Solutions to assist Japan. FROM OUT OF BOX THINKERS.

Originally posted by 46ACE
If the rods are creating heat through nuclear fission you need to absorb the excess nuetrons and slow
the reaction.(with boron ( toxic)or graphite i think) .. I would maybe dump a powdered lead slurry into it( toxic)but the lead would act as shielding between rods and anything melting absorbs heat energy

Cannot use graphite. Graphite burns, which is what happened with Chernobyl. The rods were completely exposed because the containment unit was made out of graphite and burned away.

pour reinforced cement over the water n rods till hardened.

This hold heat in and the reaction will get worse.
Sand will do the same thing.

The reactor rods need cooled NOT GET HOTTER
Dropping anything but water on the spent fuel rods will damage the container and spread the fuel or bring together fuel rod in a critical mass and cause a runaway reaction. this means no bombs. containers of coolant or any other hard objects
A critical mass produces neutrons and will cause the reaction to go on for years
Right now the fuel is just getting hot but there is no increasing neutron reaction

Anything that makes the reaction worse is VERY bad.

The Russians tried concrete and sand and the fuel just melted right out the bottom.

Water and boric acid is the best option.

Once these reactors are cooled for a couple years with water then the damaged fuel can be removed and the site mothballed.
This was what was done with Three Mile Island.
www.nytimes.com...
www.scientificamerican.com...

Cruise Ships. 5-10 of them.

Plus - an ARMY of well equipped and well protected (full body anti-radiation suits of the highest quality on earth) nuclear engineers, to work with and if needed relieve the workers at the plant, right away.

Power to the plants - equipment brought in. Generators! Power!

That's about all I have in mind at the moment.

Oh and..

Praying, also for anything, anything at all to turn this crisis around in a hurry.

Help us God and help us to help ourselves and one another wherever possible, amen.

We've got to get through this thing ok, K?

This was an off topic post....i apologize for wasting ATS;s bandwidth and promise to stay on subject

reply to post by Ophiuchus 13


How about this : Send in the Top Executives from Tepco dressed in tyvek suits and dusk masks,with fire hoses.
Or drop them from choppers into the storage pools , and bulldoze the whole place with mud,sand ,and rubble if you prefer. Finally encase with concrete and lead.

how about flying over the plant and dropping sheets of lead on it so the heat will melt the lead and absorb the radiation?

reply to post by agentblue


Make reactors with ejectable cores so we can fire them into the sun if needed! Lol.

What about we build walls around the whole site and fill it with water like a gigantic shark tank!

the entire area is a nuclear dump site, they will never be able to clean it up, it will take 40 years for the radioactivity to go away

my suggestion is to strategically place small nukes near the reactors and just nuke the entire site, thus burning up those rods and ending the whole affair. its not like the nukes will trigger an earthquake or tsunami, and it will nullify the ongoing nuclear threat

Seems to me that we have several critical issues.

1) Three reactors have melted causing radiation levels to be so high that they were using water canons.

2)Explosions, earthquake, and tsunami have caused critical damage. Without an assessment of the damage I cannot comment on the complications to systems but we do know the cooling has been destroyed.

3)Pools have not caught fire but will without water being replenished. Pools cannot be entombed due to their nature they must continue to circulate to prevent overheating and as they sit they will only produce more steam and heat.

The best I can say is this:

One to two million men will have to be sent in to remove the fuel rods from the pools. This will require carefully timed work rotations. This fuel will require vertical dry casks for storage, these will have to be fabricated in a hurry.
Next enough debris must be removed to allow the construction of large containment shells around each reactor building. If any of the reactors have undergone full meltdown it may also be necessary to dig tunnels under the plant to prevent the super heated mass from burning through the crust of the earth (e.g. Chernobyl). After this a more permanent containment can be erected.

Estimated death rate will begin near 100% fatality and gradually reach a 20-30% long-term survival rate as more radiation is contained.

There are to many details to say but this would be is a good start.
I could provide a more decisive action plan with proper information but then again so could they.

reply to post by anumohi


It could be possible to do so but would more likely cause a chain reaction intensifying the explosion. With 600,000 tons of radioactive material on site it would be impossible to burn all the fuel in the blast without an explosion larger than Chicxulub (65 million years ago.) But unfortunately physics won't allow this. Due to the area and vast amount of material, the end result would be to kill all life on the planet. The majority of the fuel would be to far from the core of the explosion and therefore would not under go fission and as a result would be carried aloft.

The melting temperature of molten fuel rods is aprox. 5189 degrees Fahrenheit or 2865 Celsius.

