One Year Later, What Does Fukushima Mean for Nuclear Research?

Peter Burns, director of the Energy Frontier Research Center, has been studying the risks and effects of nuclear fuel disposal and containment for decades. Last week, he published a review in Science that demands that we offer more research attention to big problems like nuclear safety, not post-mortems on single accidents.

“At the end of the day, if you have enough reactors operating in the world, sooner or later you will have another accident,” he says. “This is why we need to spend effort to understand the actual processes that take place during a core-melt accident and understanding the release mechanisms of radionuclides so that we can reduce the risk of the next accident that takes place.”


Accidents will take place, and because nuclear fuels are designed to work within the controlled, ordered environment of a nuclear reactor, we don’t have a complete understanding of how they could spread throughout the environment.

His review isn’t a call for a moratorium on nuclear energy, it’s a call for more attention into the fate of these fuels, and better policies for communicating this information to the public.

We’ve learned a lot about what caused the Fukushima disaster one year ago yesterday, but we still stand to learn much in the way of preventing another.

The Beautifully Frightening Atom

For the night crowd.

Something about the atom rustles up both fear and amazement in me. On one hand, it’s the smallest physical manifestation of matter (almost). On the other hand, it holds within its unimaginably small substructures such immense energy - energy that can be harnessed for both good and evil.

Thoughts of atomic energy can inspire very spooky imagery. In 2003, artist Isao Hashimoto put together the above multimedia piece demonstrating the history of atomic bomb detonations from 1945-1998. The sounds and visuals combine to form a hypnotic video game that almost makes you forget how real and destructive the blasts are.

And then I came across this image of the only known nuclear detonation in space, from a 1962 test to determine if nukes could disrupt the Van Allen belts surrounding Earth:

Again, there’s a conflict in how beautiful the image looks and how utterly destructive an H-bomb is, even 250 miles above the Earth.

What about nuclear energy? Fukushima reminded us of the balance between atomic power and human utility that we too often take for granted. I came upon this artwork from Robert Cherwink, which captures both the destructive power and the risk of boiling water with atoms:

So there you have it. While we can’t see atoms, their energy can certainly inspire haunting experiences.

France announces $1.43-billion nuclear investment

Sarkozy bucks the recent European trend away from nuclear power, which is not surprising considering that they get >70% of their electricity from it today. France is a European leader in nuclear tech and safety, and seems confident that they can avoid a Fukushima-like situation.

After all, it’s a French company that’s currently cleaning the radioactive cooling water in Japan as we speak. This new nuke funding will accompany about $1.5 billion in new renewable investments as well.

TEPCO is now recycling hundreds of tons of contaminated cooling water at Fukushima every day, which beats the old method of just storing it in hundreds of huge tanks, hoping that the radiation fairies will just magically clean it up. So how do you recycle radioactive water anyway? First, it gets passed through a simple type of charcoal filter. Then, using a chemical reaction developed by the French company Areva, the radioactive cesium is precipitated out of the water. It collects as a radioactive sludge (a la Toxic Avenger) which can be collected for long-term storage deep in the core of the Earth or somewhere like that. Then, the clean water is pumped back into the cores to continue the cooling process. (more at WSJ.com)
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TEPCO is now recycling hundreds of tons of contaminated cooling water at Fukushima every day, which beats the old method of just storing it in hundreds of huge tanks, hoping that the radiation fairies will just magically clean it up.

So how do you recycle radioactive water anyway? First, it gets passed through a simple type of charcoal filter. Then, using a chemical reaction developed by the French company Areva, the radioactive cesium is precipitated out of the water. It collects as a radioactive sludge (a la Toxic Avenger) which can be collected for long-term storage deep in the core of the Earth or somewhere like that. Then, the clean water is pumped back into the cores to continue the cooling process.

(more at WSJ.com)

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Fukushima Absorbed: How Plutonium Poisons the Body It’s got a half-life of 24,000 years, or more than three times the age of all human civilization. Even the smalles doses can be toxic or deadly. It can be slowly absorbed into the lungs and bloodstream, and it’s in danger of being released in large quantities from the Fukushima nuclear plant. So I guess it’s right on time that Argonne Labs scientists figured out the mechanism by which plutonium enters the body. Since it isn’t found in nature, it has to piggy-back on transporters and cellular machinery that transports ions like iron. Should people be subject to plutonium poisoning, this might help lead to a treatment,
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Fukushima Absorbed: How Plutonium Poisons the Body

It’s got a half-life of 24,000 years, or more than three times the age of all human civilization. Even the smalles doses can be toxic or deadly. It can be slowly absorbed into the lungs and bloodstream, and it’s in danger of being released in large quantities from the Fukushima nuclear plant.

So I guess it’s right on time that Argonne Labs scientists figured out the mechanism by which plutonium enters the body. Since it isn’t found in nature, it has to piggy-back on transporters and cellular machinery that transports ions like iron. Should people be subject to plutonium poisoning, this might help lead to a treatment,

Source: scientificamerican.com

Breaking: 3/4 of US nuclear power plants leaked or are leaking radiation

climateadaptation:

“Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.

Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP’s yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard — sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.”

Source: AP via ABC 

Especially troubling considering that tritium has a half-life of ~12 years.

(via mohandasgandhi)

Source: climateadaptation

” … when you build a reactor you are committing to controlling the nuclear fury at its heart for half a century or more, and controlling the waste produced for many thousands of years (using methods no-one has yet developed). On those timescales, unforeseen events are a certainty, with hugely costly consequences. The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan were extreme, and the IAEA report tries to argues that new nuclear safety regulations should learn lessons from the failure of the system at Fukushima to cope. But the real lesson is that it is impossible to cover all eventualities. That means nuclear power is not safe or, given the colossal clean-up costs, cheap.” A damning take on how even the most extreme preparations for nuclear safety failed to prevent disaster in Japan, and what it means for the future of nuclear energy. “IAEA/Fukushima report shows nuclear power can never be safe and cheap” by Damian Carrington
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” … when you build a reactor you are committing to controlling the nuclear fury at its heart for half a century or more, and controlling the waste produced for many thousands of years (using methods no-one has yet developed).

On those timescales, unforeseen events are a certainty, with hugely costly consequences. The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan were extreme, and the IAEA report tries to argues that new nuclear safety regulations should learn lessons from the failure of the system at Fukushima to cope.

But the real lesson is that it is impossible to cover all eventualities. That means nuclear power is not safe or, given the colossal clean-up costs, cheap.”

A damning take on how even the most extreme preparations for nuclear safety failed to prevent disaster in Japan, and what it means for the future of nuclear energy.

“IAEA/Fukushima report shows nuclear power can never be safe and cheap” by Damian Carrington

Source: Guardian

Japan government admits it was unprepared for disaster on the scale of Fukushima

While the radiation released so far is only (ha, only) 15% of that released in the Chernobyl disaster, Japan’s government as acknowledged that it was not prepared for an accident of this scale. In addition, they have decided to make their nuclear regulatory office independent of the industrial ministry, which will allow more independent oversight.