Fuel debris removal attempt halted at Fukushima Daiichi. [View all]

The big bogeyman at Fukushima gets a lot of attention, of course, certainly more attention than the roughly 90 million people who have died from air pollution since the Tsunami of March 11, 2011 destroyed the coastal city and the nearby reactors.

The number of people killed by exposure to radiation is vanishingly small, if not zero, nearly so, although the evacuation related to fear of radiation is not zero.

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

The paper cited open sourced, but an excerpt is relevant:

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On the other hand, close to 20,000 people died from the act of living in a coastal city, from collapsing buildings, drowning, and related causes as a result of a city being inundated with seawater. There is no movement of course, to phase out coastal cities, of course, although given extreme global heating and its implications, perhaps it is worthy of consideration, although it's more likely that such abandonment will occur as a result of disaster rather than planning.

Of course, these deaths went down the rabbit hole. Nobody gives a rat's ass about them.

I have argued that the money spent on efforts to "clean up" Fukushima to standards we apply to nothing else - that no one, irrespective of their lack of education with respect to nuclear issues can even imagine someone dying from radiation exposure related to the destroyed reactors - is wasted, since few lives are actually at risk. We could save more lives by spending the same amount of money to build new (and better) reactors.

I'm sure my argument falls on deaf ears. Never underestimate the power of marketing and propaganda.

This said, the situation with respect to the behavior of the fuel during the meltdown of the reactors is, to me at least, of extreme interest, since it took place under highly refractory conditions that may have even exceeded the high melting point of uranium oxide, given its poor thermal conductivity. We can learn quite a bit about the behavior of nuclear fuel by looking at the morphology and composition of the melted components.

Thus the money spent on "cleaning up" Fukushima beyond simply building a Chernobyl type sarcophagus, is not entirely useless.

However an effort to recover these melted components has failed, perhaps because of Keystone cops planning that is nonetheless not all that serious:

Fuel debris removal attempt halted at Fukushima Daiichi

Subtitle:



Some excerpts of the short article:



In the close to 5000 days since the reactor melted, many of the heat generating radioisotopes present at the time of the meltdown have decayed to stable isotopes of stable elements. For example, pretty much all of the ¹⁴⁴Ce has decayed to the naturally occurring (slightly radioactive) isotope ¹⁴⁴Nd, found in most magnets including those in wind turbines and electric cars. About 6 one millionths remains. Almost all of the ¹⁰⁶Ru has decayed to the valuable stable isotope ¹⁰⁶Pd, about 1 ten thousandths remain.

The heat load of nuclear reactors on shut down decays rapidly. One can learn about the evolution of heat loads by appeal to Dr. Kristina Yancey (Spencer's) wonderful 2013 Master's Thesis reviewing the behavior of used nuclear fuels:

https://catalog.library.tamu.edu/Record/in00003477980

Figures 20 and 21 on pages 58 and 59, respectively.



The caption:







The caption:



Have a nice day.

Eratta: The original version of this post stated that 9 million people have died from air pollution since 2011. This is a typo resulting in an error of an order of magnitude. The number is greater than 90 million people, roughly, slightly larger than the population of Germany.