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Comment by mikemike5000 | Hacker News Reader

So, what's the long game with Fukushima? This has been going on for so long and it's concerning that seemingly very little progress has been made.

Edit: added "seemingly"... as I can say for certain the degree of progress that has been made.

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Decommissioning a damaged reactor is insanely expensive and, in too many cases, not possible. Chernobyl is at best contained, not cleaned up. 30 years after the fire and meltdown, the giant curved roof built to cover it was moved into position last year. That will hold things for a few more decades. The next generation will have to work out the next steps.

The jammed AVR pebble bed reactor in Germany is contained, but there's no way to dismantle and dispose of it. Current plans are to wait 60 years and then try to figure out something.

Fukushima’s mess will also take decades. The site generated huge amounts of contaminated water, and there's now a processing plant to take most radioactive contaminants out of the water. The water still has tritium after processing. The half-life of tritium is 12 years, so that will cool off in a few decades. Meanwhile, huge farms of water tanks store the stuff. Lots of radioactive dirt has been dug up and buried deeper somewhere else. There's a refrigerated "ice wall" to try to stop leakage into the ocean. Not much has been done with the reactor vessels themselves. As today's story reports, they can't even get a robot close to the reactor vessel.

This makes one very discouraged about nuclear power.

Tritium & tritiated water can be somewhat easily separated from water. Just freeze the mixture, and it forms layers. However, there probably is quite a bit of tritiated water.

However, there probably is quite a bit of tritiated water.

Yes. Here's the tank farm.[1]

It could probably be let out into the ocean without much harm, if not done all at once. But there's opposition to that. Meanwhile, it decays with a half-life of 12 years, so eventually it will be harmless. Frustratingly, the concentration of tritium is too low for commercial extraction.

[1] http://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/fukushimatanks_...

Solar panels folks. Solar panels. Wind. Batteries. We can do it, no problem. Electricity costs a little more, but your car ends up costing less. Less maintenance on fewer parts - just swap out the battery which declines in cost each year.

Keep fossil fuels and wood for the things solar & wind will have trouble covering: airplanes, ocean shipping, winter heating.

We cannot do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yNj1zEh-nM

You only need the first 15 minutes of this talk to see why current renewables won't scale. The world needs something like 15 terawatts. When this talk was recorded, solar electricity produced something like .001 TW. We're now closing in on .03 --- and there are huge parts of the world that still haven't industrialized yet. We'd apparently need to be printing and distributing and deploying solar cells the way we do newspapers to have any hope of using photovoltaic to offset our total energy demand.

Nuclear doesn't scale either, but the notion that we're all just holding back on renewables out of greed because all it takes is wind and solar... well, it's easily refuted.

Our descendants have to do it. Coal, oil, and natural gas have maybe a century left. Fracking made more hydrocarbons accessible, but the supply is still quite finite.

We can't do the thing suggested upthread, eliminating dependence on all consumable energy sources by harnessing current wind and solar technology. Ultimately I agree that we have to find a way to do it. But there's a virulent belief that we can do it with technology that is being produced today, or might be produced in the near future if demand changed. No.

Fortunately we don't have to cover all shortfall with just PV. Increasing energy efficiency and reducing consumption (including personal car ownership) in the first world can get us there the rest of the way.

>This makes one very discouraged about nuclear power.

Yes, I used to think it can be made safe, but we are just hoping that we will be able to handle the waste later. Then if there will be a 100.000 year accident every 10-15 years, it will be a rather depressing future...

I think that solar must be the way to do it. If we can't make do with solar, we won't be able to sustain the current population size.

Every day they let it cool the job gets a little easier, so they're in no particular hurry.

It's always been a multi-decade cleanup project, but recently the estimates were pushed further into the future (~40 years). Also, the last article I'd read puts it at ~$180 billion. I can easily see that double before the end.

Is there a breakdown of the costs of the cleanup?

>So, what's the long game with Fukushima? This has been going on for so long and it's concerning that seemingly very little progress has been made.

Long? They are still, to this day, trying to bury and isolate Chernobyl's reactors.

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