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Further Updates On Post-Tsumami Japan
DarkStarZumaBeach points out a frequently updated page from the International Atomic Energy Agency with updates on the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which reports in terse but readable form details of the dangers and progress there. The most recent update says that the plant's Unit 2 has been re-wired for power, and engineers 'plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.' Read on for more on the tsunami aftermath.
Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."
dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."
Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."
Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."
dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."
Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."
Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."
Tsumami as opposed to tsusweet, tsusalty, tsusour, and tsubitter.
Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."
The linked source does NOT validate that assertion whatsoever. The 'plume' is a forecast of the way a plume would take shape across the pacific, if it were to exist. No-one is saying that there is a radioactive smoke plume of any magnitude, including undetectable. It is a weather forecast, meant for internal consumption by various national nuclear agencies for contingency planning and leaked to the NYT, nothing more.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Do you think a 30 meters wall is able to survive the impact of a 30 meters tsunami wave? You know fucking nothing.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From New York to Germany, politicians are proposing shutting-down nuclear plants.
Talk about jumping to rash conclusions. What are we supposed to use for power once the oil/coal becomes scarce and as expensive as silver? We need nuclear power as a replacement fuel (and supplemented by solar).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
A 30 meter wall would be the same height as a 10 story building... It might also stop the water from leaving the area thereby causing more problems. These things are usually designed with pretty good safety factors and with redundant systems. If it were just the earthquake or just the tsunami we probably wouldn't have this scenario, its the combination of both that caused it... Do remember an earthquake of this magnitude is a 1 in 1000+ year event. It's not realistic to plan for those when the life of your reactor is 50 years...
This link:
Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing
Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.
Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.
Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.
Remain calm! All is well!
The MIT Department of Nuclear Engineering has a web site, updated regularly, which acts as a hub for information about the nuclear crisis, including helpful background information.
See it at: http://mitnse.com/
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Welcome to media hype and the anti-nuclear nuts run amok.
They are not running amok so much as running away from the industry shills and misguided nuclear enthusiasts, who, when each new batch of egg hits their face, remind us that raw egg can be very good for the skin.
It's taken them nearly a week to get a police truck with a water cannon there (and it didn't work).
Why the fuck wasn't there a way to fly in a pumper truck, a generator, a long hose, and a ladder, to flood that building on Saturday or Sunday?
Are they so married to their procedures that they have no clue at all when thinking outside the box will save their asses? Do they have no foresight to try something preventive instead of waiting for the same sequence of disastrous results to occur in every reactor building?
Yes. And I know more than you. But don't let me convince you - just look at the concrete buildings still standing right next to the harbor. Look at the bridges, hospitals and schools that survived. Oh it will be expensive. And you'll have to fill it with earth, to take the weight. And it will crack. But it can be done easily.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Face it, they cut corners to make more of a profit. And talk about stupid, tsunamis happen all the time in Japan, this was built "after the fact." Are you seriously surprised that there was a tsunami of this size in Japan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_tsunamis
Face it, tsunami heights top five meters almost all the time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
If only you were there 40 years ago when this reactor was installed to warn them of the dangers... maybe you could have told them to use a more modern design that doesn't require active cooling to remain safe. Maybe you already have a map showing them exactly where to site the reactors? Or do you have a viable alternative to nuclear in your back pocket?
Lots of people can use hindsight to show exactly what went wrong in *this* particular incident, but who can tell where the next natural disaster will strike and how it will manifest itself? Did you already tell California to shut down its two coastal nukes? And it's not like nukes are the only power generating hazard out there - TVA was lucky that the billions of gallons of fly ash discharge didn't kill anyone.
USA officials seem to have a lot of criticism for the Japanese and how they handled this incident, but truth be told, this reactor survived a quake 30 times larger than it was designed for and so far hasn't spun out of control into a large scale disaster. If they hadn't lost power it's likely that this would have been a very minor incident. If the USA wants to criticize, then they need look no further than their own backyard. In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years. Oh, and at one of them, they installed the seismic reinforcements backwards and at the other, the entire reactor was installed backwards. Oops.
