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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

It's not an insult to me one iota. And whilst I do love to get carried away with a good scare story, it's also nice to get a grounded level headed version of events. And as mentlar as I am, I do have some heavy skeptisism with much of what is written online...Here's another one for you. 14000 deaths in the US so far, attributed to Fukushima.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/me...fukushima-reactor-disaster-fallout-2011-12-19

An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986
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xes said:
It's not an insult to me one iota. And whilst I do love to get carried away with a good scare story, it's also nice to get a grounded level headed version of events. And as mentlar as I am, I do have some heavy skeptisism with much of what is written online...Here's another one for you. 14000 deaths in the US so far, attributed to Fukushima.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/me...fukushima-reactor-disaster-fallout-2011-12-19
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's total bollocks

http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/06/17/shame-on-you-janette-sherman-and-joseph-mangano/
 
Im not going to have much time in 2012 to post updates on this. A few things have happened in recent weeks but I'll just give a very brief summary.

As long-expected they declared the situation stable / reactors to be in 'cold shutdown' in mid December, and then started coming up with medium-long term plans for dealing with the site. Many of the steps will be very hard to achieve, and rely on technologies that have yet to be developed, so no point getting obsessed by the detail just yet, but here is a document about it anyway.

http://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nuclear/decommissioning/pdf/111221_01.pdf

They have a problem with reactor 3 spent fuel pool cooling so its been disabled for some days, water temp will increase over this period but should not reach a danger level before they restore cooling. They went through a similar thing with reactor 2 pool not so long ago.

They found a load of contaminated water in a trench near to the buildings where they have been storing the highly-contaminated water before processing it. These trenches do not connect to the sea, so they don't think this water leaked to the environment unlike the previous leak.

There have been some reports floating around about various issues at the plant including why the IC cooling system for reactor 1 was lost so quickly, its mostly a technical discussion about what positions various valves take under conditions of loss of power, and issues of poor staff instruction/training.

Executive summary of cabinet committee report into failings and lessons is available in English:

http://icanps.go.jp/eng/111226ExecutiveSummary.pdf

I haven't read the report yet but apparently the authorities have concluded that much of the hydrogen gas which caused buildings to explode, may have come from the venting processes which took place at reactors 1 & 3. Some valves were probably set in such a way that some of the gas flowed back into the building via another part of the gas treatment system piping. This revelation is not terribly surprising when we look at the timing of events, since we tended to see visual confirmation of stuff venting from the gas stacks in the hour prior to the building exploding, both at reactors 1 & 3.
 
A very brief summary of recent news:

Someone died after being taken ill whilst working with concrete in the area where they are storing radioactive sludge from the water decontamination process. I don't think this is the first death of a worker in this part of the plant, but there isn't any solid evidence that points to radiation as the cause, although I wouldn't like to rule it out either.

After water was found in a trench, the company have been ordered to check the other trenches on site and see if there is radioactive water in those too. They have started looking and keep finding 'puddles' of water, all of which contain some radioactive substances but not at newsworthy levels.

One of the temperature detectors has started showing much higher temperatures in reactor 2 in recent days. Other sensors have not risen accordingly, so they have put this down to instrument malfunction, although I would not be so quick to make that judgement myself. This particular sensor is in the area where the control rods are inserted (underneath the reactor)

They are reducing the amount of nitrogen injected into reactor 2 as part of preparation to send a device into primary containment that will be able to show them images of the situation, but I don't know what date this operation is planned. It could yield some interesting info.

An apartment building that was built elsewhere in Japan in 2011 is contaminated. They are looking at what has caused this, with potential culprits including quarried stone used for the foundations, or contaminated concrete (some sewage sludge is sold for use in concrete production and we know that significant quantities of radioactive substances built up in the sludge at a variety of municipal sewage waste processing facilities in the months following the disaster).
 
((Mods: if this should be in "protest" thread rather than here please move it))

If anyone is making planning representations on Hinkley C proposals the deadline is noon on Monday 23rd January.

You need to cut/paste your words into section 3 of the form as attachments are not allowed. Also usual issues with completing your address on the form without leaving bits blank and unreadable "capture" words cause frustration and delay in submitting.

The way it works is that you can't criticise the principle of nuclear power stations or anything which goes against the National Policy Statement on Nuclear Power so representations need to be stated in local issues.
On line representations can be done here:
http://infrastructure.independent.g...st/hinkley-point-c-new-nuclear-power-station/
 
xes said:
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/01/nuclear-fuel-reactor-4/

more scare story fun time
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There isn't much to lend any credibility to that story. But before I get into that, we can also ask why we should be more scared by rumours of melted fuel at reactor 4 when we know with some certainty that there is melted fuel at 3 other reactors already.

