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Fukushima's Spent Fuel Rods Pose Grave Danger
Four atomic reactors in Fukushima, Japan, seem to be in partial meltdown. One of them, reactor No. 2, seems to have ruptured. The situation is spinning out of control as radiation levels spike. The US Navy has pulled back its aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, after seventeen of its crew were exposed to radiation while flying sixty miles off the Japanese coast.
This aerial image, from March 14, shows four reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant at Minamisoma, Japan. (Credit: DIGITAL GLOBE REUTERS/Digital Globe/Handout)
But despite three major explosions—at reactor No. 1, then No. 3, then No. 2—the Fukushima containment vessels seem to be holding. (Chernobyl lacked that precaution, having only a flimsy cement containment shell that collapsed, allowing the massive release of radioactive material.)
But there is another, potentially far more dangerous problem: the spent fuel rod pools that sit right next door to the reactors. The storage pools are packed with radioactive uranium, rise several stories above ground and are always close to the reactor, thus facilitating easy transfer of the fuel rods. Their name—especially “spent” and “pool”—conveys calm dissipation. But spent fuel rod pools are actually highly radioactive, very unstable, extremely dangerous and, compared with reactors, not well supported, contained or looked over.
The spent rods give off considerable amounts of “decay heat” and thus must be submerged in constantly circulating water. Expose them to air for a day or two, and they begin to combust, giving off large amounts of radioactive cesium-137, a very toxic, long-lasting, aggressively penetrating radioactive element with a half-life of thirty years. When cesium-137 it enters the environment, it essentially acts like potassium and is taken up by plants and animals that use potassium. (For the record, that includes you.)
The explosions at reactors No. 1 and No. 3 blew apart the respective containment buildings but left the vessels intact. Or so we think. But what did the blasts do to the nearby spent fuel rod pools? On Monday night the news in Japan confirmed that the pool next to reactor No. 3 lost its roof.
“I’ve been studying overhead photographs of Fukushima. It is very disturbing,” said Robert Alvarez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the Energy Department under Clinton and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.
“The steel wall of the pool seems to show damage. All the surrounding equipment, including the two cranes, has been destroyed. There is smoke coming from reactor No. 3, and steam coming from the spent fuel pool next to it. That indicates that the water in the pool is boiling. And that means the spent fuel rods are getting hot and could start burning.”
If the spent rods start to burn, huge amounts of radioactive material would be released into the atmosphere and would disperse across the Northern Hemisphere.
Unlike the reactors, spent fuel pools are not—repeat not—housed in any sort of hardened or sealed containment structures. Rather, the fuel rods are packed tightly together in pools of water that are often several stories above ground.
“With damaged [fuel rod] pools, we are talking about things that were never considered a credible threat,” said Alvarez.
Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action Kyoto, met Fukushima plant and government officials in August 2010. “At the plant they seemed to dismiss our concerns about spent fuel pools,” said Mioko Smith. “At the prefecture, they were very worried but had no plan for how to deal with it.”
Remarkably, that is the norm—both in Japan and in the United States. Spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not equipped with backup water-circulation systems or backup generators for the water-circulation system they do have.
The exact same design flaw is in place at Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant of the same GE design as the Fukushima reactors. At Fukushima each reactor has between 60 and 83 tons of spent fuel rods stored next to them. Vermont Yankee has a staggering 690 tons of spent fuel rods on site.
Nuclear safety activists in the United States have long known of these problems and have sought repeatedly to have them addressed. At least get backup generators for the pools, they implored. But at every turn the industry has pushed back, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consistently ruled in favor of plant owners over local communities.
After 9/11 the issue of spent fuel rods again had momentary traction. Numerous citizen groups petitioned and pressured the NRC for enhanced protections of the pools. But the NRC deemed “the possibility of a terrorist attack...speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action.” So nothing was done—not even the provision of backup water-circulation systems or emergency power-generation systems.
