What is happening at Fukushima

INTERESTING ARTICLE AT COUNTERPUNCH .ORG

About the ramping up cost of the clean up of the nuclear disaster in Japan wrote by the tsunami.

That spells out the danger to all of us on the planet both from this and the continued use of nuclear generation of electricity.

TEPCO the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Has been decommission three nuclear meltdowns in reactors, since the Tsunami.  TEPCO still does not know how to handle the enormously radioactive nuclear fuel debris, or corium, sizzling hot radioactive lumps of melted fuel rods and container material in No. 1, No 2 and No.3, this should worry us all who live in nations that think Nuclear power is the way to help us bridge the transition to renewable sources of energy.

TEPCO it seems is not even certain where all of the corium is and whether it’s getting into underground water resources. Which is certainly a risk as the amount of water they are using to keep the existing melt down cool enough not to explode and cause a mass evacuation of Tokyo is proving hard to control and account for as all of it needs to be contained to prevent further contamination as it is within minuets of use it is highly radioactive.

This situation is not unlike the Chernobyl problem of having to build the new housing for the melt down there . and the problem of dealing with the decommissioned nuclear waste currently stored at Sellafield at Cumbria in the UK.

The cooling water continuously poured over the creakily dilapidated ruins. The water held in the storage ponds full of radioactive waste at Sellafield. all becomes radio active how long this takes depends ion how hot the material is that it is trying to cool. currently at Fukushima this is almost instantaneously, and must be processed via an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove most radioactive materials. that are then housed in a containment building on site. The process flushes out “slurry” of highly concentrated radioactive material that has to go somewhere. the storage containers for the tainted slurry quickly degrade because of the high concentration of radioactive slurry. So new containers are constantly needed you may have seen this report on the news a couple of years back I certainly remember it being reported by BBC news .

The article is much longer and if you have the time and the stomach for it well worth the read. the long and short of it though is that we are all in danger of suffering from the problems of waste in the nuclear industry its disasters, as well as its decommissioning through end of use, both physically in ill health and associated sickness. As well as from the financial costs of the process. we need to move away from nuclear and build more plants like Dinorwig https://www.power-technology.com/features/featuredinorwig-a-unique-power-plant-in-the-north-of-wales-5773187/ in wales and other power storage facility’s as well as more tidal barrage generation of power . We will still have to deal with the aftermath of our dalliance with nuclear power, An I am noting that there is a difference between fission reaction the path we went down to get material for nuclear war heads. An fusion. { Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas.] so it is possible that we may be able to build fusion power plants plants that are potentially green and none contaminating. we do how

ever have a lot of cleaning up to do before we can say that nuclear is a sustainable sources of energy.