The Plan to Contain the Chernobyl Disaster for the Next One Hundred Years
April 29th, 2011Via: Scientific American:
French construction company Novarka is working on a replacement, the New Safe Confinement (NSC), which Schmieman helped to design. Because the reactor is still radioactive, architects designed the NSC with worker safety in mind. The arch will not be built over the sarcophagus but will be assembled nearby from prefabricated segments. Workers will use hydraulic jacks to slide the arch about 300 meters along Teflon bearings until it covers the sarcophagus. Once engineers seal the reactor, they will remotely maneuver three robotic cranes inside the NSC to dismantle the sarcophagus and reactor and to clean up any leftover radioactive dust.
Novarka aims to finish fabricating the NSC by the summer of 2014, at a cost of $2.1 billion from 29 countries. It is expected to last at least 100 years.
That’s just GREAT news. Let’s take a nuke madness quiz shall we? Keep in mind that Chernobyl is less of a disaster than Fukushima by a HUGE margin because it doesn’t contain all of that radioactive water that Tepco is generating daily.
Question one: How is Tepco going to store millions of gallons of contaminated water for the next 30,000 years that has radioactive elements in it that can explode if they settle out into one spot inside the storage tank?
Question two: How much money does it take to build a NEW NSC every 100 years at Chernobyl for the next 30,000 years (at least), given that today’s cost is $2.1 billion and each successive NSC will have to be larger than the previous one?
Question 3: Because of the progressive increases in size, when will spanning the layers become physically impossible from an engineering/structural standpoint?
Question 4: How tall will 300 layers of buildings stacked on top of each other be assuming it is possible to pour a foundation strong enough to hold them all?
Question 5: Name ANY power source that is cheaper than nuclear power without thinking about it. That should be easy.
Question 6: How many Chernobyl’s, Fukushima’s, Three Mile Islands, Simi Valley’s, Hanfords, test shot sites and God-only-knows how many other nuclear waste dumps will there be on the earth 30,000 years from now that have been built in the last 50 years?
Question 7: What is the sum total of years that have been peeled off of human lives because of the “wonders of the Atom” and the way evil, greedy, short sighted men have manipulated them?
Question 8: How many human lives have been saved because nuclear power was the ONLY means of providing electricity?
Question 9: How many people who do NOT own stock in the nuclear power industry support nuclear power over other power generating options?
Question 10: What is the acceptable ratio of nuclear warheads to LOST nuclear warheads?
Question 11: How long does it take for ALL of the isotopes in all nuclear “things” that have been produced to become null and void- ie, petered completely out so that a baby could chew on them in lieu of lead paint?
Question 12: How many internationally accepted entities are there that inspect ALL nuclear power plants to verify that NONE of them are being used to generate weapons grade isotopes?
Question 13: How long before the human race realizes they are in over their heads
Question 14: Who authorized building power plants in Japan below the 600 year old tsunami warning stones?
Question 15: If people won’t heed 600 year old warnings, how is anyone going to keep future generations from digging into 300 progressive protective layers of a destroyed power plant 30,000 years from now in search of “really valuable treasure?”
In other words, the ONLY way to permanently get rid of such messes is to dig a very, very deep hole and shove them in and then cover them with so many feet of steel reinforced concrete and maybe molten rock that NOBODY could EVER penetrate it and nature could NEVER wear it out or damage it. Sliding roof my ass- that’s just going to pass the radioactive buck to another generation and it’s a very stupid and expensive idea. Frickin’ stadium builders making a killing on that idea.
@Steve
Take a deep breath.
Q1: I think you have wrong data. Water by itself cannot be that radioactive.
For it to explode, it’d have to contain a lot of dissolved uranium salts or stuff like(salts of easily fissionable & radioactive) metals that.
I don’t think they have that kind of ‘water’ at Fukushima. Uranium is not particularily water soluble, and they didn’t store any uranium salts.
What they were dumping at sea is wather that was a bit radioactive from coming into contact with the waste. No one would want to swim around in it, but sea mixes stuff pretty well, and even if they were dumping a small riverful of that stuff each day into the sea, the health effects globally would be about zero. Sea is that big.
(there’s actually a good design there for a rocket engine suitable for use in deep space..as the water passes through the nozzle the uranium in it goes critical and bang… you have a very good rocket engine..)
