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US Alarmed Over Japan's Nuclear Crisis
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that the US is urging Americans who live within 50 miles of Japan's earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to evacuate as Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that no water remains in a deep pool used to cool spent fuel at the plant and that radiation levels there are thought to be 'extremely high.' Jaczko's testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee suggests that damage to the plant is worse than the Japanese government and the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has acknowledged. On Tuesday, the company said water levels in three of the site's seven fuel pools were dropping, but did not say that the fuel rods themselves had been exposed. Left exposed to the air, the fuel rods will start to decay and release radioactivity into the air and lack of water in at least one spent-fuel pool sparked fears of a worst-case scenario: the fuel could combust. 'If there's no water in there, the spent fuel can start a fire,' says Eric Moore, a consultant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on nuclear plant design and safety issues. 'Once you have that fire, there's a high risk of radiation getting out, spewed by the fire.' The power company says a reduced crew of 50 to 70 employees — far fewer than the 1,400 or more at the plant during normal operations — had been working in shifts to keep seawater flowing to the three reactors now in trouble. Their withdrawal on Wednesday temporarily left the plant with nobody to continue cooling operations."
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.
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That's not the case at all. They're fighting like hell to run power to the cooling systems to bring them back online. The brief withdrawal of workers was due to a temporary spike in radiation.
And the US and other nations have sent people there, on site, to report on what is going on. No sats required. Hell, the US Military has helped put out some of the fires, so they are RIGHT THERE.
The Emperor went on TV to ask the world for help and patience while they work on the problem. China has been asked for help in supplying boron to help cool things down.
Go follow the BBC News coverage for some real information on what's going on, they seem to be doing quite well at providing it.
$0.02 (CDN)
Yes, because we don't have *any* nuclear power plants in earthquake prone territory in America. We're way smarter than that.
We now have four rectors that needs to be cooled down, built in and kept under close watch for a couple of hundred thousands of years.
Even if those reactors melt down, which they haven't yet, they'll probably stay contained (3m of concrete underneath), and from there it would be about 10 years before access for scraping them would be possible, similar to TMI. The reactors themselves are a problem, but not the BIG problem. The pool with the spent rods is, like the summary says.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This is the least informed comment I have ever read on /.
"We now have four rectors that needs to be cooled down, built in and kept under close watch for a couple of hundred thousands of years"
That doesnt even bear any resemblance to anything that is actually happening or going to happen at that plant.
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.
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.
This disaster could well be worse than the one in Tjernobyl.
No, it could not.
- Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel to catch and contain a melted core.... it melted out the bottom of the reactor and through the floor.
- Chernobyl used graphite control rods -- and graphite burns, carrying with it radioactive isotopes right from the melted core.
All radiation is not created equal. A micro-SV is a measure quantity. A micro-SV per hour is a rate, and you have to know how long the person is exposed to get the total quantity. Eating a banana will give you about 0.1 micro-SV due to radioactive potassium-40 in bananas. An average person gets over 400 micro-SV a year just from eating food. A reporter in Japan yesterday, took a picture of a radiation meter while standing outside, and it read 0.6 micro-SV/hour. Well bellow even the most conservative safety thresholds.
Particularly in the vented steam, the isotopes found in quantity have very short half-lives. The quantity of what has been released is diluted quickly to levels barely above background in the atmosphere.
Note that most of the cooling infrastructure at the plant is completely intact... but they lack electricity to run it. A new electrical line is being run, and should be completed in a day or so. At that point, the pumps will be back on line, and the situation will rapidly de-escalate.
i live in tokyo. since friday there have been daily earthquakes sometimes multiple with a magnitude of at least 3. i live in the akihabara area and businesses are doing their best to reduce all power consumption. people too are doing a good job of reducing power consumption. sections of the greater tokyo area are in scheduled black outs. trains are running at a 50%-75% schedule. as far what is happening up north.... i know what you know. where all my foreign friends have left i am still here. i went to shinagawa 2 times this week to get a reentry permit and the line the first time was 15hrs long. so i showed up the next day 1 hour before opening and the line was 2km or longer. as far as my japanese friends they are concerned however tokyo is still running, people still have jobs to goto and such.
