Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

[audiotech]

PART TWO

 

[elbows]

Why aren't all global forces being mobilised now to deal with this very serious crises?

These hand-sitters mobilise for f*cking war easily enough.

Do you mean the nuclear issue or other disaster stuff too?

With the nuclear stuff the normal chain of events is for the operating company to keep it cards too close to its chest until something really bad happens and control slips away, then the government gets angry and assumes a more immediate role. Then if the situation deteriorates further, international assistance may be allowed in to help more. Of course by that stage its often a bit late. This event seems to have followed this familiar pattern.

Too many different things have happened at the site to make any predictions about how much others can hope to help right now, although there are a number of worrying ongoing situations there that could be rectified in the coming days, avoiding some additional terrible problems. Some hope is presently being floated that external power will be hooked up to at least the 3rd reactor soon, and that may make the situation easier to handle, depending on how much equipment is left working.

Best case scenario right now is that they get all the spent fuel pools under control, no more reactors suffer containment damage, and what is left of the cores of the 3 reactors are brought under control. Then there would be a long and messy task of clearing up the site as much as possible, and more details should also emerge about the scale of contamination to the surrounding region.

Worst case scenario is further problems at the active reactors leading to further containment breaches and even full core meltdowns, along with further explosions and emissions from the fuel pools, with an extreme worst case for the fuel pool being that a nuclear reaction starts up in one of the pools. This last scenario described as extremely unlikely but for some reason the company mentioned that the chances of it happening are not 0. There hasnt been much detailed info about the actual state of fuel pools at units 4 or 3, other than that they are in trouble, that the temp at unit 4's pool was higher than usual when it was last possible to measure it several days ago, that there have been fires and explosions at unit 4 that are presumed to have been caused by the fuel pool, and visible emissions from unit 3 that are now presumed to be coming from the pool rather than the reactor itself.

It seems likely that what will happen may be somewhere in between these two extremes.

 

[audiotech]

Both.

 

[Fuchs66]

That makes sense, with it being additional. The max safe dose being less that standard background radiation (let alone places like Cornwall, at 7.8 mSv per year), didn't quite compute.

It's not really a maximum safe dose, some of us (registered radiation workers) can have an annual dose of as much as 50 mSv (so long as it averages out over 3 years to 20mSv/a). The 1mSv is the maximum allowable dose for the general public but when it comes to radiation there is no "safe" dose.

 

[Corax]

It's not really a maximum safe dose, some of us (registered radiation workers) can have an annual dose of as much as 50 mSv (so long as it averages out over 3 years to 20mSv/a). The 1mSv is the maximum allowable dose for the general public but when it comes to radiation there is no "safe" dose.

Yeah sorry - 'safe dose' was lazy.

 

[Barking_Mad]

what happened with the black boxes Audiotech?

apologies, Windows update had replaced embedded youtube with black boxes! I thought it was a new feature

 

[Barking_Mad]

Guardian

7.30pm: AP is reporting a very worrying comment by Greg Jaczko, chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

US nuclear agency chief says no more water in spent fuel pool at troubled Japan plant.

That presumably refers to No 4 reactor. Jaczko is currently giving a briefing on the nuclear plant crisis in Japan to the US Senate's committee on the environment and public works. (There's a live webcast of the briefing here.)

If Jaczko's statement is correct, then there is nothing to stop the exposed fuel rods from getting hotter and melting down. And Jaczko should know: the NRC has experts on the ground in Japan.

alternatively

7.49pm: Jaczko's worrying comments below (see 7.30pm) are at odds with reports from the Japanese media saying that coolant continues to be added into the Fukushima reactors.

According to the last report from the Jiji Press agency, posted nearly three hours ago, states:

[Tepco] kept working to pump seawater into the pressure vessels of the No 1, 2 and 3 reactors of the Fukushima No 1 nuclear plant. But the water levels have not reached the top of the nuclear fuel rods, and portions of the fuel rods thus remained exposed.

On the otherhand, the discrepency between the US and official Japanese position might explain why the US has told its citizens to maintain a 50 mile (80km) exclusion zone around Fukushima, compared with the 20 mile (30km) zone imposed by the Japanese government

 

[invisibleplanet]

US Embassy in Japan has advised it's citizens to move to distance of 80km away from reactor zone

 

[bi0boy]

when it comes to radiation there is no "safe" dose.

Actually, this is the dogma, but it's theoretically the case that low doses should reduce cancer risk by activating DNA repair enzymes. However there isn't enough data to show how this works in practice so "there is no safe dose" is the default assumption, but actually that's likely to be wrong, though we don't know for sure.

 

[elbows]

alternatively

The Guardian are just confusing themselves there. There is no contradiction because the US bloke was talking about the fuel pool, and the other reports that coolant was still being added applied to reactors 1 through 3, not fuel pools.

