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Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

blownbuilding.jpg


Hot from Japan T.V. ...

Close up of the blown reactor building....
 
Corax said:
Rather than people having to watch to find out - could you tell us what this is and why you've posted it? :)
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It’s basically some Bimbo interviewing some Himbo, either of which have a fucking clue of what they are talking about.

bi0boy said:
Anti-nuclear campaigner engages in wild speculation for Russian propaganda machine
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You should see Harvey Wasserman's website & buy a 'Potsmoking Presidents T-Shirt'. :facepalm:
 
China syndrome....? :hmm:

From what little sense I can make of your 'explanation', the words that spring to mind are hysterical and scaremongering.
 
Open Sauce said:
This shows the part the blew

BoilingWaterReactorDesign_3.jpg
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Er... hang on...

CNN said:
An explosion that sent white smoke rising above the Fukushima Daiichi plant Saturday afternoon buckled the walls of a concrete building that surrounded one of the plant's nuclear reactors, but did not damage the reactor itself, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters.

My emphasis: from http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/japan.nuclear/index.html?hpt=T1
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If it's not another translation error, that's bad: the reactor vessel's intact but the concrete containment around it is damaged. So there may be just 10-20cm of steel between us and it...
 
looking at the picture above I wonder it was something to do with that crane lifting something at the time I can't see anything else that could had blown... I did wonder why it looked so flimsy in the picture shown... looking at it again there not very much there to account for all the dust the concrete structure must had gone too.
 
from AP
The blast destroyed the building housing the reactor, but not the reactor itself, which is enveloped by stainless steel 6 inches (15 centimeters) thick.

Inside that superheated steel vessel, water being poured over the fuel rods to cool them formed hydrogen. When officials released some of the hydrogen gas to relieve pressure inside the reactor, the hydrogen apparently reacted with oxygen, either in the air or the cooling water, and caused the explosion.

"They are working furiously to find a solution to cool the core," said Mark Hibbs, a senior associate at the Nuclear Policy Program for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nuclear agency officials said Japan was injecting seawater into the core - an indication, Hibbs said, of "how serious the problem is and how the Japanese had to resort to unusual and improvised solutions to cool the reactor core."

Officials declined to say what the temperature was inside the troubled reactor, Unit 1. At 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Celsius), the zirconium casings of the fuel rods can react with the cooling water and create hydrogen. At 4,000 F (2,200 C), the uranium fuel pellets inside the rods start to melt, the beginning of a meltdown.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said radiation around the plant had fallen, not risen, after the blast but did not offer an explanation. Virtually any increase in dispersed radiation can raise the risk of cancer, and authorities were planning to distribute iodine, which helps protect against thyroid cancer. Authorities ordered 210,000 people out of the area within 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the reactor.
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..

Tepco said the No. 1 reactor had partially melted – the first time this has happened in Japan – and was continuing effort to cool the reactor with seawater, a procedure a British nuclear expert described as "an act of desperation".

The company notified the government on Sunday morning that the No. 3 reactor had lost the ability to cool the reactor core, and that radiactive steam was being released. Kyodo News quoted Tepco as saying that the up to three metres of MOX fuel rods were exposed above water at the Fukushima plant.

Shaun Burnie, an independent nuclear energy consultant and forner head of nuclear campaigns at Greenpeace, said the presence of a percentage of fuel core loaded with plutonium MOX fuel in the No. 3 reactor posed a grave threat to the surrounding area.

"Plutonium MOX fuel increases the risk of nuclear accident due the neutronic effects of plutonium on the reactor," Burnie told the Guardian. "In the event of an accident - in particular loss of coolant - the reactor core is more difficult to control due to both neutronics and higher risk of fuel cladding failure.

"In the event of the fuel melting and the release of plutonium fuel into the environment, the health hazards are greater, including higher levels of latent cancer."
The MOX fuel was delivered in 1999 and was loaded into the reactor by Tepco only last year after sitting in Fukushima storage ponds amid opposition and delays from the prefecture's governor, Burnie said.
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Corax said:
China syndrome....? :hmm:

From what little sense I can make of your 'explanation', the words that spring to mind are hysterical and scaremongering.
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Fair do's but I read that the Japanese government has evacuated 17,000 people from around them so i think they're shitting themselves a tad, too.

People can say what they like about wind and solar power but wind generators don't go into meltdown too often.
 
