FUKE NEWS: Robot snaps inside drowned Fukushima nuke plant TEPCO, the operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, has revealed photos of the facility's flooded interior. The company sent an aqua-bot into the Reactor Containment Container of Fukushima's Unit 3 last week, revealing grainy images such as the one below. Unit 3 Reactor Containment Container CRD Housing …
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A mirror works quite well for that... put the camera in a lead box with a view of the camera - then put a lead backing around the mirror.
So long as there is no direct line between the camera sensor and the radiation source, visible light is appropriately filtered of radiation.
The X-rays that got filtered out by ~1 cm of leaded glass in a CRT faceplate had energies of up to 25 KeV max. based on the TV's 25 KV anode voltage. That's pretty soft for X-rays.
The radiation making it through the water at Fukushima (ignoring suspended or dissolved radionuclides for the moment) is essentially all gamma rays, with orders of magnitude higher energy than CRT X-rays. As a result, leaded glass lenses wouldn't block enough of it to notice.
The other thing to keep in mind about radiation shielding, aside from having to shield your electronics from all angles, is that its effect is exponential rather than linear. If 1 cm of solid lead reduces exposure from a particular source by 50%, another 1 cm will only cut THAT dose by another 50% (= 25% of the original incoming dose), so twice the shielding thickness doesn't get you twice the effectiveness. Takeaway is this: Effectively shielding sensitive electronics from high radiation levels requires really bulky, massive hunks of stuff, or else staying far enough away that 1/R^2 is your friend.
It might help, but the radiation isn't just coming through the lens, I would guess. Adding enough shielding to block all gamma rays might be impossible due to weight constraints. The X-rays blocked by CRT tubes are rather less energetic than these gamma rays, I think (10s of keV vs >100 keV, AFAIK)
Edit: I see I should speed-up my typing ;-)
Doffs hat to Steve Hersey!
the tenth-thickness for pure lead is about 1 inch. for leaded glass, several inches. 'Tenth thickness' refers to the amount of material it needs to cut radiation levels down to 1/10 of what they were without the shielding.
"do the math" and I think you'll see that shielding could be effective, but not perfect.
Surely rather than send in lots of electronics, you have a hydraulic tractor head controlled from a less hostile environment, a drag pipe and an inner optical fibre. The snake will surely have a lot longer life than a robot. Then your pipe remains there so you can go back again and again to monitor developments.
Obviously the challenges of getting anything to work in that sort of environment are horrific. But someone is going to have to think up the machines that can work there, otherwise how will they ever get it dismantled? I think we need some sort of international organisation that has lots of big and rugged machines that can cope with any environment, permanently at the ready to go to the rescue after some major emergency. Best locate it somewhere neutral, ideally near the equator. Nice tropical island somewhere?
Are they actually planning to dismantle it, or will they try to entomb it like Cernobyl? If they dismantle it, they have the problem of transporting and storing many tons of highly radioactive waste. If they entomb it they don't have the transportation problem, and the storage problem consists of "let's keep this stuff where it is as much as possible".
Are they actually planning to dismantle it, or will they try to entomb it like Cernobyl?
Usually with reactors you *have* to entomb for a while, just to let radioactive decay reduce the activity of everything to levels you can handle. Entombing is much harder when the plant's already destroyed and contaminated, of course.
Here's a more typical one we prepared earlier: http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/CReactor
Under normal conditions they de-fuel the reactor, then remove/demolish all the auxiliary equipment and structures, leaving the core. They seal up the building openings and put a roof on it to keep the rain out. Then they wait 70 years or so for it to "cool" before they take it apart.
Entombing isn't an option, due to the site's proximity to sea and local movements of (now highly radioactive) ground water. Fukashima is way more complex and difficult a situation than Chernobyl. Four reactors on site, for a start, three of which are basically rubble.
Thank goodness all those UK and French reactors at sea level for easy access to cooling water won't have to worry about tsunami or rising sea levels during the lifetime of the onsite radioactive structures, eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170215131551.htm
Still, I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. After all, SLR stops dead in 2100, right? All the scenarios and charts do, anyway...
>Obviously the challenges of getting anything to work in that sort of environment are horrific. But someone is going to have to think up the machines that can work there, otherwise how will they ever get it dismantled? I think we need some sort of international organisation that has lots of big and rugged machines that can cope with any environment, permanently at the ready to go to the rescue after some major emergency. Best locate it somewhere neutral, ideally near the equator. Nice tropical island somewhere?<
I think such an organisation would be much more focussed on saving lives, & not worry very much about cleaning up afterwards.
The reason there isn't good equipment that can deal with this is that all the manufacturers in the field have been concentrating their efforts on battle-hardened equipment that can deal with catastrophic failures in wind farms, solar farms, and tidal generation schemes.
Oh... Wait a minute.... Never mind, more nuclear power in the UK! (let's site the bastards in the centre of London - that's where the power requirement is, after all)
Fukushima: the best advert for nuclear power ever.
Outdated design, earthquake out with specs and the only issue was not having an air supply for emergency generators above the wave. And NO-ONE died! Modern facilities are ten times as safe and could withstand a plane strike. Nuclear power now!
"What 'modern facilities'? In the US our "newest" reactor was designed in 1973 and finally opened for production last year"
ACK - the "no nukes" wanna-clue enviro-fascists have, unfortunately, been WAY too successful. you know, like THESE IDIOTS.
I wonder if Trump will try to reverse that? I think he might...
A power plant out on the west coast (San Onofre) was shut down because the N.R.C. refused to approve running it at reduced power while they solved problems with a "new design" boiler. They had 2 running reactors with this new boiler, but it rattled to much internally and one of them started to leak (the other was shut down for maintenance). So they shut down and investigated. It was looking like a design flaw, and they wanted to reduce power to keep one of them doing SOMETHING while they did a refit on the other unit, etc. (radiation that was being released was WAY below the legal limit). BUT... N.R.C. wouldn't let them. Because, ENVIRO WACKOS!
So what did S.C.E. do? They CLOSED! THE! PLANT! ENTIRELY! laying off 100's of staff and leaving everything in-place as an ad hoc "radioactive storage site".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Initial_shutdown
This happened during the OBAKA administration, in case anyone wondered, 2012-ish.
Yet according to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) burning aviation fuel will melt steel and cause concrete to crumble. Then there's the Pentagon penetration, how many concrete walls did that plane punch through. So unless the 9/11 report is a work of fiction then surely every nuclear power plant is insanely vulnerable to this kind of attack?
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