Posted on 04/08/2011 12:22:45 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Powerful Aftershock Complicates Japan’s Nuclear Efforts
By HIROKO TABUCHIand ANDREW POLLACK
Published: April 7, 2011
TOKYO — The strongest aftershock to hit since the day of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan rocked a wide section of the country’s northeast on Thursday night, prompting a tsunami alert, raising fears of new strains on the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and knocking out external power at three other nuclear facilities.
The public broadcaster, NHK, said two people had died in Miyagi and Yamagata, including a 63-year-old woman whose ventilator stopped working in the blackout. Many more were injured. About 3.6 million households were still without power Friday morning.
/snip
Broken pieces of fuel rods have been found outside of Reactor No. 2, and are now being covered with bulldozers, he said. The pieces may be from rods in the spent-fuel pools that were flung out by hydrogen explosions.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Oh, my. Keep praying for Japan.
P!
How much worse can it get?
Oh joy!
My tagline is getting more realistic by the day.
Hope they are remote controlled dozers, which wouldn't be too hard to do.
There’s a chance that these pieces came from the spent fuel in pools above the reactors. Those spent fuel rods are supposed to be sitting in water and there was a period of time when they were believed to be uncovered (that was when they started dropping water from helicopters) but now they are flushing water into the pools. When the outer domes blew up and exposed these pools - could have blown some spent fuel out of the pools.
As I understand it, they kept the spent rods outside the reactor vessel in the coolant that surrounds it. So the core is probably still contained. It’s the next layer out seems to be breached, but I think this has been known for a while. This is a new complication to that problem. Not only is it breached, but now pieces of the spent rods have escaped are now in the environment. Previously it had been the water surrounding them that was getting out, but now it’s the rods themselves.
This is old news for those who are following it. I think it was from a couple of days ago. Word is now that the NYT’s cut the sentence about bulldozing over the fuel from a recent version of the article.
The ‘spent’ fuel rod pools are located on the upper level of the reactor buildings. Think of them as a swimming pool, where the fuel rods are kept in a vertical configuration in a grid, covered with water.
It is possible that one of the hydrogen explosions ejected fuel rods out from the pool.
The fuel rod pool at unit 4 is probably the source of most of the heavier element radiation. Those rods were the ‘newest’ that are outside a reactor pressure vessel.
As the article says, most likely they are from the spent fuel pool. Containment on reactor 2 is damaged (most likely in the torus), but not catastrophically so, which would be required to fling fuel rods around the outside.
This situation was already worse than Chernobyl & just keeps getting worse & out of control.
Uh, no.
It's serious, but not nearly as bad as Chernobyl.
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"They're running bulldozers around to bury the stuff so it doesn't cook people going by," he said.
It was the last sentence of the article as of 7:40 pm on April 8th and has been since removed.
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Wonder if anyone believes in Weather War now?
Weather War?
New evidence suggests US & Russia are embroiled in an illegal race to harness the power of hurricanes & earthquakes
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1061
Home » Crimes, North America » Top US Senator Assassinated As Obama “Weather War” Plunges World Into Chaos
Top US Senator Assassinated As Obama “Weather War” Plunges World Into Chaos
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/08/top-us-senator-assassinated-as-obama-weather-war-plunges-world-into-chaos/
Weather Modification
http://twm.co.nz/wxwar.html
My two cents worth (now on sale for 1 cent!)
I believe Chernobyl was worse in that containment was blown completely from day 1 and the public was encouraged to enjoy outdoor festivities while fallout blanketed teh town etc. Literally every Soviet design and radiation exposure policy was horribly flawed. And to this day, they have lied about it. There were plenty of heroes who gave their lives, and way too many who were needlessly exposed and lied to. A Russian woman went through documents when the Soviet Union broke up and found out that over 10,000 people went to the hospital the first day of the disaster but for days their government said nothing was wrong.
For my money, the Japanese have better all around design, containment is not blown wide open as was Chernobyl. All radiation exposure and design decisions by the Japanese are light years ahead. Yes I am quite concerned for them - the tasks they are facing continue to get more complicated upon inspection. I never dreamed that we’d ever see the days they are facing now. But I would not say it is getting worse because they have some power and some water flow and just went through a big aftershock ok. Overall nuclear mass at risk is higher than Chernobyl but overall capacity to deal with it (and receive support from other nations) is better. IMHO :) I continue to pray for them.
geez, not again! now what?
They have those over there, remember seeing an ad for
Japanese remote underwater dozers. Way cool.
who knows? nothing is guaranteed in life. nature is to be respected and at times, feared.
We probably do not ever want to know that.
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