Right about now — the 23d of June — the Japanese are in the process of attempting to remove the in-vessel transfer machine from the fast reactor at Monju. According to the reactor operator by way of Estimable Ex- SKF, they are going to remove the bushing in the reactor vessel lid that the transfer machine fits into. Operator believes the added clearance obtained by removing the bushing along with the machine will allow the damaged business end of said machine to retract clear of the lid.
Pucker Time! There are a lot of things that can go wrong w/ catastrophic outcomes:
– The bushing keeps the inert argon gas within the reactor vessel and separate from atmospheric air in the building. The operator’s task is to remove this bushing while keeping air out of the reactor, where it would violently react with the sodium moderator with (potentially explosive) consequences.– The pantograph may be damaged to the degree it cannot be retracted even with the bushing removed. This would require removing more of the reactor lid or disassembling the machine inside the reactor vessel without disturbing the core or coolant.
– The reactor is ‘hot’ even though it is not operating: the control rods are fully inserted. The moderator is in a liquid state. (Note: liquid metal- moderated reactors are generally not pressurized.) Fussing with the machine might effect the core, which in turn would need attention with the machine right in the way!
– Removing the machine might damage the core: the machine might also fall again with parts breaking off inside the vessel.
– Inert argon gas in the reactor is not toxic but is asphyxiating. Argon flooding the operating side would be disruptive to the crew working on the reactor at the place and time where a functioning crew is absolutely required.
– There may be something else wrong inside the reactor vessel that the operator doesn’t know about because the core cannot be inspected.
The main hazard is the sodium. If air enters the vessel the operator will have seconds to reinsert the plug and the transfer machine to smother the reaction while pumping in more argon. A ‘fire’ in the reactor would contaminate the sodium which would probably require removing the fuel — by way of a replacement fuel transfer machine — then draining the sodium. The inside of the reactor, the core, the primary cooling circuit pumps, heat exchanger and the circuit piping would have to be cleaned of oxides and other reaction byproducts.
A fire would also require a redesign of the fuel transfer machines, reactor lid and possibly the core. The reactor would be shut down for another ten or fifteen years. It would probably be the end of the $12 billion reactor itself. Like the rest of the world, Japan is broke.
All of this leaves out the chilling effect of Fukushima meltdowns on industry ‘ambitions’. This reactor needs to be shut down and scrapped as the next step after removing the in-vessel transport. Monju cannot reprocess new fuel from the waste from other reactors, only convert U-238 into a relatively small amount of plutonium. There is far more plutonium waste within the spent fuel pools at Rakkosho reprocessing ‘plant’ than Monju can produce in years of maximum production (Click on pic for big).
Figure 1: a diagram of what is taking place (Japan Atomic Energy Agency by way of Ex-SKF). What is likely to happen is:
– the operator is able to retrieve the machine safely. If this happens there will be industry pressure to fix the machine or bring forward another and restart the reactor.– the operator cannot retrieve the machine: the effort is canceled and a ‘Plan B’ devised.
The ordinary Japanese citizens need to get off their butts and start agitating against the industry/government agency duopoly which has (almost) fatally compromised the country. One way or another the Duopoly will be held completely accountable for messes so far created and those sure to come. The Japanese have no choice but to put the fire to the administrators. Time is running out: the notable ‘patience’ of the citizen needs to be replaced by a sense of urgency.
Heads need to roll, some folks need to ‘go to jail, go directly to jail, do not collect $200’.
Japanese (and the German, French, Americans, Russians, etc.) cannot run away or migrate or ‘escape’ from the reactors or reinvent themselves on some level which escapes the follies of central governance. To do so, to believe that some sort of miniature civilized society can be built around the putative ruins of these reactors is magical thinking. Radiation makes the rules and the centralized problem requires a top- down, big government centralized solution. Only governments — with the ability to marshal vast resources and direct them over long time periods — can control, manage and safely remove the reactor hazards.