The only reason the US comments about no more water being left in the spent fuel pool at unit 4 are alarming, is because the media, governments and company concerned managed not to speculate too much about this possibility in recent days, preferring to talk of pool 4 as though it is still intact, and may have some water that is just too low or too hot. None of these assumptions are safe, its coming up to 48 hours since things first went noticeably wrong in that pool and for all I know the pool has been empty or broken ever since. I doubt they know either, they just suspect, and occasionally hint at these possibilities, and the use of US spy plane may be at least in part to find out more about the realities of this pool.

 

[elbows]

US Embassy in Japan has advised it's citizens to move to distance of 80km away from reactor zone

Yes, this was mentioned a little earlier. I did some digging and found the official documents on this:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2011/11-050.pdf

This document shows details of the calculations used to reach their conclusion that this level of evacuation was warranted, based on US safety guidelines. There are no details of what assumptions and other data was fed into the computer model, so its a prediction rather than based on the reality, and we cant judge its accuracy, but with a bit of study about rem's these numbers at least show why they are worried.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2011/11-050_Attchmt.pdf

 

[Barking_Mad]

......So, these spent fuel rods - how many are there in each unit?

Although Tokyo Electric said it also continued to deal with cooling system failures and high pressures at half a dozen of its 10 reactors in the two Fukushima complexes, fears mounted about the threat posed by the pools of water where years of spent fuel rods are stored.

At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.

“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.

People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.

Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.

 

[lopsidedbunny]

[video]http://www.youtube.com/user/MercatorInfogr#p/u/2/08F5NxHwhcs[/video]

Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant.. pretty good so far I would like to see more of this...

[video]http://www.youtube.com/user/MercatorInfogr#p/u/1/7qkbggbXJV8[/video]

Meanwhile jumping a head... The danger of radiation in Japan...

 

[xes]

......So, these spent fuel rods - how many are there in each unit?

I remember seeing a figure of 600,000 in total, but i frequent some suspect places, so I'd be willing to bet I'm off by 1 or 2.

 

[Barking_Mad]

I remember seeing a figure of 600,000 in total, but i frequent some suspect places, so I'd be willing to bet I'm off by 1 or 2.

Id seen that figure too but decided not to post it. However MSM seem reluctant to wager a number, can't find one anywhwere...

 

[Corax]

I remember seeing a figure of 600,000 in total, but i frequent some suspect places, so I'd be willing to bet I'm off by 1 or 2.

As long as you're not going to tell us the reactors are in America.

 

[xes]

this place says (and also holds the quote you posted up there) "The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. "The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods."

http://my.firedoglake.com/kirkmurph...-reactor-would-be-like-chernobyl-on-steroids/

 

[Barking_Mad]

CSM has this photo of one of the spent fuel pools from 2010

And some info as to how many each hold.

Each "fuel assembly," roughly 15 feet long, is a unit containing 82 fuel rods full of the reactor's fuel: uranium oxide pellets. During periodic refueling shutdowns, workers typically replace 20 to 30 percent of the fuel assemblies.

Once extracted from the reactor, the used assemblies are housed in close-fitting steel containers that are treated with boron, to ensure they don't resume the chain reactions necessary to generate electricity.

The used assemblies are then submerged in 45 feet of water in a spent-fuel pool. The water acts as a radiation barrier, in addition to serving as a coolant.

....

At the stricken Fukushima I plant, much of the spent fuel in the six pools had been moved to a reprocessing facility. But No. 4's pool has a full reactor core's worth of spent fuel sitting in it – fuel withdrawn from No. 4's reactor during a routine maintenance outage that began on Nov. 30, 2010.

Article is good and worth a read

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0...re-spent-fuel-pools-and-why-are-they-a-threat

 

[Barking_Mad]

this place says (and also holds the quote you posted up there) "The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. "The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods."

http://my.firedoglake.com/kirkmurph...-reactor-would-be-like-chernobyl-on-steroids/

Yeah, i had posted comments by that guy before but i wasnt sure on the numbers, so didnt want to jump straight in...the CSM quote above seems to suggest different numbers, but im tired and maths never was my strong point....

Edit: From the photo above there are a possible 660 slots for fuel rods but clearly they are not all full.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Ok i have found the answer as of November last year. It suggests 1,760 Ton-U, or 84% capacity.

Page 4 of this pdf worth a read btw.

 

[ska invita]

is it just me or does the Japanese Emperor look like he has a badly photoshopped head, even in the video it looks far too big.*

*sorry, serious thread.

Yeah, theres a charcter in an anime film, maybe a Miyazaki, that looks jsut like him - i can see it it in my head but cant place what the film is - i bet its based on him

*adam curtis has posted an interesting film on his blog

As a background to the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant I am putting up a film I made a while ago called A is for Atom. It was part of a series about politics and science called Pandora's Box.

The film shows that from very early on - as early as 1964 - US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored.

he film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants.

Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.