In fact, just one day before the earthquake hit Japan, the NRC recommended a twenty-year renewal for Vermont Yankee's license. Now, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin is fighting to close the plant. He told Democracy Now! that his state has "an aging nuclear plant owned by Entergy Louisiana, a company we found we cannot trust." Shumlin noted that the plant had been scheduled to be closed in 2012.
Short of closing plants, there is a fairly reliable solution to the problem of spent fuel rods. It is called “dry cask storage.” Germany adopted it twenty-five years ago. Instead of storing huge amounts of spent fuel in pools with only roofs over them, small amounts of spent fuel rods are surrounded with inert gas inside large steel casks. These casks are quite stable and secure. At Vermont Yankee one of them was mistakenly dropped a yard or more when a crane malfunctioned—and the cask was fine.
But there is a problem with dry cask storage: it costs money. The track record of the atomic energy industry in the United States—less so in Japan—is to spend as little money as possible and extend the life of old plants for as long as possible, no matter the risks.
Meanwhile, in Japan, they wait for news. Are the pools stable? Or leaking and boiling?
36 Comments so far
Show All"We had no idea the GE design could be a problem."
"We had no idea they'd use planes as missiles."
The claim that there were no warnings about the GE boiling water reactor design is like Claude Reins being shocked that there was gambling going on in "Rick's" in Casablanca.
Anyone who was paying attention has been terrified and shocked that any serious person could allow these plants to be built, yet 23 of them have been built in the U.S. alone. They have been described as catastrophes waiting to happen for half a century.
We were so terrified thirty years ago that there hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in the US for thirty years.
and too chickens*it to close the ones operating.
As early as the middle 1980's, papers pertaining to the Yankee itself were mined by industry researchers looking for data for planned lawsuits over defective design and construction in these plants in general.
Such information is not distributed freely through the profession, so individuals involved may be more or less aware of one or another group of specifics.
Write your congressperson and request they introduce a bill to revoke the Price Anderson Act.
Nuclear plants have deadly seeds.
This design flaw stuff about stacks of spent fuel rods (a couple of stories high?), sitting adjacent to aging, active nuke reactors, is certainly chickens coming home to roost. The invisible hand of the marketplace doesn't work its magic on nuclear waste disposal or so it seems, surprise, surprise.
It's always been a question of when (not if) the San Andreas fault will have a big shiver. So I guess it's time for government to regulate.
Oops, I forgot. Government is the problem, not the solution.
Bill from Saginaw
Why is there a pale pink box headlined User Warning how appearing on my screen on this website, followed by five densely compressed lines of gibberish that is comprehensible only to folks who are into computer programming?
I am a user. What am I being warned about?
Bill from Saginaw
Good question. I tried to read it and couldn't make heads or tails out of it. Hope the site isn't going to blow up or emit dangerous radiation.
I scanned briefly through that snippet of code earlier today and it looked like the html from the part of the site that warns you if you have submitted the same comment twice.
It's just a note to your ISP to let the FBI and homeland security know that you post on this site and to add this to your already bulging file.
Don't worry they will get back to you at some point.
Ignore it.
It is basically debugging code to tell the site's programmers what is wrong. The warning is for the site's programmers, not users; there is nothing that users can do about it. The "user" in this case are the site's programmers.
I got the warning when I double-posted, not otherwise. The warning itself refers to a double posting, so I suppose that's what it is about.
It did not complete my second post as it used to. So I suspect that's all there is to it. Someone just has not yet written up a more human-friendly text to present to end-users.
I take it back. I just gave me another when there was no double post. Got me.
A more human-friendly text? The dream of yet another utopian idealist. Someday all the computer gibberish will be made accessible and clear, just as soon as they find replacement energy and figure out what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Twelve year olds with laptops are working on right now.
In any field, some jargon is inevitable, whether it is computer programming, medicine, law, biology, physics, chemistry, music, etc ad infinitum, especially since computers use entirely different languages (programming languages being an intermediate language, meant to be human friendly)
That you lack the knowledge to understand it does not make it not human friendly. It just means that you lack the knowledge to understand it.
