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
You’re right- and I think a lot of us (I mean civilians) keep thinking of FIRE! SMOKE! STEAM! and forget about what’s happening underneath. When it got really quiet today- no new explosions, no fires I started wondering about exactly what you’re saying- are there cracks beneath now and material is leeching out?
I understand your concern but I have to tell you, humans screw up the planet every day in ways that dwarf what is happening, and indeed what may happen if the worst befalls us at Fukushima. In my town and state alone there are abandoned factories and steel mills leeching who knows what into the soil and water every day. Coal-burning power plants spew thousands of tons of waste directly into the air every day. Ever visit the site of a coal-burning plant that has "scrubbers" to remove sulfur dioxide from the stack gases? You'll see a toxic sludge lake miles long and wide on the property, the residue of the lime-limestone process that scrubbers use to strip out the sulfur dioxide. In my town the taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a "waste-to-energy" plant, one that burned municipal waste to make electricity. It supposedly had an environmental benefit in two ways: made electricity without burning coal and reduced waste volume going to the landfill. Guess what? It emitted dioxins in the process. So the EPA shut it down and the county recently bulldozed the place to the ground, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for the hundreds of millions in construction bonds used to build the place.
The major powers tested thousands of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere for decades starting in the 1940s and extending into the 1960s and afterward (French testing in the South Pacific, for example). Heavy metals and toxins are dumped by the tons into the environment by manufacturers of computer chips, electronic devices, circuit boards, etc. Millions of people fly on airplanes every day that emit tons of combustion products at high altitudes, to be blown around the world by the jet stream.
I'm not trying to be a drama queen here, but you add all those up, you'll see that any environmental effects from nuclear energy, even under accident conditions, are a minor player in the overall picture, even just allowing for normal, every day operations of modern society.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/fear-the-media-meltdown-not-the-nuclear-one/?print=1#Print
Fear the Media Meltdown, Not the Nuclear One (UPDATED)
Posted By Charlie Martin On March 15, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 100 Comments
The March 11 earthquake off the coast of Japan has been an unprecedented disaster. Now estimated to have been a magnitude 9 earthquake — one of the top five earthquakes measured since reporting started in 1900 — it was the result of a “megathrust [1]” in which an area of sea floor bigger than the state of Connecticut [2] broke free and moved under the force of colliding tectonic plates. It was so strong that it literally moved the entire island of Honshu eight feet to the east. The earthquake was then followed by a tsunami comparable to the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — but since the epicenter of the quake was only a few miles off the coast of Japan, the tsunami struck the heavily populated coast of Honshu with almost no warning, basically washing many coastal villages off the face of the earth.
The earthquake and tsunami seriously damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi (“number one”) and Daini (“number two”) in Okuma, in Fukushima Prefecture, and also damaged the Onagawa plant in Miyagi Prefecture. In total, of the 55 nuclear power generation plants in Japan, 11 have been forced to shut down, cutting power generation capacity in Japan dramatically and forcing the country to adopt a series of rolling blackouts. It would seem impossible to overstate the severity of the crisis.
The media, however, has risen to the challenge, with a combination of poor information, ignorance, and alarmism, along with antinuclear activists passing themselves off as unbiased experts.
Let’s try to make some sense of it all.
(continued at the above link)
Are we talking about:
to the north Daiichi aka Fukushima I (6 units with most systems failed and apparently at some stage of fuel rod melt and spent fuel storage pools uncooled and one burning) At least two of these units are offline in shut-down mode but if the fuel rods are out and the pools are heating up (as reports suggest) units 5 and 6 may go the way of unit 4 and catch fire. The uncontained fuel rods seem to pose a greater risk for unconstrained emission of radioactivity than the reactors.
or
to the south Daini aka Fukushima II (4 units and all systems functioning and shut down in an orderly manner)
It appears to me that most of the statement from NRO is bogus BS or at least some degree of that.
This has TMI beat all to heck and gone because no matter how you slice it there are more units in equally bad shape and worse since TMI had working systems and it was pilot error that caused the partial melt of the fuel rod containers there.
At some point this seems likely to exceed Chernobyl if not only for the percentage of the nation of Japan it will contaminate.
