Japan Fukushima nuclear thread

[Globs]

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/b...

A timeline of the meltdown of reactor 1 with diagrams.

I guess 2 and 3 are around somewhere - if anyone finds them please post the links!

[Globs]

Found some more info about #2 and #3 reactors at Fukushima No. 1 plant:

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105170428.html

BTW that's a good newspaper - it has pictures of a crane putting a 60m fishing trawler back into the water.

asahi said:

According to the data, the pressure in the pressure vessel of the No. 2 reactor dropped at 6:43 p.m. on March 15. A similar drop in pressure also took place at the No. 3 reactor at 11:50 p.m. on March 16.

Those declines were apparently the result of holes made in the pressure vessels.

Previously, it was believed that water was leaking through holes at the bottom of the pressure vessels where measuring instruments and part of the control rod mechanisms were located.

Now, it appears that melted nuclear fuel formed new holes in the pressure vessels.

Interesting to look back at March 11th and see what people were saying

Yukio said:

"Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano says the nuclear power plant in Fukushima developed a mechanical failure in the system needed to cool the reactor after it was shut down in Friday's earthquake.

In hindsight I note the word 'mechanical' is used instead of 'power'.
Along with all the people saying there couldn't possibly be a problem. It would be nice if they were right.

[Globs]

Hi Hairy,

There seems to be a bit of debate about this

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487037...

Also I read somewhere (I'll try to dig it out) TEPCO saying the water levels fell in one of the rector vessels very early on - could the tsunami cause this?

[Globs]

Have you the link to the NISA report BTW?
I can find a mention of it http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/1... but not the actual report.

There are a few general reports of leaks: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/damage-suspected-...

And http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2011-05/12/cont...

But of course these could have been caused by steam explosions. As cracks in pipes have been found before without any quakes: http://www.klimaatkeuze.nl/wise/monitor/515/5057 I'd be surprised if there were none. I suspect they were too busy to even notice TBH - I'm not sure if they had the time to check the plant thoroughly for damage between the quake and tsunami.

[Globs]

Found the article I'd read again here:

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

article said:

Kyodo said a source at TEPCO admitted the possibility of key facilities having been compromised before the tsunami waves, saying, "The quake's trembling may have caused damage to the pressure vessel or pipes."

It would be instructive to track down this source although it may be in Japanese!
From the water level graph here http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/b... does it look like usual boiling activity (how is the steam getting out?) or a leak?

[Globs]

I see why in normal operation you may wish to limit the rate of cooling - but in an emergency like this it seems crazy to even contemplate switching off the cooling!!

From http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110524006012...



It looks like reactor1 melted far quicker than the others - is that just due to the different design (it was a smaller reactor IIRC)? It seems incredible that the whole pressure vessel was never designed to withstand a falling fuel rod or meltdown - it puts these accidents way beyond what they had to deal with at Three Mile Island (without the fact there are three of them and masses of spent fuel lying about in tanks).

[Globs]

Nuke plant manager ignores bosses, pumps in seawater after order to halt:

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105270183.html

Sounds like policy was made according to which way the political wind was blowing, while the manager at the plant was heeding the call of physics and doing what was needed.

[Globs]

Beyond Rational said:

It is quite interesting to look back at the views held by the 'experts' now that this information is coming to light, in the press and the other thread. It does seem as if they really wanted the outcome to be positive and so that is the picture that they painted in the absence of true data.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/18/fukushima_...

In fact on the Japan Earthquake thread JonRB, pacman1 and eharding were all extremely abusive and hostile to me when I said that I thought the reactors were melting down, and apoplectic rage followed my suggestion that TEPCO be held criminally negligent. I think the hope beyond hope got to many people.

A recent survey revealed that 73% of Japanese do not trust TEPCO. When the cooling fails there was only one outcome for those reactors and that's what happened, it's still surprising that all three seem in so much worse shape than Three Mile Island though - but I guess that didn't have any steam explosions and cooling was not totally removed for a long time like at Fukushima.