In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claims in the film that General Electric in effect refused.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/a_is_for_atom.html

 

[Open Sauce]

I'm really becoming very concerned about the meltdown currently occuring and i think everyone is estimating the danger. Levels of exageration and politically motivated hysteria are reaching critical mass accross the media in the london area. There is a serious danger that the dramatic and sudden increase in the levels of misplaced self rightousness and pompousity will result in a chain reaction that will be unstoppable and lead to a huge explosion of ingorance that will spread throughout the entire country.

Mobs made up of crazed members of the public will descend on nuclear power stations around the country bearing flaming torches like the villagers from hammer horror dracula and frankenstein films and demand that each power station be torn down and replaced by a single casio solar powered pocket calculator from the mid 1980's and one of those 12 inch tall plastic windmills like the ones you used to get from the seaside when you went on a day trip. Both these devices will be wired up to the national grid to provide a green, sustainable, cardon freindly (please feel free to insert the meaningless buzz word of your choice here) source of energy.

It will also avert the very real threat of giant slugs, mutated by nuclear radiation so that they have grown to the size of houses, rampaging (very slowly) through our cities, terrorising the population and eating all the lettuce in tesco's so there is none left for us.

Compared to the minor side issues of towns wiped off the map and thousands missing, focusing on the temperature of a nuclear reactor is whats really important and doesnt show any media bias or prejudice on an issue of contention whatsoever.

Spare us the cut and paste

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co...0b#comment-6a00d8341c565553ef0147e33d16b1970b

 

[Corax]

Spare us the cut and paste

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co...0b#comment-6a00d8341c565553ef0147e33d16b1970b

 

[Iguana]

I'm very worried about the health of any foetuses with a reasonable radius of Fukushima. The levels of radiation being reported in certain areas are way over the necessary level to cause miscarriage and serious birth defects in foetuses under 20 weeks gestation.

# In the first two weeks postconception or the second two weeks from the last menstrual period, the embryo is very resistant to the malforming effects of x rays. The embryo is, however, sensitive to the lethal effects of x rays, although doses much higher than 5 rad or 50 mSv are necessary to cause a miscarriage.

# From the third to the eighth week of pregnancy, the embryo is in the period of early embryonic development but is not affected with either birth defects, pregnancy loss, or growth retardation unless the exposure is substantially above the 20 rad (200 mSv) exposure.

# From the eighth to the fifteenth week of pregnancy, the embryo or fetus is sensitive to the effects of radiation on the central nervous system. But here again, the exposure has to be very high. The threshold has been estimated to be higher than 30 rad (300 mSv) before an effect can be seen on the IQ of the developing embryo. General diagnostic studies do not reach these levels and, therefore, these effects are rarely of concern for patients.

# Beyond the 20th week of pregnancy, when the fetus is completely developed, it has become more resistant to the developmental effects of radiation. In fact, the fetus is probably no more vulnerable to many of the effects of radiation than the mother in the latter part of pregnancy. But the most important thing is that practically none of the diagnostic radiological procedures will affect an embryo at this late stage of pregnancy and certainly there is no risk for birth defects or miscarriage from the range of exposures that occur from diagnostic studies.

http://www.hps.org/hpspublications/articles/pregnancyandradiationexposureinfosheet.html

 

[elbows]

Well the helicopters dropping water on reactors 3 and 4 has begun, and has been shown on tv. It looks like they cannot fly low enough, or stop over the reactors, so the water is going all over the place, cant tell from the tv footage how much is making it to the targets.

 

[ska invita]

Looks like its going to take some kamikaze volunteers to do the desperate work here on in...

 

[maldwyn]

I've been too stunned to post on this thread until now.

The first time I smiled throughout these dreadful events was seeing some footage on the news of a teenager roll his eyes while having a geiger counter waved over him.

 

[Weller]

I've been too stunned to post on this thread until now.

The first time I smiled throughout these dreadful events was seeing some footage on the news of a teenager roll his eyes while having a geiger counter waved over him.

did he smile and roll his eyes when they pushed and strapped him in the helicopter to drop the water though

 

[fen_boy]

There's some fucking weird tin foil hat scaremongering going on on this thread. The interesting and factual posts are in danger of getting lost amongst bizarre cut and paste odysseys.

 

[Weller]

There's some fucking weird tin foil hat scaremongering going on on this thread. The interesting and factual posts are in danger of getting lost amongst bizarre cut and paste odysseys.

While that is probably true watching this mornings press conference about today being the last day to do anything about reactor 3 and using riot water cannons to cool nuclear reactors you do have to think a bit wtf
it does seem a bit like they dont know themselves when they mention not knowing about water levels for sure and it being trial and error maybe something got lost in translation but it all seems just a bit Chernobyl deja vu all these years later especially with the US and Japan disagreeing about the severity and how big the exclusion zone should be , US saying 50 miles evacuation .