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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

I think the great thing about this thread (for the most part anyway) is that although all of us are worried about the impact of the radiation leaking from the plant on the area around Fukushima, we've all pretty much stuck to the facts (or at least the snippets of information given out by Tepco)

Whilst I understand your concern Stanley, for the most part your posts come over as somewhat hysterical, and your link dubious at best.
 
robbo180265 said:
I think the great thing about this thread (for the most part anyway) is that although all of us are worried about the impact of the radiation leaking from the plant on the area around Fukushima, we've all pretty much stuck to the facts (or at least the snippets of information given out by Tepco)

Whilst I understand your concern Stanley, for the most part your posts come over as somewhat hysterical, and your link dubious at best.
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Seconded. This is as I recall Stanley's second contribution to the thread and both have come across as hysterical. Elbows' excellent research in particular deserves better.

Stanley, could you start another thread for this stuff?
 
Thirded.

Stanley you are either trolling over the birth of these conjoined twins, or you're a fucking idiot.
 
I think xes has stolen Stanley's login. Bugger the plausibility of the causality: it's a scary story.

(The failure to separate by conjoined twins would have been nearly nine months ago. Well before the radiation. Therefore not caused by it.)
 
Unless something dramatic happens, Im taking approx a week off from paying close attention to Fukushima, as even I have limits to my nerdery.

Here are some links, many quite technical, if anybody is interested:

Photos showing the tsunami hitting the plant are available on TEPCOs photo page: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/index-e.html

Updated recovery roadmap and progress reports:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110517e2.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110517e3.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110517e5.pdf

Latest survey of radiation at many locations on site: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/images/f1-sv-20110519-e.pdf

Map of what they found when humans went into reactor 2 building: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/images/handouts_110519_01-e.pdf
 
And as for something dramatic happening, by vastly increasing the rate at which water was pumped into reactor 3, they do seem to have gotten its temperature down considerably over the last week or so. However they are concerned about hydrogen building up inside the reactor, as they have not been able to start pumping nitrogen into that reactor to prevent hydrogen explosion. And just the other day they sent workers into reactor 3 building, and they discovered radiation levels there are too high for them to do much work, further hampering their ability to start this nitrogen task.
 
elbows said:
Unless something dramatic happens, Im taking approx a week off from paying close attention to Fukushima, as even I have limits to my nerdery.
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Enjoy your break!
Thanks for your all your informative posts.
 
So much for my break. The issue of internal exposure finally came up, in a big way:

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110521p2a00m0na021000c.html

The government has discovered thousands of cases of workers at nuclear power plants outside Fukushima Prefecture suffering from internal exposure to radiation after they visited the prefecture, the head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

Most of the workers who had internal exposure to radiation visited Fukushima after the nuclear crisis broke out following the March 11 quake and tsunami, and apparently inhaled radioactive substances scattered by hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

The revelation has prompted local municipalities in Fukushima to consider checking residents' internal exposure to radiation.
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Stanley Edwards said:
In the meantime 2 headed babies are being born in Southern China... no, really, mutant babies. Who would have thought it?
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Just to pick up on this - populations in Western China, especially uighur territories in Turkestan, have been plagued with incidents of deformed babies on account of the amount of nuclear weapons testing that is carried out in the area.
From 1964-1996, there were 45 nuclear tests held at Lob Nuur lake, the experimental base of china in the territory of Xinjiang Uighur.
Of course, reporting such things leads to suspicious deaths if the reporter is in China...
 
elbows said:
So much for my break. The issue of internal exposure finally came up, in a big way:

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110521p2a00m0na021000c.html
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I find this paragraph the most worrying

"A special earthquake-resistant building that serves as a base for emergency workers at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant had its doors strained by hydrogen explosions at the No. 1 and 3 reactors in March, making it easier for radioactive substances to come in. "We had meals there, so I think radioactive substances came into our bodies," a male worker in his 40s said. "We just drink beer and wash them down," he added."

Surely if you know that the building is compromised the last thing you should do (or allow) is workers to eat and drink in it?

