The waste- water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has become a gigantic problem:

 

Fukushima Faces ‘Massive’ Radioactive Water Problem

Stuart Biggs and Yuriy Humber (Bloomberg)

As a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency visits Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled nuclear plant today, academics warn the company has failed to disclose the scale of radiation leaks and faces a “massive problem” with contaminated water.

The utility known as Tepco has been pumping cooling water into the three reactors that melted down after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. By May 18, almost 100,000 tons of radioactive water had leaked into basements and other areas of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, according to Tepco’s estimates. The radiated water may double by the end of December.

“Contaminated water is increasing and this is a massive problem,” Tetsuo Iguchi, a specialist in isotope analysis and radiation detection at Nagoya University, said by phone. “They need to find a place to store the contaminated water and they need to guarantee it won’t go into the soil.”

 

An unknown number of tons of radioactive water have already leaked into the soil and from there into the ocean. How much exactly is a guess but the number is likely to be big. Leaks are discovered in buildings that can be monitored. There are certainly more leaks in reactor buildings and under basements that cannot be approached due to radioactivity dangers.

Large and unknown is how much radioactivity each measure of water carries. Like so much else having to do with the reactor, this figure is shrouded in TEPCO mystery. The fact of the secrecy itself indicates radiation levels that are too high to endure for anything but shortest periods — and are too high for the public to know about. Indicative was the water in a basement area that burned the feet of workers in water in March. The water measured 2 Sv/hr, nearly a lethal dose. This is unsurprising as waste-water in basements carry radioactive materials directly from the molten cores.

What is reported in the water is iodine 131 and cesium 134 and 137. Uranium, chlorine, plutonium, technetium, cobalt and other elements have been indicated on and off by TEPCO. Dozens or hundreds of other elemental isotopes and toxic compounds are in the plant water, but like guests arriving at the ball, they have not been publicly announced yet. Perhaps the IAEA can persuade the Japanese government to list exactly what is to be found in the waste-water.

Japan has deployed its version of Wall Street’s extend and pretend junk strategy at the reactor complex. TEPCO emits soothing bromides about nothing in particular, insisting that everything is going to ‘be alright’ some months- or three into the future. The establishment sends managers to public meetings who say nothing but bow a lot. Occasionally, someone resigns. Day follows day with little happening other than the flow of ‘liquidity’, numbers and charts.

So far, the establishment’s strategy seems to have worked extremely well. The three reactor cores melted away months ago — within days or hours of the March 11 earthquake. Keeping quiet about the meltdowns and pretending that little radiation has leaked for months meant that when the news finally emerged it had little consequence. There is no outrage, only passive acceptance.

The strategy indicates the greatest danger is not the physical consequence of the reactor failures but the political danger to the reactor industry. While these hazards are significant, the real danger is the economic consequence of reactor failure(s) within a peak energy context. Somebody has to pay the industry to manage the safety of these reactors over a very long time period. Meanwhile, the industry as a whole is captive to the same ‘insufficiency of returns’ dynamic as the rest of modernity. The nuke industry’s product — cheap baseload electricity — is only useful and profitable in the context of industrial economies of scale. Industries in this context can only derive profits — and therefor exist — when capital (natural) inputs are mis- priced.

When inputs are repriced to reflect scarcity value the returns to industries shrink. This decreases the relative value of the industries themselves. It is this shift of values consequent to input repricing that forms entirely the current ‘economic crisis’. It is the reason why our ‘recovery’ slips further out of reach with the passage of time.

Modernity, with ever greater efficiently, has been digging its own grave.

Safety management is the reactor industry’s most important form of natural capital. Reactors are a child of the parent nuclear weapon establishment. After World War Two, building weapons gained a social ascendancy that exceeded any utility the weapons themselves could possibly provide. Nuclear weapons are too indiscriminate to be militarily useful. This internal logic doomed N-bomb making in most countries: increasing the kind and number of nuclear weapons cannot increase ‘security’, rather security decreases because of associated safety management costs.

The child of the parent: the Soviet RBMK reactor that melted down so spectacularly in the Ukraine was of a design intended to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. So also was the Windscale pile in Great Britain whose graphite/uranium fire was the world’s worst radiation disaster prior to Chernobyl.