Just as big governments are the only entities that can manage nuclear weapons and their safe disposal. Reactors and nuke weapons are identical. They must be treated identically or the destructive consequences of their existence will inevitably emerge.
In ‘finance speak’ there is a duration mismatch between the time demands of reactor management made by radiation physics (centuries) and the duration of human institutions (decades or less).
Monju lies on top of a major earthquake fault, right by the Sea of Japan (facing China). Here’s a video from inside the plant. For those who don’t understand Japanese (including me) the video is self- explanatory. There are snips of the 1995 sodium leak and fire that shut the plant for 15 years (click pic to enlarge):
(Asahi by way of Ex- SKF):
About 3 minutes and 30 seconds into the documentary, a local councilman shouts at the Monju operators after the sodium leak and fire accident in 1995: “A courage to climb the mountain? You need a courage to quit, you idiot!”About 10 minutes into the documentary, you get to see the inside of the Containment Vessel of Monju. Brightly lit, cavernous hall. We cannot assume the safety of the reactor, but if there is no radiation leak, it means it is safe, says the engineer.
17, 18 minutes into the documentary, you see the public buildings built by Tsuruga City with the money from the government for having nuclear reactors. The documentary then shows the local fishermen reluctant to say anything about Monju. One elderly man says “Safe, of course it’s safe.” One elderly woman says “I can’t answer anything”, when asked about the nuclear accident in Fukushima.
Despite the hype, the reactor industry does not flourish due to excellence of its product. Electricity is electricity and can be had from many sources: solar, wind, geothermal. The diminished amounts other sources make available can be adjusted to. There is no inherent human need for maglev bullet trains or parking garages illuminated 24 hours a day.
Instead of meeting a need, the need is maneuvered around: industry pays bribes in order to divide communities. Those that divide become ‘reactor villages’. The divided communities in turn become dependent upon the bribes and the multiple reactors that accompany them.
Meanwhile, the situation at Fukushima Daiichi continues to slowly and surely deteriorate. The temperatures in reactor unit 3 continue to steadily increase, with temperature pulses indicating reactivity taking place in what remains of the core. How can this happen if the core is an unstructured blob without a moderator?
I don’t know but the increase in temperatures speaks for itself. At 12 tons of water into the reactor per hour — much higher than at the other reactor units — there is sufficient cooling to overcome decay heat. Something else is going on in reactor unit 3 and TEPCO cannot control it (click pic to enlarge).
Figure 2: Dumping water in one end means water coming out the other. The flood in reactor basements is about 150mm (6 inches) from us out here. In a few more days the water will start flowing into the Pacific Ocean — in addition to the water that is already flowing into the Pacific Ocean from places where it cannot be seen!
The water treatment equipment that has been installed at reactor unit 1 to strain isotopes from the wastewater is not working properly. The plan has been to strain out the rads and pump the water back into the reactor to reduce the new water added to the amounts flooding the complex’ basements.
The treatment cannot work: material strained from the water is extremely radioactive. At some point the water- straining equipment will become too radioactive to approach. Then what? Maybe the material strained and the equipment can be ground up pumped back into the reactor as well. This is the ‘Tao of Rads’. They cannot be escaped or negotiated with. The radiation and the water needs to be confined in the containments.
Water leaks from holes and cracks in the reactor buildings into the ground carrying radiation with it.
TEPCO needs to start adding solids into the reactors: boron, bentonite clay (which would stop the leaks from the containments), sand, lead … at some point concrete. These can be pumped in with the water. Boron is a reactor poison that would stifle some the reactivity in the core(s). In units 1 and 2, these are likely of fission daughter isotopes: decay heat. Sand and clay would slow or stop the flood of water into the ground through cracks and holes. Solids don’t flow and can shield the radiation.
