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Large Japanese electricity utility Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) confirmed on Thursday, March 19 that nearly all fuel in one of four damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has melted and fallen into the containment building.
With the design of the Fukushima Daiichi plants, the containment building was a very simple shell protecting the reactor from the elements, but provided no real protection in the event of a nuclear accident. Instead, the nuclear reactor was enclosed in primary and secondary containment vessels, which sat atop a thick concrete pad at the base of the containment building.
In the event of a meltdown, the thick concrete pad is the only barrier between highly radioactive molten fuel and groundwater.
While there has been suspicions that nuclear fuel did melt its way through the containment vessel and to the base of the containment building, until Thursday there was no definitive proof meltdown had occurred.
The implication of the findings is that it will be very difficult to remove the highly radioactive molten fuel from Unit 1. As well, the molten fuel must continue to be cooled with water until it is removed.
Holes and fractures in the concrete base of the reactor building also means that groundwater continues to seep in and become irradiated before draining into the Pacific Ocean, causing an ongoing nuclear disaster.
The official decommissioning plan tells us the plant should be fully shut down sometime after 2022.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday April 07 2015, @11:21AM
Nuclear power is great as long as no pointy haired bosses or bean counters are involved in any way..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 07 2015, @11:36AM
This is true in all forms of human activity, not just nuclear power
(Score: 1) by Steve Hamlin on Tuesday April 07 2015, @04:36PM
No bean counters at all means the only commerce that exists is real-time bartering of goods and services, wealth must be stored in land and physical objects, and human effort is not allocated very efficiently.
No thank you.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 08 2015, @01:09AM
No it means administrators of resource management. And that they have limited abilities of control. Ie not save $10 screw which causes a $10 000 000 accident because it makes the budget sheet look good. Or any schemes that gets too much out of touch with the real resources that the economy has to reflect.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday April 08 2015, @10:52AM
True, but the key difference is that most human activity can't cause trillions of yens worth of damage over a wide area, and take decades to clean up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:18PM
Nuclear power is great as long as no pointy haired bosses or bean counters are involved in any way..
Nuclear power is great - as long as you locate it in a fusion source at the center of a planetary orbital system.
There's never been a nuke system that paid its way. Domestic commercial nuclear electrical generation has always been a subsidized, big-corp boondoggle issued as another expensive side-effect of major military suppliers like Westinghouse and GE. Same in France.
Then? There's the poor tolerance for risk, and disposal of waste - inherent in the technology.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @09:15PM
And the fuck is that different to every other power generating tech?