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

Headline win

[Noughmad]

Anyone born before 1945 must find a great amount of irony in the headline.

Re:Headline win

[poetmatt]

I'm sure it was intentional. Meanwhile, the US is being idiotic on this. If you look at non-politically spewed bullshit, you'll see that Things are being managed pretty damn well . Japan has prepared for this far better than the states. Jaczko is just unhappy that Japan is rightfully keeping him the hell away from the situation.

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

[Orgasmatron]

Yeah, better to listen to "experts" only from the anti-nuclear activist groups, like on TV.

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

[tomhudson]

They may have lost all six reactors as in none may ever produce power again where as Chernobyl still continues to operate

You really need to get with the times - your information dates from the end of the last millennium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Chernobyl_after_the_disaster

Despite the accident, Ukraine continued to operate the remaining reactors at Chernobyl until 2000, when the last reactor at the site was closed down

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:Scare tactic

[Solandri]

it will be about credibility.
That's exactly the problem the nuclear industry has always suffered from. The contamination is very dangerous and invisible, and the only one that can tell us how bad it is are folks with a strong vested interest in downplaying the issue.

Credibility? The nuclear industry has never had a credibility problem. The problem has always been a huge anti-nuclear double standard. People give the same weight to what some actor in Hollywood has to say about nuclear power as what someone who spent 10+ years earning a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering says. I'm pro-nuclear but if you search my recent post history here, I think you'll see I'm not downplaying the seriousness of the current situation. Your error is in assuming that anyone who is pro-nuclear has a "strong vested interest in downplaying the issue". The reality is that most people who are anti-nuclear have a strong vested interest in over-hyping the issue.

As a consequence, no one knows what to think--and so have chosen to believe the worst case scenario.

You think what's going on is the worst-case scenario? Let me tell you about worst-case scenarios. Have you ever heard of Banqiao? It was a Chinese nuclear plant which in 1975 suffered a severe accident. The Chinese covered it up for 30 years and quietly admitted it to the world in 2005. So quietly that most people still haven't heard of it. The toll compared to Chernobyl is just staggering:

26,000 immediate deaths (57 for Chernobyl)
145,000 long-term deaths (4000 cancer deaths for Chernobyl)
11 million people relocated (336,000 people relocated for Chernobyl)
Nearly 6 million homes and buildings made uninhabitable
768 km^2 rendered uninhabitable (489 km^2 exclusion zone for Chernobyl)

Horrific, isn't it? Worse than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly proof that nuclear power is too dangerous to use, right?

I'm sorry. I lied. Banqiao wasn't a nuclear plant. It was a hydroelectric dam . Everything else I said is true though. In 1975, during a typhoon and torrential rainfall, it filled to over capacity. After several attempts to lower its water level by opening sluice gates, the dam above it burst. The swell of water overwhelmed the Banqiao dam, and it too burst. 700 million tons of water were released, and it precipitated a cascade failure of dams beneath it. In all, 62 dams burst or were deliberately destroyed in attempts to divert water into flood plains, with a total of 15.7 billion tons of water released.

26,000 people lost their lives in the flooding. Over 1 million people were left stranded by the waters, cut off from disaster relief, and had to have food and water airlifted to them for weeks. An estimated 145,000 of them (Chinese govt figures) died of the famine and disease caused by the disaster. Nearly 6 million buildings were destroyed, and 11 million people had to be relocated. When the dam was rebuilt, 768 km^2 was flooded to form the flood catchbasin.

Horrific, isn't it? Worse than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly proof that hydroelectric power is too dangerous to use, right?

So the worst power-generator accident in history was a hydro plant. The worst-case scenario for hydro is much, much worse than for nuclear. But I'm willing to bet your gut is still telling you that hydro is safe and nuclear is dangerous. See? You have an anti-nuclear bias. Your mind easily accepts something critical of nuclear power, but rejects the exact same evidence when it's critical of hydroelectric power. You are using a double standard.

But Banqiao was a clay dam. Western dams are typically concrete.
Chernobyl was a dangerous and unstable reactor design never used in the West.

It was Chinese. They had shoddy building and operating standar

Re:"face" prevents asking for real help

[nettdata]

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.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[brunes69]

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.

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.

Rethinking my pro-nuclear stance

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always been pretty pro-nuclear power. It doesn't suffer from almost all of the drawbacks that classic power generation suffers from, nor many of the drawbacks of 'green' power generation (works only with wind/sun or you need such a LOT of it to generate anything significant). I've never had anyone be able to present an argument against it that couldn't be picked apart easily - apart from "well, *I* wouldnt want to live next to one". But I must admit I am having to rethink my position. Maybe small, self contained reactors are the answer, but I doubt it.