I wondered with a meltdown of this scale if the fuel may still be fissioning or causing the odd criticality event - does anyone have any best guesses?

[Globs]

So they want you to send all your stock to Lyon (France?) so they can count it and send it back?







They don't really want to count it do they?

[Globs]

Good call Supersingle, I read about that in the Torygraph this week.

It puzzles me how the idiots in power deal with issues like this.
The sane way would be to order a safety review and check our plants and any new plants are as safe as possible given the accidents of the past few years. Instead, (living relatively near to the same plants) these idiots just prefer to play the risks down. I guess they think the laws of physics are affected by their latest PR gaff because they have huge egos backed up by zero education about engineering or physics. The same cause of Fukushima IMO.

I suppose that's what we get when the sheeppeople enthusiastically vote in their favourite retard at each election.

[Globs]

Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima? - Global - The Atlantic Wire:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/07/melt...

article said:

The authors have spoken to several workers at the plant who recite the same story: Serious damage to piping and at least one of the reactors before the tsunami hit.
All have requested anonymity because they are still working at the plant or are connected with TEPCO.

One worker, a 27-year-old maintenance engineer who was at the Fukushima complex on March 11, recalls hissing and leaking pipes. “I personally saw pipes that came apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant," he said. "There were definitely leaking pipes, but we don’t know which pipes – that has to be investigated. I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for Unit 1 had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor.”

Also:

article said:

After the Japanese government forced TEPCO to release hundreds of pages of documents relating to the accident in May, Bloomberg reported on May 19 that a radiation alarm went off 1.5 kilometers from the number one reactor on March 11 at 3:29 p.m., minutes before the tsunami reached the plant. TEPCO would not deny the possibility that there was significant radiation leakage before the power went out. They did assert that the alarm might have simply malfunctioned.

It does beg the question of why they were using seawater, does anyone know the exact reason for using seawater rather than the usual water they used to cool the reactor? I guess the choice is faulty pipes, pumps or supplies.

Also the reverse question - how did the non-tsunami plants survive? Was it the case that a (assumed) few broken pipes in other reactors were not fatal to the reactor while they still had power and other plant facilities, or was the No.1 plant just hit far harder by the quake?

[Globs]

Busa_Rush said:

. . . the opponents of Nuclear energy are so devious and deceitful that they would ask the cleaners what they thought then claim they spoke to a "technician" . . .

The words 'devious and deceitful' could be levelled at many governments and in fact TEPCO itself - and they are pro-nuclear in a big way! So now we have 'established' the same pattern of behaviour between the two sides perhaps you could enlighten me as to these shady anti-nuclear groups and what their motivations are?

Also, which bits do you think are untrue?

[Globs]

That flooded plant at Fort Calhoun looks a bit dodgy - lets hope they keep the cooling going. At least it wasn't smashed up by an earthquake just before..
http://abcnews.go.com/US/nebraska-residents-danger...

I found this article about Fukushima, which isn't looking good at all. 97,000 becquerels/kg were recorded in some dry straw in the region. That's 1kg of straw through off 97,000 particles per second (like a 100kHz noisy note).

Additionally have a read of this: Fukushima: It's much worse than you think

For people who have no mouse:

article said:

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."

It looks like the Seattle area is also being hit with radioactive air filters even there

article said:

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.

"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.

Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."

Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.

"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."

According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

I think the problem is that while it's now yesterdays news, there is another year of frantic cooling of hot and molten fuel elements to go.

There is also more danger from Unit 4:

article said:

Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.

"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."

Also I read about Simi in California - a much higher polluting incident that Three Mile Island, at the old Rocketdyne facility which melted due to a lubricant leaching out of the sodium pump bearing and clagging up the cooling channels in the reactor.

[Globs]

A blast from the past I found the other day:
http://www.marfdrat.net/2011/03/14/fukushima-nucle...

Sadly the optimism was ill founded and the contamination is still spreading

Over 1,550 tons of highly radioactive sludge found in 5 prefectures - The Mainichi Daily News:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110729p2a00m...

Fukushima Teacher Muzzled on Radiation Risks - Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-28/fukushima...

