Preventing Spent Fuel Rods from Igniting?

Of course you have to ask the question; What are the chances we will have a 9.0 earthquake in northern Japan? Followed by a 30 foot Tsunami?

And why would you have to ask that question?

The reason I ask the question is to suggest the real question, Which is "what were the design limits being used at the design stage of these units?"

Which leads to another question do we collectively think that the people who designed these plants in the past and present are or were incapable of designing and building plants that could have withstood this type of natural occurrence?

Regardless of what any of us do as our contribution to this system called civilization, we have to work within constraints, be they economic or practical we are either given or develop limits to any effort we are involved with.

From my personal perspective I can sympathize with the people who designed these systems because in the seventies Tsunami was about as prevalent in conversation or consideration as Kamikaze. In these present times it seems Tsunamis are a bi-annual or more frequent event. Maybe that is because of the communication advancements over the years.

for some of you who are actually involved in present day design specifications; what is the usual wording that describes the Tsunami design criteria?

My point here is that we don't have to invent methods of preventing spent fuel from igniting we need to make sure that problem doesn't present itself. The large corporations that are involved in designing and building nuclear power plants have enough competent and capable engineers to address almost any design problem or criteria.

We collectively determine what we will allow things to cost. We express that determination by accepting plastic where steel is the obvious solution, by allowing planned obsolescence versus a quality product, by disregarding the value of guarantee' and warranties, and on and on. You get what you pay for, so when you ask that your nuke plant be designed for a 7.0 earthquake with routine flooding associated with a typhoon or such, guess what happens when you up the ante to a 8.9/9.0 earthquake with a 30 foot Tsunami. It is called a disaster.

Would anyone who responds to this keep the character assassination to a minimum, I bruise easily.

Well, your reply is very nice and raises some valid points. However, it has nothing to do with my original argument, which is why I asked why it begs the question you posed.

In fact, the two arguments are not connected.

I agree, these plants are old designs and it just is not reasonable to expect them to contain in their designs the volumes of learnings that have taken place since their inception.

I am actually amazed how well the plants held up to the 9.0 earthquake given the original design specifications. It seems it exceeded expectations. Unfortunately, the backup generator failed when needed, but it gets harder to extrapolate a failure analysis with compound failures.

At some point a panel of experts will be assigned to the post-mortem of this event. Until then we can only speculate based on a few facts and not knowing the full story makes our conjectures more prone to failure than the plants themselves by orders of magnitude.

For that reason I am forced to wait on my final opinion of the matter.

As I'd suggested in another thread, dump enough depleted uranium (the scrap from enrichment, very low in 235) to absorb, melt with, and dilute the pellets into a very hot, but immensely stable, slug of stable, dangerous to the touch, but handleable, metalic uranium. 10 or 100 kg/kg should be enough to poison the runaway reaction, and since we've done so much high level enrichment over the years, I understand that we Americans have a tad over 475,000 tons accumulated. I would guess that the bulk of it is oxide, but that will decompose at temp, allowing if nothing else, the burial and containment, or recovery, and shipment to the middle east where it could be used as a heating source for water distillation for drinking. Not quite capable of heating to the extent of a reactor, but still an overall free form of energy, for the right use.

It can't be any worse than the sand/cement sarcophogas selected at Chernoble.

It would at least confine nearly all fission products into the hot, stable mass.

RichH

I agree with the media taking advantage of our curiosity. It seems that a lot of their "news" is designed to inflame the public's fear of anything nuclear. Most standard news media reports seem to make great use of words like "if" and "could." The probability of these things is tiny.

You all might want to take a look at this: www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-accident-updates.html. I believe it was today's post (March 19) that also gave a list of 8 other trusted sites.

This company has a history of not telling the truth, our foreign minister Kevin rudd has even said on national television that the information being released by the company cannot be relied upon as they have provided false information about incidents in the past. When the earthquake and tsunami first hit the japanese government very quickly put out a news bulletin to say that they had spoken to the power company and their was no leakage of radiation from the plants, this was probably technically correct they just failured to mention the damage at the plant until it was very obvious. The problem of getting straight data isnt with the news agencies it is with a company trying to mitigate their losses and not be truthful about what is going on.

I don't know about the electric company either way. Take a look at this site; he tries to give a summary of events from trusted (not commercial media) sources.

www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-accident-updates.html.

I wonder if Mr. Albrecht has ever had any actual, practical experience with this sort of event, or even with normal operations of a nuclear power plant?