The nuclear power establishment demands for itself the same social ascendancy as weapons- making but cannot earn it. Land- sited reactors only produce electricity: the steam or hot water outflow is too potentially dangerous to use for domestic heating. Reactors cannot be located far from users due to costs. Reactors also cannot be designed or constructed as safety requires due to costs. Safety management strategy is to mis-price tail risks, often by way of subsidies or by cost- shifting of risks to other, non- nuclear entities. There is a competition between uses for land and water resources that reactors require, this puts reactors side by side within interconnected reactor campuses, where the failure of one hazards the others.

Both the inevitability and consequences of reactor failure accompany the enterprise. Reactors become unaffordable as safety management reprices itself and tail risks emerge. When the consequences of reactor failure are greater than the value of the reactor’s product the economic rationale for reactors to exist vanishes.

The capital (mis) investment represented by the reactors themselves is stranded. There are insufficient returns to afford safety management expenses that ‘outlive’ the industrial economies that created the reactors in the first place.

These safety management costs extend endlessly into the future. Keeping radioactive material out of the environment from the destroyed Chernobyl reactor is more costly than the Ukrainian government can afford on its own. Kiev must turn to international begging to find funds to keep the Chernobyl reactor covered. The begging takes place even as Chernobyl radiation in groundwater steadily creeps toward the water supply of Kiev.

Finance and politics have no particular time- frame and diffuse consequences for failure. Physics is relentless. Mother Nature runs a hard school: our energy constrained economic future is now. Reactors require profitable industrial societies to support them. Industrial profits requires cheap energy which excludes nuclear because of the safety management costs. TEPCO fails not only because of poor safety management but also because of knock- on effects of that failure upon the Japanese economy.

Japan is on the road to becoming the ‘New Ukraine’ only with many more reactors.

The consequences of current failures is multiplied by 500 times — the number of operating power reactors worldwide. Assumptions about the profitability of industry of longer time- frames are just that. Japan could be wise to consider making the decommissioning of its 55 reactors and the removal of the resulting waste its primary industry.

Failure to do so leaves a future of ‘boarded up’ reactors melting down all over the a country too impoverished to do anything else … with a hapless population lacking tools to do anything other than to flee. Where in the United States can we house 100 million Japanese nuclear refugees?

On whom do we offload our own unaffordable reactors?

Reactor cores follow no set rules but their own. Here is a chart of reactor unit 3 temperatures beginning with the earthquake to the present: (this graphic is from TEPCO, click on image for a larger version):
 

 

Figure 1: Each plot represents a sensor located within what remains of the pressure vessel and containment at Fukushima reactor unit 3. The pink high- lighted area indicates some kind of large energy release beginning May 1, perhaps re-criticality.

TEPCO prays the issue is decay heat and that the cores will cool steadily with time. This is what the ‘Cold Shutdown in 90 days’ remarks suggest. This is establishment ‘hopium’: what the cores contain and what the fuel mass will do is unpredictable. Because of instrument failures, no one is certain what is taking place inside reactor unit 3 and the others.

After the increase in temperatiure, TEPCO increased the water flood from 10 cubic meter to 15 per hour. A potential chain of events has water leaks getting worse exposing the core material or re-criticality taking place. Adding water will work for awhile but outflow will increase due to erosion. There is a limit to how much water can be pumped into this reactor. It must either be stored or it must flow into the ground.

Meanwhile, the amount of radiation outside the plant relentlessly increases. Cesium 137 is found in tea leaves in areas far from Fukushima Daiichi. Increased radiation is also being detected in the ocean.

Because TEPCO hasn’t gotten around to changing water gauges in units 2 and 3 nobody ‘knows’ for absolute certain whether there is anything at all in the reactor pressure vessels. Since reactor units 1 and 3 both experienced powerful steam explosions (with hydrogen components), the meltdowns would put most of the cores and related ‘melt’ goods @ the bottoms of the respective reactors. The earthquake and the explosions would have left the reactors as sieves with core material under the sieves. Water runs out of the holes with a bit on top of the cores. Cut off the supply of water and the hot cores boil off the small amount of water remaining.

Keeping the water flowing allows some shielding of the cores. In this sense Fukushima is not Chernobyl. Without the water flow, it would be almost impossible for anyone to work @ the facility, being too radioactive for anyone to remain nearby for more than a few minutes.