Reactor 4 had not been undergoing trivial routine maintenance at the time. It had been out of action for months for a very major task, that of replacing the core shroud. I do not know exactly what stage this work had reached when disaster struck, and I suppose its possible that they would load some fuel in at some stage of testing after finishing the installation of the new shroud. But They certainly hadn't loaded up the reactor into a state where it was just about ready to start, because the yellow reactor cap had not been fitted back into its position yet (its clearly visible in its storage location in photos of damaged reactor 4 building).

People who desire to believe that this stuff happened at reactor 4 have 3 things to cling to that I can think of. The rumour itself, which isn't worth much, the fact that some heat sources showed up in the reactor well area of reactor 4 in some infra-red photos taken from above in the first weeks of the crisis, and the fact that building 4 exploded. But since there are alternative explanations for these things, and the rumour lacks detail that would support its credulity, I won't be exploring this one any further.

At the end of the day many of the extreme worst case scenarios for Fukushima, ones that involve loads of fuel being blown out of buildings, can be ruled out because that would make the radiation levels so high on site that pretty much none of the work we've seen on site since the accident would have been possible. This still leaves a range of scary possibilities in terms of one or more reactor cores melting downwards into the earth, but a lack of facts about this leaves it totally in the realm of speculation for now.
 
One of the temperature readings at reactor 2 has gone up by more than 20 degrees this month, prompting them to increase the flow of water, without much success so far. I think they have taken a gas sample and injected more boric acid just in case the rise in temperature was due to recriticality, but thats not covered in this story.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/20120206_29.html
 
Well they've managed to get the temperature down a little bit, but only by injecting water at a faster rate than I remember them using at any point in the past.
 
Oh poo. That's not good.

I have to go out again next month. I hope I can get insurance this time.
Actually it strikes me that not a lot has changed and the reversal of the advice not to fly to Japan seems be based in wether the issue is in the british news or not.
 
I don't think this reactor temperature stuff currently makes any difference. I watch this sort of thing in case it leads to a significant change in the situation, but to date that hasn't been the case, as far as we (the public) are aware anyway. I can never quite bring myself to call the situation stable, but in a couple of senses I suppose that word does apply. There are few certainties going forwards, the only assurance I can really give is that as far as we know, nothing major happened for a long time now. Radioactive stuff continues to escape the reactors, but in quantities which are pretty insignificant compared to the stuff that was floating around in the first month of the crisis. So unless something big happens, probably better to focus on the the existing daily risk that the Japanese people face, in terms of contamination thats already in the environment, in the food chain etc.
 
Oops I missed that one, will try to track it down on iPlayer if I have time.

As for the reactor 2 temperature stuff I posted about, in the end they decided it was a faulty temperature sensor, and so have been reducing the water flow rate back to the level it was before that temperature indication started to rise dramatically.
 
Im not sure that theres anyone here that would want to read a long and tedious report into events, but here is a link anyway:

http://icanps.go.jp/eng/interim-report.html

Being a geek I could just about bring myself to read/skim section IV about the response on site. It does go on a lot but its in clearer English than many similar reports, and is prepared to talk about mistakes various officials made. There is no stunning new info here but the detail adds some flesh to a few bones at least. As far as Im concerned the most catastrophic mistakes were made a long time before the earthquake & tsunami struck, to do with regulation and assumptions. Its not really clear how much better the situation could have ended up if mistakes had not been made at various points after the tsunami struck, but the mistakes are well discussed in the document anyway. Mistakes were made at all 3 of the reactors that were online when the earthquake struck, including the turning off of the IC system at reactor 1 which received quite a bit of attention when first revealed not too long after the disaster. But also some poor decisions by the shift team who were in charge on reactor 3, turning off a key cooling system because they thought it might break, but then totally failing to make their alternative plan work, and failing to inform the senior plant management of what had happened.

At this point I paid far too much detailed attention to Fukushima to have much clue about how deep and detailed wider public perceptions got. I do not know for example, whether most people know that the reactor 2 building may well also have exploded if it wasn't for the fact that a 'blow-out panel' part of the wall had fallen off during an earlier explosion from another reactor, giving hydrogen gas somewhere to escape from rather than building up to combustable levels.

In terms of alarming detail that adds to the picture of what some workers went though on site, there was mention that on one visit to the torus area of reactor 3, a workers boot started to melt when they put their foot on an upper part of the torus (the torus is the large doughnut beneath the reactor drywall, and is often called the suppression chamber).

And on a much less heavy note, here is what the site webcam looks like when it snows, from a few days ago:

 
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