The Japanese are number 1 when it comes to earthquake proofing. So if they are unable to build plants that can take a big natural disaster (very big sure, but certainly not unheard of) without turning into a catastrophy, I'm really wondering if the idea simply is not inherently flawed. I mean even if it turns out this was caused by sloppy building and bribed inspectors or what have you, even if this was just a small proportion of the nuclear plants in the affected zone - then it still proves that one cannot guarantee there won't be a giant radioactive 'event' in case of a large natural disaster. I really shudder to think what would happen if there was a big earthquake in Russia right now. Or anywhere near the North Korean nuclear facilities. Does anyone believe that they are better prepared for something like that than the Japanese would be?

Re:Rethinking my pro-nuclear stance

[Stenchwarrior]

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.

Re:Rethinking my pro-nuclear stance

[skids]

My stance has always been: we can have more nuclear plants just as soon as we evolve a corporate/public culture that can guarantee their mature, responsible administration for the entire life cycle of the plant and its waste products.

This doesn't help me persuade myself that that will ever happen -- Japan has much less "plunder and profit" mentality and yet still they allowed corners to be cut in this installation, and aren't exactly handling information flow in a spotless fashion.

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:Rethinking my pro-nuclear stance

[grumbel]

The most shocking part in all of this for me is that they didn't seem to have any kind of backup plan for the worst case. They seemed to have worked under the assumption that power will be restored in time and cooling will work, but it didn't and as a result the buildings filled up with hydrogen and blew up, something that was known, but even with a day of warning not prevented. From there on things got worse and worse. Dumping water with helicopters onto the plant seems a kind of helpless act, not something that was well planed right from the start. There also seemed to be a lack of surveillance, I mean they should have something in place to get a proper answer on if they have enough water or not (cameras, robots, whatever), but instead they never really seemed to be to sure about what the current situation is.

Re:Rethinking my pro-nuclear stance

[shilly]

As the man says: "The Navy has no place for good losers! The Navy needs tough sons of bitches who can go out there and WIN!"

The true measure of safety is not "see how much it withstood" but "it is still safe?" and the answer is....not so much

I don't know what magnitude they should have prepared for, but it's clear that it was more than 8.2 and more than 9.0. That's the yardstick.

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.

[dargaud]

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.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[germ!nation]

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.

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:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[localman57]

Yeah. Yesterday they said American jets bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With news today, accuracy doesn't matter as much as time to market. The NYT tends to be a couple of hours behind CNN, but tend to do a better job, I think.

Re:Is Japan is melting down?

[musikit]

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.

Fukushima Accidend NOT an error, It is a CRIME

[FriendlyLurker]

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"

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

[rsilvergun]

I think the trouble is these plants were built in the early 70s, before all that. They require active cooling to be safe, and nobody thought they'd see a magnitude 9 earthquake in their lifetime...

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

[MS]

The magnitude 9 was 150 km from Fukushima 1. The epicenter was NOT underneath the nuclear power plant! How strong was the earthquake at the power plant?!?

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

[DrBoumBoum]

The design flaws were known from the beginning, three GE engineers resigned in 1972 over their warnings and recommendations being ignored. Then as recently as two years ago the IAEA warned Japan that the reactors were not safe in case of an earth-quake.

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

[DrBoumBoum]

They can add to the rods inside of the reactor.

Unfortunately it's more the reactor rods (about 100 tons) that will add to those on the roof (about 1600 tons).

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:Fukushima Accidend NOT an error, It is a CRIME

[randomsearch]

The worry of critical mass is not within the reactor, but within the cooling pools.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has already happened.

However, I haven't read anywhere that this will lead to an explosion - rather, just a lot of high-level radiation.

RS

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that unpredictable. To get a nuclear explosion you need weapons grade uranium, which is IIRC 90% fissionable isotopes, whereas at a power-plant you typically have fuel grade uranium which is something like 3% fissionable isotopes.

To say the reactor can cause a nuclear explosion is to say that broken eggs can spontaneously reform when hurled at the ground, a deep violation of entropy.

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

[FriendlyLurker]

that is the opinion of ONE man out of millions. Don't give it more weight than it deserves.

As he points out in the interview, it is easy to see plenty of serious security oversights that could warrant criminal investigation. For example: "The location of central Japan, near the sea is the cheapest. Emergency generators are not buried and, of course, were flooded instantly...."

