Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima Radiation Levels High, But Leak Plugged
jmcvetta wrote in with a story about Fukushima radiation levels so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. Levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places. But the good news is that the leak is patched using 1500 liters of sodium silicate.
100 millisieverts per...? A millisievert is a specific amount. If you are getting 100mS/sec you are probably in serious trouble; 100mS/day, you want to leave. Also WHERE outside the buildings? Just outside the door levels are high; 200 meters away, levels are dropping off by inverse cube law.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Hi,
I am glad I have Slashdot posters here who can help me determine the risk of radiation leaks from Japan. I take such advice as seriously as I do the sex tips I frequently see posted on Slashdot.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
There is an estimated 50,000 tons of water still on site that will need to be disposed of one way or the other. About 500 tons are pumped into reactor pressure vessels for cooling every day. Some recent information on this is reported here by NHK: Workers face challenge of water storage
To put 50,000 tons of water in perspective, a super tanker will carry about 172,000,000 gallons of oil. 50,000 tons of water is ~12,000,000 gallons. One super tanker could carry all the water on site plus and also receive all new water pumped into the reactors for the next 1332 days. No, I don't need the plausibility of this explained to me; this is an attempt to provide some scale to the problem.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
"the maximum possible damages are basically incalculable"
which is true for almost anything, look at the gulf spill, depending on who the numbers come from it's tens of billions or hundreds.
if you see news of a plane crash and shortly afterwards someone insists that plane travel is still "safer than road travel" do you turn around and shout "air travel cheerleaders should have got on their plane" or "how about you go sift through the wreckage for bodies!!!!"
no?
of course not!
because that would be retarded.
nuclear is safer, not perfectly but it's safer than most of the alternatives.
You're more likely to die on the road to the airport(unless you live really close) but when a plane crashes it makes world headlines and a lot of people die at once.
when a car crashes it makes the local news at most unless it's someone famous.
It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
nuclear is kinda like that, you're far more likely to die from lung cancer from living near a coal plant or die falling off your roof while installing solar panels but that's local news stuff.
It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
that and scary atoms and radiation.
a smog cloud or a broken neck aren't mysterious and scary.
Well it does look like they have finally got this under control, at least for the most part.
Plugging one leak does not mean the situation is even close to being under control. Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said:
... no further leakage has been detected from the pit. But there is a possibility that the water, which has lost an outlet, could show up from other areas of the plant.
The highly radioactive water is believed to have come from the No. 2 reactor core, where fuel rods have partially melted, and ended up in the pit. The pit is connected to the No. 2 reactor turbine building and an underground trench connected to the building, both of which were found to be filled with highly contaminated water.
Thousands of tons of highly radioactive water had already been found in many places outside the reactor buildings even before the direct leak into the ocean was discovered. Is there anything more substantial than crossed fingers and wishful thinking that makes you think the flow of highly radioactive water will halt now that they've plugged the direct outlet into the ocean?
In addition:
According to estimates by TEPCO announced Wednesday, 25 percent of the nuclear fuel rods have been damaged at the No. 3 reactor. The company earlier said that 70 percent of the No. 1 reactor's fuel rods and 30 percent of the No. 2 reactor's fuel rods have been damaged.
Nishiyama said past hydrogen explosions have likely occurred due to hydrogen accumulation caused by the reaction of melted fuel rods' zirconium with steam from the coolant water. But now there is concern that hydrogen could accumulate in the No. 1 reactor under a different process involving radiation-induced decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The installation of billion dollar radiation shielding around the reactor buildings has to be delayed until at least September because, of the high level of radioactivity. In other words, they need to wait for the current levels of radioactivity to decay before it is safe enough to install radiation shielding. So, ISTM, the September date is optimistically assuming the ongoing contamination will magically stop. Yet, even if the shielding could be installed tomorrow:
Some experts were sceptical about the feasibility of the measure as the step would have only limited effects in blocking the release of radioactive substances.
That is because the bulk of the release of radioactivity is downward in the water, not upward into the air. The shielding story highlights the challenge they are up against. The level of radioactivity around the plants (and in the plants) is so high, it is impeding their efforts to control the amount of radioactivity escaping. For example, work to restore the primary cooling system for reactor #2 has been halted for almost two weeks because of the high levels of radiation in the turbine building. The radiation level, due to highly radioactive water in the building, is over one sievert per hour. So a worker hits their lifetime dose limit less than 15 minutes. Someone who lingers there for an 8 hour shift will die regardless of what treatment they receive. It's been reported that the level of radioactivity in reactor buildings 1, 2, and 3 is too high to measure.
They are pouring hundreds of tons of uncontaminated water onto (into?) the reactors every day to cool them. Thousands of tons of this water has come out contaminated with radioactivity and has flooded the turbine buildings, tunnels outside the buildings, and the ground. They don't know how the water is getting contaminated or the routes it is taking
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin