Japan Fukushima nuclear thread

[Globs]

Fume troll said:

Globs said:

By the time this is done the site will have thrown out more dangerous radioactive products than Chernobyl, by quite a margin.

Where's that piece of information from?

From me.

I have taken the current rate and amount from the New Scientist article posted above, and multiplied that by the 'months' figure that was quoted by some Japanese nuclear bod.

Have you read the NS article? I'd be interested in your take on this, assuming for instance they manage to have it all damped down by July.

[Globs]

hairykrishna said:

Bugger, quite right, it does read like that. Cherenkov just means there are charged particles.

I thought it was caused by fast particles travelling in a liquid faster than light, which is sort of nothing to do with criticality (although criticality events appear to have blue flashes - which may be Cherenkov in fluids but are probably air ionisation in the dry as light will almost be at it's terminal speed there.

As for the pollution I think the actual radioactivity (total gamma+particles) is largely irrelevant for everyone except for the plant team, the damage will be done by particles being ingested and sitting there disrupting stuff until they eventually decay.

Then the bigger damage is the exclusion zone - a zone of 20km (radius?) stops over 600 square km of land use which must affect a lot of people, and when they do go back they may be afraid of ingesting anything grown in that area.

[Globs]

Trying to pin down the source of stories about the generation of Chlorine-38, lots of people are saying this but no real source for the story has been identified.

So either they are making it all up (but it's very specific info) or it's true - which means it must have some type of cause.

http://japanfocus.org/-Arjun-Makhijani/3509

[Globs]

supersingle said:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/world/asia/10wor...

Interesting insight into working conditions pre and post disaster at the power station. There seems to be a culture of secrecy and cover-up with all the nasty and dangerous jobs going to daily contractors.

Pretty good article - thanks for posting that up!

For all the people who claim there is nothing to worry about (and that goes for the thugs described in the article!) there still seems to be four piles of burning nuclear fuel with enough radioactive ingredients to make Chernobyl look very small, that are too 'hot' for anyone to get near enough to fix.

I maintain my view of criminal negligence, but from the practical point of view it's not that the risks of x Y and Z are small, but that when something does go wrong it gets worse and worse, into a spiral of disaster which has now left a disaster hit country in limbo and many areas simply unable to be searched - let alone cleared and rebuilt.

[Globs]

Japan to evacuate more towns around crippled nuclear plant:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/04/11/japa...

article said:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the municipalities are likely to see long-term radiation levels that exceed international safety standards, and he warned that the month-old crisis at Fukushima Daiichi is not yet over.

"Things are relatively more stable, and things are stabilizing," he said. "However, we need to be ready for the possibility that things may turn for the worse."

And about an hour after he spoke, a fresh earthquake rattled the country, forcing workers to evacuate the plant and knocking out power to the three damaged reactors for about 40 minutes, the plant's owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, reported.

I get the impression that all four reactor/pool buildings are still totally out of control, no one has any idea how to fix them and no one can get close enough to assess the damage properly.


170 kg per assembly
(http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/3927635973/fuel-amounts-at-fukushima)

Fingers crossed.

[Globs]

Interesting visit to the exclusion area:

http://rt.com/news/japan-fukushima-zone-radiation/

For some reason the Geiger counters in the car are fixed to the dashboard, so they may be sampling airbourne particles from the vents that the actual levels at the position, but there sounded like a fair amount of activity on there, and some readings are from outside the car.

It's fairly clear to me that the radioactive contamination of the land is pretty serious already, give another couple of months and I dread to think of the exclusion zone size.

[Globs]

grumbledoak said:

Globs said:

It's fairly clear to me that the radioactive contamination of the land is pretty serious already, give another couple of months and I dread to think of the exclusion zone size.

Can you give us the numbers for 'pretty serious'. Or should we be scared just in case?

Watch the video, listen to the counter, read my post, note my opinion.

You can be scared if you like BTW, I'm not sure why you'd think of being scared though. Are you easily scared? Does talking about something on the other side of the planet usually scare you?

[Globs]

grumbledoak said:

Or should we be scared just in case?

grumbledoak said:

Pompous tt.

Ok.

[Globs]

hairykrishna said:

What about that video leads you to suspect significant contamination of the area?

It was mainly the geiger clicking - it almost reached a tone at one point, it was quite a bit of activity from something on a dashboard.

However I could not tell if that was from a big particle or two that came in from the vent and landed on the sensor or from background - I could only think gamma could get through the windscreen and car, unless beta/alpha was flying in through the open windows. I guess beta may get through glass (can it?) so maybe particles were building up on the windscreen.

Regardless of the reason for the high count you could drive the length and breadth of England and stop for a picnic at Windscale and still register about one count a minute so it's evidence of quite a serious amount of contamination in my view, even if the exact nature and spread is obscured.

[Globs]

llewop said:

some beta's could maybe get through the glass, but probably what was being detected was gamma - I didn't recognise the instrument to comment further on that.

but: you can set an alarm on an instrument almost anywhere you like, to alarm at background levels for instance. Also - I've used instruments that indicate 1000 counts per second for 1 microSievert per hour, that gets pretty noisy! Then on the other hand even getting a single click or two from an alpha probe is more of a concern.

Cheers for that (and your info Hairy). About 2:45 you can start to hear the clicks coming thick and fast - I was ignoring the alarm as I did not know the threshold.

Interesting to know it was gamma - Caesium 137 or others do you think?

[Globs]

It's sad to be in a position of pointing out the flaws and faults with the Japanese nuclear industry (which are many and various), and then think about the amount of depleted uranium deliberately being spread around the world by the 'responsible west'.

http://rt.com/usa/news/nato-depleted-uranium-libya...

The list of countries covered in this dust is growing each year, TEPCO were irresponsible and incompetent but no match for the lunatics on 'our' side.

