Latest image from Fukushima:
Posted on 03/15/2011 8:13:35 AM PDT by SE Mom
Latest news from Japan:
From the BBC-
1456: Tepco says it may start pouring water from a helicopter over Fukushima Daiichi's reactor four in the next few days, to cool the spent-fuel pool.
1439: A 30km (18 mile) no-fly zone is in place around Fukushima, says the IAEA.
1436: The IAEA says Monday's blast at Fukushima may have affected the integrity of the containment vessel - there are fears of more serious radioactive leaks if happen.
1435: Following earlier reports, it appears there has been more than one strong aftershock in Japan - AP reports two tremors measuring over 6.0 within three minutes of each other.
Twitter-
-US Geological Survey counts 451 aftershocks since the initial earthquake struck Japan Friday. 238 of them registered magnitude 5.0 or more.
-Despite situations in Japan & Libya, spksmn Jay Carney says Pres Obama's 5-day trip to Brazil, Chile & El Salvador starting Fri night is on.
-FLASH: More U.S. military personnel in Japan testing positive for low-levels of radiation, relief missions to continue - Navy 18 minutes ago via web
Another headline to send the masses into hysteria & cliff jumping!
I hadn't thought or it that way. I'm stunned by the number of ramifications resulting from this event. By the number of reactors and amount of nuclear fuel involved. But mostly, by the lenght of time it's taking to get simple, makeshift cooling in place.>p> Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. God's will be done ...
I take no pleasure in saying to those that poo’ed poo’ed..
Yes, I was right all along.
The boss of the company behind the devastated Japanese nuclear reactor today broke down in tears - as his country finally acknowledged the radiation spewing from the over-heating reactors and fuel rods was enough to kill some citizens
He said officials should have admitted earlier how serious the radiation leaks were.
Fukushima one week on: Situation ‘stable’, says IAEA | Shameful media panic
Who am I to doubt the IAEA, but please point me to one thing that indicates "Situation stable". I still believe we're looking at a time bomb that could go critical at any moment.
Again, I hope I'm wrong ...
Throughout this crisis I had been thinking back to a science fiction book I had once read, Lucifer’s Hammer, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven...
Anyway here is Jerry Pournelle’s take on his website:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2011/Q1/view666.html#Thursday
Thursday, March 17, 2011
St Patrick’s Day
We are now down to an absolute worst case of two Tsar Bomba fallout equivalent from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Note that we are talking about fallout only: there is no danger whatever of an actual nuclear explosion. The media are breathlessly telling of a nuclear cloud approaching the United States. NPR proclaims that no nukes is good nukes. The Union of Concerned Scientists will cheerfully furnish you with as gloomy a forecast as you’d like whether you ask for their view or not.
In fact the situation is slowly coming under control. Fukushima Daiichi sits on the coast amidst a scene of almost unimaginable destruction, in freezing weather, with high winds. Every road, water pipe, and power line is gone. Debris litters the passageways to the plant. Fukushima Daiichi was protected by a 20 foot sea wall. Most of the surrounding countryside wasn’t protected by a sea wall at all.
At reactor four the fuel rods were in a spent fuel pond: the reactor was shut down in December. The pond was on the roof of the reactor building, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and could withstand an 8.0 quake, and being on the roof had a really short path from the reactor to the storage pond. All was well, until the quake cracked the pool wall. Well, that’s all right, we pump in water. Only there’s no power because the reactors scrammed at the first large tremor. That’s all right, the diesels kick in and the water pumps start up. Only now there’s a tsunami. Well, that’s all right, there’s a twenty foot sea wall. Only the tsunami is 23 feet, and maybe there has been some subsidence of the land level due to the quake. Water rushes into the complex. Back at reactor 4: the water is flowing out of the spent fuel rod pool. The rods stand on end, 14 feet tall, with about 40 feet of water in the pool. The water is flowing out. Everyone is worrying more about the three reactors which are scrammed but which still contain the fuel rods. Those rods are really hot: they are full of just created fission products, some with half lives in minutes to hours so producing a lot of heat. Over in four all the really hot stuff — fission products — has decayed out. But the water is leaking. Temperatures are going up.
At some point the water in the four tank boils furiously near the zirconium rod containers. Superhot steam plus zirconium metal produces very fast rusting. This is also known as oxidation. Rapid oxidation is often called burning. The oxygen in the water is stripped off to become zirconium oxide. That leaves hydrogen (contaminated with some tritium since we still have neutrons and beta products coming from the radioactive decay of the fission byproducts). Hydrogen gets out into the room enclosing the spent fuel pool. It mixes with oxygen from the outside. It ignites. There is an explosion that blows off the roof of the rooftop spent fuel enclosure building. Water continues to leak from the pool.
The remedy is to get water into that pool, but we still don’t have much power for pumps, nor water supply, because we are still surrounded by devastation, and we still have the problem of the reactors that have just been scrammed and are really really hot because they have recently created fission products in them.
But we can call in helicopters to drop water into the now-exposed pool. That ought to work only there is a 20 knot wind, so not all the water dropped can get into the pool, and much goes downwind in a televisible display plume.
And there we are. The good news is that the wind is blowing the results out to sea. The bad news is that a plume hundreds of miles long develops and in that plume are detectable — not dangerous but detectable — levels of radiation, and out there away from the destruction, not hampered by the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami, are a lot of news people desperate for a story, and — I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader. Detectible soon becomes potentially dangerous levels, and it’s hundreds and hundreds of miles, and a Union of Concerned Scientists expert will now tell you about it all.
