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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.
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.
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.
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 /.
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.
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.
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:
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visit randi.org
Or send in a robot. Japan should be able to find a robot.
Unfortunately no one is going to a federal pound me in the @#$ prison.
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!
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.
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.
Actually, they'd rather worry about chemical weapons in the Middle East, rather than the potential of global nuclear devastation from a damaged reactor.
Go figure.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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
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.
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.