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."

Comments

Scare tactic

[Stenchwarrior]

I don't know how much if this is true. I assume there is a modicum of truth in all of these reports, but these guys seem to offer a more rational and less sensationalist explanation.

Re:Scare tactic

[drinkypoo]

I don't know how much if this is true. I assume there is a modicum of truth in all of these reports, but these guys seem to offer a more rational and less sensationalist explanation.

Those guys are also tied directly to the DoD.

They gain credibility from their name on one hand, and lose it from their obligations on the other.

Re:Scare tactic

[drooling-dog]

I understand fully that people within and around the industry are concerned about how these events will affect the public acceptance of nuclear power around the world. It's also undeniable that the public's ability to understand what's going on is limited, and the media isn't always helpful in that regard.

But you've got to be careful about jumping the gun with all of the "I'm a nuclear engineering student and there's nothing to worry about, you idiot" posts we've been seeing since this crisis (yes, I'll call it that) started. As the crisis deepens, all they do is convince the public that people who are representing themselves as experts either don't know what they're talking about or are deliberately lying. A few days ago the radiation hazard from this plant was being compared to that from the K-40 in a bunch of bananas (and who would be afraid of bananas?), and the next thing people hear is that it's too dangerous to fly helicopters overhead.

The problem the nuclear industry and its PR vendors will face after this won't be about the details of nuclear reactor engineering or radiation health; it will be about credibility. Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.
 

Re:Scare tactic

[LordLimecat]

I would say the same about the media (though im not sure that their name alone is sufficient to give them credibility)-- their obligations are to make sensationalist stories.

Hence why you will see a whopping 2 minute segment on how thousands have died and tens of thousands have no power or water, and then a 3 hour segment on how there is low level radiation that might conceivably kill some of the plant workers if the radiation levels spike significantly and the plant blows up.

Thats real responsible reporting guys, really makes me trust everything you have to say.

Re:Scare tactic

[gad_zuki!]

>their obligations are to make sensationalist stories.

I can't believe the reporting on this. Words like "NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE" are on the TV and in print, while thousands are without power, water, and are looking for their lost loved ones.

I'm so sick of the sensationalist media. It just creates reactionary and sensationalist people. Sadly, the coal and oil industries are probably laughing at all this as building more reactors in the US will now be impossible or more difficult than usual. We're going to keep burning more fossil fuels. Oh well, here comes more pollution and guaranteed risk of lung cancer increases instead of a slim chance of radiation leakages.

Re:Scare tactic

[radtea]

Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.

On the one hand there is an understandable desire on the part of those of us who know something of nuclear physics and nuclear engineering to put a damper on the more ridiculous speculations and lies that mass media are using to pump up fear and sell eyeballs.

On the other hand, there should be a desire to educate the public about the genuine risks associated with nuclear power, which means breaking out of the ridiculous "OMG we are all going to die!" vs "power too cheap to meter".

For the longest time the anti-nuclear movement was undebatable. There is simply no point in talking to anyone who thinks that Hellen Caldicot, for example, has anything useful or interesting to say about energy policy, enginerring safety or social policy. She and other like her are are simply noise-machines, drowning out all possibility of rational discourse.

So ignoring people like that, what can we say about this accident so far?

1) Core containment appears to be intact. Core containment is a bit like a building falling down. If you are doubtful about it having happened, it probably hasn't.

2) Spent fuel storage adjacent to the reactor, outside the containment structure, is at risk of going critical. This would effectively place an uncontrolled nuclear reactor outside of any containment structure. Given the high tempratures and highly reactive envrironment this would entail, the possibility of the metalic components of such a reactor catching fire is non-zero. At this point the otherwise inflecitous comparisons to Chernobyl become unfortunately apt: the fire-driven radioactive plume from such a reactor would result in wide-spread atmospheric dispersal of actindes and fission products. With any luck, most of this would be washed out into the ocean fairly quickly, but on the islands of Japan itself the degree of surface contamination would almost certainly be quite significant.

3) Errors only become apparent after they occur. Applogists for the nuclear industry will say "we can make sure that this won't happen again", and it may not. But something else will. This is a certainty. The energy density involved in nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel has been demonstrated time and again to be so high that relatively small errors have dreadful consequences, at least economically. We have seen this in carbon-moderated reactors, PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs. e cannot engineer out susceptiblity to the kind of small and apparently inocuous errors that have produced this disaster. I do not agree that with the accessment that "this is a crime": it is just that the sensitivity of nuclear reactors to relatively routine levels of error has been shown multiple times to be high.

Coal-fired plants kill far more people than nuclear plants do, but they don't write themselves off when they do so. Nuclear plants don't kill as many people, but they become extremely expensive when people make the kind of mistakes that coal-fired plants forgive. This is not advocacy for coal, by the way, which is a filthy fuel. It is a reflection that fission power will always result in economic risks that are extremely high.

