Posted on 03/25/2011 12:25:59 AM PDT by Lazlo in PA
TOKYO – Japanese nuclear safety officials said Friday that they suspect that the reactor core at one unit of the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant may have breached, raising the possibility of more severe contamination to the environment.
"It is possible that somewhere at the reactor may have been damaged," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the nuclear safety agency. But he added that "our data suggest the reactor retains certain containment functions," implying that the damage may have occurred in Unit 3's reactor core but that it was limited.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
They are injecting the Nitrogen now into reactor 1. Nice to know it was Our engineers solution, not to be full of American exceptionalism but somehow I feel more at ease knowing they are listening to our guys and gals.
Let's hope it helps!
As for the Pacific Ocean...Yeah...perception or by in fact reality...Japan's fishing industry will be hit hard.
Found this today. New to me and a little off topic. Would it mean the end of conventional nuclear and carbon generating power plants?
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110406e7.pdf
Nice site, thanks for posting the link. Yes, the radiation is tapering off since there were simply no more fires after the first week. The tradeoff is tons of water with varying amounts of radioisotopes in it.
Really good article...
Chemistry 201: Why Is Fukushima So Gassy?
Yeah...I wonder now....A lot of different locations come from tepco and they do not make it easy matching them to previous days...I wonder if that is the issue?
I think that's a pretty key point. We may be safe from cooling pond meltdown since everything is submerged. But in the reactor cores there are only so many channels and some of those are probably caked up with salt. Then a small but critical portion overheats and cascades to the rest.
Very good info in this article...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=magnitude-74-aftershock-disrupts-ef-2011-04-07
Full NRC report on Fukushima.....must read.
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/downloads/4037602/1/NRC%20Assessment
Very informative, thanks.
Good stuff as always! Thanks,
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Japan is considering, according to government sources, raising the nuclear accident severity level to seven from 5 after the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan on Monday said ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110411-709790.html
REUTERSFLASH: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant operator says fighting fire at No.4 reactor in the Daiichi complex
Twitter - 8
8 seconds ago
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/12/japan-nuclear-alert-level-seven
10,000 tB is 270,000 Curies (1 B = 27 pCi). For "several hours", let's call it 1,000,000 Curies. Here are some comparisons: http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/greenrun.html so we are probably looking at the same order of magnitude of Cesium isotopes as Chernobyl in the ocean (as opposed to spread by air).
I guess I should say that I don’t know if that it was released into the air in the original fire, or in today’s fire, or into the ocean in some prior release. It’s not clear in the articles.
Yeah, that’s been the hardest thing in this whole crisis for everyong and that is understanding the translation.
Official now World Nuclear News press release on the raising it to Level 7
Fukushima moved to Level 7
12 April 2011
The ongoing radiological release from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has led Japanese authorities to raise the rating of the accident there to Level 7.
A batch of eight safety-related incidents were recorded on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) in the days after a 14-metre tsunami left the site flooded to a level of over five metres.
Covering both the Fukushima Daiichi and Daiini plants, these concerned the overall effect on the nuclear plants (Level 3), two losses of cooling function (Level 5), one covering radiological release (Level 5), one on loss of cooling to a fuel pond (Level 3) and three more on loss of reactor cooling (Level 3).
These have now been supplemented by an additional rating at the top Level 7, ‘a major accident’. Japanese authorities notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of their decision to up the rating: “As a result of re-evaluation, total amount of discharged iodine-131 is estimated at 1.3x1017 becquerels, and caesium-137 is estimated at 6.1x1015 becquerels. Hence the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has concluded that the rating of the accident would be equivalent of Level 7.”
More at the source...
In my previous update I talked about the possibility of an inadvertent criticality occurring at Fukushima [Unit] 1. That was based on four things. It was based on a neutron beam being detected thirteen times; it was based on the presence of chlorine-38; it was based on tellurium-129 being detected; and it was based on iodine-131 and [iodine]-132 being detected. Since I made that update to you, TEPCO, Tokyo Electric, has pulled the report upon which I based it. They, uh, the tellurium data, they say, is no longer accurate. When you’re in a mode like Tokyo Electric is in, you would hope that the information you’re using is accurate. That’s a serious concern: that inaccurate information is being used in decision making at TEPCO. This isn’t the only time; there’s a couple of these instances. When the neutron beam came out, TEPCO denied that despite the fact that the quote was from their own spokesman. There was a report of incredibly high radiation in the ocean, and TEPCO denied that and lowered the report [to an amount that was] still incredibly high, but a hundred times lower. And Dr. Richard Lahey, a General Electric scientist of great renown, was quoted [as saying] that Unit 2 had had a meltdown. Again, TEPCO denied that. So I guess I’m concerned about, one, the reliability of information coming out of TEPCO, but also that the information that’s happening in private at TEPCO is not being relayed to the public.