Great, some good old character assassination shoot-the-messenger reactions going on later in this thread in response to this interview. He must of touched a nerve. The only difference between this man and millions of others, is the he is a certified nuclear expert with plenty of published papers in respected scientific journals under his belt, and who also happened to be former director of the Soviet Spetsatom cleanup agency. He apparently now teaches and advises on nuclear safety in Vienna... so some forum claims that he must be crazy or not an expert should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

Full translated interview:

17/03/2011 Rafael Poch, Berlin Correspondent

Andreyev: "In the nuclear industry there are no independent bodies" "The most dangerous reactor in Fukushima is 3, because it uses a fuel of uranium and plutonium," said Yuli

He spent five years at Chernobyl. Spetsatom was deputy director of the anti-Soviet body nuclear accidents and knows very well how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) works.

Yuri Andreyev (1938) is one of the most knowledgeable in this area. To Fukushima includes four scenarios of varying severity, from mild to very severe.

"In Fukushima, the most dangerous reactor is three, because it uses MOX fuel more plutonium uranium that France is being used experimentally in two Japanese plants," says this expert.

In 1991 everything fell apart in Moscow. The salary of deputy minister of atomic energy, the position he was offered Andreyev, not enough for anything. The Academy of Sciences of Austria was invited to lecture and eventually settled in Vienna as adviser to the minister of environment, universities and the IAEA itself.

Chernoby is still surrounded by lies, says. The accident was not the responsibility of plant operators, as stated, but a clear design flaw in the RBMK reactors result of cost savings. Proper design of those Soviet reactors required a large amount of zirconium, a rare metal, and a maze of pipes, special techniques for welding of zirconium, stainless steel and huge amounts of concrete. It was a fortune, so they decided to save money, said Andreyev.

One of the resources of savings was to feed the reactor with relatively low enriched uranium, since uranium enrichment is a complicated and expensive. This increased the risks and was contrary to the rules of safety, but supervision in the USSR nuclear part of the Ministry of Atomic Energy. Something similar is happening today with the IAEA, as the UN agency "depends on the nuclear industry," said Andreyev, under which lies and secrets of Chernobyl are now fully present in Fukushima.

Security, money, irresponsibility

"Those who design nuclear power plants are pending on two things: safety and cost. The problem is that security costs money. If you spend too much on nuclear power plant it is not competitive. The accident at Three Mile Island is the perfect example. After the accident was to improve security in a convincing way to avoid repetition of the accident both plants more expensive, they lost all meaning. For thirty years in America was not built a single reactor. Chernobyl was all very complicated but also had to do with economics. Academician Rumyantsev showed that we had to close all RBMK reactors. Simply ignored. There are always people interested in hiding something ... "

What are they hiding?

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

[miffo.swe]

"Third, if nuclear fuel is melted and damaged the reactor casing, emissions would be produced in series, which is quite serious but it would be the worst. That brings us to the Fourth, and most catastrophic, ie, if the fuel is precipitated to the bottom and acquires critical mass, then initiate an uncontrolled chain reaction, ie an explosion. In this case, the contamination would be very serious. From this point of view, the worst is the third reactor, because it uses MOX more plutonium-uranium fuel, that France is being used experimentally in two nuclear plants in Japan."

Holy fuck Batman. And Yuri Andreyev is someone who actually knows what he is talking about but one of few not directly connected to the business.

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

[marcosdumay]

He simply can't have it both ways. Either people cut costs on refining or there is a risk of criticality.

And since nobody ever even said that they were using hightly refined fuel (and I fail to see why that is a problem), there is simply no reason to expect it to become critical.

Also, after the fuel is "burned" you'll need more mass for criticality. Your "completely unpredictable" proposal is way off. If the used fuel somehow emanated thermal neutrons or even more fast neutrons than the original fuel, nobody would discard it, and the reactor would called "breeder".

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

[CensorshipDonkey]

I guess after the Indian Ocean tsunami of '04 they should have considered the possibility...

They did consider the possibility. It was built to withstand a 5.3 meter tsunami, which would have been of record size. Instead, less than half an hour after successfully dealing with the worst earthquake in history, they were hit with a 10 meter tsunami. This knocked out the diesel power to the cooling systems, but backup batteries actually kept it going safely for another 10 hours.

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

[pedestrian crossing]

The fuel in the pool by Reactor 4 was removed so they could perform maintenance. It's not necessarily depleted. Even if it was removed for re-fueling, the expended fuel can still go critical. They don't keep it in the reactor until it's completely "burned". That's why they have to keep it in a water/boric acid solution long after it has been removed from the core, to keep it from going critical.

Also, I just read on the BBC that a TEPCO official has come out and stated that "The possibility of re-criticality is not zero."