Q6: first of all.. the more radioactive a particle is, the sooner it decays into something less radioactive. Chernobyl area will likely be safe to live in, but maybe not to farm in thirty years. Camping overnight inside the destroyed reactor is probably going to be inadvisable for meatbags for hundreds of years.
FYI: there are places on earth where the natural, background radiation recieved by inhabitans is far higher than the maximum yearly dose that can be recieved by radiation workers in countries like the US(before they are banned from their workplace for safety reasons). People there don’t have more cancers than people living elsewhere. It appears that organisms, when living in high radiation ares can exhibit higher resistance to radiation.
http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=7892
http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/ramsar-natural-radioactivity/ramsar.html
Q7: well.. go dig for some statistics, but curiously, even with all the atmospheric atomic testing back in the 1950’s, life expectancy has shot up considerably post WWII.
Some answers:
Q8: It’s not an only way. But if it were a lot of lives. Coal contains radioactive particles, a lot of these get into the air. Coal mining kills a lot of people. In China, they have massive air pollution from their dirty coal plants. Probably kills a lot of people. UK used to have this problem too.
If you run the numbers(and don’t add WWII atomic bombings to the energy deaths), it appears that nuclear energy so far is one of the less deadly forms of generating power.
Q9: You’d be surprised. Not many people around here have stock in ?EZ (czech energy company, operates several reactors and is going to build 1 or 2 more GW of capacity), but about 65% are for atomic energy. This was pre Fukushima and the scaremongering that followed. But the stock is very, very good..
Q10: it’s undefined. You cannot divide by zero. So far, no one has copped to losing a live warhead where it can either be found or re-used. There are some live nuclear weapons that are lost, but most are very old and in places your average terrorist cannot get at them. Say at an unknown place deep in a swamp, somewhere in a deep sea.
And I’m reasonably sure USN has hydrophones installed at those sites, listening for anyone loitering around these area.
USSR had, when it was dissolved many nuclear artillery shells. Those are only as powerful as say a thousand tons of conventional explosive(or less), but they were so small they could be fired from a 152mm howitzer(One artillery battery with these could stop a whole invading army without nukes). They were probably stored at higher military levels (army corps level maybe), so I doubt any were stolen. They are expensive(probably more than worth their weight in gold) and insanely dangerous. But it’s possible. The thing is, they too decay, and so far, we’ve had no bombings performed with such shells. Today they’d be just not very good dirty bombs.
Q12: International Atomic Energy Agency
Q13: Never. People are too deluded for that.
Did you know that 66% of Austrians believe the steam you can see above atomic power plants is radioactive? (but it’s really just very clean water vapour)
Q14: The Japanese themselves. Building powerplants somewhere else is more expensive, as you can’t use sea for cooling.
Q15: radioactivity is not a virus with a 99% kill rate.
The majority of recovery workers at chernobyl only got about as many mSv worth of exposure as the people living in Ramsar get each year(200 mSv is record).
If radiation were really that deadly, the Ramsar area wouldn’t be inhabited at all.
FYI, a CT(medical procedure, a more advanced x-ray) scan gives you a radiation does of 20 mSv.
Recovery workers at Chernobyl got on average below 100 mSv per person. The only ones who died of acute poisoning were the very first responders.
The guys who were trying to contain the blowout, and were working around insanely highly radioactive stuff.
Chernobyl is a far worse mess. That was a reactor open to the air, *burning*-as in on fire, for ten days or more. That’s a completely different level than Fukushima, and the only reason both are classed as the same level is that there haven’t been enough high level disasters to warrant subdividing the levels.
The radiation inside the tomb isn’t some malevolent entity trying to escape. It’s not a liquid. It’s a lot of debris that’s just sitting there. As long as no one lets a lot of water seep into the reactor, nothing’s gonna happen with in in the long run. It’ll still sit there in a thousand years, as solid, non living stuff(rocks, concrete, iron. Or have you ever seen a brick growing legs trying to run away) tends to do.
I bet there are designs to wrap the whole building in some sort of polymer, so not even dust would be able to get out.
Anyway.. study this graph by Randall Munroe.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
@Schmidt: your “answers” are all disingenuous BS. using some of the most dangerous substances known to man that will carry on being dangerous for longer than the history of human civilization (post-hunter-gatherer societies) is the stupidest, most arrogant pinnacle of human hubris ever. there is and can never any “justification” for poisoning the planet permanently to boil some fucking water for electricity we DON’T NEED. it’s all about money and politics. nothing to do with “energy”. nuclear energy is the ultimate fascist statement. corporate death on a vast scale backed by nation state power. fuck that.
oh, and the XKCD “chart” is utter BS too. “banana equivalent dose” and all. Mr. Munroe can get fucked.
