Unlimited Nuclear Disaster Updates

Started by Woolly Bugger, September 16, 2021, 08:14:56 AM

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Woolly Bugger

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

Russia retires Chernobyl-era reactor at Kursk nuclear plant
As 2021 drew to a close, the No 1 reactor at the Kursk nuclear power plant in Russia was permanently shut down after 45 years in operation, marking a major step toward retiring the country's stock of Chernobyl-style RBMK reactors.

>>>The closure is part of a gradual phase-down at the original Kursk nuclear plant, located 524 kilometers south of Moscow, that will see all four of the site's RMBK reactors retire by 2031. The power produced by those reactors will be replaced by the two VVER-TOI reactors currently under construction at the nearby Kursk II nuclear plant.


https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2022-01-russia-retires-chernobyl-era-reactor-at-kursk-nuclear-plant
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse


>>>In Fukushima's case, regarding three nuclear power plants that melted all-the-way (China Syndrome), 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, They're not even 100% sure where all of the corium is and whether it's getting into underground water resources. What a disaster that would be... what if it is already... Never mind.

The newest wrinkle at TEPCO involves the continuous flow of water necessary to keep the destroyed reactors' hot stuff from exposure to air, thus spreading explosively red-hot radioactivity across the countryside. That constant flow of water is an absolute necessity to prevent an explosion of all explosions, likely emptying the streets of Tokyo in a mass of screaming, kicking, and trampling event to "get out of town" ASAP, commonly known as "mass evacuation."

The cooling water continuously poured over the creakily dilapidated ruins itself turns radioactive, almost instantaneously, and must be processed via an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove most radioactive materials (???) housed in a 17-meter (56 feet) tall building on the grounds of the disaster zone.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/10/fukushima-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse/

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

#33
TEPCO to begin robot probe of Fukushima reactor

>>>The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station says it will launch a probe of the inside of the No.1 reactor on Wednesday using robots. The firm is seeking to clear debris from the reactor interior as part of the decommissioning process.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says the probe will involve six types of robots, each with a different function.

It says the survey will continue for more than six months. It will use ultrasonic devices to locate and measure the thickness of debris believed to be submerged under water inside the reactor containment vessel.

The utility says it also hopes to collect small samples of the debris.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20220107_02/

another article with photo of "swimming robot"

>>>Much of the so-called nuclear debris is believed to have melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel and has likely accumulated in the basement of the reactor building.

In 2017, a camera was inserted into the water collected in the containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor to check on the condition of the interior. However, no confirmation could be made of the debris because of the large amount of what appeared to be sand that covered the melted fuel.

The six submersible robots will have different functions and be deployed in a designated order to photograph and measure the depth of the sediment and to determine if melted fuel lies under it.

The first robot will install four rings on the interior wall of the containment vessel using magnets. Subsequent robots will navigate through the rings to avoid entangling the trailing cables transmitting electricity and signals.

The robots have been dubbed "IRIDolphin" because they will swim through the rings much like dolphins during shows at aquariums.

The second robot to enter the reactor will have a camera to allow for visual inspection of the interior. Subsequent robots will measure the depth of the accumulated sediment, detect the debris by picking up the radioactive materials found in the fuel, collect small samples of the sediment and measure the distribution of the sediment on the floor.

The robot with the camera will again be sent into the reactor as the final robot to try to navigate to a position right below the pressure vessel where the fuel melted through to get as close as possible to the melted fuel. Those involved in the project admit that this robot may have to be left behind if it becomes stuck with whatever is in that area.

The study will continue until August.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14519632

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

400 MINUTEMEN TO MIDNIGHT
ICBMs enjoy rock-solid support in Congress. A majority of Americans would scrap them, if they could.

America's ICBM force is comprised solely of Boeing's LGM-30G Minuteman III, an 18-meter tower of cold steel multi-stage rockets overseen by the Air Force Global Strike Command. The US maintains 400 Minuteman III (plus 50 reserve silos) missiles which were first deployed in 1970, planted like doomsday seeds in hardened silos across the great American West.

