#Fukushima Contaminated Water Treatment: 75 Tonnes of Water Processed in 5 Hours

Diposkan oleh Pengetahuan dan Pengalaman on Sunday, June 19, 2011

Information I found in Chunichi Shinbun says the Toshiba-Kurion-Areva-Hitachi water treatment system at Fukushima managed to process 75 tonnes of highly contaminated water in 5 hours before it was manually shut down.

That's 15 tonnes per hour.

At that pace, it is 360 tonnes per day, and they are pouring 500 tonnes of water per day.

And it also means the contamination level that they expected the Kurion's subsystem to reach in a month was reached in 5 hours. That means the contamination was 144 times more than they had calculated.

(As someone said, it is as if they were reconstituting the nuclear fuel rods.)

I have some questions for the experts on this blog.

Why do they need to do this serially? Kurion's "vessel" (cylinder) is 90 centimeter in diameter, 2.3 meter high. It sure seems like a system meant for much smaller amount of water with much less contamination and the treatment process is to be done very carefully and slowly.

If you pour literally tons of water that needs to be cleaned fast, if you connect the cylinders serially, of course the very first cylinder would take a radioactive hit and the whole system would stop.

Why can't they just fill up a 20-foot container with zeolite, dump water from the top, put the spigot at the bottom, connect a hose to collect water back into a tank, dump the water again until the zeolite in the container gets too dirty? Have several such containers and do it at the same time.

Or for that matter, forget the neat system set up inside the building. Just dump bags of zeolite in the building basements where the contaminated water sits. And forget the idea of circulating the water to cool the reactor. The reactors are cool already because they are devoid of the corium.

Or bring an old oil tanker or two, as many people in Japan and outside have suggested from the beginning, and store the water there until a better water treatment system can be built and tested.

(Oh I forgot. I don't have PhD.)