Backing up protection for Fukushima number 4 pool

Although I don't fully agree with all the contentions of the article http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/nuclear-insanity my response is to offer suggestions. As I have also done in the past. And which seems to get totally ignored. I could rant a bit about the possible causes of all that, like things getting done only by "hiearchy of bullies" type of interactions to get things done, but instead I will blithely launch into my assumption that the other mode of people getting things done is to all see the same nicer picture and each voluntarily pitch in to help make it happen best possible.

The "nicer picture" I offer here is that the world pitch in to do something about the threat to the world that the teetering Fukushima #4 pool of spent fuel 100 feet in the air, before it comes down (and then people say oh how awful tsk tsk and later eek eek the radiation all over everywhere.) Right now apparently the functional picture is of business-as-usual, keep the pumps running for delivering water into the #4 pool and melted-down reactors.

So how about this addition to the picture: ships from other nations bring the makings of lots of pumpcrete concrete and mixing and pumping it, over to Japan, and build forms all around the base of the #4 building, and pour a reinforced concrete wall that can resist quakes when full of water; and fill it with water. Thus if the floor collapses that holds the pool of spent fuel, it just dumps into a larger pool of water, instead of largely heaped into the air on the ground to roast and start making a huge mess all over the place, perhaps even bringing in the other melted down reactors into the picture as per the subject article's doomsday scenario.

Most likely there are other pieces in this picture needing filling, such as below-ground-level passageways and whatever means that are in place to keep water being pumped up into #4's spent fuel pool as-is.

And also most likely pieces of the picture harder for me to grasp, such as the "we are boss here, get back in line or get out of our business we rule here not you" mentality lurking about. That kind of mentality seems the cause of "KESTS to GEO" project not getting built starting back in 1989 (or even in 2000 when it finally got peer-reviewed and technical paper published by ASCE) and thus would be operational today providing SPS electrical power; in my mind that failure to produce KESTS to GEO transportation structure in time, is a disaster worse than the impending Fukushima disaster the article proclaims. Thus, the "we are better than you we rule get out of here" critters will continue to bring about the future we have to endure.

Thoughts about Fukushima on Steroids

Ref http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/fukushima-steroids "Fukushima on Steroids" article by Mark Sircus.

Having pondered this subject for ages, maybe I ought to chatter here a bit about those ponderings.

Out of the chaos a few things seem to me to sift out.

One of them is the puzzlement of why don't people cease their squabbles and mutual rip-offs, to get together to resolve emerging problems that will greatly affect them all if not resolved adequately in advance?

One of the obstacles is of course the ever declaration that each bunch is the true winner and are in the right, ego stuff that has brought them fame and fortune. Understandably a tempting lure.

But I think in the more recent decades, the almost fanatic need to stick to the precept that all business must be solely guided by that which brings the most profit, regardless of the effect on the customer base, so long as they can get away with it - and, if they first establish control of the territory, it is easy to get away with most anything, in business. This seems to be the more dominant of the two forces, that is preventing us from coping adequately with these kind of major problems.

In the example of Fukushima and its horde of associated things, would it not be far better for the world to offer Japan 100% help dealing with the problem? Instead, we just eek and grouch and worry, resting on the pseudo-righteousness that somebody can get sued for the disasters.

Surely the problems there would have solutions that could help worldwide nuclear problems, too. Another reason to team up to help.

But the teaming up to help needs be done re efficacy, not egos and pomposity, as so much is done now, including in other kinds of life-effecting subjects like health.

Some of my suggestions, now:

Japan had been building a nuclear recycling plant, but has shut it down, if I remember correctly. Why this was shut down, I don't know. But the thought of handling and dealing with spent nuclear power plant fuel rods seems a "hot potato" in more ways than one.

Nonetheless, how about getting a fresh perspective on the subject of a nuclear reprocessing facility that is fully adequate and functional? And, not done only if it will bring big profit to the business of doing it, but rather for responsibility to our world.

(I resist the urge to rant on here about how I proposed a way to resolve this over a dozen years ago, but the world just romped on as before, and seemingly deliberately made it near impossible for my proposed hoop access transportation structure up to thusly-enabled total recycling plants, to become implemented. One must start from where one is really at right now, instead of where one might have been at. Doing something halfways is better than not doing it all, usually, I think, especially when desperate. And it ought to be increasingly apparent to people that there is big trouble in River City.)

I don't know what kind of technology Japan was actually exploring re reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods, as to how feasible it could have been. So, this could just be barking up the wrong tree, re a worldwide cooperative effort, freely done, to make Japan's nuclear reprocessing plant fully operational and actively working on reprocessing Fukushima's spent fuel rods. And, can the reactor #4's especially worrisome fuel rods 30 meters up there in the blown-out building, actually be gotten to and toted over to the subject nuclear reprocessing plant, I wonder.

But the article "Fukushima on Steroids" points out the huge demand to deal with the world's growing pile of spent fuel rods. If Japan can achieve a viable reprocessing plant technology in the hypothetical worldwide cooperative effort, then most likely copies of it could be built in North America, Europe, Russia and Asia.

