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More Bad News From Fukushima
PuceBaboon writes "Both Reuters and the BBC are carrying the story of an increase in radiation levels reported by Tepco for contaminated water leaking from storage tanks on site. When this leak was discovered almost two weeks ago, Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying. The latest readings (with upgraded equipment) are registering 1800-millisieverts which, according to both news sources, could prove fatal to anyone exposed to it for four hours. Coincidentally (and somewhat ironically), today is earthquake disaster prevention day in Japan, with safety drills taking place nationwide."
-Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying.
What the actual fuck. How could such a stupid mistake be made?
1800 mSv is 36 times the maximum yearly dose permitted to US radiation workers. More here.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
This error, reporting such a dead end scale value, was also reported sometime ago by Tepco, and there was another time before that, sorry I cannot get the links out so quickly but I clearly remember this. This same mistake has occured more than once within the hole Fukushima disaster,
The scheme is also the same: First, horray everything is safe. Later, Ups the needle hit the scale end and we did not tell them to start running.
How could .. ?
Well, on the one hand untrained personel or simply intentional or both.
to keep telling us how this is nothing to worry about, as they have been since day 1 of this disaster. How many bananas do the salmon need to eat now?
While everybody is writing about the water, the real issue is the spent-fuel-rod pool. If that thing is not secured very soon, Tokyo becoming uninhabitable within a very short time is a real possibility. There is so much radiation in there, it is staggering. The pool is inadequately cooled. The pool is damaged enough that even a minor earthquake could prevent cooling it more and a fire starting in there would both be impossible to put out and starting by itself very fast. If that happens, only the wind not blowing in the wrong direction could save most of Japans industrial base and a significant part of its population. With the probability of minor earthquakes in that area, they are already on borrowed time.
Personal prediction: TEPCO will go on blundering about, and eventually they will get a nuclear catastrophe that makes all others so far look like a summer breeze. After that, Japan will not play a role in the world for a few thousand years or longer, because for all intents and purposes it will not really be there anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I am there several times a year, the ground is still unstable.
1800 millisieverts is a dose, not a level. It's as basic a mistake as confusing feet with feet per second.
From other sources, it's a logical guess that what's meant is millisieverts per hour but an article should not make the reader guess what it means.
Slashdot peoplre. It just dupe. Nothing see here. Move along plrease.
- CEO of City Power
It was deliberate, somewhat shortsighted lie. This is how every fuckin big fat corporation behaves these days. It is worse than communism. Just compare Fukushima fiasco to old commies handling Chernobyl. They did everything they could to NOT let this crap hit watertable. They've put liquid nitrogen injecting installation under the reactor to make sure it won't burn through the basement and won't contaminate ground waters. They've put 600 thousands people to work to clean up their mess (every man for one minute or so). Compare this to the crap, lies, corruption and cost cuttings TEPCO is doing on their site. Our corporate fascist system is failing us badly and if we won't put them all in check soon, consequences of their misdeeds, greed and corruption will hit us hard.
If you just googled for 1 min. you'll find this link:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/announcements/2013/1230191_5502.html
And if you still don't get it, then continues reading gossip magazine..
Slow day at /.
I always mess up some mundane detail.
How did this comment get modded UP? Tokyo is 300km from the affected reactors for God's sake. Tokyo isn't going to become uninhabitable EVER due to fuel rods at Soma unless they physically ship the rods to Tokyo.
..TAPs amps went to 11, otherwise, apparently not much else, sadly.
reporting 100-millisieverts p/h when they were in fact 1800-millisieverts is somewhere beyond `mistake`, it is in fact probable employee manslaughter.
Sieverts are a unit of equivalent dosage, not a rate of dosage. Being told "high radiation (maximum 1,800 mSv) found" tells me absolutely nothing about the radiation environment. Is it 1,800 mSv per hour, second, year? Stand under the sky for long enough and you can accumulate 1,800 mSv through cosmic rays - but it might take years.
Also, the TEPCO bulletin states that the 1,800 mSv is misleading as the radiation is primarily beta radiation. This is nonsense as Sieverts are an equivalent dose that is weighted on the radiation type (i.e. the alpha/beta radiation should already be factored into the determination of Sieverts). The number that the 1,800 may be counting may be mGy (Grays).
