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Merged nuclear power safe?

Wow, that liquid glass stuff sounds pretty cool. Wikipedia says "liquid glass" is a common name for sodium silicate-- neat stuff, lots of applications. This might be a new one, though! I wonder if it was someone's Eureka! moment of the week or if it already existed in protocols for a leak at the reactors?
 
Christian Klippel said:
Seems that they plugged the Leak:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/06_10.html

Greetings,

Chris
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From the same report:

The latest move comes as the company continues to release low-level radioactive water from the plant into the sea. The discharge started on Monday to free storage space for higher-level radioactive water. As of 11 PM on Tuesday, 5,600 tons had been expelled into the ocean.
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Ouch.

What to do with 15,000 tons (and accumulating) of radioactive water... what to do...

:eusa_think:

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?cid=30194

Japan's Fisheries Ministry has found high levels of radioactive iodine and cesium in fish caught near the troubled Fukushima nuclear power plant, Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday. One kilogram of young launce caught near the town of Kitaibaraki on the Ibaraki Prefecture on Monday contained 526 bequerels of radioactive cesium, 500 bequerels more than the legal limit, and 1,700 bequerels of iodine. The Ibaraki authorities urged people to stop eating fish, while fisheries minister Michihiko Kano said the government would toughen inspections of marine products caught in the area. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has been struggling to contain the flow of highly contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. It said that 7.5 million times the legal limit of radioactive iodine has been detected in samples of seawater near the plant.
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Gee, I hope none of those fishies are planning on reproducing and making a bunch more baby fishies outside of the "contaminated area".

Damn that polonium laden cigarette smoke...[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Swiss,Swiss721 BT]
[/FONT]
 
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Speaking of polonium-210:

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/chain.html

Each step in the illustration below, indicates a different nuclide. Only a few of the steps are labeled, and the numbers below each label indicate the length of the particular radionuclide's half-life. Uranium-238 has the longest half-life, 4.5 billion years, and radon-222 the shortest, 3.8 days. The last radionuclide in the chain, polonium-210 transforms to lead-210, and eventually the stable nuclide, lead-206.

Uranium-238 Decay Chain

u238chain.gif
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The actual full decay chain to get down to Polonium-210 :
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Swiss,Swiss721 BT]
U-238 [/FONT]Uranium-238 (alpha) 4,460,000,000 years
Th-234 Thorium-234 (beta) 24.1 days
Pa-234 Protactinium-234 (beta) 1.17 minutes
U-234 Uranium-234 (alpha) 247,000 years
 Th-230 Thorium-230 (alpha) 80,000 years
Ra-226 Radium-226 (alpha) 1,602 years
Rn-222 Radon-222 (alpha) 3.82 days
 Po-218 Polonium-218 (alpha) 3.05 minutes
Pb-214 Lead-214 (beta) 27 minutes
Bi-214 Bismuth-214 (beta) 19.7 minutes
Po-214 Polonium-214 (alpha) 1 microsecond
Pb-210 Lead-210 (beta) 22.3 years
 Bi-210 Bismuth-210 (beta) 5.01 days
Po-210 Polonium-210 (alpha) 138.4 days
 Pb-206 Lead-206 (none) [FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Swiss,Swiss721 BT]stable

Uranium naturally decaying safely below the ground.




But wait !
Don't we have to use uranium for nuclear energy ?





Hmmm, you guys are right.

Nuclear plants aren't the danger afterall... I'm thinking uranium mining/refining/enrichment in order to get to the point of an operational nuclear plant is ?

Sooo... What to do with all that Thorium-230 and Radium-226 waste product that's leftover just from the refining process of uranium ?

:eusa_think:

And shhh, let's not mention the fun of the enrichment process (the next step after the refining process) and uranium hexaflouride's reaction to moisture... oops.
 [/FONT]
 
Thorium and Radium are not waste products. Thorium is itself fuel, and can be burned in a subcritical pile and used to degrade reactor waste, and generate net energy production. Radium is a very useful medical and industrial isotope.
 
BenBurch said:
Thorium and Radium are not waste products. Thorium is itself fuel, and can be burned in a subcritical pile and used to degrade reactor waste, and generate net energy production. Radium is a very useful medical and industrial isotope.
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Yes, but is it actually being utilized, or is it just currently going into a waste bin and buried somewhere ?

It'd be interesting to see what the standard policy is.
 
volcano said:
Wow, that liquid glass stuff sounds pretty cool. Wikipedia says "liquid glass" is a common name for sodium silicate-- neat stuff, lots of applications. This might be a new one, though! I wonder if it was someone's Eureka! moment of the week or if it already existed in protocols for a leak at the reactors?
Click to expand...

I'm wondering if it is really sodium silicate that they used, or if it was something else that is called liquid glass (maybe due to some mistranslation?). Because normally it is water soluble, IIRC, and requires heat to drive out the water molecules from the silicate. But i may be wrong here.

At least the stuff i have here is water soluble, and after it dried in the air, any drop of water will wash it away again.

Greetings,

Chris
 
Xephyr said:
Nuclear plants aren't the danger afterall... I'm thinking uranium mining/refining/enrichment in order to get to the point of an operational nuclear plant is ?
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Uranium is a naturally occurring element. It's there whether we mine it or not.

We have enough U-238 stockpiled that it can supply our energy needs for thousands of years if we started building and using IFRs and TWRs.

If we decide we need more uranium, we don't have to mine it conventionally, we can simply filter it out of seawater.
 
Xephyr said:
Huh, interesting.

I had no idea cigarette smoke could seep into drinking water and agricultural soil.
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You have heard of second-hand smoke and the health problems (even deaths) it has caused in folks who didn't smoke, yes?
 
