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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:31pm PT
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Good point, Brandon. Yes.
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happiegrrrl
Trad climber
New York, NY
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:36pm PT
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Golson - "In fact we had some manipulator pieces ready to ship to us and were asked this morning by another entity within DOE whether we can sacrifice them for use in Japan."
I sincerely hope that the answer was "yes" and without hesitation. Even if the robotic items end up not getting used, or don't work, it is an act of humanitarianism I think would be difficult for even the hardest-boiled egg(head) to say no to.
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Brandon-
climber
Done With Tobacco
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:38pm PT
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If the rods are throwing heat, won't that cause some sort of convection, raising the bad stuff to the surface?
So, and I don't know much about this, but I'm a pragmatic sort of person, in the future would a particulate filter over the entire campus be a practical safeguard?
From what I'm understanding, the long range danger comes from particulate, not direct radiation.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:41pm PT
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Thank you very much:
I never really saw rrrAdam as downplaying this thing he's just giving information as he knows it and answering questions along with pointing out disinformation.
He's a quality humanitarian person here.
Ed is doing the same and you tell by his posts his high humanitarian qualities.
And thank you also for the picture of Tesla's great achievement with the Wycliff Tower, which was scrapped when the big money realized there was no way to charge people for freely available power...designed to freely power towns, houses, and vehicles from a distance:
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
The Illuminati -- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Division
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:41pm PT
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Robots Are Tougher Than You, Part 2: Nuclear Radiation
Robots are invulnerable to radiation that would kill humans. This week, we’ll take a glance at a few hard-working nuclear bots to see what they do and how they do it. In the past, remote-controlled drones have been sent to disaster areas such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island to collect structural samples and to map radiation levels. As far back as 1985, the half-ton, imaginatively named "Rover No. 1" from GPU Nuclear Corporation was busy collecting concrete samples from the Unit 2 reactor of Three Mile Island (it went critical in 1979). A little more than a decade later, the Carnegie Mellon-designed Pioneer robot (a mini-bulldozer with a 300-ft. umbilical cord) was sent to the Ukraine to explore the melted core of the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl (the result of an explosion that killed 32 people). Luckily for us, new nuclear disaster zones are scarce. Even so, radioactive robots have plenty of opportunities for action…. —Daniel H. Wilson, Resident Robiticist
The Nuclear Power Plant
We’ve all seen Homer Simpson standing outside a leaded glass window with his arms shoved into rubber gloves, juggling rods of plutonium. Homer is actually using a form of telerobotics, in which an operator controls robotic manipulators that take the place of human hands. Early designs used a pure mechanic coupling so that human movements were translated directly to the machine—the equivalent of poking radioactive material with a stick. What more would you expect from Homer?
Dismantling Nuclear Weapons
Sometimes, however, technicians don’t want to be on the same continent as the robot, much less the same room. That requires a semi-autonomous robot arm that uses actuators and its own power source to grip and manipulate objects, while still taking remote commands from a human teleoperator. Schilling Titan II robot arms have been up to the task of dismantling nukes. The "Dual Arm Work Module" uses two six-degree-of-freedom arms, one for holding parts and the other for cutting apart the warhead one layer at a time. You aren’t likely to see these robots again, however, since during the course of operation they become highly radioactive and must eventually be stored as hazardous waste. These bots can’t be fixed either, so they are designed to be highly redundant: If one tool breaks, another system can compensate.
Radiation Tests
At the Gamma Irradiation Facility at White Sands Missile Range, researchers routinely irradiate advanced electronics to see how they would perform in a crisis (you know, “just in case”). In December 2005, however, a cobalt-60 radiation source became jammed, wantonly spraying Gamma radiation that would be lethal to a human within 30 seconds. The solution was to borrow a 600-lb. bomb-disposal unit (called "Mighty Mouse") from nearby Sandia National Laboratory. Following some DIY modification, the robot unscrewed a metal plate and cleared the jam. Afterwards, Mighty Mouse was available for beers with scientists (Gamma radiation does not leave metal radioactive). Nevertheless, robots like Mighty Mouse are often designed with seals, so they are easy to wash down with special decontaminating chemicals after a hard day of manhandling nukes.
