5 ms·

The plant should have been dismantled, flooded, and buried within 24 hours of the emergency generators going down. They knew how bad it was/is, this all could h

• iuytghyjuyh 15y ago
  Good plan Dr Evil - the reason you need the generators is that a shut-down reactor still generates typically a few percent of it's power output for a while. Covering this in concrete is rather like deciding to deal with a burning car by sealing it in a large cast iron box, painting "pipe-bomb" on the side and then putting that in an infant school.
• nickolai 15y ago
  You cant dismantle a plant that still generates residual heat while a used fuel pool is on fire nearby. Its just too dangerous a place for humans to be. What should they have done? Sent Asimo?
  • Tuna-Fish 15y ago
    Just note that robots don't work either, because particle radiation has a nasty way of flipping bits stored in memory. In the presence of a strong beta ray source, you can treat sram and dram as good sources of truly random data. :)
    • varjag 15y ago
      There are of course ways to shield from that (as illustrated by spacecraft and common military electronics), but nuclear station damage control robotics is perhaps too niche application to be implemented.
      • joegaudet 15y ago
        As I understand it, canadian CANDU reactors use a robotic system to perform online refueling. They also use heavy water as a moderator, and burn unrefined uranium / [can] spent fuel from other reactors pretty impressive machines I think.
        • Create 15y ago
          FRAMATOME/AREVA/etc. also. But they don't always work well, as the history of industrial robotic arms from the nuclear business tells us...
        • iuytghyjuyh 15y ago
          Everybody uses a robotic system for refueling - really it's just a crane that seals to each fuel rod tube cap. The problem with CANDU is that you can't operate them with a fast enough fuel cycle to produce weapons grade Pu so they are only economic in nuclear countries that aren't interested in weapons.
      • Create 15y ago
        FNAL, BNL, CERN ...and KEK all use radhard electronics (obviously not everywhere), admittedly on the fringes of your illustrating application areas. Combined, that is already quite a large area, so to my mind parts for tough (damage) control robotics isn't such a niche. But true, small production runs and spares is a real issue (actually, by the time they are really used, they are already obsolete -- but this is why you have upgrade plans :).
      • jpk 15y ago
        In fact, an article about this was on HN in the not-too-distant past. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359081
• Tuna-Fish 15y ago
  ... It is simply not possible to dismantle a nuclear reactor that close after shutdown -- the power produced by radioactive decay heat right after shutdown is in the order of 10MW, and the core is incredibly hot for weeks. If they had done everything as well as they possibly could, they would not be any closer to dismantling the plants than they are today. The best course would have been to maintain cooling so that nothing would have been damaged -- they tried this and failed. The failures in their actions are not asking for more help earlier, not in the basic course of action they took. The idea that the reactors should have been buried with 24 hours of the emergency generators going down betrays basic lack of knowledge of the facts of the situation. Should you have tried to bury a core that has been active less than a day before without considerable active cooling, it would have simply melted it's way to the water table. The total amount of plutonium that has been released into the environment so far is minuscule. It is significant because it serves as an unmistakable indicator that the cladding for the rods has melted, meaning that should any containment fail now, the results would be catastrophic. But we knew that -- TEPCO said that the cladding was melting on 14th of March. Still, unless something unexpected and catastrophic happens now, the nuclear side of this disaster will still kill more people in Germany than Japan.
  • 3am 15y ago
    Germany?
    • Eliezer 15y ago
      Because if Germany makes fewer nuclear plants, they'll make more coal plants.
      • 3am 15y ago
        Or more solar? Increase efficiency? Or use less? False choice.
        • Tuna-Fish 15y ago
          The situation in question is Merkel shutting down the 7 oldest German nuclear plants for 3 months. There will be no new clean sources of power deployed during those 3 months -- and unless there is a national campaign to reduce use starting right now in Germany, it will be mostly covered by coal. During those 3 months, ~250 more will die to SO2 and NOx because of increased coal power production.
• jamesbkel 15y ago
  You can't just 'dismantle' a plant that still has residual heat being generated. Additionally, if you're suggesting burying it in reference to the solution at Chernoby, that also doesn't work so well. At Chernobyl the plant was effectively destroyed, so there was no harm in simply filling it with concrete and placing the sarcophagus over it. At Fukushima the plant is still largely intact. Unless you can submerge the plant in concrete in one fell swoop (not possible), the damage done by the piecemeal burying of the plant would undoubtedly create even more damage and result in more radiation leakage than we currently see.
• demallien 15y ago
  Of course, the infrastructure in the entire region had been destroyed by the earthquake + tsunami, making the simple task of transporting hundreds of tons of sand and concrete a herculean task...