The water flow also carries heat away from the cores: the ground around and under the plant has become the primary heat sink for the cores. This is in place of the ocean by way of condensers in the working configuration.

Water carries a huge burden of radioactive materials and gases which are released from and by the cores. This radiation is a form of energy that is removed from the cores along with the heat. The longer the water flows the more radiation enters the greater world. The reactor ruins are excellent examples of entropy. The total energy content of the reactor fuel tends to be dissipated evenly into the reactor surroundings. Water buys only a little time: water flow carries core energy wherever it can reach. Because of water- borne contamination, it will eventually be impossible for anyone to work @ the facility, being too radioactive for anyone to remain nearby for more than a few minutes.

Water flooding is the ‘easy solution’ because water is able to flow through any pipe. ‘Easy’ is proposed as a substitute for more costly ‘permanent’. Pumping highly radioactive water into a building or a storage tank will soon have the storage almost as radioactive as the core.

Because of entropy, TEPCO is going to have to cut the amount of water flowing through the plants. The tendency for leaks is to increase over time. Continuing the water flood will require TEPCO to pump increasing quantities of water into the plants just to ‘run in place’. TEPCO pretends it can ‘fix’ the leaks and recycle existing waste water but this is impossible.

Pipes have to be installed and repaired, connections made. Filters and pumps must be installed and connections made to heat exchangers. All of this must take place in hazardous environments. So far, changing a water gauge and installing some flex-duct in one reactor building appears to be the limit of what conditions allow work crews to accomplish.

Radiation within containments is fierce. There is controversy about how radioactive the containments are. Because of defective instruments it is impossible to tell, but the fact of non- entry by reactor crews speaks for itelf. The entire reactor complex underground is flooded. Just finding leaks under highly radioactive water in damaged buildings is hard to imagine.

TEPCO needs to rethink the entire water- entombment approach and develop a new plan.

There is no reason why TEPCO cannot insert monitoring equipment into the drywells, either by fishing through reactor plumbing or drilling through the concrete. Faulty instruments leaves TEPCO in the dark.

Instead of water, operators should pump sand, boron and lead as a slurry into the containments with concrete pumps. Any pipe that can carry water can also carry a slurry. Inserting a few tons of the sand mix per hour alongside the water would cut down the amount of water leakage. The sand mix is persistent: it stays put and does not flow away through cracks or holes. Enough sand and boron could be pumped into the containment to fill the drywell. Lead in the slurry would provide shielding for those conscripted to clear radioactive debris from the rest of the site.

The French nuclear company Areva has sent equipment to Japan to remove some kinds of radioisotopes from the waste- water to be recycled. Areva’s ‘secrecy’ approach raises questions about the process (From the skeptical Ex- SKF):

 

TEPCO-AREVA Contract to Treat Contaminated Water at #Fukushima I Nuke Plant Is Shrouded in Secrecy

With TEPCO again running out of space to hide (aka move) the highly contaminated water from the Reactors 2 and 3 at Fukushima I Nuke Plant, the hope is that the water treatment facility being built by AREVA will be in operation in June.

I mentioned the “rumor” in my post yesterday that the cost to treat 1 tonne of contaminated water will cost TEPCO/Japanese taxpayers 200 million yen (US$2.44 million). In addition to the exorbitant cost, some people are asking, “What exactly will the facility do? What types of radioactive materials is it capable of removing from the water?”

After all, it will be the first even for AREVA to treat radioactive water of this level of contamination.

To my (feigned) surprise, no one in the Japanese government seems to know exactly what the facility is designed to do, and TEPCO is not saying anything, because it is under the “confidentiality [non-disclosure] clause” of the agreement with the French company.

Why any work related to Fukushima I Nuke Plant is still considered “private” is a mystery to me, when the entire world is being affected and the Japanese taxpayers will likely be required to pick up the tab.

 

What entities do rather than what they pitch is suggestive: the process is not going to work so Areva wants to gain its return up front, leaving the unhappy Japanese to their radioactive fate.

Extend and pretend junk strategy is illuminated as bankrupt by the actions of participants. The idea ‘in the air’ suggests that events on the ground are set to overrun TEPCO with another series of calamities. In this sense, there is no difference between the reactor establishment ‘cashing out’ and financiers around the world doing the same thing.