The bulletin shows a very poor understanding of the units of radiation exposure - I don't know how much of that is the public relations office effing up technical information, or (more frightening) an indicator of the capability of TEPCO to understand and deal with the crisis.
making a statement about deadliness of a sievert level of water leaking into the ground is also nonsense. that would be for a full body exposure to a level of radiation, and the lethal dose is more like 5000 mS, 1800mS over four hours and a person would be almost to the point of "severe radiation sickness", but most would not die. perhaps 8% would die at that level without proper medical intervention.
There is something to be said for Slashdot's lack of Unicode support: if Slashdot had Unicode, trolls would have filled every thread with a certain invalid Arabic string and my iPad's browser would have crashed trying to read this thread.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
As mentioned in http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/announcements/2013/1230191_5502.html (mentioned by another commenter), the high radiation was 5 cm off the bottom, and fell very quickly with height. So this seems to be almost exactly the same situation as that in the xkcd strip.
making a statement about deadliness of a sievert level of water leaking into the ground is also nonsense. that would be for a full body exposure to a level of radiation, and the lethal dose is more like 5000 mS, 1800mS over four hours and a person would be almost to the point of "severe radiation sickness", but most would not die. perhaps 8% would die at that level without proper medical intervention.
Exactly out thoughts, gaijin! It's 4 hours - nobody should swim that long, and only 8% anyway - not a big deal. We are waiting for a new tsunami that will wash all this inconvenient radioactive junk into the ocean, we do not need it any more, you see. Ocean currents will do the rest, nature will find the way! Pity about dolphins tho. Tasty, tasty dolphins!
Tepco - committed to bringing nuclear power to every doorstep in the world!
This has been going on since before the plants were built. The reactors were so vulnerable to the earthquake/tsunami because they deliberately ignored the historical record of flooding in that part of Japan. The collective decision was made to ignore the worst case scenario.
After the earthquake, flood and power outage, the upper management was incompetently slow to make decisions because they were unwilling to think about loosing the plants and the likelihood of radioactivity being released. It was only the heroic action of the technical team at the site that averted a disaster worse the Chernobyl. They ultimately had to disobey direct orders to save the situation.
In the period after the so called 'shutdown' the authorities have been maintaining a delusional belief that they are doing an acceptable job and events are under control. Neither is true.
Delusional thinking is supported by not doing obvious monitoring procedures. It's magical thinking: if they don't know how bad it is, then things must be OK.
There is an ongoing failure to monitor radiation at the plant site, in the ocean and on the land. NGOs and international entities have been denied permission to do independent monitoring in the exclusion area and the ocean near the plant. One NGO Safecast has been doing radiation monitoring outside the exclusion zone and making the data available.
Quibbling about whether beta radiation is lethal is an example of delusional thinking. The fact that there are an entire spectrum of recently discovered radioactive water leaks is the critical information. None of these leaks were found in a timely manor. This happening two years after the reactor failure is appalling.
Tepco does not know how bad things are because they don't want to know. The rest of the Nuclear Village is not much better. The Abe government is putting significant effort into trying to restart other closed reactors at the expense of dealing with Fukushima. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency has no credibility, because they have done almost nothing to make Tepco more responsible. Tepco and the NRA have been hiding as much information from the public as they can, so no-one believes anything they say.
The prognosis is bleak. The situation is deteriorating, and two years have been wasted while ignoring the obvious. There does not seem to be any organization in Japan that has the leadership ability to manage the crisis. The likelihood of another very serious radiation leak is going up with time, not down.
It is completely possible that there will be a dramatic failure and an internationally chartered group will take over long term responsibility. This is in effect what happened at Chernobyl. See New Safe Containment.
Why is Snark Required?
https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Atranspires&oq=de&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60l4.966j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Transpire: occur, happen
It is now revealed.
This is not an anomaly but a continuing pattern of deception and lack of forthright information.This is of global concern and needs a global response.Sadly the worlds misleaders would rather play golf than address the most serious global contamination to date.
This is not an anomaly but a continuing pattern of deception and lack of forthright information.This is of global concern and needs a global response.Sadly the worlds misleaders would rather play golf than address the most serious global contamination to date.
My multimeter will display EE when a reading exceeds the displayable limit. Wonder if they are carrying a meter from 1960s... or a mind from hell.
If only this was because Tepco was wilfully concealing the radiation level in order to save money, but this is likely to be caused by symptomatic incompetence on so many levels in Tepco. One wonders what stupendous errors and failures Tepco will provide in the future.