No sky falling here but a reality check is that 50 persons in the contaminated plant that is at least partially on fire with systems failed and radiation present are tasked to save the day with.... not much to work with. I see this as lost but waiting on the end of the game already.
Are we talking about:
to the north Daiichi aka Fukushima I (6 units with most systems failed and apparently at some stage of fuel rod melt and spent fuel storage pools uncooled and one burning) At least two of these units are offline in shut-down mode but if the fuel rods are out and the pools are heating up (as reports suggest) units 5 and 6 may go the way of unit 4 and catch fire. The uncontained fuel rods seem to pose a greater risk for unconstrained emission of radioactivity than the reactors.
or
to the south Daini aka Fukushima II (4 units and all systems functioning and shut down in an orderly manner)
It appears to me that most of the statement from NRO is bogus BS or at least some degree of that.
This has TMI beat all to heck and gone because no matter how you slice it there are more units in equally bad shape and worse since TMI had working systems and it was pilot error that caused the partial melt of the fuel rod containers there.
At some point this seems likely to exceed Chernobyl if not only for the percentage of the nation of Japan it will contaminate.
No sky falling here but a reality check is that 50 persons in the contaminated plant that is at least partially on fire with systems failed and radiation present are tasked to save the day with.... not much to work with. I see this as lost but waiting on the end of the game already.
Wish I will be proven completely wrong.
I bought 3 bottles about a month ago on the advice of my CERT trainer. (We are 15 miles from Limmerick)
URGENT: Spraying boracic acid eyed to prevent recriticality at No. 4 reactor
TOKYO, March 16, Kyodo
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday it is considering spraying boracic acid by helicopter to prevent spent nuclear fuel rods from reaching criticality again, restarting a chain reaction, at the troubled No. 4 reactor of its quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
‘’The possibility of recriticality is not zero,’’ TEPCO said as it announced the envisaged step against a possible fall in water levels in a pool storing the rods that would leave them exposed.
What about the spent fuel rod storage pools that are now heating up and / or on fire?
Daiichi Fukiama I Units 4, 5 and 6 with systems failed, spent fuel storage on fire or heating up.
Units 1 and 3 hydrogen explosions but contained.
Unit 2 with some kind of explosion that has damaged the torus.
I want to hear what he has to say about units 4,5,6.
It's time we get a little, no a lot more serious about fixing what needs fixing. Once the American public gets pissed, things start improving. Please continue to think of ways nuclear power can be made safer and a way somehow to bind the Genie with unbreakable chains. The world will beat a path to your door. ;)
Did you know that they discovered a naturally-occurring nuclear reactor? Clumps of uranium happened to settle together underground, and water flowed through it to moderate, and voila, there was a nuclear core underground, cranking out the heat and xenon. There were 16 sites which ran for a few hundred thousand years, producing 100kw of heat on average.
Completely natural, completely uncontained. I think our planet can tolerate man-made nuclear reactors carefully constructed and judiciously managed.
Sounds like they finally got inside the crisis curve.
From an engineering viewpoint, zero failure rate is not attainable.
I am an engineer.
Everything fails eventually. All we do is manage risk to a level as low as reasonably practical.
Will do. Engineering often comes down to making the best choices we can to address a particular problem. Certainly improving safety across the board is useful, and applying more effort in the obvious places (the reason for the comparisons made earlier) is a start.
Units 4, 5, and 6 were in cold shutdown for regulation inspection. There are still fuel rods in the cores of those units. The shroud was not being replaced on Unit 4.
The spent fuel pool at Unit 4 has 783 spent fuel rods in it. They’re stored in racks.
Right there tells you they're lying about what's really going on. Then this latest about bringing in engineers to fix a generator?!? I don't think so. A few days ago the PM's spokesman was doing his best to imitate Baghdad Bob. Then the fire is out, no it's burning, no it's out, no there's a leak, no everything is fine, no call in the calvary. I've heard from friends that they were being told everything was under control but suddenly earlier today it was get outta Dodge time.
Hey SE Mom, thanks for starting this thread. It was a great idea. Unfortunately, it may go on for a while. How very sad.
Hell, you don't have to be a nuclear physicist to get that part right.
In that case, certainly. I just think one needs to use caution when making comparisons while performing an evaluation of what went wrong.
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