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US Alarmed Over Japan's Nuclear Crisis
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that the US is urging Americans who live within 50 miles of Japan's earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to evacuate as Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that no water remains in a deep pool used to cool spent fuel at the plant and that radiation levels there are thought to be 'extremely high.' Jaczko's testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee suggests that damage to the plant is worse than the Japanese government and the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has acknowledged. On Tuesday, the company said water levels in three of the site's seven fuel pools were dropping, but did not say that the fuel rods themselves had been exposed. Left exposed to the air, the fuel rods will start to decay and release radioactivity into the air and lack of water in at least one spent-fuel pool sparked fears of a worst-case scenario: the fuel could combust. 'If there's no water in there, the spent fuel can start a fire,' says Eric Moore, a consultant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on nuclear plant design and safety issues. 'Once you have that fire, there's a high risk of radiation getting out, spewed by the fire.' The power company says a reduced crew of 50 to 70 employees — far fewer than the 1,400 or more at the plant during normal operations — had been working in shifts to keep seawater flowing to the three reactors now in trouble. Their withdrawal on Wednesday temporarily left the plant with nobody to continue cooling operations."
Anyone born before 1945 must find a great amount of irony in the headline.
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That's not the case at all. They're fighting like hell to run power to the cooling systems to bring them back online. The brief withdrawal of workers was due to a temporary spike in radiation.
And the US and other nations have sent people there, on site, to report on what is going on. No sats required. Hell, the US Military has helped put out some of the fires, so they are RIGHT THERE.
The Emperor went on TV to ask the world for help and patience while they work on the problem. China has been asked for help in supplying boron to help cool things down.
Go follow the BBC News coverage for some real information on what's going on, they seem to be doing quite well at providing it.
$0.02 (CDN)
People may not be able to live there yes, but Tjernobyl has shown proven the saying "life finds a way" true again. The area around Tjernobyl has become one of the most biologically diverse in the area... probably in large part due to the lack of humans around.
We now have four rectors that needs to be cooled down, built in and kept under close watch for a couple of hundred thousands of years.
Even if those reactors melt down, which they haven't yet, they'll probably stay contained (3m of concrete underneath), and from there it would be about 10 years before access for scraping them would be possible, similar to TMI. The reactors themselves are a problem, but not the BIG problem. The pool with the spent rods is, like the summary says.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This is the least informed comment I have ever read on /.
"We now have four rectors that needs to be cooled down, built in and kept under close watch for a couple of hundred thousands of years"
That doesnt even bear any resemblance to anything that is actually happening or going to happen at that plant.
This disaster could well be worse than the one in Tjernobyl.
No, it could not.
- Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel to catch and contain a melted core.... it melted out the bottom of the reactor and through the floor.
- Chernobyl used graphite control rods -- and graphite burns, carrying with it radioactive isotopes right from the melted core.
All radiation is not created equal. A micro-SV is a measure quantity. A micro-SV per hour is a rate, and you have to know how long the person is exposed to get the total quantity. Eating a banana will give you about 0.1 micro-SV due to radioactive potassium-40 in bananas. An average person gets over 400 micro-SV a year just from eating food. A reporter in Japan yesterday, took a picture of a radiation meter while standing outside, and it read 0.6 micro-SV/hour. Well bellow even the most conservative safety thresholds.
Particularly in the vented steam, the isotopes found in quantity have very short half-lives. The quantity of what has been released is diluted quickly to levels barely above background in the atmosphere.
Note that most of the cooling infrastructure at the plant is completely intact... but they lack electricity to run it. A new electrical line is being run, and should be completed in a day or so. At that point, the pumps will be back on line, and the situation will rapidly de-escalate.
i live in tokyo. since friday there have been daily earthquakes sometimes multiple with a magnitude of at least 3. i live in the akihabara area and businesses are doing their best to reduce all power consumption. people too are doing a good job of reducing power consumption. sections of the greater tokyo area are in scheduled black outs. trains are running at a 50%-75% schedule. as far what is happening up north.... i know what you know. where all my foreign friends have left i am still here. i went to shinagawa 2 times this week to get a reentry permit and the line the first time was 15hrs long. so i showed up the next day 1 hour before opening and the line was 2km or longer. as far as my japanese friends they are concerned however tokyo is still running, people still have jobs to goto and such.
I tried very hard, but I just could not find the following _full_ interview in English, only Spanish. Reuters quote part of the interview but leave out the juiciest and most damning accusations by nuclear accident cleanup hero/expert Yuri Andreyev. Luckily google translate does a decent translation so you can read it...
A couple of (corrected) quotes:
Andreyev: "In the nuclear industry there are no independent bodies"
[What has happened in Japan's Nuclear facility] "was not an error, it is a crime"
I would have to think that catastrophe on any scale affecting the classic generation would result in different types of harm to outside living in some way or another. If a coal plant goes up in flames then we have to deal with the massive air pollution and damage to anything that happens to be down-wind. If a natural gas plant goes up, same thing, except then we're dealing with toxic levels of gas on top of all the smoke. They all have their good points and bad points. I sill believe that nuclear power offers more pros than cons.