The problem is that computing is inherently difficult. Adding layers of user-friendly only adds more code to go wrong. The comparison with these reactors could not be more apt.
Ah, humor! But all it takes is a nice bit of English or whatever as a text-string in a script. It happens more or less all the times you don't notice the other, and by the time they're 14 they'll have it cooked.
Bill,
I get that same pale pink box on mine, too. Thought it was just an old school, computer semi-illiterate person like myself that was puzzled.
Nuclear Fissile.
With interest and horror we watch the fizzle,
as many nuclear reactors splutter and sizzle.
Sometimes they pop with radioactive drizzle,
and spread lots of hot nasty fissile.
The billionaires from nuclear shares,
mostly do not fear for their skin.
if they are far away from nuclear scares,
where contamination chance is very slim.
The safety record of their profit money received,
and invested elsewhere, can be believed.
There is no chance at all, secretly relieved,
that they will pay for damages ill-conceived.
Important committees examined the plans,
and signed as safe for their ruling clans.
They took the risks of power design,
at worse they might have to resign.
For many years consumers enjoyed,
the credits of nuclear power employed.
The radioactive interest was collected,
in hot pools not very well protected.
The resulting waste is so very hot,
Thousands of years will cool it not.
Aerosolized and flushed into food chains,
so many thoughtful products of human brains.
these processes are beyond our control, our tolerance, and our wisdom...
best left alone...
orgy time...
'GE brings good things to life'. That is the one-liner that still sings through my brain even now as I imagine it bringing death to life and brains melting. Radiation death; sometimes quick, sometimes slow on the 30 year half life.
Money, they always say we can't do the right thing because of money!
As they head to their cigar clubs and their billionaire friends out on the golf course or the yacht
I guess that GE saying was an Orwellian expression. The corporate goons love that type of perversity like the "Robin Hood Fund" that specialized in ripping off poor people to further enrich the rich pigs
Translation: GE likes to make stuff that kills people for fun and profit. Warren Buffet and GE just love each other.
"The fail safe mechanisms have malfunctioned." It sounds like Peter Sellers but it was actually the New York Times.
I always thought the name "Dr. Strangelove" perfectly described the 'paper of record.'
From a Counterpunch article:
Nuclear power is the perfect metaphor for the current phase of monopoly capitalism--neoliberalism. It involves a concentration of power (literal and corporate) to effect its goal and depends on the government to provide military security to protect that power from getting into the "wrong hands." Furthermore, thanks to laws pushed through by the energy industry, if a disaster should happen because of some kind of nuclear accident, the government limits the corporation's liability for any damage and loss of life that might occur.
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs03152011.html
Make nuclear power the new HINDENBURG for the sake of your children. Bury it.
Good analysis.
Economics determines design. Seeing the world through economics alone is the problem.
Or are the pools even there anymore? Wouldn't the explosions of the past few days have sent them sky high? As in high enough to for the material to be shot up to the jet streams?
The Japanese government and its leaders should be giving us better explanations of what is going on-oh but they can't tell the truth can they because that might scare folks. But if someone is going to kill me with nuclear poisoning I'd like to know that person at least has the integrity to do it with honor, dignity and respect to my personhood, even if I am about to pass into oblivion. I believe that would be in keeping with the best Japanese traditions.
The Japanese establishment is culturally incapable of saying certain things. Dave Barry gives an example of how he kept asking for a certain plane ticket, and the agent kept changing the subject for half an hour. The agent was incapable of saying, no you dummy, there is no flight to that city. In this case, people are incapable of blaming their own superiors for causing this horrid disaster. As late as 1944, saying such a thing would get you killed, and this tradition goes way back to samurai days, when chopping down a peasant for the tiniest offense was considered normal. Murder isn't legal these days, but the tiniest lack of corporate loyalty can get you shunned.
As long as they have a substantial coolant leak, they will be pumping water in more or less as fast as they can to prevent further explosions or a meltdown.
