RE: TEPCO admits Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 core completely melted down

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 11:43:01 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2015 10:44 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: TEPCO admits Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 core completely melted down

 

On 3/20/2015 8:57 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, March 20, 2015 1:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: TEPCO admits Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 core completely melted down

 

In Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at  'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List

 

> Just in case anybody wanted to pretend that the Fukushima disaster is behind 
> us; here is this piece of bad news, based on recent telemetry using muon 
> detectors for imaging the reactor vessels. The core of reactor units 1 
> appears to have melted through both the reactor itself and the outer 
> containment structure. This is also the likely situation for units 2 and 3 as 
> well. A total meltdown is not a good scenario – and that is a huge 
> understatement.

 

I disagree.  Assuming the above is true, and it probably is, that would be 
WONDERFUL news. In a water cooled reactor, the sort that is used everywhere ( 
except for Chernobyl and other reactors in the former USSR which used graphite) 
a core meltdown is as bad a disaster as it gets, and having the fourth largest 
earthquake ever recorded right under the plant caused billions of dollars of 
damage, but Fukushima killed NOBODY. So apparently the worst that can happen to 
a water cooled nuclear power reactor is bad but not all that bad. The death 
toll from the huge earthquake was 20,000, but the death toll from Fukushima was 
zero.  

 

The incurred cancer deaths will happen quietly, years, decades, centuries and 
millennia later and they will happen off camera, but that does not mean that 
they will not happen. I doubt we will ever know the final death toll – many 
tens of thousands of years from now when the released corium decays through 
various decay series into relatively innocuous elemental products – along the 
way slowly leeching into the biosphere over the centuries, millennia and tens 
of millennia. However one thing I think is clear is that your figure of zero 
deaths has a zero percent probability of being correct…. Over the long run.

 
No doubt you're right that the number won't be zero.  But it will probably be 
small, so long as nobody messes with the corium.  They just leave it there.  
The radioactive elements will decay.  Small amounts may eventually leach into 
the water and biosphere - but there is probably a threshold below which 
radioactive elements don't have adverse effects. 

 

I agree about leaving it there, and hope that in addition active measures are 
taken to keep the hot areas isolated from moving ground water. I have no idea 
what the long term chemical consequences of radioactive decay will be for the 
solubility of the mass of glass-like corium/rock frozen melt. As transmutation 
occurs within the mass; won’t this chemically alter it. What may be a currently 
physically smooth interface – with low solubility -- may become over time much 
more jagged and more soluble due to chemical reactions within the changing (by 
transmutation) glass like material. I am speculating, because I do not know. It 
seems clear to me however that this corium (+ other elements from the 
surrounding earth/rock matrix incorporated through being melted into it) mix is 
chemically complex and that because of radioactive decay within will not remain 
stable, but is itself also chemically changing.

This is a case, where I feel it is better to err on the side of caution.

In general, I think we agree that the site needs close and continuous 
monitoring and that this is a very long term sequestration operation that will 
need to go on for a very long period of time. For how many thousands of years 
will the Fukushima corium have to be sequestered?

Chris



Brent

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