I used to build nuclear plants for a living (5 plants in So. Calif. and Arizona) so I am very familiar with the insides of a nuke plant. I understand it looks impossible to keep that spent fuel pool filled with water, (possibly the piping in the drains broke) so what else can be done to stop fires? Releasing CO2 gas into the building in a large volume might help. I know it won't stop any radiation from releasing but wouldn't it stop any potential for fires from breaking out? You could back up a tanker truck of liquid CO2 (available anywhere) and pipe up to the base floor and open the tanker valve and drain CO2 into the building for a few weeks.

CO2 gas will flow as a cloud in and around the spent fuel pool displacing oxygen. I guess the workers all have oxygen tanks they breathe from anyhow so CO2 in the atmosphere is no big deal.

I haven't thought this through completely but since water is not an option, a fire preventive gas like CO2 may be the easy answer.

Brian

The pool water boiled out because there was more heat than water after time ran out. Time ran out because there was no more water.

Being a ""used to build" makes not an expert; SoCal and Ari beware because breaking the "piping in the drains" is no more an issue than scraping the striping in the employee's parking lot.

Releasing CO2 into "the building" (which building, one might possibly ask) will do, uh, what? You haven't thought this through, you say, but your submission implies that those poor bastards whose palms are no longer even capable of sweating, whose families somehow know by now that their fathers/mothers/sisters/brothers just won't be the same when they get back from sweating this out - maybe won't get back at all - and the best we've got is "dump in CO2"?

Why didn't "they" think of that? Or of putting massive emergency cooling water tanks up on Mount Fujisimu (NO DISRESPECT INTENDED, my Nippon friends) where gravity would preclude the need for conductivity (i.e. pumps not required)...

This is all bordering on mini-ice-age histeria; mistakes were made, simple preventions were just not considered, but PLEASE EVERYONE, ANYONE, SOMEONE, PRESUMED OR PROCLAIMED EXPERTS OR EX-SPURTERS PLEASE STOP OFFERING THE MUNDANE, THE RIDICULOUS, THE "MOST OBVIOUS TO THE CASUAL OBSERVER, not saying there's not potentail markets for those claiming to casually observe something such as this but..."

The real insult to those who are dying or about to die or to send someone who feels compelled for his family, his people, his country and his national reputation to die now potentally than later certainly, is for someone who claims "expertise" to offer to those who've agonized over the failures of all their heartfelt attempts at resolving this tragic issue a lame and insulting "DUH, WHY NOT BLOW OFF SOME CO2 CANISTERS?"

Incidentally, water is ALWAYS an option, and "easy" - being no longer on the table - precludes involvement from "workers all have oxygen tanks..." please give me a break! Radiation; oxygen; too much of one but plenty of the other - all balances out, right?

Thanks for not thinking this through completely. Reps are reps.

ON THREAD: GA; the reason will be obvious to anyone who is either an expert or an engineer of some substantive reputation.

OFF THREAD: Thanks for the link.

Regards,

Gene

Enough water.

Some boron added, preferrably as boron containing glass beads to stay in the pond.

Any other cooling pond reconfigured so that convection cooling is sufficient.

Next generation nuclear power plants as AECL suggests. Much smaller (in diameter) fuel rods - as being used as single tubes in contratry to bundles - will very much facilitate

cooling.

See AECL.ca

RHABE

I'm a little lost on so many versions of a very serious prolbem. The snow brought down radioactive material thats contaminated the water and the cows drank the water and we fed the water and the products to our babies and may have drank or consumed some ourselves and this is a canserus situation. The problem that has me perplexed is where is all the water contained they are pumping from the ocean and dropping from the sky are these containment ponds to hold all of this or can we expect bulldog size lobsters in our remaining days, while we explain to our dying generation how educated minds built the dam thing on the fault for our own good. I am so, so, sorry for the ones that have died from the floods and the earthquake, but, the reason I sound upset is because I am, mother nature has her ways. I live in Oklahoma and have seen many a structure built to last the worst wind flattened to the ground.

One big worry for Japanese officials is that reactor No. 3, the main target of the helicopters and water cannons on Thursday, uses a new and different fuel. It uses mixed oxides, or mox, which contains a mixture of uranium and plutonium

It appears that you don't understand the goings-on inside a nuclear reactor. ALL fuel rods will have some plutonium in them; the longer they have been in the reactor, the more Pu. #3 may have been fueled with mixed oxides, but the fission reactions result in a neutron being captured by U-238, which soon becomes Pu-239, thus Pu is generated in the fuel.