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The map above comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center.
It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated on 21 October 2013.
originally posted by: thorfourwinds
Here's the plan to divert the underground river around the plant.
All Nuclear Fuel Has Melted At Fukushima, Say TEPCO - See more at: yournewswire.com...
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) are claiming that almost all the fuel inside one of the Fukushima nuclear plant’s reactors has melted.
Japantoday.com reports:
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the technology, which uses elementary particles called “muon” to create x-ray style images, gave the most concrete evidence yet the fuel had dropped to the bottom of No. 1 reactor.
“While our previous analysis have already strongly suggested that fuel rods had melted down, the latest study provided further data that we like to regard as progress in our effort to determine the exact locations of the debris,” said a TEPCO spokesman.
Roadmap for Decommissioning the Plant (2013 Fuel Removal) They call the removal of spent fuel rods from the reactor 4 building the first milestone of the process. That operation began last November. It's expected to be finished by the end of this year(sic 2014).
After that, the plan is to move on to the other 3 reactor buildings. (By 2020 Spent Fuel Removal Completed)
The government and TEPCO want to finish removing the spent fuel rods and start extracting the melted fuel by 2020. That's the year Tokyo hosts the Olympics. (2020 Melted Fuel Removal Starts)
Taking out that fuel is expected to require another 10 to 15 years.
(By 2051 Complete Decommissioning) Then, crews will start dismantling the reactors. The estimated completion date for that job is 2051 at the latest 40 years after the accident. But some experts say the entire decommissioning process will likely take longer. One of the major factors slowing things down is the constant build up of contaminated water
TEPCO, the company in charge of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant, cannot filter a dangerous radioactive isotope out of about 400,000 metric tons of water before returning it to the sea, and has contracted with a US company for a second system.
At the site, Toshiba Corp's Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which was designed to remove the most dangerous nuclides from water, has been in intermittent operation for the past two years, Reuters reported. Two of the three ALPS units, each capable of processing 250 tons of water per day, were taken offline in May after high levels of calcium were found in the water leaving the system.
The new TEPCO contract with US-based Kurion Inc. provides for a mobile water-filtration system mounted on trucks to be used alongside the ALPS processors, which are designed to decontaminate 62 of the 63 radioisotopes present in tank water to prepare it for release into the environment, Kurion said. The truck-based filters will focus solely on strontium reduction.
As if the damage above ground isn’t enough to worry about, the 9 -magnitude earthquake apparently cracked the walls of the plant, allowing about 400 tons of groundwater to seep into the buildings and mix with the tainted coolant water.
Tepco has controlled the coolant volume to ensure the inflow of groundwater is stronger, which will help keep it in the buildings.
About 260,000 tons of tainted water are stored in tanks; Tepco thinks it could probably store up to 700,000 tons if it had time to build more tanks. But as it stands today, there are only enough tanks to store about 60,000 more tons, which means they only have months before the entire site begins to flood.
“The contaminated water is a pressing issue,” said Takahashi.
[…]
Tepco also will have to find a way to dispose of water processed by ALPS. Since Tepco is trying to limit the amount of coolant to reduce the leak rate, any water purified by ALPS won’t be reused as coolant.
And even ALPS cannot remove tritium.
According to Tepco, the level of tritium in the contaminated water is between 1 million and 5 million becquerels per liter, and the legal limit is 60,000. Tritium has a half life of about 12 to 13 years and is about one-thousandth as radioactive as the isotopes cesium-134 and -137.
Tritium… is about one-thousandth as radioactive…
“Strontium is the greatest emitter of radiation impacting site dose-rates,” Kurion founder and President John Raymont said in a statement. “So reducing strontium in tank water stored on-site will significantly improve worker safety and reduces the risk to the surrounding environment.”
Kurion’s system will filter about 79,000 gallons of water per day, however will not totally clean up the water.
TEPCO is expected to commence construction of the underground ice-wall—which, along with a recently implemented groundwater-bypass scheme, is part of TEPCO’s approach to reduce the amount of radioactive groundwater now being stored and treated in temporary tank farms on the site—in June and finish the project sometime in March 2015, according to the Japan Daily Press on May 27.
The wall is designed to operate for about seven years.
The ice-wall project involves sinking tubes carrying coolant, one metre apart, up to 30 metres underground and in a roughly 1.5-kilometre rectangular shape around four reactors. The piped refrigerant, at minus-30 ° C, would freeze groundwater and create an impervious two-metre-thick soil wall.
The first response to combat the water contamination problem was to reject remediation proposals given by experts, such as building a concrete wall 60 feet into the ground to stop the estimated 76,000 gallons of groundwater from leaking into the ocean."
Instead, TEPCO hurriedly constructed plastic- and clay-lined underground water storage pits that soon developed leaks.
When that plan didn’t work, their next step was to build above-ground storage tanks – a lot of them – to store the cooling water and some of the groundwater runoff. At the time, there was no good, efficient way to clean the water, so TEPCO just kept building more tanks to try to stay ahead of the problem.
As the tank farm grew, it was discovered that more than 300 tons of radioactive water had leaked out of a storage tank onto the site.
originally posted by: pheonix358
Just as a tidbit of info.
I reported here a while back that RSOE EDIS had taken Fuky off their list of long term events.
Well ..... its back!
P
Sensors at the Fukushima nuclear plant have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water into the sea. Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the sensors, which were rigged to a gutter that pours rain and ground water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a nearby bay, detected contamination levels up to 70 times greater than the already-high radioactive status seen at the plant campus. TEPCO said its emergency inspections of tanks storing nuclear waste water did not find any additional abnormalities, but the firm said it shut the gutter to prevent radioactive water from going into the Pacific Ocean.