Edit to add: On reflection that paragraph could be translated badly, it seems really unlikely they'd sit and eat without any protection in a compromised area. So it seems likely that they didn't find out it was compromised till after.
 
Seems I only needed a few days off before feeling up to going on about this stuff again.

Looks like they got round to admitting meltdown at reactors 2 & 3, as was strongly hinted at when they admitted to meltdown at reactor 1 recently.

But apparently this story is just business news now:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13497656

What else is new? They took samples from the air at positions above reactor buildings 1 & 4 a few days ago, and published the results on tuesday. I dont think the results were very exciting, will wait till they hopefully do the same for reactors 2 & 3 where things could be more 'interesting'.

The IAEA have arrived in Japan but I dont expect much from this, but who knows.

Reactor 3 temperatures seem largely under control now although I think I missed an important detail when talking about this here in recent weeks - around may 15th they felt the need to put boron in the water for reactor 3.

At reactor 2, where humans inside the building were hampered by high humidity & temperature, they were supposed to go ahead today with work to install new cooling system for spent fuel pool. If this work goes well then we will be able to see how much of this problem is caused by the fuel pool as opposed to the reactor.

The megafloat arrived, which will be used to store some dodgy water. But at the same time the building where they are putting the most contaminated water is nearly full, and the new facilities will not be ready for quite a number of weeks yet, which makes it likely they will have to suspend operations to pump water from some of the basement areas of certain reactors or turbine buildings. The regulators are also demanding that TEPCO step up their efforts to stop further leaks into the sea.

There have been some protests by parents in Fukushima district, over the disgusting guideline of up to 20mSv of radiation being an appropriate maximum for children - they think it should be 1 instead, which is in line with international limits, and apparently the education ministry has admitted that the guideline may need some improvement. Either way, one very real human reality resulting from Fukushima is that some school kids are not allowed outside to do physical activities.
 
The Guardians story on meltdown admission at least makes brief mention of the idea that this meltdown stuff was pretty obvious fairly early on, and that the confirmation was delayed so that people didnt freak out more.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/japan-nuclear-plant-more-meltdowns

Tepco said it had been unable to confirm the meltdowns until it had finished analysing data, but Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University, suggested the revelation was timed to minimise its impact on the public.

"In the early stages of the crisis Tepco may have wanted to avoid panic," he told Reuters. "Now people are used to the situation … nothing is resolved, but normal business has resumed in places like Tokyo."
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Technical summary of latest TEPCO core damage analysis:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110524e13.pdf

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110524e14.pdf

2nd document goes on about temperatures on the last few pages, which includes the crazy graph that shows the ride that reactor 3 temperatures have been on. Its not really the ideal graph when you are trying to spin how stable the situation is at all the reactors these days now is it.

Apparently the full anaysis, which TEPCO have had to submit to the regulator, is hundreds of pages long and will take weeks for them to translate, so only got some limited press reports on other details so far, but it does appear to include some analysis of pressure readings which suggest possible size of containment damage at reactors 1 & 2. This is kind of important so I shall talk more of this when I know more.
 
Here are some basic stories which describe the estimated damage to containment, and the possibility that one of reactor 3's systems was damaged by earthquake. These are stories now because they feature in the long analysis TEPCO submitted the other day, that is not available in full in english yet.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_20.html

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_30.html

Some of the detail is interesting, but the general picture remains the same as what many people would have presumed a long time ago. Just as plenty of people strongly suspected multiple meltdowns, containment damage has also been suspected. As usual the company tried to somewhat play this stuff down in the first few months, but they have occasionally acknowledged possible containment damage at one or two of the reactors before now. Especially reactor 2 because a serious suppression chamber issue was the main post-meltdown event at that reactor, and suppression chamber is part of containment.

Anyway its pretty likely that TEPCO are making this assessment based on same data that has been available to all for a long time now, specifically pressure data of reactor vessels, containment vessels and suppression chambers. I think the earlier assumption was that reactor 1 appeared in better shape in this regard, and it was only when their plan to flood the containment structure did not lead to water level rising as they expected, that the likely problems there started to become more apparent.
 
elbows said:
What else is new? They took samples from the air at positions above reactor buildings 1 & 4 a few days ago, and published the results on tuesday. I dont think the results were very exciting, will wait till they hopefully do the same for reactors 2 & 3 where things could be more 'interesting'.
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They have said they are going to do the same at reactors 2 & 3, not sure when results of that will be available.

