elbows
Well-Known Member
The news since I last posted has mostly been about water and evacuation zones.
The government finally got round to banning entry into the 20km zone, firmly spelt out which new areas to the north west are to be evacuated, whilst at the same time very disturbing images & stats came out on the number of animals left to die in the zone.
TEPCOs recovery plan was indeed used to spin some optimistic bullshit to evacuees that maybe they could go home in 6-9 months, without actually promising anything. Many suspect that some places will remain no go zones for decades to come, but we shall see, I would expect that over time they will somewhat reshape the zone to take account of the contamination realities, and so a few places within the crude radius may become available to humans again sooner.
The stories about water are numerous, covering a variety of areas:
Data from the sea showing high contamination in the area of the previous leak, but a reduced level further away from this spot, suggesting their containment strategy is at least partially effective.
Worrying stories of contaminated groundwater rising at many locations, including reactors 5 & 6. Seems that the site required active pumping to deal with this stuff during normal times, and in these abnormal times this task has not been performed, leading to these issues.
Mixed news on dealing with reactor 2 heavily contaminated basement & trench water. They have successfully started to pump this water to another building where it will be stored. But at one point after pumping the water level in a trench was higher than when they started, although a day or so later it sounded like the level was some cm down from the original level, so will have to keep watching this one to see if its the 'fighting a losing battle' that its often sounded like.
Some concern from the regulator about TEPCOs plans to flood the drywell of reactor 1, up to the level of the fuel rods. They are concerned that the extra weight will make the structure vulnerable to damage from further earthquakes. As this article points out, water is thought to already be accumulating in the containment vessel already anyway, due to steam condensing. They think it is about half-way up the bulb-shaped part of the vessel so far.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_05.html
Also related to water weight, the unit 4 spent fuel pool is in the spotlight again, as I feared it might be when I briefly mentioned this subject some days ago:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_12.html
The government finally got round to banning entry into the 20km zone, firmly spelt out which new areas to the north west are to be evacuated, whilst at the same time very disturbing images & stats came out on the number of animals left to die in the zone.
TEPCOs recovery plan was indeed used to spin some optimistic bullshit to evacuees that maybe they could go home in 6-9 months, without actually promising anything. Many suspect that some places will remain no go zones for decades to come, but we shall see, I would expect that over time they will somewhat reshape the zone to take account of the contamination realities, and so a few places within the crude radius may become available to humans again sooner.
The stories about water are numerous, covering a variety of areas:
Data from the sea showing high contamination in the area of the previous leak, but a reduced level further away from this spot, suggesting their containment strategy is at least partially effective.
Worrying stories of contaminated groundwater rising at many locations, including reactors 5 & 6. Seems that the site required active pumping to deal with this stuff during normal times, and in these abnormal times this task has not been performed, leading to these issues.
Mixed news on dealing with reactor 2 heavily contaminated basement & trench water. They have successfully started to pump this water to another building where it will be stored. But at one point after pumping the water level in a trench was higher than when they started, although a day or so later it sounded like the level was some cm down from the original level, so will have to keep watching this one to see if its the 'fighting a losing battle' that its often sounded like.
Some concern from the regulator about TEPCOs plans to flood the drywell of reactor 1, up to the level of the fuel rods. They are concerned that the extra weight will make the structure vulnerable to damage from further earthquakes. As this article points out, water is thought to already be accumulating in the containment vessel already anyway, due to steam condensing. They think it is about half-way up the bulb-shaped part of the vessel so far.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_05.html
Also related to water weight, the unit 4 spent fuel pool is in the spotlight again, as I feared it might be when I briefly mentioned this subject some days ago:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_12.html
Tokyo Electric Power Company has decided to be more cautious about the volume of cooling water injected into the spent fuel pool of one of its reactors.
This is due to fear that the reactor building might be further damaged by the weight of the water itself.
The company has been injecting water daily into the spent fuel pools of the reactors to prevent fuel rods from being exposed and further damaged.
At the Number 4 reactor's pool, the water temperature was about 91 degrees Celsius on Friday, more than 50 degrees higher than the normal level, and TEPCO was forced to inject 200 tons of water. Substantial amounts of water will have to be injected daily.