It’s not just TEPCO that this is occurring with. Today the New York Times ran a story about a report circulated within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] dating back to March 26 where the NRC staff has identified significant problems and dangers at Fukushima; basically, we’re not out of the woods yet. The problems that the staff is aware of, but not really sharing with Congress or the general public, include the fact that there’s an awful lot of mud inside this nuclear reactor. Now, we’ve been talking about that for a week or more because of the seawater that’s been injected into the reactor. It’s not coming out, and it’s building up inside. The NRC is concerned about that too, they just didn’t tell you and I. They’re concerned that the weight of the building, with all this water in it, might make it unstable in the case of an earthquake. They’re concerned that a re-criticality like we talked about last time might occur. They’re also concerned about hydrogen being recreated and another explosion occurring. And finally, they’re also concerned about plutonium which likely was ejected from the fuel pools during the explosions. The NRC believes that this plutonium was ejected several miles away from the reactor, and is also onsite and may have been bulldozed into the soil. Well, all of this is happening inside the NRC; they’re telling Congress, and you and I, that the situation is difficult, but under control.
It’s not just the NRC that’s saying this, it’s [also] large nuclear corporations, including one called Areva, which is a French nuclear conglomerate, probably one of the largest in the industry. As reported in the New York Times on March 23rd: there was an invitation-only meeting at Stanford University on the 21st of March, this is ten days after the accident, where Areva presented some pretty significant problems that the public was not being made aware of. We’ve been able to get a hold of the Areva report that was presented there. Now, the Areva report is pretty damning, but in fact there’s information in it that’s wrong. I will, next time, be discussing [the] problems with the Areva report that actually make the situation worse. The Areva report talks about the fact that it’s known that the nuclear fuel in all three reactors reached five thousand degrees [5,000 degrees Celsius]. That’s beyond the melting point of stainless steel, and beyond the melting point of zircalloy which means that a disintegration of the core is pretty obvious. The Areva report talks about Unit 2 in particular and identifies that the core, [correction] that the containment was breached by a hydrogen explosion. We look at Units 1, 3 and 4 and see the roofs blown off, and [Unit] 2 looks pretty good. What happened at Unit 2, though, was that the hydrogen built up inside then somehow ignited. It’s unknown why. Sort of like a sneeze with your nose closed, you’re going to pop your eardrums. Well, that’s what happened at Unit 2, but it likely breached the containment. Areva and the nuclear industry know that, and really haven’t been sharing it with us.
The other thing that the Areva report talks about is that they recommend control of crops and dairy products out to fifty kilometers (50 km). That’s about thirty miles (30 mi.) away from the plant. That means that they believe that radiation has exceeded well beyond what the emergency evacuation zone is, and that both crops and dairy products may be contaminated.
Areva also spends a lot of time talking about Unit 4. That’s the one that has no fuel in the reactor, but exploded anyway. They basically said that this was a core melt in fresh air. The reason the core melted on Unit 4, Areva believes, is that the fuel pool cracked from the earthquake. So the water didn’t boil out of Unit 4 like we’ve been led to believe. There was a crack in the fuel pool from the earthquake and now, with no water, a zircalloy-hydrogen reaction was inevitable.
The last thing that the Areva report notices is that, this was, probably the largest release is coming from Unit 4 because there’s no containment. And, they basically say that all of the fission products can be volatilized.
Finally, industry insiders who are aware of the Areva presentation have told me that the person who presented the presentation said this, it’s almost an exact quote: “Clearly, we are witnessing one of the greatest disasters in modern time.” Well, in the private meetings Areva is saying that this is a serious issue, but in public the nuclear renaissance continues to move forward both within the nuclear industry and within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
I will update you on this Areva report and identify the problems within it in my next presentation, but I wanted to let you know that I will be trying to filter out, from all of these sources, reliable information to pass on to you in the future.
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