Instead of progressing, the situation at the Fukushima plant seems get worse day for day; the water tanks are corroding and leaking, the local radiation levels seems to break new records every month, the ground beneath reactor 4 is apparently unstable, no one have a clear picture of what exactly is going on inside the reactor buildings because of the massive radiation, and up until now, only "band aid" work and cleaning have been done; the most difficult and dangerous job of removing the spent fuel rods have barely begun, and is likely to take many years.
And every day is a disaster potentially waiting to happen; if the cooling is lost for whatever reason, the fuel rods may start a spontaneous radiological fire, releasing 3-10 times the radiation as the original 2011 disaster:
http://www.bellona.org/filearchive/fil_Holophi-Special-Report-on-Fukushima-SFP-4-r.pdf
Oh, and the same report cites a scientific paper on how new magnitude 7 earthquakes are expected in the area (Tong et al, 2012).
One hopes that Japan are lucky with the wind direction again if the worst should happen, the human and economic consequences of massive radiation cloud spreading over the Japanese inland instead of the sea, are barely comprehensible.
Source: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/announcements/2013/1230191_5502.html
There is some from HPI too (1mREM.h-1 to 100 REM .h-1 so in Sievert : from 10 uSv.h-1 up to 1000 mSv.h-1) would still have hit the end scale. Most of the offering I know of, they separate low radiation measurement to high one with different detector.
It sounds like the one they got was meant for low radiation measurement, like in a hospital radiology departement. A Max of 100mSV.h-1 is not exactely the low scale I would expect for people surveying a nuclear incident this scale, and contaminated water radiation level.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Or send in a robot. Japan should be able to find a robot.
Standard solution to any problem these days seems to be: bomb the shit - so what i Obama waiting for? I suppose he must find out where TEPCO HQ is but that is minor issue - once found the bombehrs will do the trick and problem is solved. To be sure one can bomb Fukushima too.
The replacement detectors are here and their maximum reading is 25-millisieverts. I'm happy to report we're making real progress on the cleanup. Just look at the numbers!
how does it feel to sell out your own species
the pacific takes tens of thousands of year for the surface waters to mix with deeper waters your estimate is orders of magnitude in the wrong direction. cesium is truly the least of our concerns and then there is bio-accumulation, and fact internal emitters completely invalidate models based on temporary exposure to an external source.
if you are trying to convince yourself, fine, you can accept your clearly incorrect estimate, you can ignore the measurements being made in fish off the west coast of _america_. but stop trying to persuade other people that might swallow your indulgence.
canada is being sold all the large fish being caught near japan that are illegal to sell in japan, how? because canada raised their legal limits to 10x the japanese limits.
the canadian limit is designed such that 8,000 cancers per million are expected over a lifetime of consumption.
this is thousands of times the levels of cancers considered acceptable for carcinogenic chemicals in canada.
how does it feel to sell out your own species.
its people like you and that contributed to the world ignoring and forgetting about this for two years.
now after this time we learn that the water filtration system tepco gambled on to deal with the enormous amounts of hazardous water generated constantly, is unworkable. they have thousands of tanks with thousands of tonnes of water in each and they are now at 90% capacity.
your need to completely completely revise your "back of the envelope calc". most of the assumptions it makes are false, and should be made in the precautionary direction. not in the ... lets just assume we can reduce it half a dozen orders of magnitude here, and here, and there.... ah the answer confirms what i believed all along.
go ahead tell the masses of children having their thyroids removed in japan... they are completely wrong... _your_ back of the envelope calculation _clearly_ shows they had nothing to worry about. you can compose your email and address it to a japanese paper...
when you are done, please post your email here, _or_ post a complete retraction.
thank you Anglosphere for fighting to educate.
god bless you
What the Fuk.
Wrong disaster. Ho Lee Fuk was the pilot of the passenger airliner that crashed in California a few weeks ago.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
and the lethal dose is more like 5000 mS, 1800mS over four hours and a person would be almost to the point of "severe radiation sickness", but most would not die.
Except it's not 1800mSv over four hours, it's 1800mSv per hour over four hours, so that's 7200 mSv in four hours, 3600 in two hours. And the lethal dose is 5000.
