Why the
good life, all of a sudden?
Well,
consider the state of affairs at Fukushima reactor four. The reactor, you remember, was down for
maintenance when the earthquake / tsunami struck, which meant that the radioactive rods
were not in the core of the reactor, but in a cooling pool.
Einstein said it best: nuclear power
is one hell of a way to boil water. So here’s my physics-for-poets of how this
process works.
Small
pellets of radioactive fuel are placed in rods, which are encased in zirconium alloy.
Important—that zirconium alloy is highly explosive, and can ignite on contact
with air. Anyway, during the reaction process, enormous heat is generated,
which goes to heat the water, which produces steam, which drives turbines,
which in turn produce electricity. The problem?
Well, the
fuel in the rods is only 95% consumed, so those rods—logically called “spent
rods”—need to be cooled. For how long? Five years, minimum. So the spent rods
are put in cooling pools, which circulate cool water constantly.
Now, where
did the rocket scientists decide to put the cooling pools for the Fukushima
plants? Five or six storeys up, on the roofs! Oh, and there’s no containment up
there, as there is in the reactor. So if something blows the roof off, the
cooling pool is exposed.
You know
what happened—initially, the plants were cooling down after the earthquake. The
tsunami hit, and guess where the generators were? Yup, right there in the
basement.
Guys?
But before
you start raising you eyes in disgust at the Japanese, I should point out that
we have 23 of the buggers in the US. Oh, and they were designed by General
Electric.
Nor is that
all—the generators flooded, the power was off, but it wasn’t “just” spent rods
up there, because the operators of the plant had emptied the core, and had put
202 unspent, reactor-ready rods up in the cooling pond on the top floor. And they
are side by side with the 1331 spent rods. (Note—in fact, the sharp-eyed
Miss Taí pointed out that it’s really 202 unspent and 1331 spent rod assemblies.
Why? Because up to 80 rods are packaged
together in one unit. So the actual number of rods is something over 120,000….)
Now then,
here’s what the building looks like:
Two things—minimally—happened:
the earthquake damaged the structure, and the there was an explosion / fire at
the plant. Think it can’t get worse? Think again, because the operators of the
plant made the decisions to pour seawater into the cooling tanks. And that
seawater is corrosive.
Fasten your
seat belts—we’ve barely begun….
Because the
water from the cooling pool, you see, is leaking, and that leaking is making
the ground very soggy. So what do we have? A sinking building with 1500-plus
spent and unspent rod assembies of radioactive fuel in a leaky pool 100 feet in the air
in a building that might collapse.
Oh, did I
mention that the pool may have had debris from the explosion, and that that
debris may have damaged the integrity of the pool?
And I
probably forgot as well to tell you that there are 80 damaged fuel rods up
there? Here’s what one source had to say:
In
an 11-page information sheet released in August, TEPCO said one of the
assemblies was even damaged as long ago as 1982, when it was bent out of
shape during a transfer. … The damaged racks were first reported by a
Fukushima area newspaper on Wednesday, as TEPCO is preparing to decommission the plant
and remove the spent fuel assemblies from Reactor No. 4.
I should
note, by the way, that the “August” referred to is August of 2013, two years
after the disaster took place.
Or rather,
started. Because let me tell you—it’s by no means over yet. Yes, they have
installed a crane, and work started in November of last year to remove the fuel
rods from the pool. As of 30 March of this year, 983 rods were still in the
cooling pool—the process is expected to last all year.
Now then—time
for today’s vocabulary enrichment—“criticality.” And here, I bring you one source on the issue.
Arnie
Gunderson, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy
Education, told Reuters that “they are going to have difficulty in
removing a significant number of the rods,” especially given their close
proximity to each other, which risks breakage and the release of radiation.
Gundersen
told Reuters of an incredibly dangerous “criticality” that would
result if a chain reaction takes place at any point, if the rods break or even
so much as collide with each other in the wrong way. The resulting radiation
is too great for the cooling pool to absorb – it simply has not been designed
to do so.
“The
problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no
control rods
to control it,”Gundsersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is
designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”
Simply put,
for the next year, we are all going to have to hope that nothing, absolutely
NOTHING happens out of the ordinary—not one fuel rod dropped, not one rod
corroded significantly, not one rod stuck in the pool, not one rod bumping into
each other.
Oh, and
keep your fingers crossed, Readers, that there isn’t another earthquake of 7 or
above on the Richter scale since that…?
I know you’re
asking—so what happens if one rod breaks, releasing radiation? Well, take a
look at this headline:
Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens
‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario. Radiation Fuel Rods Matches Fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima
Bombs
Potentially,
there could be a huge cloud of radiation drifting over the Pacific Ocean, and
reaching the West Coast in a week.
Now you see
why I was up at four in the morning?