As I mentioned earlier in the thread Arclight on Twitter has some good explanations of what is happening and what needs to happen "before you end up with radioactive crap on someone's lawn"
You have to get the (say) cesium out of the fuel pellet, past the cladding, out of the reactor vessel, out of containment and downwind.

All those barriers are from a principle called defense-in-depth. If one thing fails, there's another behind it.

We're not out of barriers but we're close, far too close for my comfort level. I lost any comfort level when they hit core damage.

Once you hit fuel damage you likely have written off the whole power plant. It will never restart. Now you do everything to save containment
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two sheds said:
Fair do's but I read that the Japanese government has evacuated 17,000 people from around them so i think they're shitting themselves a tad, too.

People can say what they like about wind and solar power but wind generators don't go into meltdown too often.
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They've evacuated far more than 17,000.....I was reading many people want to leave (poss from further outside exclusion zone) but the roads are so bad they cant get out in some places at least by car etc. so they are left wondering what they should do.
 
Barking_Mad said:
They've evacuated far more than 17,000.....I was reading many people want to leave (poss from further outside exclusion zone) but the roads are so bad they cant get out in some places at least by car etc. so they are left wondering what they should do.
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Bloody nimbys again eh :mad:
 
Barking_Mad said:
They've evacuated far more than 17,000.....I was reading many people want to leave (poss from further outside exclusion zone) but the roads are so bad they cant get out in some places at least by car etc. so they are left wondering what they should do.
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It's 170,000
 
Barking_Mad said:
They've evacuated far more than 17,000.....I was reading many people want to leave (poss from further outside exclusion zone) but the roads are so bad they cant get out in some places at least by car etc. so they are left wondering what they should do.
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Build a causeway to pass over the detritus from scavenged materials to get as many people as possible away from the nuclear reactor. I know that's what I'd involve myself in organising.
 
Barking_Mad said:
As I mentioned earlier in the thread Arclight on Twitter has some good explanations of what is happening and what needs to happen "before you end up with radioactive crap on someone's lawn"

All those barriers are from a principle called defense-in-depth. If one thing fails, there's another behind it.
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This article in the Washington Post also talks about 'defense-in-depth' and is a little reassuring.

The nuclear power industry speaks of "defense in depth," a concept of multiple layers of containment and backup plans to ensure that, even if something goes wrong, catastrophe won't ensue. The failure of these systems in Japan carries an echo of the BP oil spill disaster, in which backup safety devices and redundancies turned out to be unequal to the unfolding blowout.

"The problem with the BP event is that they didn't have a Plan B," said Alex Marion, vice president of nuclear operations for the Nuclear Energy Institute. "We have, I would say, sufficient defense in depth. We have Plan B, C, D and possibly E."
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I hate the word 'meltdown', it just sounds so scary.

Trouble is it's not officially defined by the various nuclear authorities and people seem to jump to the worst possible conclusion, when in fact a meltdown is normally contained in the reactor's containment structure and doesn't present any great danger, the big exception was Chernobyl- and that was because of very poor construction standards.

In a modern reactor, a nuclear meltdown, whether partial or total, should be contained inside the reactor's containment structure. Thus (assuming that no other major disasters occur) while the meltdown will severely damage the reactor itself, possibly contaminating the whole structure with highly radioactive material, a meltdown alone should not lead to significant radiation release or danger to the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown
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From what they are saying both the primary and secondary containment structures are intact, it was just the roof and walls of the service building above which were destroyed by the explosion caused by a planned & controlled release of steam from the core, done to reduce pressure before flooding with sea-water.

It would seem the flooding with sea-water is plan C or D, and should do the trick, it just fucks the reactors and puts them out of service for good.
 
From AP

A partial meltdown was already likely under way at one nuclear reactor, a top official said, and operators were frantically trying to keep temperatures down at the power plant's other units and prevent the disaster from growing even worse.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Sunday that a hydrogen explosion could occur at Unit 3 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex, the reactor that could be melting down. That would follow a blast the day before in the power plant's Unit 1, as operators attempted to prevent a meltdown by injecting sea water into it.
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two sheds said:
So the shock wave right at the start of that vid was the hydrogen explosion from injecting sea water into the core?
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I think that's what they are saying, they released steam to lower pressure in the core and that resulted in the hydrogen explosion, which in turn produced the shock wave.
 
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