Makes you realise how much stuff in the atmosphere etc gets mixed around all of the time. So far it seems to be concentrating in ash, air filters and water treatment sludge, the amounts are huge however. 8,000 bequerels/kg is in my view a huge amount as a counter would be extremely active next to that, whereas usual UK levels are about 0.1 bequerel (estimated from my old Maplin counter).

[Globs]

A thread resurrection to match the melt-throughs that seem to be happening/imminent at the plants, it looks like reactor No. 1 is going to be the first:

http://enenews.com/radio-just-a-matter-of-time-bef...

Some live video footage of the plant being discussed here:
http://enenews.com/fukushima-webcam-discussion-thr...
Interesting to check out the fires, light shows and emissions.

On one hand TEPCO is claiming close to cold shut-down, on the other hand we have people speaking of frequent criticality events, fissioning, a view of some that the corium has left the building already... and fires at No4 storage facility.

As I still remember people explaining how it was all perfectly safe and nothing could go wrong I wonder if we will see the corium hitting the water table (not so far away as it's next to the sea) and be sad witness to steam explosions far beyond the dirtiness of Chernobyl. Currently I have rather less faith in Tepco than I do/did in the Russians to put a lid on this.

[Globs]

Beyond Rational said:

The original thread reads like a dark comic, the level of vehement insistence of safety is worrying if they worked in the industry.

Yup, the 'It's perfectly safe, idiot' posts start here, I only wish they were right

We'll have to hope Tepco are right, but I have little faith in their ability to get near it.
There was Iodine 131 reported over europe (Hungary) recently - I suspect that's not from Fukushima but I would like to know _where_ it did come from.

What caused the Chernobyl melt to stop? Was it the sand around the vessel? I know they dug a runnel underneath (and a hero died draining a water tank below it) - did they just fill it with concrete in the end or a cooling system?

[Globs]

hairykrishna said:

supersingle said:

hairykrishna said:

I was astonished that anything made it out of containment, I freely admit that I didn't think that this was at all likely

Why would you be surprised that it breached containment?

If a large BWR loses all cooling when it's running surely the only outcome is melt-through?

It wasn't running for a start - it was shutdown as the earthquake happened. All of the damage was from decay heat. Plants are supposed to be designed so that the containment contains all radioactivity in the event of an accident. I didn't know the details of Fukishima, how old it was for a start or how badly damaged it's emergency cooling measures were. I also think I initially underestimated how hard it was for outside help to get there.

Actually it was running right up to the quake IIRC, #1, #2 and #3. #4 was shutdown but the spent fuel was still in need of cooling. So 1, 2 and 3 were all pretty 'hot' when the LOCA occurred, which meant they really could only do one thing and that was to promptly melt down into a big blob at the bottom of the vessel, where all the boron and water would not have any effect.

Additionally this blob is then capable of criticality events and fission, to varying degrees and likelihoods dependent on the exact configuration and dynamics of the corium blob. This then can go on to melt through to the earth below and then into water tables etc.

It does seem that all three reactors are some variation of corium blob now, the status us #4 fuel pool is unclear but could be similar. One factor is I think the lack of design criteria for a steam explosion in the vessel or secondary containment - those explosions must have damaged quite a few (more) critical pipes, valves and sensors. Then there is that torus, if the melt travelled down any of the torus tubes and melted through there is much less concrete below those.

It would be good to know more about the actual situation but because of the secretive Tepco and the glowing, unapproachable balls of death that are part of todays Tepco nuclear program I can understand why we don't.

It's worth thinking back to Three Mile Island, where a _much_ shorter temperature excursion caused _far_ more core damage than anyone had imagined possible. Using the TMI yardstick I think the 1,2 and 3 reactors became fiery blobs quite early on.

[Globs]

Busa_Rush said:

It's not irreversible - everybody seems to think once the cooling system is damaged the reactor fuel will melt. In some cases it will but in many cases it doesn't.