4) Reprocessing is not risk free, even when spent fuel never leaves the site. It has long been argued by reprocessing advocates that it can be made safe, and one of the means of doing so is keeping everything on site. One can't help but ask, "How's that working out for you?"

Once upon a time I expected to have a career in the nuclear industry. I trained as a nuclear engineer and went on, post-Chernobyl, to become a nuclear physicist. While I still have a fondness for the concept of nuclear power, it has become increasingly clear in the past several decades that even well-run, well-regulated nuclear industries have significant economic issues associated with them, and we should be at last cautious about building new nuclear plants without finding some means of providing genuine public evaluation of risk and oversight of constrution.

Re:Nothing to worry about

[Nidi62]

No, no - it's safe as milk.

Clean, safe , cheap power source my ass.

When you are using 50 year old designs, then yes, you're right, it isn't all that safe. Now, if the anti-nuclear energy lobby had actually allowed us to build more, modern reactors over that time period, then we would have plenty of new, modern, safe nuclear reactors. So, the anti-nuclear power people really have to blame themselves as much as anyone else for the current state of nuclear power in the world.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[Narcocide]

Yes, because we don't have *any* nuclear power plants in earthquake prone territory in America. We're way smarter than that.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[suso]

Obviously nobody knows anything if CNN is putting sentences like this in their articles: "buildup of hydrogen gas, which is the highly flammable, lighter-than-air gas used in the Hindenburg."

Oh jeez. While true, it really shows the expectations of science education in the US. I mean who is a sentence like that aimed at? Kids? They don't know what the Hindenburg is? Seniors? They invented the hydrogen bomb. People should know what hydrogen is.

No, it couldn't.

[Fallingwater]

Stop spreading this sensationalistic bullshit. Even in a worst-case scenario, that being meltdown of all cores, cracking of all containment buildings and fires in all spent fuel pools, the consequences would be tiny compared to those of Chernobyl. Yes, the whole area would be evacuated (some of it already is), and there would be large amounts of radioactive pollution, but there would be no "liquidators" giving their lives up to contain the situation, and people wouldn't be sacrificed in an attempt to save face. Japan isn't the Soviet Union.

Note: after writing the above writeup I considered deleting the whole thing because the parent post is obviously trolling, but then I decided to leave it in place anyway as there's already too much misinformation about this situation.

Re:We should all be concerned

[cpu6502]

I feel like that last post was written by a cheerleader.

>>>If something similar happens in Japan then Tokyo could quite easily become a ghost town

Tokyo's around 200 miles away! Jeez. 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.

Re:Robots are the Answer

[MrQuacker]

But they are, in a way. Predator drones from Guam are now patrolling around the plant 24/7 sending live data to the Japanese techs on the ground.

Re:Nothing to worry about

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to blame others right?

If it weren't for those pesky hippies the good energy companies would have constructed those highly expensive new reactors and shut down the old ones. They would have willingly forfeit the MASSIVE profits they are making with old reactors. The pro-nuke energy lobby is only lobbying for the extension of old reactors because ... uh ... something ... eco friendly ... certainly not because they are pumping out pure profit since they've been paid off long ago.

Re:Nothing to worry about

[kju]

Now, if the anti-nuclear energy lobby had actually allowed us to build more, modern reactors over that time period, then we would have plenty of new, modern, safe nuclear reactors.

Oh really? I have not much insight but i keep reading that there was never much resistance against nuclear power in the Japanese population because they a.) believed in the technology and b.) saw the necessity.

So what has barred the Japanese from buying those hypothetical "plenty of new, modern, safe nuclear reactors." Yes, I know that the plant in question was about to be shut down. Still it was in operation for 40 years in which time span the safety of nuclear was allegedly so much increased. So why wasn't it replaced 20 years ago?

The truth is that these power plants are operated by companies who want to earn money. They will never replace a plant before they are forced too. And that they weren't forced is not the fault of the opponents of nuclear power.

Re:Nothing to worry about

[NoobixCube]

Without an earthquake (one of the biggest in recorded history, I might add) to disrupt the reactors, the Fukushima Daiichi plant could have continued happily along with no major problems. Good time to be somewhere else, granted, but this is hardly a disaster yet. As long as non-essential personnel get the hell out of there, and as long as they either get the reaction under control or start taking steps now to contain a meltdown, there should be no major issues. A bit of contamination, but Hiroshima AND Chernobyl are both relatively safe, compared to what nuclear doomsayers would have us believe about the lasting effects. Yes, I know the halflife of Plutonium is somewhere up around forty thousand years (give or take), but Plutonium won't comprise the majority of the contamination. Most of the decayed elements will be smaller radioactive isotopes with far far shorter halflives (years, decades maybe, not millennia), like Iodine, or Caesium. In fact, there's been more negative impact from coal and oil based power, even since the advent of nuclear power; hell, even if we include nuclear WEAPONS, there's been far more negative environmental impact made by fossil fuels than radiation. If I had a choice of living next door to a nuclear power plant, or a coal power plant, I'd pick nuclear any day of the week.

