Fukushima Daiichi Water Leak Raised To Level 3 Severity

AmiMoJo writes "Japan's nuclear regulators have raised the level of severity of the radioactive water leak from a tank at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It is now a level-3 serious incident. The revision from level 1 is based on estimates of the volume of radioactive substances leaked. The International Atomic Energy Agency supports the revision. They say the tank leak can be assessed separately from the Fukushima Daiichi crisis as a level 3 incident. Japanese experienced a level-3 nuclear event in 1997 with the fire and explosions at a fuel reprocessing plant in Tokai Village, Ibaraki Prefecture. 37 workers there were exposed to the leaked radioactive substances."

Comments

Re:The fate of the 1997 workers

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing happened to those workers.

They had a worse incident where they were carrying uranium in a bucket and it went super-critical in 1999. That was a level 4. 2 people died of multiple organ failure.

http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/4241_Tokaimura_Accident.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident

The three operators' doses were far above permissible limits at 3,000, 10,000, and 17,000 mSv; the two receiving the higher doses died several months later.[4] The most severely exposed worker had his body draped over the tank when it went critical. He suffered serious burns to most of his body, experienced severe damage to his internal organs, and had a near-zero white blood cell count.[4]

The cause of the accident was said to be "human error and serious breaches of safety principles", according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.[5]

Re:Capitalism SUCKS!

[noh8rz10]

well a single ionizing event has a bundle of energy. Power is the number of ionizing events per second, which is what rems are.

The spent fuel pool disaster clock is ticking

[ka9dgx]

The radiation from the corium pockets underground is bad, but it's nothing compared to the mess is still waiting to make a disaster bigger (85 times bigger!) then Chernobyl..

Re:The fate of the 1997 workers

[AmiMoJo]

One consequence is that I am now unable to get travel insurance to visit my girlfriend who lives in Japan. The UK government is advising against travelling to any part of Japan because of the on-going problems with Fukushima, so even if I have insurance it will be invalidated by visiting a country on that list.

I'm going to go anyway. Most of the country is safe, and that seems like a big over-reaction to me, but if I get ill and need medical attention I won't be insured.