I agree that there is no danger of a nuclear explosion (requires highly enriched Uranium and exactly the right physical conditions), but criticality is definitely a possibility.

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

[ToadMan8]

In a country like Japan (i.e. Not North Korea), I do assume that primary sources are providing pretty much accurate information. I noticed your username after I posed the first time; in light of that, it seems appropriate that you make doom and gloom assumptions of corporate and government cover-up. I will give my best attempt at getting the facts and avoiding the rhetoric (as another poster noticed the words "NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE" are being used as thousands are without power, food, water, and are looking for loved-ones. Seems to distract from the real issue at hand.

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:Hindenburg

[TaoPhoenix]

(ChildLeftBehind)
Isn't that a type of cheeseburger? Or a town in Germany?
(/ChildLeftBehind)

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:We should all be concerned

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[east coast]

They should have put video footage of the Hindenburg ablaze with Herbert Morrison crying "Oh the humanity" in the background followed by the reporter looking directly into the camera and saying, in a grim voice, "this could be happening in Japan as we speak!"

I'm sure people would have ate it up.

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:Robots are the Answer

[Compaqt]

Did you see the video of them dropping water on the reactor? What a joke.

They said it was 7 tons. 1 ton == 1000 L. That's like 50 or so of those office water things. Multiply by 7.

Did they seriously expect some serious cooling with that? Anybody with any smarts is going to go far away before the authorities fess up to the extent of the problem.

Re:Hindenburg

[Illicon]

I can see it now: Come down to Bob's for the Hindenburger. Only available well done.

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.

Re:tell me if my understanding is wrong but:

[zarzu]

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

Incidentally, this is what they are doing. But since power isn't restored just by clapping your hands, they're doing whatever they can to delay meltdowns and spread of radiation.

Re:THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.

[ZigiSamblak]

This may be moderated as flamebait, however this is exactly the attitude many people responding to the news of the Fukushima reactors on slashdot seem to have. How can you be so in love with nuclear that even when four reactors are in various states of melting down and leaking dangerous amounts of radiation into the environment that you find it necessary to attack any doubts on the supposed safety and environmental goodness of nuclear power?

Reminds me of Inspector Drebin standing infront of the exploding building in Naked Gun. "Nothing to see here people!"

Re:Nothing to worry about

[should_be_linear]

I new these stupid "greens" are to blame here, I just couldn't find any way to connect emerging nuclear catastrophe with them. Thanks!

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:the media

[Inzite]

You're obviously consulting the wrong media.

Some suggestions:
* BBC
* Russia Today
* Bloomberg
* The Guardian
* The Wall Street Journal / The Financial Times
* Al Jazeera (hit and miss - great coverage of Egypt/Libya/Bahrain, terrible coverage of Japan)
* Der Spiegel

Note: True financial publications like Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal (e.g., NOT CNBC) tend to get their facts straight because their readership is much more demanding. Financial publications aren't perfect (The Financial Times' coverage of Russia has historically been pathetic), but they're a hell of a lot better than what passes for news in the US. I'm American and I don't even watch mainstream US news or read mainstream newspapers anymore - the signal to noise is just dismal.

Re:Where's the water?

[CnlPepper]

I suspect it is more likely a leak or partial leak. These plants have been through hell, a serious earthquake, multiple smaller aftershocks, a tsunami, 2 huge hydrogen explosions, 2 smaller hydrogen explosions and fires. It is possible that some of the water circulation pipes or the pool structure was damaged.

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:Nothing to worry about

[rotide]

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."

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

[roothog]

It is amusing to see the comments here which excuse the problem at the Japanese nuclear plant because the earthquake was really big.

The issue was the tsunami, not the earthquake. The plant handled the quake just fine, the reactors automatically scrammed. However, the tsunami knocked out the fallbacks because it well exceeded any expectations: in Japan, a 3-meter high tsunami triggers their highest warning level. This tsunami was 10-meters high. It's a once-in-1000-years event, which in engineering is a rather acceptable risk to take.

Re:Why people are afraid

[slim]

1. This is the fourth-largest earthquake ever recorded on Earth, ever.

2. See point 1. They had a big fucking seawall; the tsunami was bigger.

I'm afraid that's not good enough. People have only been recording earthquakes for some 100 years. Seismologists knew a big one could happen pretty much any time, and they knew it would result in a tsunami.

You might say it was foolish to build *anything* within reach of a tsnunami -- I mean, 10,000 deaths projected. Let's guess that the risk/reward ratios work out so that, as grim as it sounds, those deaths and the cost of all the rebuilding, are outweighed by the benefits. It seems to me that when the disaster scenario is a partially uncontained nuclear meltdown, the risk/reward ratio is a *lot* worse.

