Recently I have been on a four-day hiking trip, completing another 80 km (~50 mile) stretch of the 1171 km National Blue Trail running across my tiny country.
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
What needed to happen was anyone exhibiting skills that lead to 'progress' should have been beaten to death immediately.
For instance - if someone announced to the other hunter gatherers - look - I have harnessed fire. Immediate throat slitting - and feed that person to the pigs.
Or look - I planted this seed - now we can feed many more mouths! That bastard should have been burned alive.
If that had been done early --- we would not be about to go extinct
In the film Transcendence, they treat the technological singularity as a means to heal, through technology, all the damage that technology has done to the natural support of life. The protagonist of the film, Johnny Depp, creates nanotechnology capable of synchronizing symbiotically with life and regenerating it. Of course, to create something so sophisticated, he first has to become a god and put his mind into a supercomputer. Just like what some super rich people want to do now. His initial motivation was to be a god, and he justifies his delusion of grandeur by arguing that the only way to save life, and therefore the human being, is to make the human god. It is not necessary to have studied a lot of science and engineering to understand that the only way to achieve a sustainable technology ad eternum is to make it in the image and likeness of life itself, to repair itself, to develop a circular economy with recycling rates of 99% . It is obvious that if the goal is sustainability, it would be much more sensible to conserve the life that remains on the planet instead of continuing to massacre it under the pretext that we must transcend technologically to reinvent life itself. The only thing that explains such stupidity and inefficiency in achieving the goal of sustainability is that the true goal of the human technophile is not sustainability, but the search for power without measure. The problem with the imaginary of progress is that it has instilled in us that we have eyes to always see further and in the end win the race to infinity, but that is impossible, unhealthy and will end up prematurely destroying any intelligent species that is not capable of getting out of that approach. Intelligence, in order not to disappear, will have to end up understanding that its eyes are there to see its place in the underlying network of life and not to dominate that network. Our great power is not so much our ability to dominate, but rather the ability to broadly visualize and understand that interdependence with the natural matrix. Intelligence does not serve to avoid this interdependence, but to contemplate it and transcend by doing so. And we are not even here to preserve life, we do not have a task given by the gods to save life on Earth and spread it throughout the Universe. We are only here to learn to see and contemplate life, and also death, the beauty of the immortal process.
Great post, yes 'progress' through technology is a massive delusion. Living in (relative) harmony with Nature was always the way, as indigenous people (including Native Americans) knew for millennia (and still know).
It's a bit late now to worry about it too much, but it's good to recognise that all the talk from 'leaders' and governments about Net Zero, 'sustainable' growth etc. etc. is absolute bullshit.
All the super-rich and the parasitic managerial classes will be 'reduced' to what we all actually are - animals. Their pampered arses will not cope at all, lol.
Well said.
Thanks B. I looked up "National Blue Trail". It is Hungarian, with a little bit in Austria.
I like Hungary. We (family of 6) visited friends in Szeged for a week and went to Budapest with them in 2005. We faithfully buy Szeged paprika. :-)
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
https://energyskeptic.com/2017/the-devils-scenario-near-miss-at-fukushima-is-a-warning-for-u-s/
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16628547/
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
Thank you B 🙏
What needed to happen was anyone exhibiting skills that lead to 'progress' should have been beaten to death immediately.
For instance - if someone announced to the other hunter gatherers - look - I have harnessed fire. Immediate throat slitting - and feed that person to the pigs.
Or look - I planted this seed - now we can feed many more mouths! That bastard should have been burned alive.
If that had been done early --- we would not be about to go extinct
In the film Transcendence, they treat the technological singularity as a means to heal, through technology, all the damage that technology has done to the natural support of life. The protagonist of the film, Johnny Depp, creates nanotechnology capable of synchronizing symbiotically with life and regenerating it. Of course, to create something so sophisticated, he first has to become a god and put his mind into a supercomputer. Just like what some super rich people want to do now. His initial motivation was to be a god, and he justifies his delusion of grandeur by arguing that the only way to save life, and therefore the human being, is to make the human god. It is not necessary to have studied a lot of science and engineering to understand that the only way to achieve a sustainable technology ad eternum is to make it in the image and likeness of life itself, to repair itself, to develop a circular economy with recycling rates of 99% . It is obvious that if the goal is sustainability, it would be much more sensible to conserve the life that remains on the planet instead of continuing to massacre it under the pretext that we must transcend technologically to reinvent life itself. The only thing that explains such stupidity and inefficiency in achieving the goal of sustainability is that the true goal of the human technophile is not sustainability, but the search for power without measure. The problem with the imaginary of progress is that it has instilled in us that we have eyes to always see further and in the end win the race to infinity, but that is impossible, unhealthy and will end up prematurely destroying any intelligent species that is not capable of getting out of that approach. Intelligence, in order not to disappear, will have to end up understanding that its eyes are there to see its place in the underlying network of life and not to dominate that network. Our great power is not so much our ability to dominate, but rather the ability to broadly visualize and understand that interdependence with the natural matrix. Intelligence does not serve to avoid this interdependence, but to contemplate it and transcend by doing so. And we are not even here to preserve life, we do not have a task given by the gods to save life on Earth and spread it throughout the Universe. We are only here to learn to see and contemplate life, and also death, the beauty of the immortal process.
Excellent B!
A related post:
https://placereseninvernadero.blogspot.com/2022/04/tecnologia-organica-e-inorganica.html
An astonishing hypothesis.
Exothermic core-mantle decoupling.
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2024/05/12/exothermic-core-mantle-decoupling-dzhanibekov-oscillation-ecdo-theory/
Great post, yes 'progress' through technology is a massive delusion. Living in (relative) harmony with Nature was always the way, as indigenous people (including Native Americans) knew for millennia (and still know).
It's a bit late now to worry about it too much, but it's good to recognise that all the talk from 'leaders' and governments about Net Zero, 'sustainable' growth etc. etc. is absolute bullshit.
All the super-rich and the parasitic managerial classes will be 'reduced' to what we all actually are - animals. Their pampered arses will not cope at all, lol.
I recall Taleb ... Back Swan... being in a board room with Very Serious People... and thinking ... what a f789ing joke all of this is...
When BAU implodes... even though I die... I enjoy knowing that The Very Serious People all die too.