TEPCO also needs to get off its collective butt and build a sheet- piling cofferdam around the reactor campus, Sheet piles are interlocking steel plates that are corrugated lengthwise to give them rigidity. They can be vibrated into the ground to the bedrock to keep water in the soil under the plant. The piles are caulked shortly before driving them to keep water from seeping between adjacent piles. Using these piles is a commonplace technique for building seawalls, revetments and bulkheads. A cofferdam could be built around Fukushima within weeks without exposing workers to radiation. A cofferdam should have been started once radiation was discovered in seawater outside the cooling outflows, once management knew water was leaking out of the reactors.
Here are sheet piles in New Orleans post-Katrina . The cranes in the background hoisted the pilings up and vibrated them into the ground to form a water- resistant palisade.
Figure 3: (US Army Corp of Engineers photo)
Reactor buildings are … buildings. A compromised structure deteriorates rapidly, much faster than an integrated one that is well- maintained. The four reactor buildings have been compromised by the earthquake, by the shifting/liquefaction of earth under the foundations, the tsunami, the explosions, by high heat and intense radiation, fires and exposure to corrosive elements. As is usually the case with compromised structures, they fail catastrophically with no warning.
A good example is the three large towers that made up the World Trade Center.
The extreme radiation prevents necessary maintenance and inspections. The emissions expose structure elements to stresses they were not designed to carry for more than short periods. The radiation is a reason why the buildings appear to be deteriorating day by day.
The large amounts of highly- radioactive water in these buildings are effecting the structures in ways that are hard to determine. Reactors have never before been flooded as these have been for extended periods. The water being poured into the buildings is saturating the soil under the buildings. The reactor structures are fractured with cracks and holes. The longer these reactors are filled with ‘hot’ water, more likely something important will break. A shift of a few inches by a vital component will be enough to cause a cascading series of structural failures.
The failure of one building would lead to the inevitable failure or abandonment of the others. The buildings now are too ‘hot’ to work on or in, even for the press- ganged Barakumin whom Yakuza ‘sub- contractors’ dredge up to feed into the radioactive meat grinder..
These reactor buildings are immensely heavy and loaded with tons of spent fuel in open tanks. This represents potential energy needing only a ‘moment’ to release: a tiny structural overload somewhere hidden in a basement or underground. Nobody will discover this ‘overload’ until after it has rendered repair or adjustment impossible.
Meanwhile, in the American Heartland, the Fort Calhoun reactor is having its trial by water as the Missouri River slowly claims it.
There are several issues with this reactor along with others that line the Missouri and Mississippi rivers downstream.
Calhoun is shut down and the fuel has been removed from the pressure vessel into a spent fuel pool. This reactor is a pressurized water reactor unlike those at Fukushima Daiichi or the Cooper nuclear station that is also facing the flood.
Figure 2: Ft Calhoun reactor showing two spent fuel locations. The more radioactive core material is located in a secure (from flooding) service building adjacent the containment. (Nati Harnik photo, AP) The spent fuel lagoon in the background is surrounded with an earthen levee. The plant itself has earth and concrete barrier along with a inner ‘porta- levee’ which is a giant neoprene tube that is filled with water. You can see the tube surrounding the plant in the photo.
Reactor and spent fuel layout is otherwise similar to the boiling water reactors.
The core and the in-reactor spent fuel pool in a boiling water reactor which are above ground, both are accessed at the service deck. As with other PWRs, the pressure vessel and the spent fuel pools @ Ft. Calhoun are at ground level. Both pool and vessel are in buildings that are gas/water tight, as part of ordinary design. Air pressure in the main reactor buildings is reduced to keep dust and gases within the reactor. The building can keep river water outside for an indefinite period.
Not so the support structures and the ‘main’ spent fuel pool that contains hundreds of tons of fuel assemblies. This pond along with its cooling system are next to the reactor building covered by a flat cement lid. There are two problems:
– the river can flow over/under/sideways/down past the temporary levees and flood the pit, effecting the cooling for that pit. The water- tightness of the cooling equipment building and its electrical components is unknown.– The fuel assemblies are cooler than those in the containment and they would indeed be underwater. However, the reactor’s spent fuel would be directly connected to the river. Some radioactivity would escape into the water and be carried downstream.
