Water radiation soars at Fukushima No. 1 [Strontium readings spike 6,500-fold in one day]

[freshwest]

37. One solution early on was to entomb the mess, like Chernobyl. That was one hell of an opration, it

Last edited Mon Oct 21, 2013, 01:00 AM - Edit history (3)

was a suicide mission for those who worked directly on the fire or flew overhead and poured concrete over it.

It's still a no man's land there. Did it work adequately in the long term?

IDK. But it was suggested for Fukushima as an immediate solution and ignored, AFAIK.

Fire containment

...Twenty years after the disaster, he said the firefighters from the Fire Station No. 2 were aware of the risks.

Of course we knew! If we'd followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation – our duty. We were like kamikaze...[49]

The fire was extinguished by a combined effort of helicopters dropping over 5,000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and neutron-absorbing boron onto the burning reactor and injection of liquid nitrogen. The Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko captured film footage of an Mi-8 helicopter as its main rotor collided with a nearby construction crane cable, causing the helicopter to fall near the damaged reactor building and killing its four-man crew.[50] It is now known that virtually none of the neutron absorbers reached the core.[51]

From eyewitness accounts of the firefighters involved before they died (as reported on the CBC television series Witness), one described his experience of the radiation as "tasting like metal", and feeling a sensation similar to that of pins and needles all over his face. (This is similar to the description given by Louis Slotin, a Manhattan Project physicist who died days after a fatal radiation overdose from a criticality accident.)[52]

The explosion and fire threw hot particles of the nuclear fuel and also far more dangerous fission products, radioactive isotopes such as caesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90 and other radionuclides, into the air: the residents of the surrounding area observed the radioactive cloud on the night of the explosion.

Equipment assembled included remote-controlled bulldozers and robot-carts that could detect radioactivity and carry hot debris. Valery Legasov (first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow) said, in 1987, "But we learned that robots are not the great remedy for everything. Where there was very high radiation, the robot ceased to be a robot—the electronics quit working."[53]

Evacuation developments

The nearby city of Pripyat was not immediately evacuated after the incident. The townspeople went about their usual business, completely oblivious to what had just happened. However, within a few hours of the explosion, dozens of people fell ill. Later, they reported severe headaches and metallic tastes in their mouths, along with uncontrollable fits of coughing and vomiting...[56]

Flora and Fauna



After the disaster, four square kilometers of pine forest directly downwind of the reactor turned reddish-brown and died, earning the name of the "Red Forest".[120]

And the reports for fauna are predictably horrible. I have not heard about anything like this in Japan. There were some stories of older men volunteering to work in the disaster area. They know they will die, but they, too, like the Russian firefighters, see it as their moral obligation to future generations. I've read that every human being who was breathing at that time in the world, is carrying those isotopes and radionuclides inside their bodies now.

I'm wondering if it's too late, since it's gotten into the groundwater; and I don't like their idea of dumping any of it in the ocean, IMO they have no right to do so. Here is what happened less than thirty years ago in Russia, not all the areas exposed:

Radiation Area



Groundwater was not badly affected by the Chernobyl accident since radionuclides with short half-lives decayed away long before they could affect groundwater supplies, and longer-lived radionuclides such as radiocaesium and radiostrontium were adsorbed to surface soils before they could transfer to groundwater.[119] However, significant transfers of radionuclides to groundwater have occurred from waste disposal sites in the 30 km (19 mi) exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Although there is a potential for transfer of radionuclides from these disposal sites off-site (i.e. out of the 30 km (19 mi) exclusion zone), the IAEA Chernobyl Report[119] argues that this is not significant in comparison to current levels of washout of surface-deposited radioactivity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl

There are probably difference to the technological correct crowd in these two disasters. I don't care. This is and was stupidity, one of the worst ideas from the Cold War era.

Just my humble opinion.