Nuclear power is only bad when something goes horribly wrong. Consider how many nuclear reactors there are in the world. How many reactive cores are currently operating. Now exactly how many times have we had a Chernobyl-scale disaster? One of the reasons Chernobyl got so far out of hand, I hear, was because the information output, such as it was in that era, just couldn't keep up with changing conditions inside the reactor. You'd have people working on information ten, fifteen minutes old, patching up lost causes the whole time. Chernobyl was of cheap, shoddy construction, even for then, and we learned so much from it - mostly in the "what NOT to do" category. Every year, there's a good dozen stories crop up on Slashdot about some new miracle bacteria or algae that just LOVES eating what we'd call radioactive waste, so storage and disposal of radioactive materials will eventually cease to be a problem. It would be cool if we could find a use for these radiation-eating bacteria, but hey, you can't have your pony and eat it too.

Conversely, no news is good news. How many times do you pick up the news paper and read the headline "All is well at the nuclear power plant"? How many success stories do you read about? Every time something involving nuclear power makes it into the news, even if it's (no, ESPECIALLY if it's) plans for a new reactor, the media is full of worst case scenarios and fears of another Chernobyl.

Re:Is Japan is melting down?

[Colonel Korn]

As reported in the NY Times - it looks like this is Japan's Katrina. From reading the article, I get a sense that this is worse than what happened with Katrina in the US. Any readers from Japan care to comment? It seems like, even if there are very dedicated and smart people working the problem, this wouldn't be something that can be handled simply by nuclear experts. Effective management of this as a crisis is needed, and the people in charge need to work together as a team to solve a national crisis. Neither of which seem to be happening.

The nuclear bit hasn't produced much in the way of damage, at this point, but the tsunami did far, far more damage to Japan than Katrina did to the United States. Katrina isn't even on the same order of magnitude. I've been shocked to see tv news sources suggesting that Japan wants to avoid a Katrina-scale disaster as if this weren't already ~hundreds of times worse.

the media

[Charliemopps]

This disaster has destroyed what little faith I had left in the media. It's disgusting what they are doing right now.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[putaro]

I think the failure in planning here wasn't in any of the systems in the plant. It was in not realizing that something like a tsunami would cause so much devastation around the plant that restoring power would be so difficult.

Re:Is Japan is melting down?

[jasenj1]

Neither of which seem to be happening.

Neither of which is being reported by US media.

Tens of thousands of people have disappeared. Entire towns have been scrubbed off the earth. Japan has WAY more things to warrant its attention besides one nuclear power plant. The power plant is important, but there's only so many hours in a day. And 23 1/2 of them may be better spent focusing on immediate humanitarian relief and rebuilding. TEPCO is mostly on their own to work through this issue.

Re:Fukushima Accidend NOT an error, It is a CRIME

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is a certain amount of reason to suspect that they were packing the spent-fuel ponds rather tighter than would really be advisable in an area where damage to the powered systems is known to be plausible...

The reactors themselves, the really complex bits, seem to be doing comparatively adequately; but the condition of the fuel ponds seems pretty dodgy(since, after all, simply spreading the spent assemblies out more, or having bigger ponds, while more costly, would have been a trivial way to increase the safety margin with minimal engineering complexity.

Nuclear reactors are hard. Nuclear fuel ponds are safety-critical applications of swimming pool technology...

Re:Is Japan is melting down?

[Yuuki Dasu]

The nuclear bit hasn't produced much in the way of damage, at this point, but the tsunami did far, far more damage to Japan than Katrina did to the United States.

This. Speaking from on-the-ground here in Japan, the west is throwing a bit fit over nuclear scaremongering, but national news coverage is far more focused on the earthquake and tsunami. People within 30km of the station have evacuated, and that has its own problems, but the biggest difficulty right now is the mass destruction of homes and shelters, given the cold weather - it's currently -1C in Sendai.

Nuclear winter makes for much sexier headlines, but it's the plain old regular kind that's of biggest concern right now.

Why people are afraid

[seyyah]

It is amusing to see the comments here which excuse the problem at the Japanese nuclear plant because the earthquake was really big. You see to many people who don't have an automatic fear of anything nuclear, there remains the problem of the people running it. The technology might be safe but when those in charge aren't doing their jobs then there is basis for distrust.