The first iteration of the Minuteman dates back to the early 1960s, with Minuteman III production ending in 1978. Today, despite more than $7 billion spent in upgrades, improvements, and part replacements, the missile is slated to be retired and replaced with the brand new Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), expected to reach initial operational capability by 2029.

Replacing Minuteman III with GBSD is projected to cost $264 billion through 2075, although many analysts believe it will be over budget and behind schedule. The high cost of building a whole new strategic nuclear weapons system with more than 650 missiles plus another $14 billion or more for warheads defies current budgetary limitations. In 2020, an Air Force chief of staff openly acknowledged that the US cannot afford to modernize aging conventional weapons and nuclear weapons at the same time.

https://inkstickmedia.com/400-minutemen-to-midnight/
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

'You can't live with them': Madison WWII vet exposed to atomic testing warns about nuclear weapons

>>>Floating on a U.S. Navy tugboat in the Pacific Ocean nearly a year after the end of World War II, Lincoln Grahlfs and his shipmates could hear a countdown over a radio, signaling their mission would soon begin.

The sailors were told to cover their eyes with their hands before the countdown hit zero. Four hours later and wearing no protective gear, Grahlfs and his ship traveled 11 miles through Bikini Atoll to ground zero of where the United Stated military had tested a nuclear weapon.

The crew was tasked with putting out fires on empty ships used as targets and towing those that hadn't sunk to shallower waters for examination. More than 75 years after cleaning up the aftermath of two atomic tests in the central Pacific, the Madison resident has used his personal experience to advocate for ridding the world of nuclear weapons and on behalf of fellow veterans exposed to dangerous radiation.

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/you-cant-live-with-them-madison-wwii-vet-exposed-to-atomic-testing-warns-about-nuclear/article_3a607a7d-1788-5e39-a724-07c54285245c.html
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

#36
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

A remote-controlled robot has captured images of what appears to be mounds of nuclear fuel that melted and fell to the bottom of the most damaged reactor at Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, officials said Thursday.

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Images from a remote-controlled submersible robot show damaged areas inside the Fukushima nuclear power plant damaged in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, in Fukushima, Japan. The robot captured images of what appears be mounds of damaged fuel that had melted and fell to the bottom of the hardest-hit reactor at the nuclear plant for the first time since the 2011 disaster

About 900 tons of melted nuclear fuel remain inside the plant's three damaged reactors, including about 280 tons in Unit 1. Its removal is a daunting task that officials say will take 30-40 years. Critics say that's overly optimistic.

https://apnews.com/article/science-technology-business-japan-tsunamis-9e906166eab4f838abb1251af1880a5f
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

Chernobyl caught on film: Using recently found footage, a poignant new documentary reveals – in real-time – how the disaster devastated the oblivious locals

>>>>You might think you have seen the most realistic portrayal possible of this epic disaster.

In 2019, the HBO mini-series Chernobyl dramatised the accident and its aftermath in breathtaking detail, winning ten Emmys and nine BAFTAs.

It would be a foolish documentary-maker who tried to tell the same story again, surely?

But when he stumbled on this footage with the flashing lights, director James Jones, himself an Emmy-winner, knew he had to.

'I first saw it in May 2020 in the first lockdown,' he recalls. 'I'd been reading a couple of books about Chernobyl and it all seemed relevant, somehow, with us facing this invisible enemy.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10515693/Chernobyl-caught-film-Poignant-new-documentary-using-recently-footage.html

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, later this month, Sky Documentaries.
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

What Set Fukushima Apart
Nuclear reactors are designed to leave nothing to chance, but at Fukushima, a lot came down to luck.


>>>Looking back on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, one of the most expensive and complex industrial accidents of all time, it's striking how often simple luck influenced the course of events. Chance follows us everywhere. You miss the bus after bumping into a friend; a stranger pays it forward by buying your morning coffee; a burst water pipe floods your home. It's no surprise that a certain amount of luck was involved in an accident as colossal as the Fukushima disaster, but the amount of it is perhaps a little overlooked. Reading through the various government and institutional reports into what happened, words like "coincidence" appear more often than you might expect.

