Fukushima: time for the IAEA to take direct responsibility for the operation.

TEPCO have just dumped 11,500 tonnes of radioactive water into the sea, in order to create space for the 60,000 tonnes of more highly radioactive water that has accumulated in the reactors.

Traces of radioactivity is showing up in samples of edible fish.

This discharge of radioactivity to the environment can and must be stopped.

First, it is time for the IAEA to take over direct responsibility for managing the Fukushima rescue operation.  By dumping to sea, TEPCO is making it an international problem. 

The present situation is that control has been lost. The fission process is starting up again in at least one of the reactors, which means ever greater heat, more leakage, and more radiation which means more difficulty in getting close enough to do remedial work.

This means that we probably have to abandon all hope of keeping the reactors cool.

The hot fuel will burn its way down to the water table, forming steam, which will leak out through the soil, possibly sometimes with explosive force.

So what can we do? I have heard unconfirmed reports that ther is a US  plan. Bomb it. Yes, you heard: Bomb Fukushima. From the side you understand, so it tips over into the sea, which will automatically cool it, and also disperse it so that the fission reaction stops.

I only mention this to show how desperate people are getting, and to show how sensible is the Emergency containment solution I am putting forward here.

The principle is that, given the reaction itself is out of control, we must apply ourselves to controlling the emissions to the environment.

These emissions occur in two main ways: air and water.


Air Pollution


I have dealt here with the solution to air emissions: cap the reactors with fabric, draw off the contaminated air, filter off the radioactivity, and store.

This atmospheric emissions solution should start tomorrow with Reactor No 2, pictured below:

Photo: REUTERS / Japan Defense Ministry



The rectangular window should be fitted with a duct through which the steam can be drawn and passed to a series of filters. The filter design choice can be a combination of particle filter, cyclone, ion-exchange washing or any other suitable modality. It is simple, bog-standard engineering. The filters can be changed, modified and added to to the heart's content of the engineers involved. Reactor 2 will be the pilot for the other, damaged reactors, which will need the more challenging fabric containment before their gases can be captured.

Water Pollution

Again, the engineering for this is simple. I am grateful to an engineer, @BottomfedBhudda (yes, I know) for this. 

We drill two holes, one deep, one shallow.

The aim of the deep one is to lower the level of the ground water. It will yield cold, clean, fresh (or brackish) water which can be used for the cooling operation. Lowering the ground water will give more time before the radionuclides come in contact with it - because once the groundwater is contaminates, radiation will diffuse through aquifers to remote sources of water.

The shallower drill will pick up contaminated water filtering down from the reactors.

This contaminated water will be passed first through a physical filter to trap particles, and then a series of ion-exchange resins and any other process that would reduce, including chemical reactions designed to precipitate out the dissolved radionuclides. 

Again, the treated water can be fed back as coolant.

So, much can be done to mitigate the Fukushima disaster. The engineering is simple. The most difficult bit is to  get the message through to the decision makers in a timely way. 

George Monbiot, Helen Caldicott and the Nuclear Consensus

There is a debate on Democracy Now! between Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear medic, and George Monbiot.

Basically George takes the broad consensus of the high level scientific community that discounts the effect of internal emitters, and the work of Ukrainian scientists. The latter are set aside because they were not published in the right journals.

So he believes that the deaths from Chernobyl were about 50, not 1,000,000.

He is stuck with the a false analogy between climate change science controversy and the radiobiology controversy.

This is interesting.

The fact is that the scientific community can and does get things wrong. That's how science moves: there is a consensus, new evidence comes along, there is a battle, and the consensus shifts.

With climate change, the consensus was that man-made CO2 cannot affect the climate. Over the last 30 years a huge body of evidence has built up showing that we can. This new view is resisted by politically motivated diehards, who rely on cherry-picking data to support their battered case.

With radiobiology, the old view is that external radiation should only be reckoned with, and internal emitters should be set aside. Predicted effects of a given amount of radiation on populations can be calculated from 50 year old datasets from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and new empirical data that suggest greater damage are discounted.

Nuclear scientists tend to prefer the scholastic to the scientific method.
[Update:
This means that they estimate the amount of radiation that people have received, go back to tables based on the single dose of gamma radiation received by people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from that calculate how much disease should have been caused. If there is more disease than their calculations allow for, it is put down to chance. This is scholastic, because it assumes that all truth is already known and written down.

The scientific approach on the other hand looks in detail at the radiation dose given to people affected by Chernobyl fallout, looks at the incidence of disease, compares the disease with levels existent before the disaster, and also makes comparisons with similar populations who were not affected by Chernobyl.

This requires an enormous amount of work. Much data collection was carried out in the Ukraine, but it was not published in Western, English language journals, and ended up being discounted by the UN report.]

The challenge for George Monbiot is to look at the work of Yablokov and be open to the data he has suggested that the effects of Chernobyl are far greater than the models espoused by the nuclear industry predicts.

The other question he needs to answer is whether he accepts that nuclear power should now take out fully comprehensive insurance, instead of the 1% insurance it currently enjoys.

I have tweeted both these questions to George, who has ignored them. If they questions are put to him repeatedly, he will have to address them.

[update 5th April;
A brisk debate has started over this matter. George has attacked Helen Caldicott's evidence. In an effort to get a cool overview, I have gone to the TORCH report commissioned for Green MEPs.

It seems reasonable, stressing the scientific uncertainties, in marked contrast to George, who seems very certain that only 56 or so died.

I think Monbiot's weakness is the difficulty in getting scientific data on epidemiological matters. It takes a massive amount of expensive work. Much work was published in non-English journals, which do not then reach the mainstream "peer-reviewed" journals.