Chernobyl deaths http://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/info/Chernobyl%202xA4.pdf
“based on Belarus national cancer statistics, predicts approximately 270,000 cancers and 93,000 fatal cancer cases caused by Chernobyl. The report also concludes that on the basis of demographic data, during the last 15 years, 60,000 people have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and estimates of the total death toll for the
Ukraine and Belarus could reach another 140,000.”
• steve holmes Says:
April 30th, 2011 at 7:19 am
That’s just GREAT news. Let’s take a nuke madness quiz shall we? Keep in mind that Chernobyl is less of a disaster than Fukushima by a HUGE margin because it doesn’t contain all of that radioactive water that Tepco is generating daily.
Question one: How is Tepco going to store millions of gallons of contaminated water for the next 30,000 years that has radioactive elements in it that can explode if they settle out into one spot inside the storage tank?
Answer: They have already proven in their behavior that they intend to dump as much as they possibly can get away with straight into the ocean. It’s too expensive and too dangerous to store in tanks as Hanford has proved. The cooling pools currently have upwards of a MILLION damaged rods in them right now and tens of millions of fuel pellets that cannot be put into “permanent” storage containers- because containment of such an event has obviously never been planned for. Those debris piles in the pools and in the bottoms of the reactors have already undergone numerous criticality incidents that have release lethal level of neutrons. If any of the cooling pools collapse for any reason, cooling them will be nearly impossible which will lead to heating of the debris resulting in a fire that will involve far more debris than Chernobyl plant #4 had.
Question two: How much money does it take to build a NEW NSC every 100 years at Chernobyl for the next 30,000 years (at least), given that today’s cost is $2.1 billion and each successive NSC will have to be larger than the previous one?
The question is rhetorical. There is no way to even assure local and federal governments will even exist 5 years from now, much less thousands of years. Consider that the world superpower USSR that Chernobyl existed in 25 years ago was dissolved 5 years after the plant 4 disaster began, leaving tiny and destitute Ukraine to deal with the cleanup and monitoring. Thus the international community is having pay for a replacement cover for the sarcophagus which decayed to unstable levels just from exposure to the natural environment- wind, rain, temperature fluctuations and ground movement. The designed life of the replacement is 100 years due to the same exposure. The radioactive debris inside will remain a hazard to carbon based life forms for a calculable length of time FAR beyond the life expectancy of people born long after everyone alive today is dead, however, the toxic debris will be a danger to ground water for millennia, and so far NOBODY has figured out a way to control contaminated ground water. In fact, the new cover is a sliding cover that doesn’t contain the bottom side of the debris, and a leak in the roof will cause those toxins to enter the ground water, which doesn’t simply go straight down and stop. Just the ground water management issue at Hanford, which is in the middle of a desert, is costing millions of dollars per year just to monitor. There is NO way to contain it and no assurances that monitoring will remain affordable. http://www.hanford.gov/c.cfm/sgrp/GWRep09/html/gw09_nav.htm
Question 3: Because of the progressive increases in size, when will spanning the layers become physically impossible from an engineering/structural standpoint?
Answer: When engineers forget how to build suspension bridges.
Question 4: How tall will 300 layers of buildings stacked on top of each other be assuming it is possible to pour a foundation strong enough to hold them all?
Answer: Only as tall as the collapsed debris pile of all previous covers that are too toxic or radioactive to remove and replace. Replacing covers before the prior ones collapse would be prudent.
Question 5: Name ANY power source that is cheaper than nuclear power without thinking about it. That should be easy.
You name it- all power sources are cheaper than nuclear power when you consider the entire cost equation of the entire nuclear power cycle- especially 100% permanent and safe disposal/reprocessing of all of the waste and the costs of cleanups from accidents. How much does 50,265 acres in Japan cost to replace- or decontaminate such that food crops can safely be grown inside of the 50 mile radius that the US told its citizens to stay out of?
Coal fired plants have scrubbers and natural gas plants don’t need them, so pollution is not an issue.
Question 6: How many Chernobyl’s, Fukushima’s, Three Mile Islands, Simi Valley’s, Hanfords, test shot sites and God-only-knows how many other nuclear waste dumps will there be on the earth 30,000 years from now that have been built in the last 50 years?