In the nuclear power industry, a sector famed for its caution and strong redundant systems, we can see that luck rarely held much sway prior to the Fukushima disaster. At the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama in 1975, for example, two men tasked with inspecting an electrical-cable room for air leaks used a naked candle to check for air flow. The flammable foam insulation ignited, damaging the cables, which then crippled the control room instrumentation for two reactors. Not much bad luck there, just a lack of common sense. At Three Mile Island in 1979, luck started the accident when a trickle of water seeped its way into an electrical circuit, but from that point on it had little impact. The safety equipment all functioned as intended up to a critical point, after which it was overwhelmed people who couldn't grasp the situation and made incorrect decisions because of a badly designed control room.


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-set-fukushima-apart/
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

What Russia Is Stirring Up at Chernobyl

>>>The Russian military's capture of the Chernobyl nuclear facility in northern Ukraine last week led to heightened levels of both radioactivity and confusion. Since the infamous 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, which sent nuclear materials as high as five miles into the atmosphere and likely condemned far more people than the United Nations' projected long-term death toll of 4,000, the plant has been radioactive. It's defunct. Why would the Russian military want it?

Maybe Russian forces overtook the facility for the sake of convenience—after all, it's along the route from Russian ally Belarus to Kyiv, ��the Ukrainian capital, which is now under assault. Or maybe, as Russia's Defense Ministry claimed, the military wanted to protect the plant's infrastructure, preventing any staging of a "nuclear provocation." Or maybe, as a Russian security source told Reuters, it was a warning to NATO.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/03/ukraine-russia-chernobyl-warning/623878/

Meanwhile, the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear site was knocked off the power grid Wednesday and forced to switch onto generators, a worrying new development that raised alarm about the plant's ability to keep its nuclear fuel safely cool.
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

Fukushima's Earthquakes Show That Risk Is Inevitable
By accepting risk and planning for failure, communities are more likely to survive catastrophes.


>>>wo hundred feet up in the foothills that surround Aneyoshi, a tiny coastal village in Japan, warnings are engraved into the rocks. Most of the messages come from 19th-century survivors of large tsunamis that terrorized people along the coast. "High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants," one inscription declares. "Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."

But more recent residents of coastal Japan did build below that point. Homes at first, but eventually nuclear facilities, which were built where they could be cooled by nearby ocean waters. On March 11, 2011, a massive undersea earthquake occurred east of Oshika Peninsula. The quake, which lasted six minutes and remains the fourth-most powerful ever recorded in the world, triggered tsunami waves that reached up to 130 feet above sea level. The rushing water ultimately led to a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, where a loss of power shut off the cooling system, resulting in hydrogen-gas accumulation. As surprised workers tried to cool the facility manually—using water from fire trucks—a gas buildup led to the expulsion of radioactive material into the atmosphere and groundwater. Part of Fukushima prefecture is still uninhabitable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-management-onagawa/627070/
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

found this tidbit interesting....

William Roger Smith
March 24, 1927 - August 27, 2020


In March of 1945, Bill was called to duty for the Navy, during his senior year at Prescott High School. He sailed overseas on the USS New Jersey, as a replacement in the Amphibious Division in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. When the first A-Bomb fell, everyone on board was issued 3 cans of beer. He was among a crew of 100 that secured the beaches afterward by sinking US landing craft equipment or placing it under protective covers. Bill was discharged in July 1946. He enrolled in Dairy Manufacturing Studies and Chemistry at Washington State University to learn how to make ice cream. He studied at WSU until 1947.

https://www.waitsburgtimes.com/story/2022/03/31/specials/william-roger-smith/18857.html


ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!

Woolly Bugger

slow progress


TEPCO to launch first probe of reactor core at Fukushima plant within 3 years

>>>The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it will launch a probe of the inside of the pressure vessel of a reactor within three years. It will be the first survey of a reactor core, where heat is generated.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, is seeking to decommission the plant, whose No.1 to 3 reactors experienced meltdowns after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

One of the biggest challenges in the process is the removal of radioactive fuel debris from the reactors. The debris is a mixture of molten nuclear fuel and pieces of metal structures. It still emits extremely high levels of radiation.
ex - I'm not going to live with you through one more fishing season!
me -There's a season?

Pastor explains icons to my son: you know like the fish symbol on the back of cars.
My son: My dad has two fish on his car and they're both trout!