– As per reactor usual, there is no way for the operator to access this fuel to ‘move’ it somewhere/nowhere.
The problems of high- current cables and switchgear being in (flooded) basements and inaccessible is not really a problem with this reactor. The equipment for maintaining the in- reactor spent fuel is also secure with outside power available by way of towers, underground cables with backup available. If the water becomes deep enough the operator can bring even more power to the site on a barge.
The Cooper reactor is more problematic because it is a boiling water reactor (BWR) like those @ Fukushima with similar undersized containment issues. Right now, the reactor is operating at full power. The utility operator is watching water levels. This reactor has flooded before. If cooling is hazarded the plant will be shut down, the issue will then be maintaining cooling to remove decay heat.
Interesting comment by EX- SKF:
“There have been doubts expressed whether the operation is technically feasible.”
No explanation or source by EX- SKF for this remark.
The machine lift does have a certain ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ aspect.
Here’s a JAEA photo:
The original lift attempt made use of the hoist, whose hook is @ the center of the pic; to lift by main force. JAEA canceled when they feared breaking the reactor. It would not be surprising if the pantograph arm is fully extended into the vessel, with instruments indicating otherwise.
UPDATE 2: JAEA reports the machine was successfully retrieved. Now they can use it to shut down the plant permanently.
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Steve, since you’ve revealed yourself to be a Kubrick fan I thought I would post this quote from Jay Weidner and the link to his interview with Mel Fabregas.
“It appears as if these people have decided to get rid of all of us. I can reach no other conclusion. And the managers that have been left behind by these people are as dumb as stump, and their children are gonna die too, with us. So if there’s a Rothschild/Rockefeller conspiracy, they’re in the same deep water that we’re all in right now. I’m afraid that’s exactly what’s going on. And THEY went off planet, and they’re holding out until we’re all cooked. And that’s the only explanation I can give you for what’s going on at in Japan. Because I cannot come up with one reason why the entire world isn’t rushing all of our engineers and scientists into that poor country and helping those people. But they’re not. They’re not even talking about it.”
http://www.manticoreradio.com/radio/VS-110603-jweidner-s7k.mp3
I didn’t go to college — law, economics, history — but went to art school instead. Now … only god can make an artist but anyone can observe art history and learn from it. Unlike ‘real’ or political history which is offered as a linear narrative of progress and ‘growth’, art history is made up of more or less unconnected periods.. Fads emerge, ascent to dominance and fade, succeeded by new fads. In art, there is no such thing as ‘progress’ only ‘difference’ or novelty.
What is certain is this, what is ‘in’ or ‘hip’ today is out, tomorrow.
Capital P- Progress (as a branch of American nativism) is a term of art, a piece w/ our culture zeitgeist. Our ideas of progress come from comic books and sci-fi — Vonnegut, Huxley, Kafka, of course Kubrick — from which ‘tech’ springs. Dick Tracy had his ‘2-way wrist radio’ decades before the cell phone, he also flew to the Moon on a magnetic ‘space car’ built by Diet Smith and on the way found a ‘Moon Maid’. Silly people have been in charge of our ‘systems’ from the beginning. Surprise is they have lasted as long as they have, but the ideas are stale, time marches on.
Politicians/managers are actors reading from the ‘silly script’ in a larger play or performance art piece. The script sez reactors will trickle up from Diet Smith’s workshop to propel star ships. Who are we to challenge our culture’s myths? What do we have to replace them?
New myths? Ultimately, what these will be is uncertain.
You know, being from the investment management field (and math by training), I get really excited when ideas come from other disciplines. Your blog is helping me reach outside my comfort zone.
Your point about duration mismatch with nuclear power resonated with me. I would like to take it one step further. All of finance is based on the time value of money. A cookie today is worth more than a cookie tomorrow. Is that even the correct lens to look through when considering a “spaceship earth” scenario where resources are finite?
