Slashdot Mirror
TEPCO Confirms Partial Meltdown of No.2 and No.3 Reactors
blau writes with an article in NHK World. From the article "The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says findings show that fuel meltdowns may have occurred at the No.2 and No.3 reactors within days of the March 11th earthquake. But it says both reactors are now stable at relatively low temperatures."
TEPCO is also now blaming the tsunami for most of the damage rather than the earthquake.
Relative to what? The sun?
Many of the status reports from early on indicated a partial meltdown. (It was described as "fuel damage" - but that's meltdown).
So how is this news? We already knew the fuel rods had suffered from partial melting/damage. It's almost a given when you see status reports indicating fuel with only partial water coverage.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As I recall, the blame was on the tsunami since day one. Sure, there was a brief moment of "The earthquake may have been more responsible than initially thought" a few weeks back, but that didn't seem to amount to much.
Well, I haven't heard of any 3rd parties reporting anything unusual or notable regarding radioactive contamination above or beyond what has been reported already (and TEPCO can't exactly hide stuff that escapes the site.) Surely if it were so horrible then there would be accurate and reasonable reporting on the "true" radiation levels rather than what is reported, but I'm not seeing anything. And anecdotal rumors and information being spread via social networks (especially in a country like Japan that loves rumors) is suspect.
You don't get it. It melted down. That means that no one can live in Japan ever again. Millions will die, This disaster makes the actual Earthquake and Tsunami seem like nothing!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The long term effects of this to the population: Nothing. The levels are so low for the population that they're laughably small.
Don't pretend like 0 is the number of people affected by this meltdown. Nobody has been "laughing" since they got kicked out of homes they lost millions of yen for. It's not like someone's going to give that house back to them, nor their cash. School closings smack in the middle of the Japanese school year also mean lots of disrupted youths.
With Japan's prior issues with unemployment, fukushima was the straw breaking the camel's back for many souls now banned from living somewhere safe and known to them. But nobody is talking about the local lives in the cone of influence of the actual meltdown.
Because, you know, all gunshot wounds only hurt locally and we can just ignore the pain if we concentrate on the body parts not hurting. Right?
Maybe, if the earthquake also knocked out the cooling systems.
But it didn't, so it's likely they could have pumped enough water to keep the rods from melting at all, though they would have had a hell of a time sealing the crack.
The fact is that losing electricity to the pumps led to a cascade of catastrophic explosions turned a cracked vessel from a bad thing into a months-long nightmare. And that fact points to naive, negligent, or deliberately penurious design.
Tepco is shifting blame AGAIN.
The Tsunami knocked out the power, but if it knocked out the valve control systems and pumps, why didn't all three reactors melt down at the same time?
How come they started overheating when their back up batteries ran out of power. With the first reactor's batteries failing earlier due to tsunami damage. Mere coincidence? I think not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
The reason the reactors overheated and melted down was because power was not restored to the reactors' emergency cooling systems before their batteries ran down. If Tepco didn't try to handle everything internally for the first few days, they would have gotten power hooked up to the cooling systems much sooner. The Japanese Self Defense forces could have flown in some generators if requested and if they didn't have any I'm sure the US Military would have been glad to help out and airlift a few generators to help avoid a nuclear meltdown.
The key is that Tepco didn't request any aid from outside sources till it was too late and was forced to by the Japanese government.
From what I can see it's a case of ineptitude by Tepco employees that made this situation much worse than it should be been.
Mod parent up.
Some pumps were still running after the earthquake and tsunami, and they continued to run until the backup batteries ran down. Loss of power was the real cause of the disaster. If they'd some backup power source that worked, the reactors would have reached cold shutdown in a day or two, there would have been no hydrogen explosions, and no core melting.
This is really important. A plant could lose backup power for many other reasons: fire, flood, hurricanes, terrorism, contaminated fuel, tank leakage, transformer damage, maintenance outages, or exhaustion of fuel supplies. Hospitals and data centers with backup power have at times lost power for all those reasons.
Read NUREG/CR-6890, "Reevaluation of Station Blackout Risk at Nuclear Power Plants ", from 2005. Volume 2, page 22, has the line "Risk is evaluated only for critical operation, not for shutdown operation. External events, such as seismic, fire, or flood, are also excluded." That, as we know now, is an overoptimistic assumption. The NRC does a statistical analysis on backup power sources, assuming independent failure of separate units, and computes the odds accordingly.
Nuclear plants that need power to reach shutdown need power sources as tough as the containment vessel. That's now very clear.
It is true that thyroid cancer is probably the best choice if you get to select which cancer you get. Survivability is very good. I don't want to discourage you, but I have a couple of friends who lost their thyroid, which may or may not be related to us growing up in on of the fallout hotspots of Chernobyl and getting a healthy dose of rain at exactly the wrong time. They all survived, but having to adjust and readjust your thyroid hormone medication all the time can be pretty shitty. Mood swings, depression, life-long dependency on medication. So, even though a vast majority survives it, the impact on your life is not exactly fun. Regardless of our differences on certain matters, you have my best wishes for getting through that if it should strike you. Regarding coal - there are alternatives. I am not saying to abandon all nuclear power overnight - but a controlled phasing out over 2-3 decades leaves ample room for replacement by natural gas, solar thermal, geo thermal, biomass, smart grid demand control and so on, and so on.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
which may or may not be related to us growing up in on of the fallout hotspots of Chernobyl and getting a healthy dose of rain at exactly the wrong time. They all survived, but having to adjust and readjust your thyroid hormone medication all the time can be pretty shitty. Mood swings, depression, life-long dependency on medication.
I already have those issues and quite possibly for the same reason. Forget the mood swings, the adhd like symptoms or sudden weightloss are much worse. The last one is really vicious, because as you lose weight you end up with too much thyroid hormone, which leads to more weightloss, and on and on.
I agree there are alternatives, but the cost is the issue. Money really does mean the difference between life and death for many. I think 2-3 decades is being very ambitious. If we got rid of coal power on that time scale I would be ecstatic, I think we are stuck with nuclear for a hundred years or more. Solar thermal is great where it can be done. Using northern Africa to power Europe would be a great goal. It is not really an option in a place like Japan though. Not enough land to do that, and not enough light either.
Shipping enough coal or natural gas to replace nuclear power plants is expensive too. Again, that cost could well mean lives.