Antinuclear

Frankly speaking, I find it amazing that the people and the media talk so much about Fukushima Daiichi having leaked contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean since March 2011, and about Tepco possible future release of the tritiated water accumulated on site into the Pacific Ocean.

Whereas nobody ever talks about how much contaminated water the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing site on England’s west coast has been releasing into the Irish Sea (then from there flowing into the Atlantic Ocean), and how much contaminated water the La Hague nuclear fuel reprocessing site on France west coast has been releasing into the English Channel (then from there flowing into the Atlantic Ocean.

If you think that Fukushima Daiichi is contaminating the Pacific Ocean since 2011, why are aren’t you aware that Sellafield and La Hague have been contaminating the Atlantic Ocean for decades already?

Both sites having large pipes underwater going…

Tokyo Electric Power Co. shows its installation work to cover the upper part of the No. 3 nuclear reactor building that was blown off by the March 2011 hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture–Tokyo Electric Power Co. showed reporters its progress in installing a new roof above Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant’s No. 3 reactor building on Aug. 2, ahead of work to remove spent nuclear fuel from a storage pool.

The company demonstrated how it is carrying out the work, which is necessary because the upper section of the reactor building was blown off in a hydrogen explosion in the nuclear disaster at the plant in March 2011.

The roof project marks a step toward removing nuclear fuel assemblies in the spent nuclear fuel storage pool in the building.

A photograph taken from an Asahi Shimbun helicopter shows a section of…

There is much to be said about Tritium and Fukushima. I strongly recommend watching this interview with Kevin Kamps on Fukushima conditions, including and especially the huge volumes of tritiated water stored at the site:

Tritium is quite devious because its difficult to detect internally.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about tritium. My friend Clyde Stagner introduced me to the ubiquity and dangers of tritium in the environment. You can read his book (Hidden Tritium at Amazon) and my blog description of his work here.

Today I had lunch with a friend who is an atmospheric chemist and we discussed how tritium in fog, or tritiated fog, might differ from ordinary fog.

We had a great discussion that I will follow up on later with implications drawn for webcam watching.

Living downwind from the Palo Verde Nuclear Power plant, and swimming quite often in open water…

TEPCO released three videosof its robot probe inspections inside unit 3. The videos provided some interesting information, showing some unexplained “blobs”, thick adhered substances, concrete spalling seen in fires, possible melted fuel formations, and thought to be solidified melted fuel around the lower end of a control rod.

TEPCO think the graphite gaskets sealing the control rod holes in bottom of the reactor vessel melted allowing molten fuel to flow through these holes to drip down into the reactor pedestal. Structures in the pedestal show some of the patterns created by the thick substances that appear to have splattered around the containment structures.

TEPCO cites 364 tons of fuel debris (melted fuel, internal reactor parts and control rods) to be expected at unit 3. The videos only show very small views of the damage found making it difficult to determine how much fuel debris was…

In more than 6 years they have not been able to really find yet the melted fuel, despite their beautiful PR stunt last week, and now they talk about which techniques to use to remove it. Maybe they should better find it first before talking about how to remove it, that is if most of it has not been already vented and projected into our skies.

How to Clean Up Hundreds of Tons of Melted Nuclear Fuel

More than six years after three nuclear reactors melted down in Japan, the country is homing in on the lost fuel inside one of them. Japan’s biggest utility and owner of the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc., last week released images that for the first time showed what’s likely melted fuel inside the No. 3 reactor.

If confirmed, the nation will have to devise a way to remove…

From Majia’s blog

I was reviewing my notes regarding plutonium found at Fukushima and I found this news story worth remembering:

Amina Khan (of the Los Angeles Times). (March 8, 2012). Plutonium near Fukushima plant poses little risk, study says Published: Thursday, March 8, 2012 http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20120308/NEWS02/703089849

The levels of radioactive plutonium around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant aren’t much higher than the amount of plutonium remaining in the environment from Cold War-era nuclear weapons tests, and it probably poses little threat to humans, a new study indicates.

The paper, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, provides the first definitive evidence of plutonium from the accident entering the environment, the authors say. It examines the area within a roughly 20-mile radius of the plant and details the concentration of plutonium isotopes deposited there after explosions ripped open multiple reactors.

At the three sites examined, the levels for certain isotope…