The solid with the highest melting point is tungsten. With a melting point at 6192 Fahrenheit or 3422 °Celsius.

An out of the box Idea that can potentially save the radiation catastrophe would be to not cool the nuclear fuel, but to move the nuclear fuel.

If each containment enclosure were encased in a thick tungsten "bucket" if you will, a super giant helicopter or helicopters capable of carrying the weight of the whole core itself within the tungsten bucket can carry it to a place in the world where the threat of radiation is not as life threatening.

I know carrying the fuel away was already posted here, but I give an enclosure that would not melt during the process.

Now to find out how much weight the largest helicopter can handle and how many there has to by flying to lift that tungsten bucket up "somewhere else" more human safe.

How about a half mile down hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere and bury the top and call it history.

And I sure hope they would not accidentally spill it prematurely.

reply to post by anumohi


Nuclear weapons don't work that way, all that would occur is a massive level of highly radioactive particles with extremely long half-lives being put into the upper-atmosphere to spread contamination over a very wide area. Think Chernobyl now magnify it to cover a quarter of the world.

However, there are lessons to be learned from Chernobyl here. In order to begin to douse the reactor there, the Soviets used helicopters to drop thousands of tons of sand, lead and boron on the reactor itself. Boron acts as neutron poisons to reactions and so therefore effectively silence the release of neutrons from a source. This could be used if the need is to stop a fission reaction in the spent fuel rods.

The dropping of lead however, while at first sounding like a very good idea because of its radiation-shielding properties, presents other issues. Powdered lead is flammable, and the fumes produced are extremely toxic. If this was dropped on a flaming part of the complex, add poison gas clouds to the list of problems.

Add to this that precision is not the easiest when dropping materials from a helicopter. The video of the attempted water drops from the plant would have been laughably inaccurate if they weren't so tragically pathetic.

I am no engineer, and I don't claim to have any solution to this, so far the best I can say is to pray, if you are the sort to do so, that the people of Japan are not horribly scarred from this disaster the way the people of the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are to this day by Chernobyl.

reply to post by Ophiuchus 13


I dont think they can do anything there. They need to relocate the people. That would take time and the clock's ticking.

Only their ET tech would help.

reply to post by Sky watcher


Well if the radiation didnt poison the water that would be a great idea.

reply to post by Redevilfan09


I think we need to assume the oceans and by extension the world are a lost cause if we do not stop the radiation pouring out. I love the "..safely out to sea." BS being reported. Cs-137 will be absorbed by all life in the sea. It will build in concentration through natural processes of things eating each other. We and other non-aquatic life will eat the sea life and through the same natural processes disperse it through terrestrial ecosystems. Same for P's, U's, etc.

Why not push it into the sea and eat each other until there's no one left?

reply to post by harrytuttle


i have thought the "nuke it" thru and say first: how much nuke would be required to release all the thermonuclear energy in each reactor and cooling ponds?, then realize that each reactor and it's cooling ponds could in theory be more megatons than the earth could handle! wow ! the only option i can think of is volunteers working in the crafts and engineering that would be needed to work in repairing the reactors bringing them under control! one heck of a feat. give them the best of materials and support and pay their families a great amount of gold! if i knew i was dying in a few weeks or a couple of months i will!### but what ever is to be done Must be done! just fn do it! it must be done. and i am not in a beer commercial!

reply to post by bluewaterservant


Not to mention that the pools contain enough material to give over a trillion lethal human doses. Just do something now.

Anyone else ready to volunteer?

they just need heat resistant robots to remove each rod and drop them into shielded heavy water containers one at a time until they get them all out, then move them to a vault pool somewhere until they can figure out the best way to dispose of them.

japan is the robot kings of the planet, why the hell didn't they have all this stuff worked out before opening up for business?

To all of the people thinking that nuking a nuclear plant would have any possibility of working please read this:

Wikipedia-Nuclear Weapon Design

Creating a nuclear chain reaction for a bomb is not just a simple matter of throwing a bunch of uranium or plutonium in a can with a fuse. This stuff is not like normal explosives, it is a special kind of reaction that is very particular. If we were to set off atomic weapons at the site it would not produce fission of the radioactive materials at the site, it would only spread them. What you are talking about isn't making the world's biggest nuclear bomb, but the world's biggest radiological dirty bomb.

Just watched on the news they now have two firefighting snorkel trucks from Tokyo with 66 foot booms on site.
www.mountaingrove.net...

These should be able to get water right into the spent fuel cooling tanks if they relay water to them with other fire rigs.