Yeah, I won't be standing right next to that tank, I think.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
workers sent to fix any leak will reach permitted dose in 1min 40sec (yes, for US workers, theyve probably increased theirs by some factor). yes these permitted levels are intended to assure a large margin of safety, but in this situation the workers are facing significant risk just to carry out their jobs.
they have thousands of tanks with thousands of tonnes of this contaminant. the tanks are currently at 90% capacity. many of them are leaking because they contain waste so hot it burns holes through the steel (how do you think these leaks developed).
they bet everything on a filtration system that was going to process the waste allowing them to continue the process of pumping in 300+ tonnes of water and then recollecting it each day.
http://enenews.com/study-plutonium-could-be-pacific-ocean-liquid-direct-releases-fukushima
"PattieB
February 4, 2013 at 3:59 pm Log in to Reply
That's just bullshit! I've got the over-fly data that says quite the opposite!
MORE THAN HALF of what went up, was plutonium! TRUE, 1/3 was transmuted to U-234 ! But the remainder WAY WAY surpassed Chernobyl !!
THEY were NOT running Plutonium in the reactor! So only had the 5-7% By-Products
Fukushima WAS! 212 kilos was in the CORE.. THAT went into the EARTH!.. The POOL had over 65 MOX rods, AND 50+ 10+years OLD Plutonium BREEDERS sitting in it! THAT is what made it go BOOM!
I'll lay it out again
700 lbs per rod, and the MOX that's 142 +/- lbs of material EACH!
http://www.ccnr.org/max_plute_aecb.html
DO THE NUMBERS, FOLKS!"
I remember when SA was worth the time to read, about 20 years ago. Today its more like "newscientist" than a real journal, all artwork and little substance.
http://www.ccnr.org/max_plute_aecb.html#3
more than half of what went up, was plutonium! This significantly surpassed Chernobyl.
Chernobyl wasnt running Pu in the reactor! So only had ~5% Pu as by product, whereas fuku was! 212 kilos was in the CORE.. THAT went into the EARTH!.. The POOL had over 65 MOX rods, AND 50+ 10+years OLD Plutonium BREEDERS sitting in it! THAT is what made it go BOOM!
700 lbs per rod, and the MOX that's ~142 lbs of material EACH!
tepco bet everything on being able to use a filtration system to greatly reduce the volume of this constantly accumulating liquid waste, except its so hot it just burns holes in the filtration system. now what will they do? oh sure just dump it into the ocean... thankfully tepco is not as incompetent as that! but its looking like this is reaching the ocean despite all their best efforts, as reported 300 tonnes a day is leaking + ground water transport. the entire plant is sitting on and the cores have melted down into fractured sandstone aquifers!
the posters claiming that 1.8Sv is not (always) an _acutely_ lethal dose are really missing the point. most harm will occur more slowly, even more slowly than the 2 years that have elapsed so far.
At least read #3 of that plutonium page. then do the math on a _worst_ case _bound_. you know, where caution would dictate you begin. _then_ you can pare it down to an estimate of how much might be reasonably released considering the vessels were breached and water was being pumped in, and leaking straight out, for years on end. oh and im sure youre up to date with the ideas proposed to try to locate the underground molten cores! thats right, they dont even know where they are! but new imaging techniques might allow us to _locate_ them.
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/aiop-gtt080713.php
if you cannot do this calculation of the worst case number of deaths from the Pu you have no right to ever lecture or ever deride anyone ever again on nuclear safety. After youve done the calculation _then_ you can factor in the amount of Pu released. finally you can account for the potential exposure to all life forms over the long decay life.
no matter where you want to draw the line, in a fantastically optimistic scenario it is very likely that many grams of Pu has made it into the water table. In a worse scenario there is enough slowly migrating through the aquifer into the ocean to decimate the ocean in the surrounding region and beyond.
by now you _may_ realise you should apologize to your veteran software engineer colleague.
we dont even know what the eventual effect will be if these isotopes affect the wider food chain. ocean grasses and phyto plankton play unappreciated roles in the biosphere including being the largest carbon sinks on the planet. even if this only spreads slowly it will take tens of thousands of years to decay. yes life in the oceans will survive this, but any degree of bioaccumulation through the food chain will mean that larger ocean animals may be devastated.
What about all those thousands of tonnes of stored waste water, how much of that is going to end up in the ocean. what is in that ! what happens if another earthquake large enough to upset these tanks occurs (god forbid) ! what is the probability of such an earthquake occurring before the liquid waste can all be neatly filtered down to (tonnes of) solid concentrate.
you may have noticed so far ive been making statements rather than asking questions, but here is one; How does it feel to sell out your species?
Perhaps you really are as ignorant as your post implies, if so please for the love of the planet keep it to yourself. If it wasnt for _cunts_ like you pushing randal monroe's comic something might have been done far sooner. i bet you never considered that advice like the derision you, and so many othe
What radioactive substances are these waters comprised of?
What's the half-life of those substances?
How long will governments sustain their nuclear programs before it's too late?
I'd rather cope with electricity outages than be certain our offspring be in terminal danger.
You bring up one good point, which is the ocean mixing timescale. During the short-term future, only the top layer will have time to mix. A typical depth seems to be about 50 m, which is surprisingly shallow. That brings the effective ocean mass down from 1.3e18 kg to 1.8e16 kg, or a factor of 72. My other numbers would then need to be multiplied by this factor. Hence, the surface layer would get an effective exposure of 0.45 mSv/year.
Taking bioaccumulation into effect, assuming most of the biomass is in the top mixed layer, and still using the factor 640 estimate (the highest Cesium bioaccumulation factors I could find in a quick search were about 10, but I might have missed something higher), that would give humans an effective exposure of 286 mSv/year. That is definitely big, and would probably be enough to significantly reduce average life expectancy. I couldn't find any numbers for how much, though.
What I don't understand is why you didn't try to do the calculation yourself. You seem very interested in this issue, after all. Your answer would have been a good one if you had brougt up the issue of ocean mixing and then proceeded to show its effect rather than pouring out angry accusations.
The whole nuclear issue can be boiled down to the simple subject of mistakes and/or accidents and the consequences of said mistakes/accidents. Ranging from human error to incompetence to negligence to greed to malice to willful stupidity to earthquakes to tsunamis to rats chewing cables, despite all the 'Score: 5, Informative' comments going on about how safe nuclear energy is, etc, these issues will never go away. Therefore it becomes a question of what consequences are you willing to live with. When the potential consequences of something going wrong with nuclear energy are untold amounts of area (the ocean is a big big place) being radioactive for hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years, these consequences are simply not acceptable in any circumstance.
I don't have any love for TEPCO, because due their incompetence I was forced to cancel my trip to western Japan in march 2011, and lost at least 1000 dollars in the process, but what are you saying is absolutely wrong. The fuel in Unit 4 of Fukushima I has been cooling since November 30th 2010, it had almost 4 months of proper cooling and handling before the disaster. That's why the fuel despite the lack of cooling and the fire in unit 4 caused by the destruction of the core of unit 3 didn't got damaged. After almost 3 years, the heat output of this fuel has dropped considerably, and unless all, all the countermeasures in place fail, including the fire engines placed in the NPS and nobody does anything about this fuel in a week or two, then it could become dangerous. Also, most of the fuel in the pool of unit 4 is not irradiated, so it will not be a pressing source of concern. For the rest of the damaged units, the fuel has been cooling for even more time than the fuel of unit 4. The real, pressing issue, since march 2011 is all the radioactive contamination coming out of the damaged cores of units 1, 2 and 3.
The spent fuel pools are already more or less secured, and the cooling since august 2011 has been properly done, with heat exchangers put in place and redundant systems. The Unit 1 is already fully covered by a new structure, Unit 2 is closed, in unit 3 there is work underway to remove all the rubble and cover the building, and in Unit 4 they are building the structure to remove the fuel from the spent fuel pool an the pool itself has been reinforced, so the possibility of Tokyo or any city or village in Japan becoming uninhabitable by the spent fuel pools of Fukushima I is very close to 0.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Explain to me how the free market would have solved this problem.
I'm honestly curious - and want to be amused.
And to think, were it not for Nixon we could have Thorium reactors that are safe, cost about 10% the cost of today's reactors, Fuel cost to run a year is about 10% as well. The fuel is more efficient and produces over 99% less waste than a conventional reactor and that waste can be reused as fuel. The waste contains no Plutonium, fissile materials, or other long lived products. IE NO DISPOSAL PROBLEM and unlike Fufashima (sp?) no melt down or high pressures to cause contamination. As they produce no plutonium, we don't have to be concerned as to who has them. If I understand correctly they were developed at Oak Ridge in the 50s or 60s, but killed in favor of the mess we have now. Currently a number of countries are working on their development and implementation.
irrelevant. no one is standing next to any tank. this is something leaking into the ground, not a pool in which someone is immersing themselves up to the neck. meaningless sensationalist way of talking about a measured level of contamination. Now if people living in houses were getting this kind of dose from the environment, that'd be a scary story of nuclear doom for a city.