a tall cylinder where the temperature is specific to an elevation zone so that at each temp the specific vapors are extracted. It is a rather elegant way of taking the crude oil components apart.
Cracking is just a still on steroids (no pun intended).
No doubt that what has spewed already (and continues to) in terms of radioactive isotopes is millions of times more than what might come off with boiling the "dirty" water.
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The steam can be recaptured and reboiled, so let's hope they are doing this. So, it sounds to me like the water scrubbers have reached their maximum capacity or only certain water is incinerated? And, Cindy, if they aren't reclaiming the steam and just letting ti vent to the open air, it would be because they are following the widely held notion that low levels of radiation are harmless. The heavy metals will sink. What's to worry? Holy crap is right.
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Now, now, TEPCO has reported to the IAEA that the Daiichi plant is only emitting .01 Bq/Hr. Let's trust their word. They wouldn't add any radioactivity to the atmosphere, would they?
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And they are emitting HOW much from Fukushima? In the report of course to the IAEA?? Anyone have recent information? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?…
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I don't think the incinerator would be used to boil of water. They are not designed for that. Those would be boilers. (unless something is lost in translation.)
The incinerators have a "door" to load solid waste and burn them at HIGH temperatures. I would assume they have some solid waste they need to destroy.
My biggest fear is if they decide to incinerate the saturated watter scrubber filters… That would suck… For all of us… And there is no way to know. Everything is covered up.
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It's a criminal cover up. It's world terrorism. It's freekin insane and has to be stopped!
WTF does a NPP need an incinerator for? Do other death plants around the world have their own incinerators?
Where's greenpeace and other third party monitors at this site. It's just ridiculous to leave these criminals in 'control' of the situation.
We don't stand a chance.
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…used to cool firebox liners and exhaust flu…
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from the link:
-October 8; started transferring accumulated water in Unit 1 Turbine Building basement to Unit 2 Turbine Building basement.
-September 28: started transferring accumulated water from Unit 4 Turbine Building basement to the Central Radioactive Waste Treatment Facility
-October 8: started transferring accumulated water from Unit 4 Turbine Building basement to the Central Radioactive Waste Treatment Facility [High Temperature Incinerator Building].
They apparently have just been moving a mass of water from one basement to the other of the buildings.
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A giant boiler should be an expensive thing to do.
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The Japanese officials have been incinerator junkies for decades:
"Japan burns more garbage in the heart of its big cities than any developed country. The Toshima plant is one of 21 factory-size incinerators that operate around the clock amid Tokyo's 12 million densely packed residents.
…Here in Tokyo, about 186,000 people a year frequent the Toshima Incineration Plant. These visitors, most of whom live in the neighborhood, come to swim and exercise in the plant's handsome and affordable fitness center.
The center was added to the incinerator complex when it was built in the late 1990s to appease neighbors appalled by the prospect of millions of tons of garbage being burned in their back yard.
Those neighbors now swim in a pool heated by burning garbage. They work out in rooms lighted by electricity generated from a steam-driven turbine linked to the furnace that burns the garbage. Surplus electricity, enough for 20,000 homes, is sold into the grid. The complex also has a health clinic for the elderly."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/17/AR2008111702968.html
SP: They have been burning radioactive waste in Tokyo since early February 2012 and dumping the radioactive slag into Tokyo Bay. The vaunted filters on the stacks are not capturing a large amount of the radioactive nuclides so Tokyo's metro population of 37 million people breathe in additional nuclear poison as well as nations downwind.
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Think of it as Tepco's ultimate decontamination/cleanup process. Radioactive isotopes taken up by millions of bio-filters (human lungs).
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SP, you are right about that..
http://www.jaea.go.jp/english/04/tokai-cycle/top.htm
wait till you see this
http://www.jaea.go.jp/english/04/tokai-cycle/04.htm
and this
http://www.jaea.go.jp/english/04/tokai-cycle/01.htm
I personally believe there are underground tunnels from Fukuland to Tokai
and the neighbors are
http://j-parc.jp/index-e.html
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http://www.new4stroke.com/fukushima3.jpg
Andrew
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Yep, breathing radiation. And it's on crops in Japan, and countries downwind ..yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And days after.
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Does anyone remember this?
480,000 Discarded Radiation Suits Pile Up At Fukushima
By Green Living Tips | Published 10/18/2011
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/blogs/631/480000-Discarded-Radiation-Suits-Pile-Up-At-Fukushima.html
Was reported here on enenews around that time and they must be pilling up even more now.
I would think that is what the incinerator is for and the water is being filtered and maybe distilled off leaving radioactive sludge to burn with all those rad suits and filter casings…
History has a place for all these crimes against mother earth.
Although it may be a silent history, it will eventually be.
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"History has a place for all these crimes against mother earth." – yeah, i see it well documented in lame stream media.
The criminals are getting caught and prosecuted. The accident is getting cleaned up. All radiation has stopped. There is a Santa Claus.
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Although it may be a silent history, it will eventually be.
Mankind or Santa Claus, does not have to be present, for history to be…
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If there's no one to read it, is it history?
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