This is going to be a messy and time consuming business. At present my priority is to prevent the escape of Fukushima radiation to the environment.

Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident.


Update ends]

Contacting IAEA with proposal to prevent air contamination at Fukushima

I have just emailed this to the head of operational matters H.Agbogbe@iaea.org at the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA):


Dear Horace

At this time you will be receiving many communications with suggestions for improvements in managing the Fukushima situation.
Many of these will be impractical, but you would be well advised to filter them all, looking for new angles on the situation. Human ingenuity is a major resource, and there is a vast pool of this resource out here, who may offer new insights to the tired teams of professionals dealing with the crisis 24/7.

Therefore I would be grateful if you would examine the attached file, and if you agree it merits consideration, pass it on to decision makers.

I accept that it is late in the day for us to be designing responses, but that is in the nature of these crises. at very least, the IAEA might consider whether all NPS in seismically active and other vulnerable locations might be ordered to prepare and store such an emergency containment device in order to increase preparedness for the next catastrophic event.

Many thanks for giving this matter your attention.


---


[Update 21 March
To my surprise, this has had a response, not from IAEA yet, but from a copy I sent to another agency. Correspondence in progress.]

Hinkley Point: Is it flood proof?

Stalled in my pursuit of jamming Libyan State TV, I've just emailed the Green Party Councillor in North Somerset:

Hi Tom

I don't suppose you could enquire what would happen to Hinkley Point in the event of a storm surge flooding the power station, or even in a repeat of the 1607 tsunami?

Would cooling systems be lost?

Should they reposition all vital systems, say, 2 metres above the ground?

Lessons learned from Fukushima

Just to say that we have some lessons to learn from Fukushima:

1. Don't build nuclear power stations on geological fault lines, even with the best protection
2. Don't build nuclear power stations near the coast
3. Don't build nuclear power stations inland, where they rely on rivers that dry up in droughts. 

Which adds up to : Don't build nuclear reactors.

COMPLAINT TO EUROPEAN COMMISSION ABOUT SUBSIDIES FOR NUCLEAR POWER

This from the excellent Gerry Wolff:

A formal complaint has been made to the European Commission that nuclear power in the UK is receiving subsidies, and that those subsidies are unlawful ‘state aid’ under laws governing competition in the EU.

“One of the biggest subsidies for nuclear power in the UK is that it is required to pay much less than the full cost of insuring against a Chernobyl-style disaster or worse” said Dr Gerry Wolff, a member of the Energy Fair group that has made the complaint. “The nuclear industry is also paying much less than the full cost of disposing of nuclear waste and for the decommissioning of nuclear plants.”

“Without the subsidies that it is receiving, nuclear power would be hopelessly uncompetitive. But it is a mature technology that should be commercially viable without support. Those subsidies are distorting the market and working against the development of the clean, green sources of power that are now urgently needed. There are now many reports from reputable sources showing that there are more than enough renewable sources of power to meet our needs, now and for the foreseeable future.”

NOTES

1 The three documents in the complaint are:

• State aid complaint form (PDF).
• Grounds for complaint (PDF).
• The Nuclear Subsidies report (PDF).

2 This complaint relates to the situation in the UK as it is now. Recently, the UK government has made proposals for reform of the electricity market which, if they are accepted, will change the situation in the future. We will be studying these proposals and if, as we suspect, they mean new subsidies for nuclear power and fail to remove existing subsidies, it is likely that the new proposals will be the subject of another complaint to the EC in the future.

3 There are more than enough renewable sources of power to meet our needs, now and in the foreseeable future: www.energyfair.org.uk/pren .

4 The several problems with nuclear power are described on: www.mng.org.uk/gh/nn.htm .

5 The website of the Energy Fair group is at: www.energyfair.org.uk/ .

Nuclear Power is too slow to meet our energy needs

Here is a letter from the excellent Gerry Wolff, who is one of the vanguard of nuclear power critics.


Dear Editor

NUCLEAR TOO SLOW

The Energy Committee of MPs is right to have doubts about the speed with which nuclear power stations can be built ("MPs 'sceptical' that nuclear power stations will be built on time", 26 January). They are notoriously slow to build, no such power station has ever been built on time in the UK, and the Olkiluoto and Flamanville projects are both delayed.

An analysis published recently by the Royal Society "suggests that despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2°C." and that "the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change."

Given the urgency of the need to cut emissions, renewable sources of power, with energy saving measures, are the way to go. A recent report from the University of Cambridge shows that, with existing techniques, it is feasible to cut worldwide use of energy by 70%. Germany installed 8.8 GW of solar panels in 2010 alone, producing more electricity than a 1 GW nuclear power station. Several reports show that renewables can produce more energy than the world is using now or is likely to need in the future. In case anyone objects that renewables are not reliable, unplanned outages of a nuclear power station are much more disruptive than gradual and predictable changes in wind power. Variations can be ironed out by connecting renewable sources across a wide area via the planned supergrid ("UK steps up plans for European energy 'supergrid'", 21 January). And renewable sources such as hydropower, geothermal power, concentrating solar power, and tidal lagoons, can deliver power on demand, day and night.

The Energy Fair group has shown that, when hidden subsidies are stripped away, nuclear power is one of the most expensive ways of generating electricity. Instead of hitching its wagon to a failed technology, UK plc should be positioning itself to take advantage of the huge market for clean energy and conservation of energy that is now developing.

Sincerely,

Dr Gerry Wolff PhD CEng

www.energyfair.org.uk.