I think people have this view because all of the accidents are caused by coolant issues, from Chernobyl (where they deliberately disabled them) to Three Mile Island (Low water level) to the RocketDyne (sodium cooling failed) to Fukushima (coolant level (#1 reports suggest coolant loss) and pumping failure).

I guess only the disasters make it into the news however.

This is a useful resource:
http://newsblogged.com/fukushima-nuclear-power-pla...

Reading the related articles helps explain why people have an irrational fear of nuclear power, particularly these stories:


Failed cleanup

Massive secrecy about what's really going on

Evacuated people without homes or compensation

Unexplained rashes and illness

Now while I can look at nuclear power without too much emotion is has in the past few decades laid waste to quite a bit of land area, contamination that is pretty impossible to shift too. Imagine if europe is blanketed with this type of fallout, if it isn't 'someone else' suffering it 'a long way away' but it was right here, in your own gardens, your own food, on the road, trees, fields, buildings. It's sobering to think that many particles that used to live inside Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors are now spread around the world - including in our back yard.

Also how ever much we may like nuclear, uranium is running out just as fast as oil and coal. Faster in some ways.

[Globs]

Busa_Rush said:

even Chernobyl which was a poor design and exploded with fuel rods being blown over the local area, then tons of sand poured on top creating massive levels of dust plus a fire - about as bad as it gets - only contaminated the local area with long term radiation.

IIRC it contaminated about 75% of Belarus and significant areas of the Ukraine.
Even forests in Germany have still got radiation checks on game caught there.

Depends what you call long term, but the 30 year half-life of the strontium and caesium isotopes seem pretty long to me!
Additionally Chernobyl is still not stable, the sarcophagus never got the money to make the super new version, and the vitrified melt appears to be degrading into lumps of uranium and holes that water could get into.

Thinking of all that money wasted on the pathetic CO2 scam it's alarming that our idiot grasping politicians are so ignorant of the sleeping dust pile on their doorstep.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFj0sulgrrQ

[Globs]

More 'Yellow rain' and 'Yellow powder' found in Japan, I wonder if there has been another 'contamination event' recently (September 23rd, 2011) at Fukushima? Any chemists here?

http://enenews.com/report-yellow-powder-found-nort...

article said:

Just like after the rain in March, yellow powder was found in North Kanto area, where Utsunomiya is.

In March, the yellow powder phenomena was found everywhere after the rain too [... the] government explained it was pollen or yellow sand from China, but strangely, nobody had ever seen it before though pollen and yellow sand fly every year.

The yellow powder was found in Chernobyl too. It looks “like” cesium powder actually

Also from the day before (22nd Sept): "330 Million bq/km² of radioactivity found yesterday 50 mi. from Tokyo — Had been ‘not detected’ for weeks — Now at March levels"
http://enenews.com/local-govt-330-million-becquere...
although that reading is not reliable apparently.

Japan has > 30,000 Bq/m Cs137 contamination of 8000 square km of land so far:
http://enenews.com/8000-km-japan-contaminated-cesi...

Fukushima Prefecture: About 6,000 square kilometers
Northern Tochigi Prefecture: About 1,370 square kilometers
Southern Miyagi Prefecture: 380 square kilometers
Ibaraki Prefecture: About 260 square kilometers

I guess it's nothing to worry about and just people fussing about nothing though right?

johnfm said:

I reckon we could power a 4000 GW plant just on Pistonheads outrage and rant power....

there's a lot of superheated liquid on these fora...

I guess a reasonable question is

• "How many times do the 'pro-nuclear' brigade have to be badly wrong before they realise no one is listening anymore?"

So far we have gone from nothing at all to worry about idiot - to two explosions, three meltdowns - large parts of Japan blanketed in radiation that will last for decades, massive (and continued) contamination of the Pacific, fires and now we are looking at three melt-throughs with potentially catastrophic results for all of us.

Seriously guys, don't blame the media for whipping up hysteria against nuclear power - this is all self inflicted. Instead feel sorry for the poor sods without access to their homes, gardens and pets, who won't be able to return in their own lifetime to their neighbourhoods. That's what the nuclear industry has done for them.