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Page added on April 8, 2015
Japan considers evaporation of Fukushima water
Japan is considering evaporating or storing underground tritium-laced water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant as an alternative to releasing it into the ocean, Tokyo Electric Power Co’s chief decommissioning officer told Reuters on Wednesday.
The removal of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of water containing tritium, a relatively harmless radioactive isotope left behind in treated water is one of many issues facing Tokyo Electric as it tries to cleanup the wrecked plant.
Tokyo Electric wants to release the tritium laced water to the ocean, a common practice at normally operating nuclear plants around the world, but is struggling to get approval from local fisherman, who are concerned about the impact on consumer confidence and have little faith in the company.
With the release to the ocean stalled, the government task force overseeing the cleanup is looking at letting the water evaporate or storing it underground, chief decommissioning officer Naohiro Masuda, told Reuters at the close of a seminar on decommissioning.
Masuda said he didn’t know when the discussions would be completed and a decision made.
Time and space is running out for Tepco, which has been forced to build hundreds of tanks to hold contaminated and treated water.
The evaporation method was used after the Three Mile Island disaster but the amounts were much smaller, Dale Klein, an outside adviser to Tepco told Reuters last week.
“They have huge volumes of water so they cannot evaporate it like they did at Three Mile Island,” Klein said. “If they did it would likely be evaporated, go out over the ocean, condense and fall back as rainwater. There’s no safety enhancement.”
Tepco has been fighting a daily battle against contaminated water since Fukushima was wrecked by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 and three reactors underwent meltdowns.
Water flushed over the wrecked reactors to keep them cool enough to prevent further radioactive releases is treated but current technology can’t remove tritium.
“They really do need to make a decision,” Klein said. “Storing it in all those tanks, you are just asking for failure.”
Missteps and leaks have dogged the efforts to contain the water, slowing down the decades-long decommissioning process and causing public alarm.
“I think they will need to make that decision,” U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Stephen Burns, said when asked should Japan release the tritium laced water at a media briefing at the U.S. Embassy on Wednesday.
14 Comments on "Japan considers evaporation of Fukushima water"
Plantagenet on Wed, 8th Apr 2015 10:14 pm
The half life of tritium is 12.3 years. If they could store it for a century they’d get rid of ca. 99.5% of the tritium.
GregT on Wed, 8th Apr 2015 11:03 pm
Unfortunately tritium is not the only radioactive isotope in the contaminated water being stored at Fukushima. Caesium-137 is far more dangerous, and has a half life of 30 years.
None of us are likely to be here in a century planter. As I have stated before, this is one hell of a legacy for us to leave to our grandchildren, in a hugely reduced energy future, if they manage to get through the bottleneck that we have already created for them.
We never should have screwed around with things that we do not fully understand, never mind things that we have no clue how to safeguard.
Plantagenet on Wed, 8th Apr 2015 11:31 pm
How hard is it to understand that you shouldn’t build a nuclear power plant in a tsunami hazard zone?
Perhaps that is a “thing you don not fully understand” gregter, but after the Fukushima disaster it’s really quite obvious.
GregT on Wed, 8th Apr 2015 11:56 pm
It really doesn’t matter where nuclear power plants are built lil planter. We do not have the capability of safeguarding the waste in our lifetimes, never mind the lifetimes of our children, and our grandchildren.
Stop playing the class idiot.
Go Speed Racer. on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 12:32 am
Blow the whole complex up like Bikini Atoll. One fusion warhead, light fuse and get away. Fun for the whole family. Now it Miller Time. Make money selling ticketz, T-shirts, and dark glasses. Why can’t you people get this, hey 110 years ago they made money crashing train engines together. Same idea we just scale it up.
gdubya on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 1:36 am
Let’s see, we need to boil away a shirtload of water, so we’ll need a super-powerful cheap heating plant. I know, we could build a nuclear reactor!
Dredd on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 9:17 am
To pollute or not to pollute.
Such a difficult question.
I’ve got your back.
Ken300 on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 9:24 am
The cost to clean up and store the nuclear waste at Chernobyl and Fukishima is enormous. Those disasters continue today with no end in sight. The technology to clean up the sites does not exist.
Chernobyl’s new shell – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJSpDAwEtjA&spfreload=10
keith on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 10:53 am
Insurance companies do not ever insure nuclear power plants. But they still get built because Governments promise that the public trust will insure them. Over time every nuclear power plant has the potential to melt down
penury on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 11:07 am
The predicament in which we find ourselves over “nuclear waste” is just one more indicator of human failure to plan. If there were a solution to the contaminated water,dirt and other items I think someone would be making billions on clean up fees. We still have leaking tank problems at Hanford. And this was a WW2 plant. There are currently no answers to the disposal problems of nuclear waste, and it appears that there is no money to spend to find an answer.
Mark Ziegler on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 3:08 pm
Just cement the whole thing like the Russians did. Start over
viewcrafters
Perk Earl on Thu, 9th Apr 2015 6:27 pm
Maybe nuclear of some form will get most species or maybe too much CO2 will acidify the oceans. Read on;
http://www.livescience.com/50440-ocean-acidification-killer-permian-extinction.html
Ocean of Acid Blamed for Earth’s ‘Great Dying’
Death by acid was the fate of the sea monsters that perished in Earth’s biggest mass extinction, some 251 million years ago, a new study finds.
Nearly every form of ocean life disappeared during this “Great Dying” at the end of the Permian period, when more than 90 percent of all marine species vanished, from the scorpionlike predators called eurypterids to various types of trilobites, some with alienlike stalked eyes. It’s the closest Earth has ever come to completely losing its fish, snails, sea plankton and other marine creatures. Some 70 percent of animals and plants on land died off at the same time.
The gap between the when each isotope records jumps — first carbon, then boron — could mean that Earth’s oceans slowly absorbed the first wave of excess greenhouse gas from the eruptions, Clarkson said. Then, another burst of activity about 10,000 years before the end of the Permian Period triggered a massive die-off due to ocean acidification.
Apneaman on Fri, 10th Apr 2015 1:30 am
A third of Nuclear Reactors are going to die of old age in the next 10-20 years
http://energyskeptic.com/2015/a-third-of-nuclear-reactors-are-going-to-die-of-old-age-in-the-next-10-20-years/
Kenz300 on Fri, 10th Apr 2015 9:22 am
Nuclear energy is too costly and too dangerous to exist.
There are safer, cleaner and cheaper ways to create electricity.
Wind and solar are the future.
It is time to decommission all these aging nuclear power plants before we have more disasters.