And all the while we have ignorant fkwits bleating on about CO2, Christ what a screwed up world we live in!

As for our own home nuclear plants I think the main thing is our favour is luck.

[Globs]

JonRB said:

I've been meaning to ask you this... in both threads... what are your qualifications that you are this able to pontificate about a whole industry?

Jon, I realise I'm more interesting to you than the events in Japan, but please try to get a grip. Use the 'Ignore Thread' button if you need to.

[Globs]

Japan nuclear emergency at Fukushima to continue for six to nine months

article said:

It will take another six to nine months before the crisis at Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant is resolved, operator Tepco has admitted.

Link

But it's not all bad news, Banri Kaieda, Japan’s trade minister, said some could return home within six to nine months - coincidentally. Assuming there are no more surprises of course.

[Globs]

An interesting article by Bill Keisling, who covered the Three Mile Island meltdown, covers some of the emotion of a plant going out of control:

http://www.yardbird.com/meltdown_the_fukushima_exp...

[Globs]

llewop said:

the plain wrong: rule 7 I think it was 'all radiation is bad' - even if there is a small risk from the exposure due to medical radiations - they offer a net benefit - especially radiotherapy.

I don't understand how he is wrong here. There are huge (HUGE) benefits to nuclear power too, but that doesn't make Iodine-131 safe does it?

Same with a medical x-ray, sure there is a huge benefit of being able to see through people's bodies for diagnosis, but that still doesn't mean X-rays are anything but dangerous. Net is a term that means advantages - disadvantages.

In general I think financial and chemical effects swamp any low-level background-class radiation effects, but that doesn't make radiation safe either, it can still disrupts cell DNA and still kills people, especially when particles from a disaster like fukushima get lodged in the body.

I'm still trying to fathom how stupid the designers of Three Mile Island had to be to just assume a valve was open if the computer gave it the signal, especially bearing in mind this is a valve that switches over 2200psi and it's correct operation and state is vital to plant safety. It makes you wonder how many other idiots got in on the design stage of the thousands of other plants around the world.

[Globs]

It looks pretty grim I agree. I wonder how many months or years they'll have to basically pump water through the melts and into the sea?

Maybe the talk of constructing a 'filter' barrier in the sea was for this very reason, anyone have any more info on this?

ETA: non-mobile youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3NxTtNIlFw

Edited by Globs on Thursday 28th April 21:50

[Globs]

hidetheelephants said:

So they need to park a midsize tanker offshore and a big hose to pump the waste to it? Job jobbed; where do I send the bill?

If it was that simple they would have done it already

Difficult repairing and jury-rigging stuff you can't get close to.. I expect the first efforts will be pumping water from places outside where it collects - it may be years until they can get a grip of the reactor vessel itself - if ever.

[Globs]

cuneus said:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-0...

Thanks for finding that, it paints a picture for me of very slow progress.

My opinion is that it will be well into next year before they get any type of control over these reactors, and then it will be by default of the fuel cooling enough. When they will be able to get near enough to do more? - it could be decades.

I think TEPCO mean to ride out the storm by spending as little money as possible on this disaster, limiting their losses. For anyone not able to return to their house in the vicinity it's sad to think they have lost everything, even though it's still there, a strange limbo like existence.

[Globs]

Interesting!

IIRC the land level sunk 1m when the quake struck so they lost that before anything even happened..

[Globs]

Brother D said:

An interesting article from New Scientist...Espcially regarding the intial report on failures and the lack of 'reporting' there after...

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscienc...

Thanks for posting that!

NewScientist said:

Earlier this week, news emerged that shaking from the earthquake itself, not the subsequent tsunami, may have caused enough damage to trigger meltdowns within hours in reactor units 1, 2 and 3.

TEPCO had always asserted that the reactors successfully closed down automatically following the quake and sustained damage later because cooling systems were deprived of power after the tsunami destroyed all on-site power supplies.

Documents the company released on Sunday reveal that in reactor unit 1, the core had probably melted down within just 16 hours of the quake, which occurred at 2.46 pm on 11 March. Three hours later, the water level in the reactor, vital for cooling the fuel, had plummeted, and the fuel rods began to melt in the evening at 7.30 pm, with most melted by 6.50 am the following morning. Japanese government officials warned that the same thing had probably happened in reactor units 2 and 3.

Information released by TEPCO on Monday also suggests that the cooling systems for unit 1 had already failed before the tsunami struck.

Funnily enough just what I was saying - everyone was saying it was the tsunami that did the damage, but I never saw a shred of evidence that the reactors and plants survived the quake itself. I had 4 very cross people shouting at me in the other thread for raising that possibilty and now here it is in black and white.

NewScientist said:

TEPCO's handling of the crisis, meanwhile, is coming under increasing scrutiny. On Monday, it emerged that the Tokyo prosecutor's special investigation unit has begun an independent investigation into the company's conduct both before and after the disaster, to see if there are grounds for criminal negligence prosecutions. Investigations by Japanese police initiated early last month are also continuing.

Next week, a fact-finding mission organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency will arrive in Fukushima to conduct its own investigation into the catastrophe.

Again - interestingly when I mentioned 'criminal negligence' in the other thread I was roundly attacked by the same Fab Four - and lookey what we have here. I hope they get the full force of the law, the damage their carelessness and complacency has caused and is causing is immense. We need a situation where nuclear plant operating companies start actually caring and thinking about protecting the integrity of their rather dangerous fuel.

I expect more details of the chaos within to come out in the next few weeks and months - I hope this will at least put many operators under pressure, scrutiny and attention, something they obviously need.

BTW Thanks for the pics rhinopig, it really shows just how useless the sea defences were:











ETA missing pictures

Edited by Globs on Sunday 22 May 21:58