Answer: Probably only a few because radiation decays to stable levels eventually and human demand for land space will over-arch any well intended government restrictions on exclusion zones. However, the impact on human life caused by nuclear accidents is already incalculable.
Question 7: What is the sum total of years that have been peeled off of human lives because of the “wonders of the Atom” and the way evil, greedy, short sighted men have manipulated them?
Answer: Incalculable- however, nearly everyone from Marie Currie onward would have wanted a few more years of high quality life. But “evil, greedy, short-sighted men” such as Marie Currie only see what is in front of them. Few people have the guts to honestly see the big picture, otherwise we would be living in a very different way.
Question 8: How many human lives have been saved because nuclear power was the ONLY means of providing electricity?
Answer: Other than volunteers in Antarctica, none.
Question 9: How many people who do NOT own stock in the nuclear power industry support nuclear power over other power generating options?
Answer: Who cares? The vast majority of people living on the west coast of the United States aren’t real happy with the industry right now.
Question 10: What is the acceptable ratio of nuclear warheads to LOST nuclear warheads?
Answer: None. Possession of a stolen or black market nuke does not constitute “lost” those are simply “retargeted” weapons of mass destruction. All that are truly lost will eventual become a toxic danger to the environment and the food chain. Unrelated but interesting: http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/50.aspx
Question 11: How long does it take for ALL of the isotopes in all nuclear “things” that have been produced to become null and void- ie, petered completely out so that a baby could chew on them in lieu of lead paint?
Answer: It’s a moot point- heavy metals are toxic forever, long after the radiation is gone.
Question 12: How many internationally accepted entities are there that inspect ALL nuclear power plants to verify that NONE of them are being used to generate weapons grade isotopes?
Answer: There isn’t one. The IAEA has never been given full and unfettered access to the Dimona plant in Israel that has been producing nuclear weapons since the 1960’s.
Question 13: How long before the human race realizes they are in over their heads
Answer: Never. The last 100 years of human advancement is bitter-sweet. We now have electronics, medicines and locomotion as never before, but at the same time we now have “the ability to kill 70 million people in the next 25 minutes” as Richard Nixon so proudly announced at a dinner party in the White House.
Question 14: Who authorized building power plants in Japan below the 600 year old tsunami warning stones?
Answer: Fools, obviously- or perhaps amoral geniuses who laughed all the way to the bank then rode off into the setting sun in the land of the rising sun?
Question 15: If people won’t heed 600 year old warnings, how is anyone going to keep future generations from digging into 300 progressive protective layers of a destroyed power plant 30,000 years from now in search of “really valuable treasure?”
Answer: Behaviors of others cannot be controlled, even in prisons, so there is no way of stopping people from treasure seeking later on in history. I personally know people today who collect radioactive glass from flea markets and antique shops as souvenirs. But there isn’t one shred of proof that all people will consistently understand and heed warnings in real time, much less over the course of hundreds and even thousands of years, and it is narcissistic and arrogant to assert one’s “right” to save $.03 per kilowatt hour while causing all of the misery, disease, sickness, expense and death that Nuclear power has thus far produced for those who don’t even use it.
Perhaps buying a nice wool sweater and turning down the thermostat a bit would probably more than make up the difference in cost savings.
@ Schmidt,
I did some research on Ramsar. Interesting.
The thing that put me off the XKCD chart was the statement:
“A cell phone’s transmitter* does not produce ionizing radiation and does not cause cancer. *Unless it’s a banana phone.”
I really enjoy XKCD’s humour most of the time but believe it sometimes displays the uncritical thinking of a fundamentalist.
The Fukishima containment will be much more problematic.
Well how about that- Schmidt, you may have some folks on your side after all. 7th photo from the top, taken in India- it looks like there are possibly 11 people who agree with you. http://cryptome.org/info/nuclear-protest2/nuclear-protest2.htm
Just FYI: I know you guys were having fun with Schmidt, but he’s banned now for trying to submit racist comments.
LOL (really)
That’s disgusting that he would deliberately slither to a place that low on the non-radioactive invertebrate list. I was hoping he might be interested in going out and doing some bottom fishing in that perfectly-safe-highly-diluted- pollution-free-zone he was talking about. He can keep my share of the catch. http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/04/30/greenpeace-tweets-japans-pacific-ocean-radiation-cover-21459/