As for a story about the results at 1 & 4 that I said were not terribly exciting:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_07.html

So above the legal limits for what levels are normally allowed at plant perimeter, but not insanely high. Mind you Im not sure how much faith I have in TEPCOS method for collecting the samples, for it seems to me that if they position things wrong then they could get misleadingly low readings that dont really reflect what is escaping from the buildings on an ongoing basis. Having said that, I doubt that insane levels of radioactive stuff could have been escaping into the air daily without this showing up in a variety of contamination readings elsewhere on site & further afield. In this respect the contaminated water remains the pathway of high contamination that is probably of most concern right now.
 
elbows said:
I doubt that insane levels of radioactive stuff could have been escaping into the air daily without this showing up in a variety of contamination readings elsewhere on site & further afield.
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If insane levels of radioactivity were being released into the air, they'd be showing up in measurements worldwide by now.

The sea, I'm not so sure...
 
Report to Government Confirms Three Reactor Meltdowns

It seems that the Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, spoke too soon when it recently confirmed that the facility’s No. 1 reactor had suffered only a partial meltdown. In a report submitted to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency on 24 May, TEPCO acknowledges that reactors No. 2 and 3 had suffered the same fate. And it appears that while the earthquake did some damage, it was nothing compared to the havoc caused by the wall of water.
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This also from NHK it seems to be the best source for news at the moment:






"The environmental group Greenpeace has urged Japan to conduct radiation monitoring on more marine species after finding elevated radiation in waters near Fukushima.

The group released in Tokyo on Thursday the results of its monitoring carried out from May 3rd through 9th, with samples analyzed at laboratories in France and Belgium.

Greenpeace said radioactive materials beyond safe limits were found in 11 types of fish, shellfish and seaweed, some of which are not on the government's checklist.

It said a type of fish caught in Onahama Port in Iwaki City had 857 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram, 1.7 times the safety limit.

Radioactive iodine and cesium beyond permissible levels were also found in oysters, sea cucumber and seaweed collected from other ports in Fukushima Prefecture.

Radioactive materials were also found in seaweed drifting in waters about 50 kilometers southeast of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Greenpeace said its data shows contamination spreading over great distances from the plant.

The Fukushima prefectural government said contaminated seafood will never reach the market because fishing has been banned in nearby waters."

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/26_40.html
 
Thy can sound as confident as they like about the fish not reaching market, Im cynical, because it sounds like tea has:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/26_06.html

Radioactive contamination has been found in tea leaves in Chiba and Gunma prefectures, about 200 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Similar contamination has been found over a wide area around Tokyo including Ibaraki, Kanagawa, Saitama and Shizuoka prefectures.
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The Chiba government on Wednesday requested tea growers in the 4 cities to voluntarily halt shipments, and asked dealers not to sell the tea produced in the areas.

But 2 tea growers in Narita City reportedly shipped their tea leaves, and dealers sold some processed tea to local consumers.
Click to expand...
 
School radiation has been in the news a few times again very recenty. Not got links handy, but one area is giving radiation dose monitors to all kids, some decontamination work is beginning, and there have been more noises from government department agreeing that they should be aiming for 1 milliSievert/yr exposure guideline for kids, not the previously mentioned and extremely irresponsible 20 milliSieverts/yr.

Humans have gone back into reactor 1 building again, to perform a small array of tasks:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/27_33.html

Workers have entered one of the damaged Fukushima reactor buildings to survey a pool of radioactive water that the plant operator plans to recycle as a coolant.

The No.1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is thought to have suffered a meltdown after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami.

Highly contaminated water is apparently leaking from holes created in the pressure and containment vessels, flooding the building's basement.

Workers entered the reactor building on Friday, preparing to pump out the leaked water before cooling it and sending it back to the reactor.