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:43pm PT
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999...1000 boom
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:53pm PT
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much of the concern over this is based on the threat we perceive to ourselves. what the Japanese people are going through is unimaginable, now is a time to seek ways to help them overcome something even larger than just the failure of the nuclear reactors, they have been through even more than that. Agreed.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:53pm PT
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the Russians have a long history of developing electronics designed to operate in high rad environments, such as a nuclear war. We learned about this when a defecting pilot brought over one of their latest fighter planes with what appeared at first to be ancient electronics on board
At least one such robot was used at Chernobyl to go in and look at the 'Elephant's foot'; the pile of slag left below the melted reactor core
we used the best cameras we could devise to keep track of the big hydrogen burps going on in Hanford tank 101SY, but they only lasted a few hours before needing replacement
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Mar 17, 2011 - 05:58pm PT
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From what I gather from the media, TEPCO is focusing on the Reactor 3 spent fuel container because it is the only one of the storage pools that has MOX fuel which, due to its plutonium component, has the potential for more serious contamination.
Can you folks comment.
Plutonium is very bad stuff. Check the wiki article on it.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Mar 17, 2011 - 06:03pm PT
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My uncle in Richland WA (Hanford)) has told me about handling Plutonium buttons with his bare hands; with the cautionary note that you really don't want any dust particles into your lungs. He is now a healthy 90 years old...
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Mar 17, 2011 - 06:39pm PT
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Happy, the answer was yes.
Tom, thanks for your work on the burping tank. We still have 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste in storage tanks at the Hanford site. The waste is not from the Nuke Power industry but is an undesireable product of Plutonium weapons production. I manage construction, Start-up and Commissioning of 3 of 5 facilities designed to vitrify that waste.
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Mar 17, 2011 - 06:47pm PT
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I manage construction, Start-up and Commissioning of 3 of 5 facilities designed to vitrify that waste. That is a great solution to part of the problem with waste..
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:02pm PT
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Thanks Adam. It is neither cheap nor easy, but like your plant I know my facilities are significantly safer than commercial chemical plants with like hazards.
Edit:
Here is a picture of the plant.
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Bargainhunter
climber
Central California
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:10pm PT
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The danger of the spent fuel rods shouldn't be underestimated. This is now theorized as a bigger concern than that of the reactors themselves, according to the authors of this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18spent.html?pagewanted=2&hp
Paraphrased summary:
‘Richard T. Lahey Jr., a retired nuclear engineer who oversaw General Electric’s safety research in the early 1970s and who wrote a classified report for the United States government several years ago on the vulnerabilities of storage pools at American nuclear reactors, chimes in:’
“Tokyo electric has also brought up the possibility of the spent fuel rods melting and achieving "recriticality", i.e. resuming the fission process that they were originally intended for in the reaction chambers. Although this is unlikely, "..if recriticality occurs, pouring on pure water could actually cause fission to take place even faster....If a lot of fission occurs, which may only happen in an extreme case, the uranium would melt through anything underneath it. If it encounters water as it descends, a steam explosion may then scatter the molten uranium…”
So it sounds like there is a possibility of spent fuel (which is not surrounded by a containment vessel) resuming fission? It doesn't sound so spent to me…
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Also, in reference to Tom Cochrane’s concerns of maintenance flaws and cover-ups a la China Syndrome, a climber physicist friend from the PacNW just wrote on my FB page this morning:
“…Some of my coworkers did work at Fukushima in the 90's as part of regular maintenance operation. We built and operated a large robot arm to clean the scale buildup in the cooling pumps in the reactor. The lengths that Tokyo Power went to to cover up even the smallest deviation were astounding. These included paying the contractor several times the going rate with the understanding that broken or damaged parts were written up as being inspected instead of being repaired and mysterious 'extra' bolts or washers found in the core were not recorded in the log book.”
