Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Fukushima Ice Wall Failing and Post-Typhoon Webcam Update



The ice wall is failing. This is no surprise but it is quite unfortunate:

EDITORIAL: Is Fukushima ice wall project still viable despite early failure? The Asahi Shimbun, August 30, 2016, http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201608300031.html

A government-backed, large-scale project to reduce the amount of contaminated water produced daily at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has become bogged down.  The project involves creating a frozen wall of soil around reactor buildings at the plant to stop the flow of groundwater into the facilities.

...But the project has failed to produce the expected results. The work to build a frozen soil wall around the No. 1 to No. 4 reactor buildings was completed in June. Nearly three months on, however, there remain unfrozen parts through which groundwater enters the facilities.

The total daily amount of groundwater, which becomes contaminated with radioactive materials within the reactor buildings, has remained unchanged at about 400 cubic meters.

I imagine that the recent typhoon that came through the area (see here) has not helped the contaminated water problem:
10,000 tons of toxic water pools in Fukushima nuclear plant trenches. The Mainichi, August 23, 2016 (Mainichi Japan), http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160823/p2g/00m/0dm/074000c
For the last couple of days there has been a patch of flickering red on the large crane visible from cam 4:







It was still visible last night but is finally gone. I hope it was simply a reflection.

 

3 comments:

  1. 628 billion and counting

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  2. I am not engineer but the ice wall sounded from the beginning like a project that would fail. Possibly it was created to make it look like they were controlling the problem when they were not.

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  3. This is one example of the way the Japanese government and the Japanese scientific community have seen the Fukushima nuclear disaster not as something that needs *serious* attention to get it cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time, but as an opportunity to try out various kinds of dubious research projects to see what might work and might have business applications in the future. I agree when people say "Oh, well, we've never been here before, so we don't know what works," but the ice wall and other proposed projects (like using robots to haul the molten fuel out of the wrecked reactors) have gone against strong advice that they will not work and also at times appear to ignore the basic known science (the molten corium is not simply a lump of material that can be lifted out of a reactor with a crane-like device), leaving one with the feeling that the scientists involved are dreaming up experiments just to get the research money. The Japanese government should be making every possible effort to do a sincere job of cleaning up the F1 mess, including soliciting sound international help, but prefers not to take the situation seriously because it wants to pretend that nothing very serious happened there. Thus PM Abe was able to tell the Olympic Games committee that decided on the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games that "everything is under control" when it most certainly is not!

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