BenBurch said:
And when we talk about relative dangers we have to consider that we can for now make enough energy to keep civilization running by one of two ways; Coal or Nuclear.

Nuclear is much safer and less polluting even when you consider Chernobyl and the Japan incident now unfolding. Not even close.
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This point has been made many times already, but it really can't be restated too much. The question is not if nuclear power is so perfectly safe that it can never harm anyone. Nothing can ever be that safe, so it's utterly pointless to even think about it. What is important is how safe it is relative to other forms of power generation.

Fukushima is constantly in the news, and so far has a death toll of 2 (actually caused by direct damage from the tsunami, not from anything to do with nuclear power) and an injury toll of a further 2 (who have turned out to be fine, just hardly anyone bothers reporting that instead of all the gross fearmongering). Other nuclear facilities have not, as far as I'm aware, harmed anyone during this time. How many has coal power hurt in the same time frame? Quite, a few in fact. And that's just the deaths that are relatively easily found with a quick Google search. Who knows how many more have been killed or injured just in industrial accidents in mines and power plants, let alone the less direct results of pollution and such.

Aepervius said:
whereas coron kill TODAY as Rolfe showed for the USA already killed
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I'm reasonably sure Wales isn't in the USA.:)

Xephyr said:
Gee, I hope none of those fishies are planning on reproducing and making a bunch more baby fishies outside of the "contaminated area".
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Why, do you think radiation is contagious or something? You may not want to eat that particular fish, although as already explained the limits are so low that it's probably perfectly safe to eat anyway, but any offspring it might have had would have been perfectly safe.
 
DC said:
it was you that refused to deliver a source, so i had to assume you made it up.
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Lies and hypocrisy. The official rhetorical fuel of the anti-nuclear brigade.

I provided the credentials and qualifications of several people that I have met with in person that I have used as sources for my positions on nuclear energy.

You, on the other hand, flatly refused to provide qualifications for your own sources and engaged in personal attacks to draw attention away from your own lack of support and evidence (same page, same thread, as linked above).

You've never backed up any of your anti-nuclear tirades. It's hypocritical and dishonest of you to insist on standards from pro-nuclear people that you won't uphold yourself.
 
Christian Klippel said:
I'm wondering if it is really sodium silicate that they used, or if it was something else that is called liquid glass (maybe due to some mistranslation?). Because normally it is water soluble, IIRC, and requires heat to drive out the water molecules from the silicate. But i may be wrong here.

At least the stuff i have here is water soluble, and after it dried in the air, any drop of water will wash it away again.

Greetings,

Chris
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Yeah, that part does seem a bit odd. Unless there was a lot of heat in the region of the leak, I'm not sure what would cause it to "set." Maybe it is something else called liquid glass. I still wonder if it was standard protocol or if someone had a serious Ah-ha! moment.

ETA: There's no reference but this site suggests it was indeed sodium silicate. This Daily Mail article (again, not the best source) quotes a Tepco spokesperson who says it was a mixture of liquid glass and a hardening agent. It was injected into the ground below the leak (not dumped into the water itself) and hardened, stopping the leak.
 
volcano said:
Yeah, that part does seem a bit odd. Unless there was a lot of heat in the region of the leak, I'm not sure what would cause it to "set." Maybe it is something else called liquid glass. I still wonder if it was standard protocol or if someone had a serious Ah-ha! moment.

ETA: There's no reference but this site suggests it was indeed sodium silicate. This Daily Mail article (again, not the best source) quotes a Tepco spokesperson who says it was a mixture of liquid glass and a hardening agent. It was injected into the ground below the leak (not dumped into the water itself) and hardened, stopping the leak.
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Ah, OK. Thanks for the links. Yes, maybe they added something that in turn hardens the substance after a while. I'm just a bit cautious about things that are translated from Japanese into English, since it sometimes results in funny wording or wrong words. That's why i was wondering.

Greetings,

Chris
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
Lies and hypocrisy. The official rhetorical fuel of the anti-nuclear brigade.

I provided the credentials and qualifications of several people that I have met with in person that I have used as sources for my positions on nuclear energy.

You, on the other hand, flatly refused to provide qualifications for your own sources and engaged in personal attacks to draw attention away from your own lack of support and evidence (same page, same thread, as linked above).

You've never backed up any of your anti-nuclear tirades. It's hypocritical and dishonest of you to insist on standards from pro-nuclear people that you won't uphold yourself.
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LOL what a bunch of nonsense and lies........

1. I was not talking to you.................. so spare me your false accusations, thanks......

and btw i have delivered his name, if you are ndeed interested in him, you could have googled about him. I gave you his name and his former job. so spare me your lies, thanks.

what a cheap attempt, you take a post of mine where i quoted someone else and then go on and claim you have provided sources...... WTF is wrong with you?
it was not your story and claims i asked for a source......

why the lies? i thought in your religion lies are considered a sin............
 
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and again, just to make it clear, i am pro nuclear, but i am not working for the nuclear industry in any way like SoT is, so i dont need to repeat all the slogans from the nuclear lobby...... it is the best technology for energy production en mass we have, But it is far away from the perfect source like you seem to believe, also you seem to believe nukes will solve all our problems..... you have lost all objectivity.

and btw, when you are posting your tirades against Wind or Solar energy, you NEVER back up any of your claims.....
 
DC said:
LOL what a bunch of nonsense and lies........
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"You lie !"
"No, YOU lie!"
"Nooo... You lie!"
"No, no, no !! You LIE!"

Etc...

i am pro nuclear, but i am not working for the nuclear industry in any way like SoT is, so i dont need to repeat all the slogans from the nuclear lobby......
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Somehow the bit after the "but" makes me doubt the part prior to it.
 
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