Look at our own (America's) efforts to clean up the nuclear waste stored at Hanford, since the building of the first a-bombs in the mid-1940's. Last responsible thing I read, was that we were pouring enormous funds into building facilities that no one knows will even work; but, pouring lots of money into it makes everyone feel we are dealing with the problem.

Science is wonderful, great of carefully assembling knowledge about the real world and how to affect it. But it tends to slip into the trap of becoming exclusively "left-brained" analytical cognitive mode, missing the lateral trails to explore, especially when research is funded by business which of necessity can afford only to explore paths that could lead to improving their profit more than their present course.

Thus it seems to me to be of essence, now that we all have fallen into the ditch together, to open both eyes and get a stereo view of the situation, get both sides of the brain into gear, and start making more progress with far fewer bad endings.

Analytical "left-brain-hemisphere" can't get there without begging help from the other halves of our brains - which often is busy doing something else, unfortunately, as it is a holistic linkage among minds far and wide and has been usurped for the exclusive betterment of a few folks, unseen by its unwitting hosts who were totally engrossed in left-brained analytical studies and tasks. Yet, each of us owns both a left and right hemisphere to our brains, and it seems prudent to find ways to get our full act together. It can be done.

Coping with Fukushima and the world's nuclear fuel rod disposition problem, needs to have our full attention (both sides of our brains in gear) to get the job done.

We might come up with such ideas as grinding up fuel rods and diluting their contents to natural ore radioactivity average intensity as mixed into concrete, and the resulting concrete be put back into the very same holes in the ground that were the mines where the uranium etc was dug out; and it all be sealed up, and so labeled. Maybe using the mine's tailings for some of the agregate in this concrete, too. Sure, it will remain somewhat nuclear-hot for eons, but the original ore that had been in the same spot, was that same level of intensity way there too.

Once we have both sides of our brains creatively coming up with lots of ideas for dealing with the nuclear waste problem, we also need to strongly establish a system for evaluating the resulting unusual ideas, by applying principles of honoring all peoples and our wonderful Mother Earth environment, among other things. That way we could trash ideas such as "dumping the ground up fuel rod stuff all over the land of our obnoxious neighbor's country" that could get proposed especially in the middle-eastern parts of the world, who sometimes seem bent on eradicating each other. Not that they are the only ones, of course. We need to get mature and honor all others - juvenile aggressive as some might be at the moment - during our search for viable solutions to this world crisis.

And hopefully our newly united two-sided cognition brains - our left-linear sequential serial processors shaking hands with our right-parallel pattern processors - will then wake up to our other big problems, like civilization's need for huge amounts of energy now and into the future. Right now those decisions seem mostly made by following the paths of easiest and greatest wealth such as oil and coal baron's business decisions. They have provided us with our wonderful energy-using ways of life; they deserve our thanks for that. Yet, getting stuck in that rut is increasingly obviously unsustainable and is crudding up our worldly nest, and our physical bodies, in multiple ways.

Can we do this? I believe we can, theoretically. Will we do this? Experience multiply says no we won't do this.

But I can burble in this apparently unseen blog about it all.

Fukushima nuclear reactor cleanup suggestion

Cleaning the huge amount of radioactively contaminated water at the Fukushima nuclear reactor site has been declared an urgent task. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12908313 "Water clear-up 'urgent' at reactor." The article mentions that someone suggested using ion-exchange resins to filter the water before discharging the water safely. However, that means disposing of those resin filters afterwards. The article also mentions instead using the water to make concrete and then store the concrete somewhere.

Here is a different approach:

I had pointed out an alternate means, in a comment I left at some news site several days ago. It apparently has not reached the right ears. So I will point it out here, since there seems to be no communication path from me to the folks who can responsibly deal with the problem.

Back in the early 1960's, during the major nuclear scare where people were being given plans for emergency fallout shelters, it was told us that to decontaminate suspect drinking water, one could put some clay soil into the water in a jug, stir it up well and let the clay particles settle out until the water was clear. Then the water would be free of most of the radioactive particles, having been snagged by the clay and taken to the bottom of the container.

It seems such a process could be done there in Fukushima. Even right where floors and tunnels are said to be covered with ankle-deep radioactive contaminated water, by putting in some clay soil and stirring it up well then letting it settle out for a day, then pump out the clarified water on top, then shovel out the clay mud with the trapped radioactive particles in it, to be sun-dried into bricks for stashing in some abandoned mine, perhaps a worked-out former uranium mine that originally had far more radioactive rock removed from it in the past. Or they could first pump out the water and do the clay mixing and settling out in an external tank, which would have the advantage of not making a big cleanup job inside the facilities from the clay in an otherwise very clean environment, but have the disadvantage of getting contaminated pumps and hoses needing disposal. Pumping out and external settling would probably have less exposure of workers to the radiation overall, however, but take significantly longer to setup and do; the same external tank could be repeatedly refilled with pumped contaminated water and more clay stirred in, thus processing a much larger volume of water overall, until it became too filled with clay sludge and then needing to be scooped out and made into the aforementioned sun-dried bricks.

This process seems to enable a much larger volume of water to be processed quickly, and far cheaper and environmentally-friendly than using ion-exchange resin filters or using the water to make concrete.