1. The earthquake was big: It's Japan. You can't not expect a big earthquake. Everything has to be ready for it.

2. The tsunami unexpectedly washed out the generators: see point 1.

3. It was an old plant, the new ones are safer: if this one wasn't safe then why was it running?

The point to me is not that nuclear power is unsafe, but rather that unacceptable risks were taken in this case. Does the same problem exist are other sites in other countries? I have no idea (and I bet the armchair Slashdot crowd doesn't know either), but there is a serious lack of trust right now over how that risk is being evaluated.

None of this excuses the sensationalism in the media or the fools in the US who are buying anti-radiation tonic in preparation, or even the foreigners who are fleeing the entire country of Japan over the threat of 'meltdown'.

PS. What if all six reactors had been working?

Re:Why people are afraid

[jez9999]

It's a once-in-1000-years event, which in engineering is a rather acceptable risk to take.

Um, bullshit? The typical life of a nuclear plant is 50 years. That gives a 1-in-20 chance of this occurring during the life of the plant. It's near enough to Tokyo, the most inhabited metropolitan area in the world with 35 million people.

I support nuclear power because modern plants can be safe, but the negative image for nuclear power and potential health damage this may cause make me want to weep.

I'm not happy

[ciderbrew]

My wife is Japanese and most of her family lived in that area, some only 1km away from the Fukushima power plant.
I've been so upset by the event and livid with the BBC and I'll not even talk about other news sources in the UK. I want a law to block the sensationalism I've been seeing. Keep that for guff filler shite celeb stories and film releases.

It is harrowing and needs no build up. I can't watch another presenter, first being told by some expert that there is no threat, to only then ask the question "What about the worst case?". You’ve just asked him, you had your answer about the now and the future, and now you want guy to make up an answer? Well fuck you BBC. For balance, what is the best case? If this works, how soon can people return? Will the farms in the area be safe?

The expert may be proved wrong tomorrow, but he gave his opinion about today. Why do you have the need to constantly push for the worst case?
How is that the news? I can't read another statement about radiation going up 4 times and how awful that is, only to find out that the level is less than a scan at a hospital? Do these people have any journalistic pride any more? I've seen so many stories and write-ups pro and con that I now have no idea who to trust or what is really going on.
So whilst the nuclear pro and con here spout the next 10 pages of stuff, I’ll be still no better off from their posts. ... ... And lots of other stuff too!!! / rant and vent over.

Chain is only as strong as the weakest link

[cyclocommuter]

What this incident proves is that the chain is indeed as strong as its weakest link. If it is now obvious that nuclear power generation is a long complex chain, with each link requiring utmost planning and care. People may argue that newer reactor and/or containment designs may be safer and/or stronger but what about the other links like backup power, spent fuel storage, pipe fittings to withstand the tremendous pressures inherent in the generation of power from nuclear energy? Part of that chain is also the proper training of personnel not only to operate the plants properly and minimize human error but also on how to manage a crisis situation. They should be drilled every day on how to go about this during a plant blackout or plant fire scenario. The more complex the chain, the more there can be weaknesses. If plants are to be built in the future each of these links in the chain must withstand close scrutiny.

Re:Rethinking my pro-nuclear stance

[Lazareth]

The reactors were built to withstand a mighty 8-8.2 earthquake without issue. It was hit with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequently hit by a tsunami that flooded the plant. Stand back and think about just exactly how much the reactors has withstood at this point. Try to fathom it. Then realize that much of what is being spewed by the media currently is anti-nuclear propaganda and that the reactors at this point has survived for a number of days without catastrophic incident after the earthquake and that a powerline is currently being drawn to the powerplant to bring back online all the safety systems, at which point the whole thing will deescalate rapidly.

What is basically going on now is manual coolant and damage control until the systems are back online. Meanwhile the media is getting days worth of "OH GOD IT AINT FIXED YET WE'RE GONNA DIEEEEEEE!". Imagine how happy they are at that, I mean can you ask for more profit? Sensationalism at its best. Meanwhile the actual emergency, the effect of the tsunami on the civilians, is getting less and less air time. The world is more interested in the action flick currently being played then they are of the relief efforts and tragedies.

Return to the point about just how much the reactors has withstood. The seventh strongest earthquake in our memory, a 9.0 earthquake on a logarithmic scale when it was built to withstand a (mighty) 8.2 earthquake and subsequently being hit and flooded by a tsunami. If you can fathom that, I think you should be agreeing that it is pretty damn well built for 50 year old obsolete tech.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[Dunbal]

Nuclear blasts involve supercritical masses, not critical masses. That's why you have the whole "explosives to compress the core" thing dontcha know. While criticality will produce a shitload of nasty (read gamma rays) radiation as opposed to less harmful alpha and beta particles, and it would also produce enough heat to melt and even vaporize the fuel, leading to a nice plume of radioactive material, you are NOT going to get a "nuclear blast". EVER. So how about learning some physics if you want to keep coming to this site?