I can’t say that this won’t be worse than Chernobyl, but so far we have no stories whatever of anyone off the plant site injured, which makes this a TMI story, not a Chernobyl story. And that’s the way things are at Noon on Thursday as best I can tell. Here’s the headline:
Japan nuclear crisis deepens as radiation keeps crews at bay
Race is on to restart cooling systems with emergency power after dropping water on damaged reactors has little effect
To the best of my knowledge the Japanese crews are winning the race. This will end up worse than TMI because many of those in the plant will be injured, and some may be killed: I understand that some workers have voluntarily exceeded their annual badge limits and by a lot because they thought their work was critical. At TMI there were no off site injuries, and the worst to the workers was that they exceeded their badge limits and were sent away. At Daiichi there have so far been no off site injuries, but some to many of the plant workers have exceeded their badge limits. In addition six or more have mechanical injuries, some from the hydrogen explosions, one from a heart attack. Pray for them.
http://www.amazon.com/Lucifers-Hammer-Larry-Niven/dp/0449208133
Lefty nutcases all. Go figure.
That's where I got the expression, "Well, I'll be dipped in sh**!" :)
Great column, Steve - thank you.
Ping so you don’t miss it Mom. :^)
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html
Japan Earthquake Update (18 March 2011, 10:15 UTC)
Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that new INES ratings have been issued for some of the events relating to the nuclear emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants.
Japanese authorities have assessed that the core damage at the Fukushima Daiichi 2 and 3 reactor Units caused by loss of all cooling function has been rated as 5 on the INES scale.
Japanese authorities have assessed that the loss of cooling and water supplying functions in the spent fuel pool of the Unit 4 reactor has been rated as 3.
Japanese authorities have assessed that the loss of cooling functions in the reactor Units 1, 2 and 4 of the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant has also been rated as 3. All reactor Units at Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant are now in a cold shut down condition.
Special Report: Radiation fears may be greatly exaggerated
As workers struggle to contain the fallout from the crippled nuclear plant in northeastern Japan, people as far away as Illinois are calling public health officials in a state of panic.
They are hoping to get their hands on potassium iodide pills to protect them from radiation -- despite warnings that, in the absence of a real nuclear threat, taking the medicine is riskier than doing nothing.
Sixty-six years after the first atomic bomb exploded over the city of Hiroshima, radiation spooks people everywhere. But the anxiety is largely disproportionate to the actual danger.
Ya think?
Latest image from Fukushima:
Excellent!
MEANWHILE- Greg Jarrett subbed for Shep this afternoon (maybe he’s headed back to New York) and had that funny little scientist on whose name I can’t remember- very pleasant fellow- he’s got gray/white hair - maybe he’s Japanese or Korean? I don’t know. At any rate, he’s the most alarmist I’ve heard YET- he went on and on saying if this if that etc...ended by saying then you have China Syndrome. I about put my FIST through the tv.
Reuters Special Report: Radiation fears may be greatly exaggerated
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2691024/posts
Would England, Australia, or Germany do any better? We can only hope they could. Outside of Canada, Scandinavia, and maybe Russia (yeah, I know), the rest of the world can't pour water out a boot with the instructions on the heel. If things don't start improving, in a few years we may not be able to find the heel either. I can call the folks who manage, or rather mis-manage, our water ways and tell them I'm on my porch watching a flood but they're clueless sitting in a cubicle watching a computer screen hours away - Oh, no way, it's not flooding because my computer doesn't say it is so move along there's nothing to see. Idiots!
The counts haven’t gone up since early in the day at the Radiation Network.
Well, an “I told you so” is actually a fairly complicated thing to do here, as the conversation, at least here on FR, really has not been a binary choice between Bliss and Hades.
My own take on the crisis has always been that locally it was quite dangerous but that the dynamics for a) a China Syndrome event, or b) a globally dangerous, highly concentrated high atmosphere plume, simply aren’t there, meaning that all the potassium iodide pill-popping here in the states is pure hype and hypochondria, and that it was and remains irresponsible to stoke panic.
Having said that, we need to be clear on what the article actually says. The plant director has not conceded that ordinary Japanese citizens living reasonable far offsite are or ever were at risk of lethal exposure. Rather,
“Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency admitted that the disaster was a level 5, which is classified as a crisis causing ‘several radiation deaths’ by the UN International Atomic Energy.”
… which I take to mean those with the greatest exposure, who in this case would doubtless be the workers in the plant, members of the Fukushima 50, and not ordinary citizens following emergency management instructions. And tragic as it is for these workers to suffer harm, it is a risk that all nuke plant personnel understand and willingly accept as a condition of employment. Nuke jobs do pay very well, and well they should. It’s just that every now and then, the risk matures. I really don’t know how you put an “I told you so” on that.
That article has the very useful “before” picture (the second one on the page) that puts the location of the green crane (visible through the hole in the wall of the #4 reactor building) and the nearby fuel rod storage pool that it services(serviced) into perspective...
This?
A Meltdown Is Forever
Fox News Insider with Greg Jarrett
http://www.foxnewsinsider.com/2011/03/18/michio-kaku-%E2%80%9Ca-meltdown-is-forever%E2%80%9D/
Kaku is a co-founder of string theory (very sexy theoretical physics stuff)... but also a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science, at least according to wikipedia... hmm...
To be fair, the Japanese are talking about entombment too. And entombment is appropriate for cases in which the situation is so drastic that nothing can be salvaged and must be left onsite due to radiation leaking. It is a financial loss and an eyesore but not sure it is worse than that.
I am reading some of Kaku's online pronouncements, and he tends to take a worst case position-- cradled in conditions to protect himself in case he is wrong. Standard alarmist stuff, just coming from a string theory guy. There are many subfields of physics, like any science, and just because one knows one subfield does not mean one is infallible in another.
I have been told that GE people are being told to remain quiet to the press. This and standard leftist drivel probably explains why the media is going to compliant third-stringers like the "popularizer" Michio Kaku.
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