Radioactive water at Fukushima Daiichi - new video

TEPCO has released the fourth, and final, video in its series covering the handling of contaminated water at Fukushima Daiichi. This series has been of particular interest to this writer; after the gravity of the entire accident scenario had become clear (or clear enough) one of the first real races against time was that involved with finding enough storage capacity for the water that was being used to cool the three damaged reactors, since it clearly was leaking out of the reactors and not only entering the reactor buildings but the turbine buildings and even outside pipeways ("trenches" in TEPCO's parlance.) From that point on, a number of simultaneous plans were launched to secure storage and to process this water and for quite some time it seemed as if the company were only a step or less ahead of the water buildup.

Quite the opposite is now the case, and in fact, even with the early growing pains that the water cleanup systems had, TEPCO appears to have mastered the situation. I have hammered this following point to death, but it bears repeating: While many accident scenarios have been played out and simulated in the past, even to the point of core damage and melt, none has done anything to educate the industry on the realities of a major accident like Fukushima Daiichi has. TEPCO and NISA are literally writing accident handling procedure as they're inventing it, and are implementing it immediately with only brief, but clear, analysis .. because time is of the essence. It is certain that much hindsight has been used by outside critics in regards to TEPCO's handling of both the accident and its releases to the press in the writing of critical pieces, but this again is hindsight after all and it's hard to imagine a better onsite and offsite performance by any other company.

General George S. Patton wrote something to the effect that "a workable solution applied vigorously is vastly superior to a perfect solution applied too late," and TEPCO has taken this kind of thinking to heart by taking the best possible solution for each problem that it could have soon, while also looking a bit down the road. This is exactly why, having two different purification systems, TEPCO continues to work on making the earlier, more complicated one work while it operates the second, slightly better (simpler) design which arrived on site much later. (TEPCO, as shown in the video, intends to install pumps between two of the Kurion system skids to avoid having to change the pumps that fail frequently on the second skid; these pumps are adjacent to the cesium adsorption tanks which have a high rad level at their surfaces, making pump changeout workers become rad sponges. The new pumps will get around this problem, and probably be better pumps.)

All that considered, please watch this video more than once. It goes by quickly enough that the real complexity of the onsite water transfer and storage job might come off too lightly; consider the size of this site, and look at the overhead plan showing just how much area the tank system is taking up and how widespread it is. This would be a very important thing to consider, at least briefly, for any nuclear plant site --- in other words, if this kind of thing ever did happen on site, would there be enough space for tankage of a magnitude in correct proportion to the number of plants at that given site? If there are enough acres, are they level? Much in this video makes one stop and think on the second viewing.


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7:25 PM Eastern Thursday November 17, 2011
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW