Japan Disaster
gregladen | April 18, 2011Ana's Feeed starting Sunday mid day through last night:
TEPCO press conf. (NHK): Since the accident, we have caused a huge amount of trouble and inconvenience to residents and anxiety to the greater population in general ... Residents have been asked to evacuate and they would like to return home and we would like to assist the govt in planning for their return. Therefore, we release this plan:
To achieve cold shutdown in 6-9 months via 2 steps: 1) reducing radioactive material (3 months) and 2) controlling the release of radioactive elements (3-6 months)
3 areas of focus will be: cooling,…
gregladen | April 17, 2011Claims are being made that the situation at Fukushima is starting to improve, but there is no actual evidence of this. We probably (but not certainly) passed the point where nuclear fuel is likely to accumulate in such a way as to cause a major fission event or explosion, but there is still sufficient heat to cause, apparently, water to split into hydrogen and oxygen, or at least, there is concern of this possibility. (Hydrogen explosions have already occurred here early on in the crisis, and there is concern that this may happen again.) All of the basic safety systems are still not working…
gregladen | April 12, 2011The most significant news seems to be the raising of the level of this accident, on the international scale of how bad things get at nuclear power plants, to the highest level, which is also the level set for the Chernobyl accident. This does not mean that the Fukushima Disaster is the same as the Chernobyl disaster. They are different situations, different technologies, and different things going wrong. However, it is now official: On the scale from TMI to Chernobyl, Fukushima is officially Chernobyl. But different.
An earthquake on April 7th had knocked out power at the Fukushima…
gregladen | April 5, 2011Welcome to the "I'm starting to get cynical" edition.
The situation at Fukushima Diiachi Nuclear Plant reached an impasse over the least few days. Two or three of the reactors are in a situation where cooling is being kludged, the reactor fuel rods are damaged and have melted but the details are unknown, storage pools are not being safely managed, unexpected fission events keep occurring despite the widespread belief that this can't happen, and no one knows what to do because no one can see what is happening because of the more immediate problem: There is a deposit of very dangerous highly…
gregladen | April 2, 2011Despite the deafening silence from TEPCO regarding questions over a physical breech in Reactor 2, it is now generally being considered that there is a breech in reactor 2. It is not clear if it is a hole in the containment vessel of some kind or just some disconnected or cracked pipes. Experts are estimating the percent of fuel in the reactors that were active at the time of the quake that has been damaged as fairly high (over half). The most significant news over the last several hours is probably the identification of a major route by which radioactive water is leaking from Reactor 2…
gregladen | April 1, 2011Curiouser and Curiouser .... the podcast. This is part one of three planned discussions with Theo Theofanous.
gregladen | April 1, 2011The experts monitoring and reporting on the Fukushima nuclear disaster have, for several days now, stopped talking about melting reactor fuel or breached containment vessels. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Energy Collective, and other groups now merely pass along information about pressure and temperature and make a note here and there about water being sprayed on something or not sprayed on something. They have not stopped talking about melting overheated fuel because they have determined that there isn't any. They stopped talking about it because there isn't anything to say…
gregladen | March 30, 2011As I tune in to NHK live TV, and see the piece on using Twitter to aid in disaster relief being shown for the 20th time over the last 48 hours, I wonder about what appears to be a sudden and dramatic drop in the level of coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Over the last several days, the IAEA has stopped bothering to note that cooling systems are still not working and have shifted their attention to monitoring the rising radiation levels outside the plant on both land and sea. Meanwhile, TEPCO engineers are speaking of covering the reactor plant with a big blanket of…
gregladen | March 29, 2011It is said that it is physically impossible for the nuclear material in any of the Fukushima reactors to melt through the containment vessels. Despite a rumor of a crack in one of the vessels, nuclear power experts have maintained that it is impossible that there could be such a crack. Nonetheless, a US based GE-connected nuclear engineered who has ties to the Fukushima facility has boldly asserted that he thinks that the core in reactor 2 has "melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel ... and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell."
Richard Lahey was head of…
gregladen | March 28, 2011The most interesting and important current news, interesting if confirmed, is that plutonium has been discovered in soil near Fukushima. With all this talk about radiation, it is easy to forget that some of these elements are extremely poisonous in their own right. Plutonium is a very nasty poison. I've not seen the news reports or any details yet ... as of this writing, this is just reasonably reliable rumor. I'm off the intertubes for the rest of the day, but I'll update tomorrow on this topic.
The cooling systems are still not operational and a huge amount of radioactive water has been…
gregladen | March 27, 2011Sea water has now been replaced with fresh water for cooling reactors, and, apparently, spent fuel storage pools. Work continues on restoring power and repairing cooling systems, but the cooling systems remain unrepaired. An interesting development overnight (overday in Japan): A very high radiation reading in Reactor 2 showed what apparently was high enough radiation to cause workers to immediately evacuate, as well as a high enough rate of short-lived radioactive isotope to make it a certainty that fission was happening, if not currently, within the previous few hours, and that…
gregladen | March 26, 2011A crack in the containment vessel of Fukashima Reactor 3 has been mentioned by MSNBC and ABC news, citing the New York Times. The New York Times has an article in which the crack is mentioned in a side bar, attributed to an anonymous person. An anonymous source is not particularly impressive, but the New York Time is. So I suppose this is somewhat impressive.
Various news sources are reporting an actual quote from the anonymous source and say a little more about him. This is what is being reported:
A senior nuclear executive who insisted on anonymity but has broad contacts in Japan…
gregladen | March 26, 2011This is a particularly important update. An anonymous source in Japan has told reporters connected to the New York Times that there is a visible crack in the Fukushima Reactor 3. This is the reactor that showed isotopic evidence of a leak of some kind. Arguments had been made that a hole in the reactor vessel was an impossibility. The increasingly convincing evidence of a leak led people to admit, or realize, that the reactor vessel already has holes in it ... those designed to allow pipes and such in and out of the large thick-walled metal object. It was then presumed that this is where…
gregladen | March 25, 2011The water within Reactor Number 3 (where three workers were exposed to high levels of radiation yesterday) is 10,000 times more radioactive than the average water inside a nuclear reactor and contains radioactive iodine that is generated during fission and has a half-life of 8 days. Japanese engineers are pretty sure that this means that fuel rods within the reactor have contributed to fission reactions.
Here's an important bit: The physical container that holds the fuel rods inside the reactor is very robust and is probably not leaking. However, as you might guess, the reactor container…
gregladen | March 25, 2011Ana's Feed starting at about 2PM Thursday 24 March:
Finally found some info on that simulation mentioned earlier: "...the model showed that areas where cumulative exposure over 12 days reached 100 millisieverts--the government's maximum for infants--extended beyond the evacuation zone. A map based on data from the center showed areas that received a cumulative 100 millisieverts extended as far as about 40 kilometers northeast and south from the plant."
Radiation 10,000 times normal level in water where nuke plant workers irradiated -kyodo news
1.3 million Bq of iodine 131. (NHK)
Workers stood…
gregladen | March 24, 2011Ana's Feed starting just after midnight 24 March:
"...estimates that 57,000 pounds of salt have accumulated in Reactor No. 1 and 99,000 pounds apiece in Reactors No. 2 and 3, which are larger." (Editor's note: This is what I had independently calculated, so it looks right to me)
Ban Ki-moon and IAEA and various governments are going to talk about ways to keep nuclear power safe. (NHK broadcast)
NHK is quoting the recent US poll that shows a decline in public opinion about nuclear power, adding "this means the American people are seriously responding to this situation in Japan." (NHK)
Work at…
gregladen | March 22, 2011And maybe dinner, too. This will mainly affect our local Twin Cities folk:
Thom Pham and the staffs of Wondrous Azian Kitchen and Thanh Do Restaurant with support from World Class Wines and Joto Sake will host two fundraisers to support the people affected by the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami.
On Wednesday, March 23rd at Thanh Do and on Thursday, March 24th at Wondrous Azian Kitchen 100% of the sales proceeds for the entire day will be donated to the American Red Cross in support of its disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and Tsunami throughout…
gregladen | March 22, 2011Risk, Trust, and the Arrogance of Numbers
...The coal and biofuel safety numbers don't come with a disclaimer that the greatest number of additional deaths from these fuels are due to indoor use for cooking, not from industrial energy production. Wind and solar energy numbers don't reflect that these are developing industries, without decades of safety standards behind them. (Including development numbers for nuclear would drastically change the picture there, given that it was a technology born out of war.) None of these numbers include the costs of destruction of ecosystems, displacement,…
gregladen | March 22, 2011With the current nuclear power plant kerfuffle1 in Japan, people are making comparisons with a TMI-Chernobyl scale, with TMI being a nuclear accident that is not bad at all2 and Chernobyl being the worst case scenario.3 This is actually very reassuring, because Chernobyl was really no big deal.4
The event itself killed dozens of workers and rescue personnel, but the number of people killed in nuclear power plant accidents in total, including Chernobyl and all the other active plant accidents ever, is still far lower in terms of energy produced by that method than the number of people killed…
gregladen | March 21, 2011There are new fires at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plants. There was a fire on the roof of Reactor Unit 3. It burned for several hours causing workers to pull out of the area to have radiation levels tested. The radiatoi levels did not, however, change. About 6:00 PM local time fire went out (on its own) something like steam or smoke (said by TEPCO to be most likely steam but not from the fuel storage pool) started coming out of the building housing Reactor 2. There is no explanation at this time for either incident.
Both reactor buildings were damaged by the same hydrogen…