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Crack In Fukushima Structure May Be Leaking Radiation
SillySnake writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it had found a crack in the pit at its No.2 reactor in Fukushima, generating readings 1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour in the air inside the pit. 'With radiation levels rising in the seawater near the plant, we have been trying to confirm the reason why, and in that context, this could be one source,' said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), said on Saturday."
Also of interest: Cryptome is featuring high-res photos of the reactor site, taken by UAV.
This just in: Armchair quarterback could have done better. More at eleven...
Really. this 'probability jargon' is starting to annoy me. you found 3000 times the normal radiation in seawater around the plant, and STILL 'maybe' ?
...
this overemphasized 'keep public calm' attitude of government and the annoying enthusiasm of main stream media outlets like cnn to drop the fukushima incident off headlines is really annoying me.
European energy commissioner said 'biggest disaster of the century' over chernobyl, yet, talking heads in mainstream media almost trying to convince people that radiation is good for their health. Despite EPA found 1000 times allowable radiation in groundwater in massachusetts.
whaddya gonna do. as long as 'lobby' concept is around, and news generation and distribution stays corporate, these kind of stuff will happen. just prevent interested industries profiting, screw the rest
Read radical news here
For Technophiles at /. its always "maybe" when things are already happening? Are you living in the past or something?
"generating readings 1,000 millisieverts"
Is this another instance where they say "1,000" because their detectors only go that high?
the nuclear energy "success" continues!!!!!
$300 billion cleanup bill for this mess. Years of unusable land. Polluted ocean. Unknown effects on health of people within the radiation zone. What is the true cost of nuclear power? The sad part it what will really stop nuclear power dead is if this forces the PM to resign due to public pressure. The potential disruption of the political power structure are what the politicians are really going to be worried about. In my opinion this is the end of nuclear power plants.
IMHO, a major thing that seems really stupid was the plants venting the radioactive hydrogen gas into the upper building instead of out into the air. The explosions clearly must have jeopardized the control over the process, since workers got hurt. From what I understand, the radioactive gas could have been vented without any ill effects. I suppose the reactor just isn't built to do that though.
Emotions! In your brain!
http://www.spiderbomb.com/blog/?p=317
there are people who are going around and saying 'radiation is good for your health'. but more importantly, there ARE people believing them.
Read radical news here
mod to -1, please.
this guy is an 'asshole'....
(yes, you guessed it)
here:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11040307-e.html
-Today at around 9:30 am, we detected water containing radiation dose overc
1,000 mSv/h in the pit* where supply cables are stored near the intake
channel of Unit 2. Furthermore, there was a crack about 20 cm on the
concrete lateral of the pit, from where the water in the pit was out
flowing.(We already informed.) During the same day, we injected fresh
concrete to the pit, but we could not observe a reduction in the amount
of water spilling from the pit to the sea.
Therefore, we considered that a new method of stopping the water and
determined to use the polymer. Necessary equipment and experts of water
shutoff will be dispatched to the site and after checking the condition,
we're doing continuous work to stop water by injecting polymer(April 3rd).
-Monitoring posts of No. 1 ?No.8 set up near the boundary of power station
area have been restored. We will periodically monitor the data and
announce the results of monitoring.
This crack maybe explains why the levels of I-131 had not dropped at the same rate than in the previous days in the readings of I-131 and Cs-137 published by MEXT in their readings of radiation and contamination of water by prefecture page. In most prefectures they have dropped to levels that are not detectable but in a few the levels of Cs-137 have increased.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
-1 Obvious Goatse redirect. (Sorry, got not mod points of my own right now)
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Parent is goatse troll.
I think it's been handled pretty well. Nobody has been killed by DEADLY ATOMS, and the only radiological injuries have been skin burns to two workers who ignored their dosimeter alarms. The release of radionuclides into the air has been minimal, and the amounts found in food and water have dropped back below minimum levels in all but the immediate locality to the reactor complex (and the levels there are only above the 'constant yearly exposure' maximums). Reactor core and storage pool temperatures are again under control, and coolant water containment in all but two reactors is unbreached. In one of those, the leak of irradiated coolant is within the reactor complex.
The 'crack' mentioned in this case is not in the reactor containment itself as the summary and article imply, but in a water storage pool next to the sea, with the crack being between the pool and the sea.
Not that lessons can't be learnt from this: gravity-feed coolant reservoirs would be a good idea, as well as separate backups for the storage pools and cores, but it's far from "getting steadily worse".
IAEA Incident page
MIT NSE hub
WNN
I don't understand. Can someone translate that into old-fashioned units like luminous watches per hockey game?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your statement shows not only your ignorance on this disaster and Chernobyl, but on nuclear safety itself. 30 people died in the immediate aftermath of what happened at Chernobyl. No one in japan has died from this reactor yet (although there may be some in the future.)
This reactor was hit by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, followed up by a 30 foot tidal wave. Had this happened to any other major source of power (coal, natural gas, hydroelectric) the death toll would have been in the hundreds... maybe in even the tens of thousands if it had been a hydroelectric damn.
Please, do some reading so you have some idea of what you're comparing this to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects
Chernobyl was a horrific even, orders of magnitude more devastating that what's happening in Japan right now. Just the initial released was equal to a 50 kiloton atomic bomb going off.
... and only one : Would their stupid plane not get irradiated?
Welcome to last week.
WTF?
"Today at around 9:30 am, we detected water containing radiation dose over 1,000 mSv/h in the pit"
That doesn't make any sense. Sievert is a measure of absorbed radiation dose. The measure of 'radiactiveness' is Becquerel/Curie (per liter, kilogram, mole).
Oh please, PR about a disaster that conveniently happened when "western" (US) media and "non-government" organizations were in a full attack mode against anything related to USSR economy or politics.
I am sure, I was counted among "victims" of Chernobyl disaster, too. If you are reading this in US, I am probably healthier than you are.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
...what this will cause to the world, when it'll be on Wikileaks!
you are trying to 'understand' ann coulter ?
Read radical news here
Nobody was killed? Just wait a few years and you will have many deaths.
I think you just dont know how dangerous radioation is, otherwise I cant explain me how you can write such stupid text.
Radiation is in the air, in the sea, in drinking water, in foods and many peaople will get cancer the next years.
Also the whole area will be contamined for many many many many years.
Its a dead zone there.
It's a matter of incompetent engineering. Placing it where it was located was a really bad idea, and it should have turned up during the design phase when they were brainstorming all the worst case scenarios to plan for. Additionally, I was shocked that they didn't have any spare backup generators that were available in case the backup went down. Especially given its role in preventing a lot of the mess that they've gotten into.
And the lack of robots hardened against radiation, this is Japan, they can do robots, and they haven't got any to work in this environment? Have they not seen Godzilla?
Do you think those high-res photos of the reactor site will give inspiration for some bad-ass fps even more realistic than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?
I don't, but they could.
My understanding is that the people working directly to keep the reactor under control understand that they will die within weeks or months.
I will say that the information coming out of this disaster has been much more forthcoming than what happened with Chernobyl. They didn't even tell people for like 2 days after the incident, never warned people about eating food from nearby sources etc. Within a day or two of having it capped with concrete the story was "success!" and a flag was put up. The radiation destroyed the flag within a week so they sent the military in to put up another one... over, and over again. Each time was a suicide mission.
Goatse link.
The title should be "Crack In Fukushima Structure May Be Leaking Radioactive Materials". When I hear "leaking radiation" I think of a neutron beam shooting out the crack. :-P
said it had found a crack in the pit at its No.2 reactor in Fukushima, generating readings 1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour in the air inside the pit.
(yeah, yeah, I'm replying to an Anonymous Coward posting currently rated at -1 Troll)
Let's revisit this question in ten years or so....THAT's when we'll probably see the results of the radiation.
Like smoking, you won't be able to pin a SPECIFIC death on radiation, but you'll see a statistical correlation and perhaps an unusual number of cancers in people in the area... yes, perhaps the cause listed on the death certificate will be "cancer", but there will be a rise in them and that rise is caused by the radiation.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
You have to wonder who actually ordered the gas not to be vented into the atmosphere. If it was the engineers, then shame on them, but I'm willing to bet it was the suits at TEPCO and/or the government. When the disaster first struck TEPCO went out of their way to assuage everyones fears saying they had total control of the situation. Actually venting gas, even if it wasn't incredibly dangerous, would have been admitting failure, even just a little bit. It looks like the suits at TEPCO wanted to save as much face as possible, so they went with the riskier plan even if the worst case scenario was much more dire than if they had released the gas..... or I could just be a conspiracy cook :P
Monstar L
1,000 millisieverts implies four significant digits of precision... I wish they wouldn't do that... just say "1 Seivert" and be done with it.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110403a1.html
Since this plant sits on the edge of the Japanese Current, Any thoughts on what 200,000 gals of this stuff per day will do to the Northern Pacific and Bering Sea fisheries?
Almost all Articles regarding Fukushima got "may be" in their subjects
It's not really incompetent engineering IMO. Most of the stuff at the plant was built 30-40 years ago. For its time I imagine the engineering to be very sound.
If you cleared all the regulatory hurdles to building a nuclear power plant and started construction today, you'd be done in 5 years at the fastest. By that time, all of the engineering involved in the plant will, unsurprisingly, be outdated by five years.
I wonder if there's a way to crowdsource conceptual ideas. You start with a basic question like "How do we do this"? and then go from there. If someone asked me what I'd put in such a plant, I'd probably have the radiation-hardened robots placed in strategic locations with Roomba-style chargers.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Because 1000 sounds so much 'better' (in the media sense of the term) than '1'.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
1,000 millisieverts imply only one significant digit of precision. Anything more is just your imagination. If you really wanted four significant digits of precision, you'd write: 1.000e3 millisievert or 1.000 Sievert.
A dam used for irrigation and drinking water (much like any hydroelectric dam anywhere in the world) in the hills above Fukushima town failed during the earthquake. The resulting flood killed at least four people and a bunch of others in houses downstream are missing, presumed drowned.
Several dams in the area are known to have sustained damage but many others have not yet been properly inspected.
If we are to believe TEPCO which is doubtful, workers that have received more than 150/200mS are brought offsite. These are dangerous exposure but far from certain death.
Why wouldn't they have four significant digits of precision? I believe it possible to measure even microsieverts per hour.
I cant explain me how you can write such stupid text.
Quite.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
because I keep hearing exactly 1,000 ... I never hear 1,005 or 1,002 .... I somehow doubt that the measurements are always exactly 1,000 millisieverts
false precision
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
How come when they have a leak the reading is always "1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour" they have been saying that level for weeks no more or less always "1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour" kind of strange.
Perhaps the meter only measures up to 1 sievert. :)
- Raynet --> .
I believe that Chernobyl will be nothing next to this disaster soon.
I don't know about that... one of the big differences here is that the Chernobyl core was actually exposed, and releasing radioactive materials which killed observers over a kilometer away. Look up the "Bridge of Death" in Pripyat.
By comparison, Fukushima is releasing (only) 1000 mSv per hour - this is concerning, and would poison anyone exposed to it, but compared to Chernobyl (estimates there were 350+ Sv per hour - several orders of magnitude higher), not even in the same ballpark. Furthermore, the option still does exist to cover the leaking reactors in a concrete sarcophagus... but things need to get a lot more dire before that happens, because then you have a permanent radioactive structure.
They have tried twice now to plug the crack - first with a load of concrete, and then with an expanding polymer. Both failed, which makes me suspect the crack is a lot deeper than they think it is. Deep cracks in the ground are not terribly surprising after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. They may have to cofferdam the water upstream of the crack, and then dig it out the surface concrete, and fill it before patching it again. A cofferdam is a temporary barrier to keep water out of a construction site.
Apparently these backup generators never really work, anywhere.
http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/
It appears to me the rating system is broken.
Why should a perfectly sincere and polite post end up with -1, just because it is against the opinion of the moderator?
If that is what moderating is for, then maybe there should be a -1 "disagree" option, and the easy to abuse "Underrated"/"Overrated" should be gone. I say easy to abuse because there is a small risk for negative metamoderation for these.
Why not have a multidimensional rating system, maybe using left wing and right wing or INTP as in the psychological scale?
Then I could change my preferences to only show me the posts that agreee with my opinion ;-)
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
How about we get a story when something is happening! I'm sick of things that "may be" happening...
Comment of the year
What I find most disturbing is the lack of information they are telling us.
Have you seen anything in the news about the reactor in #3 blowing the lid off the primary containment vessel?
The Hydrogen explosions at 1 and 4 were the same shape cloud. It was a gas explosion. Number 3 on the other hand was a tall cylinder explosion with a cap of debris that fell out of the top of the cloud. I have not said anything about it yet as I could not confirm my finding, but today they released the high resolution drone photos. Another item is buildings 1 & 4 blew because of a hydrogen explosion. The hydrogen exploded and the resulting pressure blew the buildings apart. Number 3 on the other hand had a hydrogen explosion after the building ruptured. The big flash of the hydrogen fire lit when the building blew. Listen to the explosion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ It is different.
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm#20%20March
Reactor 1 and 4 have a more traditional shape for a confined gas explosion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK0-scxGEak&NR=1
Take a very good look at the photos. Locate the primary containment dome in #4. It is bright yellow just like in the drawings. Note it is NOT in the center of the building. Note the roof truss of #4. The roof blew off, but most of the truss is intact. Now look at the elevation in #4 of the yellow containment dome.
Using that as a reference, now look at #3. Look for anything as high as the dome in #4. In the middle is a rubble pile. Note in the corner of the building in a mirror location to #4 look at the circular hole in the truss. It's where a plume of steam is rising. The fire and charred truss is at the other end of the rubble pile, or over the cooling pond. Where there is supposed to be a yellow dome is a steaming hole. Now look at the roof of the turbine hall next to it. Notice a hole in the roof about the right shape and size for that dome lid to have fallen in?
I'm not sure yet if the core blew off it's lid, but the primary containment did blow the top.
The above is my opinion based on my personal examination of the photos in the link above and the noted difference of the explosion of #3.
Due to the radiation levels, the torris may have ruptured resulting in the top blowing out of the primary containment building. This would explain the relatively low amount of radio active parts blown about the area.
The truth shall set you free!
But wouldn't you have to, you know, ingest the water into the body somehow to receive the full dose, not just be next to it?
In "Half Life", you are okay as long as you don't step in it.
You have to wonder who actually ordered the gas not to be vented into the atmosphere.
That probably was established procedure for the reactors. Keep in mind that the alternative was to allow pressure to build up till something major broke. When this is all said and done, it'll be interesting to see how closely TEPCO hewed to the emergency procedures that were in place. There are obvious deviations, such as pumping sea water into reactors. But it surprises me how people with no information are willing to attribute all sorts of faults to the people making the decisions, even though it's usually (if not always, to be honest) not obvious why the decision should be wrong.
But those deaths were a result of the earthquake, not because of the problems with the nuclear reactors.
If we have to revisit it in 10 years, it's still nowhere near how bad Chernobyl was.
I wonder if in 10 years there will even be a blip statistically large enough to be significant.
I wonder if in 10 years we, in general, will even remember this ever happened...
Presumably, we should only see that if radiation levels are significantly higher for most of the population.
Slight increases in radiation doesn't seem to harm us in a way that we can statistically determine. This is easy to show -- most parts of the earth have varying levels of background radiation, due to the type of soil and bedroom, as well as the elevation (Denver receives more radiation than the sea coast, all other things being equal). But we don't detect differences in the cancer rate.
NOTE: This post is mostly recycled from a previous post at the bottom of a thread under the previous Fukushima story. The thread started with a post I made warning that most of the radioactivity leaking from Fukushima was moving downward into the ground and ocean, not upward into the air.
Filling the crack and fixing this leak won't reduce the amount of radioactive material spewing from reactor #2 into the environment. This pit and the concrete with the crack in it were never intended to be part of the containment system. If they succeed, then the HRW (highly radioactive water) will either (a) find another way into the sea, or (b) further contaminant the groundwater, or (c) flood the ground and then do (a) or (b). Depending on the total amount of radioactivity released, it *might* actually be better to pour this HRW into the ocean where it will be diluted down to safe levels.
The term "containment" has a fairly precise technical meaning (BTW: I've got a Ph.D. in nuclear physics but not nuclear engineering). These reactors are basically a bottle in a bottle. The inner bottle is the pressure vessel and it is used to maintain pressure for the creation of steam and electricity. The outer bottle is 10cm or 20cm thick stainless steel. It is called the containment vessel. Its sole purpose in life is to contain all the radioactivity in the event the fuel rods melt down. Normally almost all the radioactivity is contained in the zirconium clad fuel rods. That is why there can be HRW 100,000x higher than the water found in a functioning reactor. Almost all of the radioactivity in a functioning reactor of this type is contained in the fuel rods. When the fuel rods melt down, high levels of radioactive materials contaminate the water making it highly radioactive.
Up until last week, the word "containment" had the simple and obvious meaning of radioactive materials staying inside the massive stainless steel containment vessel. I believe TEPCO forged a new meaning in order to downplay the significance of the HRW that was found in the turbine buildings. I will use the traditional technical definition, not the new one invented by TEPCO.
You see, the idea was that as long as the radioactivity was kept inside the containment vessel then you could safely operate the plant and move around in it. The environment was safe. The control room was safe. The turbine building was safe. Even the reactor building was safe (as long as you stayed out of the containment vessel and storage pool). Everything was safe. One of the difficulties caused by a loss of containment accident is that it becomes difficult and dangerous to work on the plant. That is why they need to pump out the turbine buildings before they work on restoring the cooling. If they hadn't lost containment (in the traditional sense) this would not have been a problem.
The pit, the tunnels, and even the turbine buildings were not designed to contain radioactivity. The buildings were designed, like most buildings, to keep the rain out, etc. For example, right after they had those scary hydrogen explosions that blew apart the reactor buildings, I was assuring people it was not a big deal because those buildings were never designed to contain radioactivity. TEPCO and the government were offering the same assurances.
When I heard about the HRW in the turbine buildings I stopped issuing reassurances and I started to be greatly concerned because it meant they had lost containment. I was hoping against hope that the HRW in the turbine buildings was a fluke and that it hadn't spread elsewhere. When I then then heard the tunnels outside the turbine buildings were flooded with HRW I knew this was a serious accident, much worse than Three-Mile Island. When I heard there were 18,000 tons of HRW outside of containment (that number has now been reduced to 13,000 tons) I knew this was a big fucking deal and I was surprised that the Western press were ignoring these developments even though they had been h
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I think this is more among the lines of "Guantanamo was not as bad as a Soviet gulag".
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
When was the last time you told someone you drove 1 Mm, instead of 1000 km? Or if you are being pedantic about 4 sig digs - Is the Moon 360,000 km or 360 Mm far away? I bet you say 360,000 km or rather 360 thousand km and don't mean 5 sig digs. There are standard units and typical domains - and we used mS for these domains. In computing we have all gotten used to byte, kb, Mb, Gb, Tb and Pb, and translate between them. But we don't often mix up km, m, cm, mm, um, nm, pm because they are different domains.
All we hear is more of the same day in and day out. They're doing this, oh and we discovered that. They're now leaking cesium 141 into the ocean which has a half life of 30 years vs 8 days with the iodine. And ocean water flows clockwise towards the US and our fishing waters. After transocean were going to find we have very little seafood that's not contaminated because of human activity.
The government needs to get their power company out of the picture and work on real solutions, that power company is doing everything it can but at a slowness to save it's own ass.
The crack is leaking the water? Are you sure its the crack and not the still-solid reinforced concrete part? Next thing you will start telling me that its the hole in the boat thats causing it to sink, or the hole in the roof of the airplane thats causing the wind to rush in! What kind of nonsensical thinking is this? Any middle manager would insist that you first prove that its the actual hole in the airplane, leak in the bottom of the boat, or crack in the core before even asking about attempting repairs. "Prove to me that the radioactive material is coming from inside, prove that the radioactive material wasn't in the ground before! I insist that before you attempt repairs, that we know for sure that someone else didn't put that radioactivity there, and that it hasn't been there all along!"
Slashdotters please note: I worked for a middle manager in IT for too long. I put up with stupid idiotic crap for too long, and it has led to this...
One the scale between 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl this disaster is worse then TMI but much closer to TMI than Chernobyl.
Chernobyl:
No containment vessel.
A high Positive void coefficient.
Surrounding population wasn't evacuated for days after.
Most radiation exposure from the surrounding population came from eating contaminated food.
Three Mile Island:
Containment vessel worked.
Pressure Vessel was never breached.
Negative void coefficient.
Total radiation impact of release was 1 extra cancer.
Fukushima:
Containment Vessel may have been damaged.
PressureVessel may have been damaged.
Negative void coefficient.
Population evacuated.
Food screened for contamination.
1 Sievert
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp2/daiichi-photos2.htm
includes lots of ground and non-aerial photos.
I am sure, I was counted among "victims" of Chernobyl disaster, too. If you are reading this in US, I am probably healthier than you are.
If you're anything like the Ukrainians I've met, you likely have larger breasts.
But 4+missing, not tens of thousands. Even so, it's Infinite% more than the radiation/poisoning deaths.
From NHK:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/03_11.html
Tokyo Electric Power Company has said two employees who had gone missing since the March 11th disaster were found dead at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
The bodies of Kazuhiko Kokubo and Yoshiki Terashima, both in their 20s, were found in the basement of the turbine building for the Number 4 reactor on Wednesday.
They had been carrying out a regular check-up at the plant.
The chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tsunehisa Katsumata, said in a statement that the company is extremely sorry about losing two young employees who had tried to maintain the plant's safety in the midst of disaster.
Sunday, April 03, 2011 13:02 +0900 (JST)
Rest in peace.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Those are within the safe limits for workers in the nuclear industry. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary will happen to them.
The readings from the suppression pool at unit 2 are of negative relative pressure. NISA reports that the suppression pool is damaged. Despite being the less impressive in pictures, the damage in unit 2 is the most serious.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Do you have a reference to anyone speaking for TEPCO or the Japanese government saying they had total control of the situation, ever?
I agree that it can be slow getting English-translated information from the site, and that there aren't people at the site making conjectures and reporting speculation, and the whole thing can feel like an information embargo which can be interpreted as official dissembling and outright lying.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>What I find most disturbing is the lack of information they are telling us.
Do you think they (TEPCO, or the Japanese or US governments) have any information they haven't made public? Could you be specific about what that information might be? Do you think anyone who is actually involved in the disaster effort has had any material information withheld from them?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>Nobody was killed? Just wait a few years and you will have many deaths.
That's a conjecture based on your assumptions.
You are basing your assumptions on speculation and a biased opinion about the disaster. Your guess may turn out to be right, but just because you might have a lucky guess doesn't mean that facts should be invented.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
OK, I looked up "bridge of death pripyat" and found a shitload of pages, all telling an identical story of people standing on a bridge watching the fire from a distance, half of them dying of radiation sickness.
So how come none of them are listed on the known death toll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
Everybody on that list was on the plant grounds or in a helicopter crash. Every one of them was involved in performing professional services (reactor employees or experts called in, electricians, firemen, security, etc).
Unless someone can document this instead of repeating an apocryphal tale, I'm officially calling bullshit.
Radiation Survey Report
Location: Fukushima, Plant 2, Sub level: The Pit
Time: 9:03am
Level: (choose only one)
__ 1-200 millisieverts
__ 250-500 millisieverts
__ 550-1000 millisieverts
__ over 9000 millisieverts **do not check upon penalty of termination
Technician:
Overseer:
Overfiend:
is that you, 567632?
not terribly safe - the workers may have to quit smoking to keep their cancer chances the same.
100mSv is the point at which a rise in cancer rates above the error bars is observable.
but it's a small rise.
250mSv is getting more serious though.
in Soviet Russia, radiation makes you stronger!
those guys in the turbine rooms got ~4Sv right into their feet.
they'll probably lose them.
Is Sv a linear or a log scale?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I suppose Tiananmen Square is an invention of the evil West too, right?
The odds of finding any documentation stating exactly what happened there is slim to none. Remember, Chernobyl was in the clutches of the Soviet Union at that time. The rest of the world only found out about the disaster once the contaminated winds drifted into nearby countries.
Having said that, it may just be a tale. Only the original residents of Pripyat know for sure. But the point remains the same - 1000 mSv of leakage is hardly anything by comparison.
At least they used Seiverts. Could be worse, the could have said "1000 times the amount of radiation you get on a hot sunny day when riding in a plane, eating a banana and delivering a baby" or some other random unit of measure that doesn't tell you anything.
You can't compare #3 with #4 because #4 was shut down for refueling. During refueling, the containment cap is lifted off and laid down off to the side, probably in the corner. For example (this is not the same facitlity), here's a pic of the containment head being lifted off http://www.nucleartourist.com/images/headlift.jpg
And here's another pic that shows refueling underway. http://www.nucleartourist.com/images/rflg-fl2.jpg
Notice the dome sitting on the floor in the back, out of the way. That is probably analogous to what the pictures of Fukushima Daiichi #4 building are showing. You can't assume the containment head position would be the same in the other reactor buildings.
You have to wonder who actually ordered the gas not to be vented into the atmosphere.
How are you going to vent it without power? Open a window?
1,000 millisieverts... is that, like, 1 million microsieverts or something?
Yes, yes, it's all just peachy. As I read more the worse it seems to be. You sound like a PR flunkie for Tepco. Truly the situation is worsening or haven't you been keeping up? The thing is that it's a long way from contained even now. Keep watching.
It does have potential, and Japan is a good place for it. That California plant injects treated sewer water, taking care of two problems at the same time. Since Japan obviously needs a crash program to build power generation in all forms available, they will probably get some geothermal.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The design of this reactor was first questioned in 1972 by the US Atomic Energy Agency. Worse though, was the idea of NOT putting the generators and fuel on the bluff above the plant. What's your excuse for that tard move?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Here is how Radiation effects the human body:
http://www.standeyo.com/News_Files/NBC/radiation.human.body.html
Radioactive water found leaking into sea from pat at Japan nuclear plant. This can be devastating to say the least to all humankind! The effects of radiation sickness and poisoning include cancer, genetic and reproductive damage, hormonal damage, and thyroid blockage (that's why they want you to take potassium iodine, another dangerous toxin) but I wouldn't. There are much safer substances like Zeolites.
A couple good articles on radiation sickness protection that shows what you need do to test radiation levels, treat water, and what to take internally to not get sick:
Water Purification Tablet
Radiation Sickness
Actually what all the reports are saying is OVER 1,000 :p so your doubts are correct.
Apart from the two bodies they pulled out the other day? You are not only ignorant while calling others ignorant but very insensitive no matter what those power station workers actually died from in the plant.
It's also way too early to write posts like yours above. Even massive doses of radiation can take a while to kill people but hopefully nobody has been exposed to that much or will be exposed to that much as work on the reactors continues. I think we should all calm down and wait for the hype from rabid opponents, rabid fanboys and the press that want a disaster movie to die down. The comparison to Chernobyl doesn't make much sense but when you have a three point scale of nothing/TMI/Chernobyl then people are going to do it.
The idea that protesters wanted "democracy" was.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Okay, but what was the size of that dam? How much water was it holding back? Did it rupture all at once, or did it hold on long enough for them to controllably spill water out before it was completely compromised?
All dams, and disasters affecting them, are not made equal. If the Grand Coulee dam on the Columbia River took that 9.0, it's quite possible that north Portland OR, and Vancouver WA may cease to exist.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Thanks for the great photos. They show the locaton of the containment in the relation to the corner. It's about one containment diameter from the wall, just as the photo shows.
Anyway, I found another article where they say it "May have been breeched.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/16/fukushima_wednesday/
It now appears that a similar breach may have taken place at the plant's No 3 reactor: Japanese chief cabinet secretary Edano raised the possibility in a briefing during the early hours of today (UK time).
The truth shall set you free!
The way the reactor was designed the hydrogen would vent into secondary containment which operates under negative pressure. In normal conditions it would be pumped out of the secondary containment through filters to remove radioactive particles. But without power, that's difficult
You could argue that they could have used small explosion to blow holes in the secondary containment and avoid a larger explosion. Of course, that could have triggered a larger explosion. I doubt they would have been authorized to do it in time to prevent the explosions.
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is not that cool. You know what's cool? a billion nanosieverts per hour!
Japan issue blamed on greedy business, government, lazy contractors blah blah blahh blah.... Cost of nuclear blah blah. Nuclear bad because of dead fish and contaminated land, nuclear bad blah blah. There was a fucking EARTHQUAKE. A BIG one. There was a fucking TSUNAMI. A BIG one. Shit happens and sometimes it's no ones fault. Even typos and bad grammar.
Just curious, why can't they take out the fuel rod? There must be some kind of robotic arm for this job, as they do need to change them regularly. Once separated, they stop bombarding each other with neutrons and the chain reaction should stop.
I understand that it might be too late because things are melting inside reactor #2. But earlier when they are not melting, why not taking them all out? Am I missing something very important?
I thought i read that in YESTERDAY's /.