The most impressive thing to me is the creation of new inlets, and the loss of sand. I wonder how long (if ever) before the sand bars will reform.
BTW, they landed a plane at Sendai Airport. I imagine it will be a long time before normal operations are established there though. AFAIK, those military transports can take off and land on anything that's flat and not too muddy.
I was online this morning with a few people from Japan.
I found out that American schooled people are being evacuated, and that all of the "Military kids" of the higher echelons have already been moved out of the area.
Of course, these could just be rumors, but one guy was pretty convinced he was being evacuated today.
It's not starting back up. Ever. If the salt water wasn't enough, the potassium borate that they were pumping in (remember the report of the US delivering "coolant"? boron is a neutron absorber, it's not normally in the cooling water, it's used when the cooling water isn't working, and it gums up the core) was. Those reactors are useless forever now.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
1/1000 chance per year = .999 annualized chance of normal operation .999^(~436 reactors) = 1 in 3 annualized chance of meltdown somewhere in the world.
Clearly your numbers are off, but still, the point remains the same: when it comes to things with great potential for harm, you need a far higher standard than just 1:1000 chance of disaster. What's an acceptable rate of time for a 50% probability for an INES Cat. 6 event? 1:500 years? Each reactor would need to have an annualized INES Cat. 6 failure probability of 0.000317% (a 1 in 315,000 chance).
Great risk requires great caution.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
Aiming for a perfect safety record, or in general setting the bar too high, just causes people to game the system (just look at the games that go on with Japan's homicide police given the expectation of 90%+ solution rates for murders). Aiming for safe failure modes makes much more sense, and this plant was quite reasonable in that regard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Cutting corners to up profit
THAT is bean-counter territory. every color and nationality has them; and the engineers take shit.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Yeah, sure, most of the problems were financial or political, not engineering. But we can fix those, too.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Did anything in most post look like I was disputing their claims? I found your post a little over simplified, so I posted slightly more information.
And of course the plants were not as safe as they could have been, that is always true about everything.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Port Royal, Jamaica had a huge earthquake in 1692 pretty much dropping a fair portion of that city under the ocean. It is still there, flooded and under water. Protected as a historical site, divers frequently dive on it. In some places entire buildings are still there, intact as if they were built under the water.. The reason I'm asking is, has the land that is flooded in Japan actually subsided to below sea level due to the earthquake, or is it simply still flooded? It looks to me as if most of the land in Japan that was affected is still at the same height above sea level as pre-quake, however there may be areas that are now below the ocean... in any event Port Royal was pretty much destroyed again in 1909, and has been hit and hit hard by Hurricanes and probably is due for another temblor in 200 odd years.... I sure hope they don't build a nuke plant there, and I hope that Japan and every other country planning a new nuclear plant try their hardest to site them in areas that
(A): Don't have a history of earthquakes.
and
(B) don't have a history of storm surges from Hurricanes/Cyclones/Tsunami's...
But it's not "Japanese culture" that's building the nuclear plants. It's corporate culture. And "cutting corners" is part of the corporate DNA. They can't help themselves.
The people who are getting off planes from Japan in Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago's O'Hare airport and setting off the radiation detectors might disagree.
There are those who have decided that nothing will change their minds about nuclear energy. Everything will be taken as evidence of their point of view. You don't want those people making decisions.
I'm agnostic about nuclear energy. I think it's a necessary, if transitional energy source that should be used. But under no circumstances should private industry be in charge. Energy is just too important for the private sector to run.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In other words, GE tried to sweeten the price and TEPCO bought into it. It's OK to disparage TEPCO too btw.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/955468--japanese-power-companies-hid-nuclear-safety-problems-wikileaks?bn=1
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110317/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_earthquake_nuclear_scandals
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The "radioactive crap" will be 90% gone within a few months.