In the morning, 8 workers lowered a depth sensor into the basement and found that the water is about 5 meters deep. Five other workers then collected samples for analysis.

In the afternoon, different workers attached a hose to the pool for spent nuclear fuel on the 3rd floor. The hose will be part of the pool's new heat exchange system that is due to be installed around July.
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Main news is that a pump stopped working at reactor 5, leaving it without cooling for quite a number of hours, but they have replaced it now.

Other concerns are to do with the weather - typhoon affecting Japan and heavy rain expected at the Fukushima site over the next day or so.
 
Proposed recovery timescale showing signs of being written off already:

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/05/94111.html

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is coming to the view that it will be impossible to stabilize the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant by the end of this year, senior company officials said Sunday, possibly affecting the timing for the government to consider the return of evacuees to their homes near the plant.

The revelation that meltdowns had occurred at the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors at the plant, most likely with breaches to pressure vessels encasing nuclear fuel, has led the officials to believe that ''there will be a major delay to work'' to contain the situation, one of them said.

The plant operator, known as TEPCO, announced on April 17 its road map for bringing the troubled reactors at the plant into a stably cooled condition called ''cold shutdown'' in six to nine months.
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Really they should have been able to do basic meltdown & containment damage analysis long before they even wrote the roadmap, so there is little excuse for acting surprised and pretending that mid-Aprils fair hopes have been dashed by previously hidden realities.
 
Just seen this reported on BBC Breakfast News...

Germany pledges to end all nuclear power by 2022

Germany's ruling coalition says it has agreed a date of 2022 for the shutdown of all of its nuclear power plants.

Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen made the announcement after a meeting of the ruling coalition that lasted into the early hours of Monday.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had set up an ethics panel to look into nuclear power following the disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan.

Germany saw mass anti-nuclear protests in the wake of the disaster.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13592208
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Think the worst of the typhoon (which got downgraded) has past now.

Internal exposure of workers back in the news again:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/30_30.html

The operator of the damaged nuclear power plant in Fukushima has been slow in checking workers at the plant for internal exposure to radiation.

Tokyo Electric Power Company began internal checks-ups on March 22nd, 11 days after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

It takes about a week to get the results of a check-up. Workers go to the utility's Fukushima Daini nuclear plant or its Onahama Coal Center in Iwaki City in Fukushima Prefecture for the screening.

To date, less than 40 percent of about 3,700 workers at the damaged Daiichi plant have received internal check-ups for radiation exposure.

TEPCO says 2 workers may have been exposed to more than 250 milisieverts of radiation, the new limit for emergencies set shortly after the disaster erupted. The 2 had been at the plant since the March 11th earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear disaster, but had their first internal check-up in mid-April --- more than a month later.
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http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/30_24.html

Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission has expressed concerns about internal radiation exposure for workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

High levels of radioactive substances have been detected in the bodies of 2 workers at the plant.

After a meeting on Monday, commission member Shizuyo Kusumi told reporters that the organization had concerns about whether protective masks can fully protect workers from internal exposure.
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http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/30_18.html

Two workers at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have been exposed to high levels of radiation exceeding the safety limit set by the government.

If confirmed, these are the first cases of radiation exposure since the health ministry raised the limit in March following the accident.

Tokyo Electric Power Company said on Monday the 2 workers are men. One is in his 30s and the other in his 40s. Both worked at the control rooms of the Number 3 and 4 reactors, and elsewhere, after the accident broke out at the plant.

TEPCO said a test conducted at an institute last Monday found 9,760 becquerels and 7,690 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 in the workers' thyroids. This means they are likely suffering from internal radiation exposure after inhaling radioactive substances.

These figures are more than tenfold the other workers.

It was confirmed that the 2 contaminated workers have been exposed to external radiation of 74 and 89 millisieverts so far.

TEPCO said these combined readings suggest that the 2 may have been exposed to radiation levels exceeding the safety limit of 250 millisieverts set for emergency situations.

TEPCO says that so far, the workers have not complained of health problems.
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