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Posted on 01/11/2012 10:08:53 PM PST by justa-hairyape
Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere..
And then the NOAA goes on mumbling about positive and negative feed backs to confuse the masses.
We spent 6 months in Western Europe right after Chernobyl blew. I feel for folks in Japan because there’s no where to go. I’m also struck by the difference in media coverage. Mass quantities for Chernobyl, and far less for this continuing disaster. Go figger. BTW, the only medical repercusions for us 26 years on: We can’t donate blood. But that’s due to Mad Moo, not any radiation-related concerns.
well there ya go, rain causes globull warming
Thanks for the link. I’ll read it before today’s workout.
Is Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market still operating? In other words, are they still exporting fish caught in the contaminated waters off Japan?
Here’s what the place is all about for those of you who have never been there. I was there in 2010. It’s incredible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukiji_fish_market
Could be worse though. Just imagine what will happen if a Chinese or Iranian reactor melts down ? No information at all. Can see Iamadinnerjacket jacket saying, Reactor ? What reactor ? Kinda like when someone asked him about gays in Iran. Gays ? We have no gays in Iran.
Later.
I think the nuke meltdowns in Japan are unprecedented. I’ve heard that on here from people using it as a reason why it could not happen here.
I’m of course using it to say that the nuke meltdowns in Japan were the worst that have happened.
To follow up on this thread, there were three more quakes near Fukushima today. All were relatively small and there was no visible ground motion on the Tepco camera video archives. So hopefully this was just a swarm that went through and will subside. One of the quakes was interesting. It is linked below. Its depth was reported as Very Shallow. It was under the ocean so we are talking close to the sea floor.
Also, apparently NHK (Japanese Mass Media) reported just 5 minutes after the largest quake yesterday, Japan Time, that there was no damage at Fukushima. That was before anyone at Tepco had even inspected the plant. Welcome to 1984. Everything old is new again.
NHK reported Fukushima plants were safe before Tepco confirmed after an earthquake
So that appears to be the Japanese government line. No matter what happens there is no problem. Why ? Well because the glorious leaders of Japan have declared cold shutdown and crisis over. So obviously, the gods, the planet and the laws of physics must follow the government decree.
Here is a list of quakes near Fukushims just in the past week
So after they installed the 32 steel support pillars, they filled an area inside the pillars under the spent fuel pool with concrete. That is much better, but it looks as if the entire support is resting on the concrete walls of the Containment Vessel ? That is better, but not as good as it could be. Would take a major quake near the plant or an explosion inside the CV to cause problems now, I suspect.
You would hope that engineers figured that if all the walls of Unit 4 collapsed their recently constructed add-on support could be freestanding along with the reactor vessel, containment vessel and spent fuel pool remaining intact as one structure.
Unit 4 was in shut down mode before the Great Quake for a remodel of the reactor specifically the stainless steel shroud was being replaced, normally the unit would have been decommissioned after end of life or usefulness but TEPCO pioneered replacing the guts of the reactor (aided by GE, it’s their design). Here’s short .pdf on shroud replacement. http://www.irpa.net/irpa10/cdrom/00584.pdf
The shroud replacement had just recently been completed at Unit 4.
This why Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool has twice as much nuclear fuel in it as the first four units. To accomplish shroud replacement you have to remove all the fuel from the reactor and store it somewhere for the duration. The SPF were never meant to hold that much fuel but GE reconfigured a temporary arrangement of the fuel assemblies by stacking and cramming to accommodate all that nuclear fuel.
Unit 5 & 6 were built to be larger producing reactors thus there SFPs can hold more fuel.
Thanks for noting the RPV is empty. No threat of explosion, however they did initially blame the fire/explosion in reactor #4 on hydrogen gas from other reactors that came up some pipes leading to the exhaust stack.
Also need to worry about liquefaction that could cause the CV to lean.
Yeah lots of worst case scenarios still possible like three melted cores aren’t enough beside Unit 3’s AWOL SFP.
The next major step is to unload the Unit 4 SFP, can’t wait to find out where they are going offload and store all that fuel...in swimming pools at the finest hotels in Tokyo?
Can’t wait to find out how they plan on capping the three melted core when they find them esp. if they are leaking/leaching into ground water.
Concerning the nuclear rods, there was a poster here who early on suggested that spent fuel rods could be stored in his backyard. Maybe I should dig that post up out of the ether :> Ah, just kidding. Forgive and forget is the best way to get through life on the internet.
No one really understands the implications of what’s going on at Fukushima. Even any evaporating plant water vapor is radioactive contamination. Small readings maybe, but were never there before.
They are recycling cooling water by filtering, never been done before on such a large scale. This produces more nuclear waste as they run the cooling water through various filters to remove anything from salt to plutonium, that filtered waste has to be stored somewhere. Then the water is sent back into a loop for cooling and gets recontaminated as the corium x3 spews its poisons...That is the best case scenario. Continuing contamination to deal with but cold stable corium x3. (I think they are burning the filtered out dregs and burying the leftover ash.)
If the corium is exposed and not contained or has paths via cracks or fissures to groundwater then the thinking was to trench around the plant to pour a concrete wall underground to dam the radioactive contamination and continue pumping and filtering the water within this well(?) until the corium x3 is found and capped with concrete.
For complete containment you would have to have a solid floor in place besides leak proof walls. Fuku was not built on solid bedrock but extremely harden sea floor, more like dense hardened mud. I don’t see how they will ever contain the corium x3 unless they lucked out and plants concrete foundations are intact and are holding the corium in eroded concrete voids caused when the cores were melting at high temperature. Any cracking then, now, or future in the concrete foundations would contaminate groundwater which leads anywhere to an ocean or aquifers.
Nuclear power, the gift that keeps on giving.
This second stage will probably take quite a few years. Locating the loose coriums, removing the fuel rods from the pools, fully containing the rods that still remain in the RPV's of 2 and 3, and constructing some type of barrier or containment system for the loose coriums. All of this will be occurring while Japan experiences aftershocks from the mega-quake.
The challenge of a lifetime.
"Baseless Rumor" from an LDP Upper House Politician: Explosion in Fukushima I on January 9?
Breaking news : Hydrogen explosion of reactor 4 may have happened on 1/9/2012
Japan Lawmaker: Gov’t may be concealing recent explosion at Reactor No. 4
Good comments on that last link. That anti-nuke site usually contains a lot of hyperbole, but those comments look very cogent.
Also this new breaking story.
Breaking News: Possible rapid increase of temperature at Reactor 2
Last night (Japan time) you could see what appeared to be smoke coming off the roof of #2 on the JNN cam, but it was not visible on the Tepco Cam. Possible steam or convection coming off the roof of #2. Kinda makes sense with all the recent shaking in Fukushima.
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