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As per the radiation dose threat table pasted by Cintune, the data is from 2001. I graduated from my Emergency Medicine residency in 2008, thus in that 7 year period more data has come in from long term effects of CT scanning. The teaching in 2008 was that a single CT scan gives an adult a 1:2000 chance of acquiring a terminal malignancy (the risk doubles if you are under the age of 18). Thus if you are 15 years old and get hit by a car and come to my ED unconscious with low blood pressure concerning for internal bleeding and/or a spine fracture, you will most likely get a “pan scan” which includes 5 CT scans (head, neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis). That single exposure gives you 1:200 chance of dying of cancer from that single diagnostic test alone. This data came before the widespread use of the even more powerful CT scanners (e.g. 64 slice) used today…which give great images, but expose you to more radiation. Thank you, but I’d much rather have surgery for my suspected appendicitis, than a diagnostic test than could be both inconclusive and ultimately harmful. (BTW, once you reach age 50, the radiation risk is considered negligible, as theoretically you won’t live long enough to die of the cancer.)
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As for the use of robots to examine the meltdown core in Chernobyl, watch the documentaries (available on YouTube). The primitive protective gear used by the Russian scientist investigating the aftermath was shockingly crude. At one point they use a remote controlled toy tank bought for $15 rubles at a department store with a camera strapped to it. Watch the follow-up British documentary of the scientists investigating the Chernobyl sarcophagus to see if anything is leaking...several cry when they describe the deaths of their 40 year colleagues of vague causes (stroke, heart disease, etc.) since the first documentary was made. They also lament how much they underestimate the danger of the exposures themselves...and these were the "experts."
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:30pm PT
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“…Some of my coworkers did work at Fukushima in the 90's as part of regular maintenance operation. We built and operated a large robot arm to clean the scale buildup in the cooling pumps in the reactor. The lengths that Tokyo Power went to to cover up even the smallest deviation were astounding. These included paying the contractor several times the going rate with the understanding that broken or damaged parts were written up as being inspected instead of being repaired and mysterious 'extra' bolts or washers found in the core were not recorded in the log book.”
This kind of crap makes me more mad than just about anything. Earlier in this thread people wanted to throw the designers under the bus. Don't blame them. The designers built a plant with inherent limitations but one that surely met all of the design criteria. If the design criteria was wrong, then that is partially a nuke safey engineering responsibility but primarily a Management Responsibility.
I have studied disasters in Chemical Plants, NASA and other industries for over 15 years as part of my job. In most of the disasters, management had a significant role. And if they didnt? They are management, its their job to be responsible.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:31pm PT
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If a meltdown occurs, worst case scenario, at least it's there - oceanside - and not upwind.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:37pm PT
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rrrAdam,
great stuff, tfpu.
Are you in a position to say if nuclear tech with regard to safety esp has advanced much (like a magnitude or more) in the last 30 years? Or is all pretty much the same, boilerplate basics, whatever? Curious to your input.
What would you say is the one greatest advance made in the industry regarding safety in the last 30 years?
This is going to be hot political issue in the future - like never before - now that this has happened and now that fossil fuel prices are set to soar - the citizenry more than ever need to be informed on this.
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:49pm PT
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HFCS,
I work with a lot of ex-Navy Nukes (about 20 of them) . As Adam said, their fuel is more highly enriched and therefore, there are proliferatoin concerns with the fuel. Having said that, I heard some things today about the design of their reactors that makes them seem way more advanced than the ones in Japan.
Adam can probably tell more details than me.
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PP
Trad climber
SF,CA
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Mar 17, 2011 - 07:55pm PT
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Fukushima is providing all the informing I need to make a decision as to whether I want Nukes in the future. There will be massive propaganda to tell us that this could never happen in the US.
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cintune
climber
Midvale School for the Gifted
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Mar 17, 2011 - 08:20pm PT
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There's something to be said for not having this, of course, but without nuclear power it's gonna take a lot more of this:
So either way it's a harsh reality to be faced.
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