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.
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.
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.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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?!?
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
This disaster has destroyed what little faith I had left in the media. It's disgusting what they are doing right now.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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.
My wife is Japanese and most of her family lived in that area, some only 1km away from the Fukushima power plant.
... ... And lots of other stuff too!!! / rant and vent over.
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.
It's kind of depressing if you think about it. Humanity is a bigger scourge to biological diversity than massive doses of radiation.
Happy people make bad consumers.
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.
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?
Because electronics wont work in radio active enviroment. The russians tried it in Tjernobyl but they failed rapidly despite pretty heavy shielding.
HTTP/1.1 400
As others have pointed out, the rods won't go "boom" but some of the compounds in the rods will catch fire, and that will push radioactive material into the air.
therefore, the only real emergency solutions i see, correct me if i am wrong, is either: 1. get some new backup generators there asap, or 2. run some emergency electrical lines to the power plant asap
3. Drown it in powdered boron, which is how they ultimately killed the Chernobyl fire. That seems to be the solution Japan is going for, but they have to get the boron from Korea.
Boron has two uses; one, it melts and then evaporates quickly, which sucks a lot of energy out of any fire it hits, and two, it's a neutron absorber, which kills any runaway criticality in the core. It's the right tool for the job. I just wonder why a country so dependent on nuclear power doesn't keep an emergency supply of boron on hand. Maybe it was hubris; maybe they thought things would never get this bad.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Stop.
Lying.
Please. Shut. The. Hell. Up. You have zero clue what you are stating, and are showing yourself to be either a shill for the oil/coal companies, or just too clueless to know better. By chance, are you being paid by Fox News?
Do you have any idea of the lies you are spouting? It is not going to blow up even if all the rods turn into one big blob, just because the uranium is not the right isotope. If this were the case, Iran would just empty all the rods from an existing facility and use that in their devices, as opposed to all the work with the centrifuges.
Nuclear power 101. Yes, power reactors get hot, but they do not get even near a mass critical enough to do a detonation. No reactor ever designed would do this. Yes, they will melt, but they will not be turning into a Fat Man ever.
At least learn about the subject you are trying to scare people on. As of now, your post history shows that you are a liar, a troll, a shill of a company/organization who wants nuclear power killed, or mindlessly spouting someone else's rhetoric that you do not understand.
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.
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?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
An abridged list from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_tsunamis :
2004: Indian Ocean - The initial surge was measured at a height of approximately 33 meters
1993: Okushiri, Hokkaido, Japan - Okushiri, a small island near the epicenter...was struck with extremely big waves, some reaching 30 meters
1983: Sea of Japan - The waves exceeded 10 meters in some areas.
1964: Alaska, USA - The waves were up to 100 feet tall, and killed 11 people as far away as Crescent City, California.
1960: Valdivia, Chile - It spread across the entire Pacific Ocean, with waves measuring up to 25 meters high.
1958: Lituya Bay, Alaska, USA - an earthquake caused a megatsunami to reach a height taller than the Empire State Building, measuring over 520 metres (1,706 ft), killing two. ...
1923: Kanto, Japan - waves reaching 12 meters were recorded.
1896: Meiji Sanriku, Japan - the waves, which reached a height of 100 feet, killed approximately 27,000 people
1854: Nankai, Tokai, and Kyushu Japan - Earthquake generated a maximum wave of 28 meters at Kochi, Japan
1792: Mount Unzen, Nagasaki Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan - the waves reached a height of 330 ft, classing this tsunami as a small megatsunami.
1771: Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa, Japan - Estimates of the highest seawater runup on Ishigaki Island, range between 30 meters and 85.4 meters
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
== Jez ==
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