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

[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: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: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

[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: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: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: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.

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.