The facility shouldn't have been built there; or, its defences should have been better.

Re:Why people are afraid

[pushing-robot]

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

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.

Japanese Say SDK has Spotted Water in #4 Pool

[rubycodez]

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.

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.

Re:I'm not happy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'm not happy

[BJ_Covert_Action]

My wife is Japanese and most of her family lived in that area,

I know it's not much, but you have my sympathy. I hope your wife's family is safe. My thoughts go out to you, them, and the thousands of other people this calamity has claimed. If you ever need to vent or talk, you can feel free to e-mail me, or track me down on facebook or something. I use this same pseudonym just about everywhere on the net these days.

Good luck.

Re:I'm not happy

[rubycodez]

I'm properly logged in this time, so not AC for 2nd round of no-bullshit. note readings 30km (12 miles) away are now 17 millirem / hour (0.17 mS per hour), that kind of dose over a week is over 3 REM! Even for adults every REM of dose increases number of deaths by cancer 0.04% over normal, to say nothing of many times that for non-fatal cancers. Two weeks at that level and radation poisoning starts. For children under 8, divide the time to stated risk by factor of five (ie, don't be there). For babies and fetuses, by more than ten (don't be there!!)

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[Tyler Durden]

It's kind of depressing if you think about it. Humanity is a bigger scourge to biological diversity than massive doses of radiation.

Re:Is Japan is melting down?

[maxume]

Reports about tens of thousands of people simply not being accounted for at all have been on the news since Friday, along with reports of official numbers of dead and missing.

The focus has certainly been on the nuclear situation.

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.

When...

[JaneTheIgnorantSlut]

When do the TEPCO executives start committing seppuku?

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[localman57]

Looks like it's gone now. CNN often rewrites articles under the same URL when things are developing. Again, the NYT beats them on credibility by posting a change log for corrections at the bottom of the page. But at least one of CNN's local partners picked up the story off of their wire and has archived it: http://www.12newsnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=14254119&clienttype=generic&mobilecgbypass

Re:Where are the robots?

[miffo.swe]

Because electronics wont work in radio active enviroment. The russians tried it in Tjernobyl but they failed rapidly despite pretty heavy shielding.

Re:fuel rods are explosive

[randomsearch]

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.

Re:tell me if my understanding is wrong but:

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[oddaddresstrap]

The problem in Japan is that the rods in question are in cooling ponds with no coolant. They are outside the containment (ie, not in the reactor). The power company itself said yesterday that "The possibility of re-criticality is not zero". You're probably right in that they'll most likely get water back into the ponds and things will settle down. Keep your fingers crossed. There are three ponds in this state and the engineers don't seem to know if the ponds are even able to hold water after the earthquake.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[MechaStreisand]

It sure takes some balls to publicly display the level of ignorance required to believe that this could turn into a nuclear blast. Gotta commend you for that, at least.

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?

The Horses Mouth

[meekg]

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.html

Just read the Fukushima updates. How come nobody links to this?

If the #4 pool is NOT dry, then that NRC official should be fired...

That said, I can't understand why the spend fuel pool is not inside any containment structure and not at ground level.
This is not a "First generation product" issue. This is a cost savings issue.

Re:Worse than Tjernobyl.

[Petaris]

From what I was reading a few days ago you just described the new type of reactor know as SBWR or the variation ESBWR (which is under review in the US) which I have heard referred to the Type III, while the reactors at this plant are Type II. The type III uses a passive cooling mechanism. You can read a bit more about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor (part way down the page).

I would still be more interested in the type that lets us use up all of those spent fuel rods we have to deal with storing waste. The IFR or a relative of it is an idea but introduces liquid sodium as a coolant which could introduce other issues. Read about the IFR here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

Re:ATTENTION C64 POLICE!!

[spun]

You are a sockpuppet. You use multiple accounts because you are a known troll and have fucked up your original account, but you are so damn dumb, you make all your sockpuppets Commodore related. All these Commodore related accounts started popping up right around the time the c64_lurv got chopped at the knees. And they all write the same bullshit in exactly the same way. We know who you are, m'kay? Most of us just don't give a shit. We know its you, and so we just ignore you like we always have. But some people here apparently just fucking hate suckpoppets like you, and judging from past experience, they will never stop hounding you.

Re:ATTENTION C64 POLICE

[spun]

Address the fact that a number of Commodore related accounts popped up right around the time that the well known troll account "commodore64_love" was banned. No insults, just facts that need to be addressed in order for you to retain any credibility.