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TEPCO: Nearly All Nuclear Fuel Melted At Fukushima No. 3 Reactor
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Almost all of the nuclear fuel in the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant melted within days of the March 11, 2011, disaster, according to a new estimate by Tokyo Electric Power Co. TEPCO originally estimated that about 60 percent of the nuclear fuel melted at the reactor. But the latest estimate released on Aug. 6 revealed that the fuel started to melt about six hours earlier than previously thought. TEPCO said most of the melted fuel likely dropped to the bottom of the containment unit from the pressure vessel after the disaster set off by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami."
This article really doesn't explain why this finding matters. TEPCO themselves said they do not know how this will effect the decommissioning process for the reactor, if at all. The only thing that seems to be different is that they now believe some of the fuel is still inside the pressure vessel, and it's not clear that they didn't already know that to begin with. It doesn't seem like anything will really change until TEPCO actually sends people in to get a look at it.
In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
It could have been worse except for one determined engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, who insisted on a higher seawall for the Onagawa plant. A good article can be found at http://www.oregonlive.com/opin.... I have a quote on my wall from Tatsuji Oshima, one of his proteges. "Corporate ethics and compliance may be similar, but their cores are different. From the perspective of corporate social responsibility, we cannot say that there is no need to question a company's actions just because they are not a crime under the law."
Isn't that what they said about these reactors?
That is incorrect. ... the surrounding power pillions failed, shutting off the plant from external power.
The mag 9.5 quake was 450 miles away.
Ar the place of the reactor the quake was not even mag 6
The plant itself was damaged by far enough to be unable to produce its own power and cool itself.
And then the Tsunami hi tits emergency power.
So, claiming the 'plant survived' a '.... how was your words? Ah: "This reactor survived one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded." '
No, it certainly did not. It is smoldering in its ashes.
Not only was it NOT EVEN HIT, by the 'worst natural disaster', but it got destroyed by its wake (1 thousand times weaker than the a actual disaster/quake)!! Or actually as wake implies by the water of the tsunami.
Even if there had not been a tsunami, the plant was destroyed. What is so fucking difficult in accepting that? Sure, the emergency diesel power likely had prevented a 'disaster'.
But the plant never would have gone online again.
Claiming 'it survived the biggest catastrophe in mankind' is bullshit, and is a disrespect to the dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or the simple earth quakes of the last 100 years.
Google/Wikipedia for it. The official death toll is never even close to the 'unofficial' one. And all those quakes certainly qualify your brain dead definition of 'biggest disasters naturally recorded' ... Fukushima was no such thing yet. It will be in 30 or 50 years when the radiation death will start piling up.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hmm, 1.3 billion cubic km of ocean, at 3 ppb uranium naturally...
So, the ocean has, as a matter of course, ~4 billion tons of uranium, of which 0.72% is U-235. So 28,000,000 tons of U-235 in the ocean naturally.
So, if the reactor in question had a MILLION TONS of fuel (trust me, it didn't), it increased the natural radioactivity on the oceans by less than 4%.
A more realistic number would be 0.001% for the increase.
And even that number is a generous overestimate.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen).
In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...
Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.
I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand ... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.
Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.
Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years ... plus.
Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies, on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.
So you think all of the radioactive crap that got dumped into the ocean is going to be magically dispersed evenly throughout the globes oceans?
Or more likely it's going to bugger up seafood local to japan for decades to come.
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