As long as the plant is over-hot and impossible to shut down, they have to open most and probably all pressure valves and pressurizer rooms, to blow the radioactive steam out into the atmosphere.
Since the plant is actually still heating up at least part of the time, it is fairly certain that radioactive materials are leaving the plant at more or less the same speed as emergency crews are able to pump materials back in. This does not tell us the exact quantities by any means, nor how much is released into the atmosphere as opposed to the water around the plant, but it does indicate a substantial leak.
If you have ever seen a smoking campfire in a steady wind, you have some idea what the dispersal pattern would look like if you see the radiation leaving the plant. Following previous large leaks and nuclear testing within the United States, cancers and other medical problems have been distributed in almost the same pattern: the graphing of disease shows a pattern that looks like smoke trailing from a fire.
If you are nearby or downwind of the plant, leave or stay underground.
I'm going to put two and two together. This story reports that if the fuel rods are exposed to air for a day or two, they begin to combust. Later, the story says that the wall of one of the pools is damaged. A Reuters story reports that a fire broke out at the plant.
So, I conclude that the fuel rods caught fire. There is no other reason why firemen would risk death to put the fire out. The site is already a disaster. They would only risk their lives to prevent a greater disaster.
From February 2003:
PRINCETON, N.J. -- "A space-saving method for storing spent nuclear fuel has dramatically heightened the risk of a catastrophic radiation release in the event of a terrorist attack, according to a study initiated at Princeton.
Terrorists targeting the high-density storage systems used at nuclear power plants throughout the nation could cause contamination problems "significantly worse than those from Chernobyl," the study found.
The study authors, a multi-institutional team of researchers led by Frank von Hippel of Princeton, called on the U.S. Congress to mandate the construction of new facilities to house spent fuel in less risky configurations and estimated a cost of $3.5 billion to $7 billion for the project.
The paper is scheduled to be published in the spring in the journal Science and Global Security.
Strapped for long-term storage options, the nation's 103 nuclear power plants routinely pack four to five times the number of spent fuel rods into water-cooled tanks than the tanks were designed to hold, the authors reported. This high-density configuration is safe when cooled by water, but would likely cause a fire -- with catastrophic results -- if the cooling water leaked. The tanks could be ruptured by a hijacked jet or sabotage, the study contends.
The consequences of such a fire would be the release of a radiation plume that could contaminate eight to 70 times more land than the area affected by the 1986 accident in Chernobyl, the researchers reported. The cost of such a disaster would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, they said.
The study builds in large part on analyses already done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pulling together disparate sources and adding new calculations to put the issues in sharper focus, said von Hippel.
"The NRC has been chewing on this for 20 years," said von Hippel. "That's one of the reasons why we did this paper -- because they never seem to do anything about it."
Von Hippel, who co-directs the Program on Science and Global Security in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said the direct impetus for the study came from an investigation conducted by undergraduate students last year. Five students focused on the New Jersey Salem Nuclear Generating Station and issued a report calling for the distribution of protective potassium iodide pills to people within 50 miles of nuclear plants, improvement of mock attack drills and reconfiguration of spent fuel storage.
[snip]
At issue in the study is how nuclear power plant operators deal with the narrow, 12-foot-long rods of uranium that, after three or four years of use, no longer contain enough chain-reacting material to sustain a nuclear reaction. For the first few years after they are taken from the reactor, the fuel rods continue to generate a lot of heat due to their intense radioactivity. Without cooling, the rods would burst and ignite the zirconium alloy sheaths in which they are encased.
The water-filled cooling tanks were originally designed to keep only about 100 metric tons of the hottest rods, while the cooler ones would be moved to a nuclear fuel recycling plant, which was never built. The United States also has not yet built a long-term storage facility for nuclear waste, so the pools have been packed with 400 tons or more. In its low-density configuration, a cooling tank could be adequately cooled by air in the event of a loss of water, while the high-density system could not."
