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American company Kurion Inc, an innovator in nuclear waste management, says that as of Aug 17, cesium levels in the contaminated water within the facilities of the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had dropped by more than 40% since startup of the Kurion Ion Specific Media System on June 17.
Kurion says the design goal of the Kurion 50 MT/hour (220 gpm) rated system is to remove approximately 99.9% of the cesium, the principal source of radioactivity in the contaminated water. When originally operated in its design configuration, the system was removing cesium by a factor of 70,000 (99.999% removal).
The reliability, safety, and robustness of the Kurion system was recently confirmed by the Aug 16 analysis of water treatment facility operations that shows, with the exception of a few initial operational missteps regarding incorrect valve alignments or having the system taken off line over dose buildup at the first skid (subsequently determined to originate from the upstream feed piping and not the Kurion vessels or media), the Kurion system has quick upset recovery mechanisms and no constraining radioactive hotspots.
The pump redundancy in the Kurion system allows for prompt resumption of operations following a pump trip, minimizing throughput impacts. In fact, because of its pump redundancies and high design margin the system has recently been operating at its design throughput with only three of its four lines, limited by the processing capacity of downstream water treatment facility systems. Since its cesium removal technology is a passive approach, the Kurion system is capable of operating using no system pumps with sufficient pressure at the inlet connection.
Additional processing capacity (Cesium absorption Instruments No. 2) started up Aug 18 with the goal of polishing the Kurion effluent by removing the small amount of remaining cesium or operating in parallel to increase the water treatment facility processing rate to 100 MT/hour.
© Japan Today
9 Comments
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Asagao
Someone please translate. Is this actually good news?
edojin
... only 60% more to go ...
Oracle
That's it! I am selling my Kurion stock!
hanataro
in english please
Smorkian
Yes, this is good news - the water decontamination system is actually reducing cesium levels, which is what it's supposed to do.
Asagao
Ok then, what they gonna do with the collected cesium, which must be like 1200000 times the recommended limit? Bury it, throw it in the sea or dump it in Somalia?
Smorkian
Bury it. You bind the cesium to something stable and bury it in a safe location. The increased concentration is a good thing, the residue takes up less space...
gogogo
I was dead correct, I said this is the problem when they first reported it in my previous comments.
Johannes Weber
The article is mostly good news. The basic statement is that despite initial problems radioactive waste water filtering works mostly as expected and TEPCO is making progress with cleaning up the mess at Fukushima. They are almost halfway done.
The entire idea of all nuclear reprocessing or filtering is to put radioactive material into a solution as ions and then separate the highly radioactive material from the the only slightly radioactive rest. Normally, the highly radioactive fraction is very small in terms of volume. The method bears strong similarity to ion exchangers in washing machines, which is common household technology, tried and true over decades. One of the common chemicals in washing powder, usually called EDTA, is the standard substance to abosrb plutonium in liquids.
These purification plants use certain kinds of resins, which have a threedimensional or surface structure, which is especially suited to adsorption of ions with certain sizes and charges. With threedimensional patterns, the ions are virtually put into the holes of a giant (on atomic scales) threedimensional "crystal lattice".
In the end, you remove the resin and surround it with molten glass and put it into highly resistant steel barrels, which then have to be stored far away from people. The result is a large reduction of the volume of radioactive waste. It does nothing to reduce the radioactivity, but it separates it from the mostly harmless rest.