I wonder whether cultures that have lasted a long time have been less likely to “discount the future?” We take it for granted that this tendency is hardwired into the human psyche but perhaps it is not. Hopefully it is not!
Is there a difference between progress and ‘fake’ progress? Is it possible to know?
Perception of progress is an undermining concept upon which psychoanalysis, marketing/propaganda, ‘post- modern’ philosophy have been scaffolded. Lacan, Freud, Bernays, McLuhan, Deconstructionists/Marxist revisionists (including luminaries such as Steve Keen) all come to differing terms w/ the ‘real-fake dilemma(s) even as they spring from it.
For instance, the entire political/economic discourse right now is defining ‘wealthy’. Who is wealthy and who isn’t? Progress is promoted as a means to ultimately make all wealthy. The entire system as operating indicates no one is truly wealthy and that those who we might perceive to be most wealthy really aren’t. That there is much to do before those most favored can actually become wealthy some time in the far- distant (discounted) future. In other words, our society can create wealth and must be supported at all cost … even as it has so far been unable to produce anyone who yet become wealthy. Better luck tomorrow, right?
Your questions – Ellen’s and Fourier’s: ‘Is this the right metric, or is this definition process worthwhile?’ These are the good — and loaded — questions.
Is the ‘money society’ a better way of organizing or is hunter- gatherer or something in between? The odds are stacked against humans: 99% of all species become extinct. I expect the ‘extinct’ drive is hardwired along with its opposite ‘survive at all costs’ drive. What costs? When do we make the exchange? Now? Do we have to? How about tomorrow? Isn’t the sorting out of drives something we should do first?
If we are driven to self- destruction and extinction shouldn’t we figure out how better to ‘discount’ that?
This is what is playing out right now in Greece as well as Fukushima. Can’t we have that meltdown next month? How about next summer. Why don’t we just tell ourselves the reactors/Greek bonds are more or less okay sitting at the bottoms of the reactor vessels/bank accounts waiting for us to come and get them?
Then, we can stop snorting coke. We are going to stop snorting coke tomorrow, right? How about the day after?
What do you mean I’ll feel better when I stop snorting coke? I have to do without coke/debt/cheap baseload electricity? Don’t tell me that. Next thing is we will be living in caves! We’ll all have beards and long hair and have to watch Islamic porn. I don’t want to pray five times a day, I just want everyone else to do so.
We want our future a certain way or else, not realizing the correct choice to ‘buy’ some future and make the best of it. Better than than no future. Right?
Cultures that lasted the longest had no “future” as our culture considers it. They mostly adopted non-linear historical narratives, or at the very least cyclical narratives of societal birth-death. This was crucial for managing and accepting the cyclical nature of bioregions.
Western European culture, as we know it, discounts the future based on a history-as-linear concept of time; that we are arcing toward some Utopian Progressive where everyone has a flying car and talking robot. That Progressive narrative is basically defined as less work, more leisure, early retirement and has been metastasizing as a cultural narrative on the back of fossil fuels for 100 years.
The view that history has a direction – and that it is headed upwards towards perfection – is characteristic of Christianity. People who believe that things will get progressively better should be more willing to put off current gratification in favor of the greater rewards that are ahead. They would tend not to discount the future. So I don’t believe that discounting the future is anything but a cultural phenomenon and a sign of the collapse and decay we are going through.
We begin to discount the future when we stop believing that things will get better. Uncertainly about future rewards is what raises discount rates. The corporate shills may keep telling us that things are inevitably moving upward and onward but I don’t think anyone has believed that for a long time.
I have a cousin who is a rather well known writer. He describes how his father (a WWII greatest generation type) would take him out into the graveyard near our family’s summer compound and show him all of the tiny headstones. He would say that because of the work of scientists little children no longer died young and that science would only continue to improve people’s lives.
Needless to say, none of his four children believes anything like this. We will all take what we can get NOW thank you very much!
