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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.