Look at Chernobyl.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
How exactly do you think this failure mode is a desirable one? There are spent fuel ponds containing more fuel than in the core itself which are in various states of overheating, half of the buildings have been gutted of sensors, pumps, cranes, etc by hydrogen explosions, the core is cracked on the #2, god only knows what's happening in the common fuel pool, the radiation level has been high enough to drive away *helicopters flying high overhead* some days, etc. You call that "reasonably safe"? God forbid we get a recriticality in a spent fuel pool. The explosions left half of them sitting exposed to the air and full of debris.
This is an INES level 6 disaster, same as the Kyshtym disaster that caused the Soviets to quietly have to remove 30 towns from their maps. The US has ordered a 50 mile exclusion zone for Americans around Fukushima Daiichi -- and the disaster is still unfolding. For comparison, it's under 40 miles from the reactors of Indian Point to Times Square, and far less to the outer reaches of NYC.
And, FYI, you're applying an observation bias to your "wrong thing at every decision point" argument. if they had done the right thing, you wouldn't have heard about it. There are nuclear accidents all the time. Nearly every reactor has had accidents of varying severity. Only the bigger ones (generally INES-5 and above) make the news. Naturally those are going to be the ones where more than one thing went wrong. And, FYI, both in Chernobyl and TMI, there were many *right* decisions made also. They simply didn't outweigh all of the wrong decisions. And many "wrong decisions" occur during the engineering stage, not the operation stage, but aren't known about until they reveal themselves many years later.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
You have just demonstrated that you do not understand the difference between a sterling engine and a steam turbine, so I will point you to Wikipedia, where you can remedy your lack of education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine
Or perhaps you do not understand just how hot things remain when a reactor is shut down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat
Hopefully that should be enough for you to understand why a sterling engine sized to run the emergency cooling pumps will work off the decay heat, while a full sized steam turbine designed to produce electricity would not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The plans to "rewire" the power plants were from yesterday and, at the moment, they are just that, plans. This morning Toden announced that the construction of the electric cable that was supposed to be complete yesterday will be delayed until at least tomorrow. At the very end, they said also, in a markedly small voice, that they hope restoring the electricity will go smoothly, but there are worries that the equipment on the ground - pumps and transformers - may be out of order (maybe - after those explosions and all that water dumped on them from the air?), and that could probably hamper the effort.
In reality, there is no staff (except the firefighters, Chernobyl style) on the ground since Saturday - a relative and a former colleague worked at the plant and are already in Osaka since Tuesday - all measurements are taking place from the helos and from an observation points 30km away, and radiation in excess of 150 microgreys is being reported 30-40 km away upwind from the reactor by the local authorities.
So, there is only stalling, spinning, and no information.
Incidentally, here are the radiation reports by the ministry of science and bullshit (japanese, sorry, all data is in microsieverts, and if the last column is without dates, it has the long-term averages) : http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303723.htm
I feel very strongly that the press have behaved very irresponsibly throughout this and gov'ts around the world should take them to task.
Everyone is panicking now and buying iodine tablets.
What a pack of pussies the world has become.
In the 1950s, people used to watch above ground atom bomb tests in between shows and gambling in Vegas while sipping martinis.
Our current president had to be roused from his busy schedule of vacation or golf or whatever to make a comment. Former President Teddy Roosevelt once killed a Kodiak bear with his mind, and personally dug the final mile of the Panama Canal.
Send in Chuck Norris in a lead apron. He'll kill the fuel rods with one punch.
In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years.
Not with our horizontal slip faults. The biggies come from the subduction zones, and the nearest stretches from Northern California up to British Columbia. And the plants were designed for 7.0 quakes *directly* underneath, and there's no faults directly under them.
Couple of problems
- The generators/switch gear are designed to produce transmission voltages. Industrial voltages for the plant are probably taken from a normal power substation, not directly from the high voltage transmission lines. It's likely the sub-station servicing the plant was wiped out.
- Strangely enough, generators don't work properly if there isn't *enough* load. It's unlikely that the needs of the plant are high enough to keep the generators online.