Most people expect that the future will resemble the past – that the sun will rise tomorrow and that one day will be pretty much like any other day. That belief is what allows us to plan and make decisions based upon past experience. A lot of scorn is heaped upon those who predict discontinuity. No one wants to hear it because they don’t know what to do a about it. It requires an unpredictable change in the normal way of doing business. Since no one can predict the future, no one knows exactly what to do. The corporate sovereign is so worried about the reaction of its subjects to the incredible change that is coming they are keeping the lid on as best they can.
The think about Fukashima and the nuclear plants is that we now do know what is going to happen. It is time to get the word out and this blog is very helpful in doing that. I am hoping that Judge Murtha will not allow Vermont Yankee to keep going. We shall see.
“The view that history has a direction – and that it is headed upwards towards perfection – is characteristic of Christianity.” Not in this world, Ellen, only in the next world. Here’s what’s in store for us on earth:
– Armageddon
– the Mark of the Beast
– the Antichrist
– nations rising up against nations
– earthquakes, famines, pestilence
The notion that we can find a pattern in history is one of the myths in which we believe – that we can step outside of our culture, look at it dispassionately and describe its pattern. It is fun to think about patterns and what will happen next, but not sufficient to predict the future. Theories of history are always disprovable unless they are so broad as to refute all possible contrary evidence in which case they are tautological. Life will always be a mystery looked at in the broadest sense.
However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t make predictions and establish causality etc. etc. about specific events. We know for sure that these old nuclear plants are going to need a extraordinary attention and funding for a very long time – essentially forever. Why isn’t the world focusing its attention on this? I totally agree with the quote in your initial comment. Why aren’t we doing that? It is so much more obvious than climate change, peak oil. Armageddon will be so much easier to deal with if it isn’t radioactive. Even the anti-christ would agree with that!
“It is fun to think about patterns and what will happen next, but not sufficient to predict the future.”
Those are fightin’ words to a technical analyst!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis#History_tends_to_repeat_itself
I don’t want to predict the future I just want to describe what’s happening right now without flinching.
Analysts cannot understand the future because
a) the future is a form of entertainment rather than a time period,
b) they refuse to see the present as it is, preferring ideology. ‘Futurists’ aren’t.
A good example is Greenspan not seeing the ongoing real estate bubble starting in 2003. He could not accept a bubble b/c it did not align with his ideas about how an economy should work. He missed all the bubbles, even though they were right under his nose.
A lot of big- time analysts missed the credit/shadow banking collapse even when it had already had begun. Their mindset did not allow them to consider the possibility of an excess of credit or that the risk ‘mitigation’ wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
Of course, this i the easy stuff, the experts are still looking for the petroleum peak. When did that happen? Next year?
I predicted hyperinflation in China back in summer ’09. I don’t know if it was an easy call or not. I cannot tell what the inflation rate in China is b/c the bosses lie. I figure 5-6% per month. Nobody has good figures for the ‘official’ economy that make sense. As for the loan shark economy; nobody has an idea other than it is there and growing. Two economies side by side, one is a dollar black- market economy and the other the official yuan economy tells me there is very high inflation in China but little else.
What will it do next week? I dunno, I hope I can get out of bed tomorrow!
Ellen, if you have the time I highly suggest reading The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss. The book was written in 1997, and it’s predictions have been stunningly accurate. Here’s a quick video primer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXcDiGpVtbc
its predictions
Wow! Some really good stuff here.
For what its worth, I think that the time value of money stems from impatience, pure and simple. This human vice has become the metric upon which all commerce is based. Impatience has many friends, like gluttony, envy, etc, and modern finance has managed to quantify them for us in the form of a risk free rate of return.
How is it that something we are supposed to be struggling to overcome becomes the basis for how resources are allocated? I have a four year old daughter. When she wants something, she wants it NOW. She takes actions without thinking about futures consequences and then comes crying to me for help. When these actions are performed by a four year old, we call it immaturity. When they are performed by a 30 year old at a bank, we call it financial engineering.