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And encasing everything in concrete would be dumb, as the nuclear material would simply keep heating-up until a worse disaster happened. You have to DEAL with the problem, not dump a bunch of concrete and hope it goes away.
Actually, that's not true. Encasing it is a viable (though probably last ditch effort) solution. Yes it will generate a lot of heat, but that doesn't really matter. The important thing is that, once encased, it cannot start a fire (no oxygen). Radioactive soot from a fire is probably the most dangerous part of the whole situation (outside of direct radiation exposure to people actually at the plant)
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
"Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.
At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels."
Japanese dispute claim of no water in #4, claim helicopter crew was able to see water but the level isn't known. Last night saw on HNK news the U.S. will fly unmanned drones to verify water level, as getting close to pools involves very high exposure.
It's kind of depressing if you think about it. Humanity is a bigger scourge to biological diversity than massive doses of radiation.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Because electronics wont work in radio active enviroment. The russians tried it in Tjernobyl but they failed rapidly despite pretty heavy shielding.
HTTP/1.1 400
As others have pointed out, the rods won't go "boom" but some of the compounds in the rods will catch fire, and that will push radioactive material into the air.
therefore, the only real emergency solutions i see, correct me if i am wrong, is either: 1. get some new backup generators there asap, or 2. run some emergency electrical lines to the power plant asap
3. Drown it in powdered boron, which is how they ultimately killed the Chernobyl fire. That seems to be the solution Japan is going for, but they have to get the boron from Korea.
Boron has two uses; one, it melts and then evaporates quickly, which sucks a lot of energy out of any fire it hits, and two, it's a neutron absorber, which kills any runaway criticality in the core. It's the right tool for the job. I just wonder why a country so dependent on nuclear power doesn't keep an emergency supply of boron on hand. Maybe it was hubris; maybe they thought things would never get this bad.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Stop.
Lying.
Please. Shut. The. Hell. Up. You have zero clue what you are stating, and are showing yourself to be either a shill for the oil/coal companies, or just too clueless to know better. By chance, are you being paid by Fox News?
Do you have any idea of the lies you are spouting? It is not going to blow up even if all the rods turn into one big blob, just because the uranium is not the right isotope. If this were the case, Iran would just empty all the rods from an existing facility and use that in their devices, as opposed to all the work with the centrifuges.
Nuclear power 101. Yes, power reactors get hot, but they do not get even near a mass critical enough to do a detonation. No reactor ever designed would do this. Yes, they will melt, but they will not be turning into a Fat Man ever.
At least learn about the subject you are trying to scare people on. As of now, your post history shows that you are a liar, a troll, a shill of a company/organization who wants nuclear power killed, or mindlessly spouting someone else's rhetoric that you do not understand.
What do you want, soothing words or the no-bullshit answer? If the fuel pools and reactors can't be cooled, then the reactors will be as good as their containment systems, which should mean a meltdown is not a problem. There is a hole in the containment system of reactor #2 (suppression torus) though, no one knows how that will impact the performance of the containment vessel around the reactor. An uncontrolled spent fuel pool fire would be the worst thing that could happen, would release more contamination than Chernobyl. So do you trust that they can keep the reactor and pools cool for the next two days while emergency power line brought in and attempts made to start site pumps?
No-bullshit answer is any relatives or friends within 1km are too close if current cooling efforts fail, the best thing if possible is to back off 50 or more miles (90 km) at a minimum.
I was a scheduler at a nuke plant.
An abridged list from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_tsunamis :
2004: Indian Ocean - The initial surge was measured at a height of approximately 33 meters
1993: Okushiri, Hokkaido, Japan - Okushiri, a small island near the epicenter...was struck with extremely big waves, some reaching 30 meters
1983: Sea of Japan - The waves exceeded 10 meters in some areas.
1964: Alaska, USA - The waves were up to 100 feet tall, and killed 11 people as far away as Crescent City, California.
1960: Valdivia, Chile - It spread across the entire Pacific Ocean, with waves measuring up to 25 meters high.
1958: Lituya Bay, Alaska, USA - an earthquake caused a megatsunami to reach a height taller than the Empire State Building, measuring over 520 metres (1,706 ft), killing two. ...
1923: Kanto, Japan - waves reaching 12 meters were recorded.
1896: Meiji Sanriku, Japan - the waves, which reached a height of 100 feet, killed approximately 27,000 people
1854: Nankai, Tokai, and Kyushu Japan - Earthquake generated a maximum wave of 28 meters at Kochi, Japan
1792: Mount Unzen, Nagasaki Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan - the waves reached a height of 330 ft, classing this tsunami as a small megatsunami.
1771: Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa, Japan - Estimates of the highest seawater runup on Ishigaki Island, range between 30 meters and 85.4 meters
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?