Hey wait, the pro-nuke trolls who post here say that zirconium can't ignite, burn or burst into flames. Don't worry, the nuclear power trolls have everything under control. (sarcasm alert)
It seems like our pro-nuclear posters (maybe paid trolls, maybe not) have largely given up on presenting the official "everything is under control" line here at CD, and have given up on presenting on CD technical details selected to show that nuclear power is safe.
But OMG what a mess:-
* The mining of Uranium (U) is such a dirty polluting process. It generally involves having radioactive poison entering the water table.
* Uranium enrichment is no less dirty, and then the eventual disposal of some of the depleted U (DU) is performed by means of weaponisation and firing into so called "axis of evil" countries that have no means of defense against superpowers, and no means of making the perpetrators take responsibility. The perpetrators deny everything, of course, insisting that DU is safe (safe for the victims but never for the perpetrators), and always fail to mention the deformed births.
* Then the reactors have cooling fluids that eventually find their way into their ocean and I notice many have been built close to the ocean. There are transport (shipping) reason, but I also expect it makes the disposal of cooling fluid much easier...
* And then we have no effective means of disposal of the waste. The best plans involve encapsulation into artificial stone and dumping into the ocean where the poison is gradually released into the ocean or used mines where the poison gradually finds its way to the water supplies. They reason that everything is OK so long as it all happens gradually (no one will notice, I suppose). But lots of waste all gradually releasing poisoning adds up a lot in the long term. All it achieves at the end of the day is a postponing of poison release.
And that is just the best plan. What is actually happening, for economic reasons, is that the waste is simply being piled up in "temporary" storage areas.
* !!! And all of the above is if nothing goes wrong !!! No accidents during transport and no accidents or incidents in the reactors. And what do you know ... SHIT HAPPENS.
It is time to start decommissioning these nuclear power facilities, and please let us not build any more.
JJ,
Your post is correct that the fuel assemblies must be kept in the cooling pool for at least 5 years. Many of the pools have been re-racked to increase the storage capacity. There is a limit in how far that can go, however. You cannot stack the fuel bundles atop one another. You must keep the tops of the bundles about 16 feet below the surface and the pools are only so deep.
An additional option that has been used at many reactor sites is storage casks. After the requisite 5 years of water cooling the fuel bundles can be transferred to an air cooled cask. The cask provides the protective shielding required for personnel safety.
As you have said, the government has dropped its end of the bargain and has not taken possession of the used fuel. (The utilities pay a mandatory fee for the government to take possession. They have been paying the fee for decades. There have been law suits against the government on this issue.)
Bill
For years now I have been saying that the terrorist threat must be incredibly over stated because the little red riding hood targets (nuclear power plants) have not been touched.
They are not that well guarded or fortified and a small, armed, and well trained group could more then likely take over and turn it into all the franchises of Kentucky Fried Chicken rolled into one ball park with that faint pink afterglow that would last the half life of god.
My neighbors nine years old, who in a 15 minute visit to my place, can turn every knob, lever, pull, dial, button, or drawer twice over ..... would put one of this reactors into orbit if given 20 minutes by a sleeping night watchman.
Christ mankind is crazier than when I was on that 5 years acid trip in my youth.
Cesium 137 is very bad news. Google how it affects humans. Note what a small amount is needed to do lethal damage.
The injury to the body is caused primarily by interfering with cell biology and breaking apart molecules. This creates free radicals, or single electrons usually present in pairs. Cells are capable of repairing the damaged genetic material, but high levels of exposure can overwhelm the system. By far the most vulnerable tissues are bone marrow and the lymph nodes.
In other words you get a compromised immune system and tremendously diminished capacity to make red blood cells (the life span of a red blood cell is about 100-120 days). You make over two million per second. When Cesium 137 hits, all this marvelous machinery goes berserk.
Plutonium hits the lungs and guarantees cancer.
Strontium-90 heads straight for the bones and is taken up like calcium (another kind of cancer with LOTS of pain before death)..
Iodine isotopes head for the thyroid gland.
And so on.
Check it out.
Make nuclear power the new HINDENBURG. Bury it or it will bury your children