Strona Mirosława Dakowskiego. - Fukushima No. 12s - never-ending battle with radioactive water</td></tr><tr><td width="70%" align="left" valign="top" colspan="2"> <span class="small"> Wpisał: Kazuaki Nagata </span>    </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2" class="createdate"> 11.03.2015. </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" colspan="2"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:HyphenationZone>21</w:HyphenationZone> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <p style="text-align: center; line-height: 150%" class="MsoNormal" align="center"><span style="font-size: 20pt; line-height: 150%; font-family: Algerian">Fukushima No. 1</span><span style="font-size: 20pt; line-height: 150%">′</span><span style="font-size: 20pt; line-height: 150%; font-family: Algerian">s - never-ending battle with radioactive water</span></p> <h5 style="line-height: 150%">=============</h5> <h5 style="text-align: center; line-height: 150%" align="center"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Nie mogłem dziś <em>(11 marca)</em> nie wspomnieć o tej potwornej sprawie – z niewyjaśnionymi intencjami “twórców” – <span style="color: red">kiedy dowiemy się PRAWDY??</span><span>  </span>md]</span></h5> <h5 style="text-align: center; line-height: 150%" align="center"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">W oryginale dobre szkice wersji oficjalnej obecnej sytuacji.</span></h5> <h5 style="line-height: 150%"><span>--------------------</span></h5> <h5 style="line-height: 150%"><span>by </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Kazuaki Nagata</span><span> Staff Writer Mar 11, 2015 </span><span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 150%"><a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/11/national/fukushima-1s-never-ending-battle-radioactive-water/#.VQCHco7WGkA"><span>http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/11/national/fukushima-1s-never-ending-battle-radioactive-water/#.VQCHco7WGkA</span></a></span></h5> <p style="line-height: 150%" class="credit"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%"> </span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">The disaster that struck four years ago may have abated for most of the Tohoku region, but the nightmare continues at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, which suffered three reactor core meltdowns and is plagued daily by increasing amounts of radioactive water.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Tepco hopes to improve the situation via two key measures: a 1.5-km-long sunken wall of frozen soil encircling stricken reactors 1, 2 and 3 and the damaged reactor 4 building to keep groundwater from entering and mixing with coolant water leaking in the reactor building basements, and “subdrain” wells around the buildings to pump up the tainted groundwater for treatment and ultimate discharge into the Pacific.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">The utility hopes these steps will drastically reduce the amount of radioactive water, which is now increasing daily by some 300 tons.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Many experts, however, say Tepco can’t expect smooth sailing as a wall of underground ice of such magnitude has never before been attempted.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">And Tepco’s plans to pump up tainted groundwater via the subdrains and discharge it into the sea after removing most of its radioactive components also appears iffy. The company has already lost the trust of fishermen over its failure to disclose the extent of the radioactive water flowing into the Pacific.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">The crippled complex has to contend with some 300 tons of new tainted groundwater every day, and part of the process has entailed a nonstop effort to build steel storage tanks. The groundwater, mainly rain that seeps into the soil both at the complex and at locations farther inland, flows toward the sea, including into the basements of the buildings housing the three wrecked reactors.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">There, the groundwater mixes with radioactive water that is leaking from cracks in the reactors. Tepco must keep pumping new water into the reactors to cool the melted fuel rods within. The basements are too radioactive to enter.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">The problematic groundwater flow used to amount to 400 tons daily, but the utility has taken some steps, including paving over part of the complex with asphalt to keep rainwater from seeping underground.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">To stop the increase of tainted water, Tepco must keep all, or at least nearly all, groundwater from flowing into the basements.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">The sunken ice wall is considered critical to this goal and Tepco has been setting up pipes to run coolant underground to freeze the soil — a process the utility hopes to start at the end of this month if it receives approval from the Nuclear Regulation Authority.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Although Tepco said it will take several months to completely freeze the soil into a solid ice wall, it expects the wall to reduce the amount of groundwater flowing into the reactor buildings to 50 tons a day from 300 at present.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">One “problem will be how long it will take to freeze soil evenly (to make an ice wall without holes), and we have already seen this problem when Tepco attempted to make ice walls inside the underground trench (connected to the reactor turbine buildings),” said Shigeaki Tsunoyama, an education and research special adviser at the University of Aizu.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">“I’m worried that the same thing might happen with the ice wall (encircling the reactor buildings),” said Tsunoyama, who sits on a panel formed by the NRA to oversee the decommissioning of the nuclear plant.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Fukushima No. 1 has a maze of underground trenches connected to the reactor turbine buildings to run cables and pipes, and they are now filled with highly radioactive water leaking from the turbine buildings.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">To remove the water in the trenches, Tepco tried for months to block the tainted water running from the buildings by freezing it before abandoning the effort last year.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Kiyoshi Takasaka, an adviser on nuclear issues to the Fukushima Prefectural Government, also said there are many unknown technical factors regarding the ice wall, including areas where the uneven groundwater flow is fast and underground cable and pipe conduits that may impede the freezing effort.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Then there’s the plan to pump up groundwater from dozens of subdrain wells built around the reactor buildings and dump it into the sea.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">This is different from the so-called groundwater bypass, which is already underway and aimed at intercepting clean groundwater before it arrives at the plant and pumping it into the ocean directly.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">If the subdrain well plan works effectively along with the ice wall, Tepco estimates it will be able to effectively stop the groundwater from reaching the reactor buildings.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Ending the increase is a pressing issue because the utility has been endlessly making tanks to store the tainted water at the site, and some of those tanks have leaked.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Tepco already has more than 500,000 tons of tainted water on its hands. As this amount grows, so does the possibility of leaks. Also, the amount of high-level radioactive waste derived from the cleaning process will also increase.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Meanwhile, the groundwater pumped up from some of the subdrain wells likewise contains highly radioactive materials.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Tepco says it will scrub the water with treatment systems to lower the levels of radioactive substances to less than the legal limits before discharging it into the sea.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">This plan was authorized by the NRA in January, but Tepco has been unable to get fishermen to approve it.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">People in Fukushima “do not want Tepco to dump the water into the sea. The most troubling thing is . . . harmful rumors,” said Tsunoyama, who is also an adviser to Fukushima Prefecture on nuclear issues.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">“You can’t really persuade people to ignore harmful rumors,” he said.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">The subdrain well plan is also not a cure-all, as it was revealed last month that Tepco knew radioactive rainwater has been leaking from the roof of a reactor building into the sea since last spring but did not think it necessary to disclose this information.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Some of the fishery groups in Fukushima were about to agree to the plan, but Hiroshi Kishi, chairman of the National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations, said fishermen no longer have any trust in the utility — and this will make it even harder for Tepco to get them on board.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Tsunoyama and Takasaka both said Tepco won’t be able to start the subdrain well plan anytime soon, so the ice wall will be a vital step in slowing the increase of radioactive water.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Takasaka said that although such an ice wall has been used before in civil engineering work, the scale of the project at Fukushima No. 1 will be unprecedented.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%">Takasaka and Tsunoyama said Tepco’s measures have tended to be ad hoc, so it has always had to come up with extra measures. The utility must make careful plans, including identifying spots expected to be tough to freeze, and take precautions to avoid unexpected problems in creating the ice wall, they said.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%"><br /></span></p> </td> </tr> </table> <span class="article_seperator"> </span> <table align="center" style="margin-top: 25px;"> <tr> </body></html>