Go
here to download the Android source code. Then read
the license
here:
The preferred license for the Android Open Source Project is the
Apache Software License, 2.0 ("Apache 2.0"), and the majority of the
Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project will
strive to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions
which will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux
kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions,
which can be found on kernel.org.
As others have already suggested, the FSF friendly way to
"gain control of and final say over customization" is
through the trademark, not the software license. There is no
evidence in this article that this is not the path Google is
taking, yet we got a plethora of posts saying "On noes! Google
has become evil!".
You know the funny thing? This is yet another example when
Google does
something
very good (standing against software patents in this case) and
then gets slamed with make-believe charges that they are doing
something evil. It is clear, to me at least, that is is just another
foray in
Microsoft's attacks on Google because they know they can't
complete technically. It's like this decade's version of what
was reported in the
Halloween documents
I thought you were going to suggest preventing the contaminated water
from moving inland. If the total radioactivity is small enough so
that it can be diluted to safe levels in the ocean then maybe it is
better to let the highly radioactive water (HRW) go into the ocean in
order to protect the groundwater inland.
I honestly don't know which option is better. They're dumping
shitloads of HRW into the ocean now and I think it is diluted to safe
levels within 100 km. I worry that if a significant amount of HRW
gets into the water table, it could make areas of Japan uninhabitable.
OTOH, dumping all of the HRW into the ocean could have consequencs far
away from the plant. Also, it may take years for the HRW to percolate
into the water table inland.
The HRW reminds me of the big pink spot in The Cat in the Hat
comes Back. They seem to be creating hundreds or thousands of
tons of HRW every day. Where is the best place to put it all?
But to put it simply... you do not know very well what you are talking about.
You know, it's a funny thing, people were saying that and worse when
I warned that most of the radioactivity was leaving the plant downward
in the water, not upward in the air. What was a crackpot idea a few
days ago is now obvious today:
If they can get the contaminated water under control then a big piece
of the wider impact will be more or less under control.
Exactly my point. But that's a very big "if".
This is why they are trying to pump this stuff out of the basements,
because nobody thinks they will be strictly water tight.
This is not what TEPCO and the Japan government have been saying.
They have consistently said that they are pumping out the turbine
buildings to make them safe enough so they can go back to work
restoring the primary cooling systems. Never once have a seen
them express a concern about water leaking out of the turbine
buildings although I've seem them talk about pumping out the turbine
buildings so they can restore the cooling systems dozens of times.
As for your point about layers of containment, of course
there are layers of containment. As I stated, the first layer is the
zirconium clad fuel rods. When this layer fails we don't say there
was a loss of containment, we say there was a meltdown (assuming the
failure mode was melting).
I also agree with you that the reactor buildings and turbine
buildings were designed to be able to safely vent steam from
a functioning reactor. In other words, steam from water
that is 100,000 times less radioactive than the water that is pouring
out of reactor #2.
For the rest of it, I think you are, at best, picking nits. As long
as either the fuel rods stay intact or the containment vessel doesn't
leak then it is still possible to safely operate the plant. In other
words, the containment vessel was specifically designed to contain
almost all of the radioactivity in the case when the fuel rods fail,
most likely via a meltdown. On the other hand, while the buildings
were designed to contain small amounts of radioactivity, they were not
designed to contain the bulk of the radioactivity when both the fuel
rods melt down and the containment vessel fails.
... if they can plug a few leaks they can reduce (not yet stop) the
external impact, so that's what they are trying to do.
I disagree. If there are 100 holes in the bottom of your boat,
plugging 10 of them will have almost no impact on the overall
situation. If they can plug a few leaks then it *might* reduce
the amount of radioactivity leaving the plant but it is equally likely
that it might not. They don't know how the highly radioactive
water (HRW) got into the turbine buildings and they don't know how it
got into the tunnels outside the buildings. I guess it is possible
that the majority of the HRW leaving the reactor building has already
been discovered but no one really knows. I think it is equally
likely, perhaps more likely, that they have only discovered a
small fraction of the total. How do you find out if HRW is leaking
into the ground underneath the plants. Or, more challenging, how
do you determine it is not?
As to secondary containment, the pressure vessel you are talking
about, there is no indication that it failed. Current temperature
readings are lowish (100-200C) and have remained there for almost 2
weeks now.
They have found at least 13,000 tons of highly radioactive water (HRW)
*outside* of the secondary containment systems. They know it is
continuing to pour out. ISTM this HRW either came from melted spent
fuel in a storage pool or melted fuel from inside one (or more) of the
reactors. ISTM this means that the secondary containment is either
useless (because the HRW is coming from a storage pool) or it is
breached. If the secondary containment was working then there would
be no HRW in the turbine buildings or the tunnels outside. Am I
missing something?
So finally, the emergency appears to be over, but plant remains in
very precarious semi-stable state. Things will have to be repaired
caused by the hydrogen explosion and cooling water in the secondary
containment will be very radioactive.
!!!! The emergency is certainly not over and the plant is certainly
not stable unless you consider a steady stream of thousands of tons of
highly radioactive water pouring out of the plant "stable". The leak
is massive and ongoing and they don't know its full extent. See my
post above that starts with Excellent point about the fortified
basement...
Excellent point about the fortified basement designed to prevent
melted fuel rods (corium) ending up under the basement. I hope we
agree that HRW (highly radioactive water) in the turbine building
constitutes a containment breach.
I disagree that a constant level of HRW in the basements indicates
that the basements are water-tight. Remember that they are pouring
literally thousands of tons of water on the reactors in order to cool
them. If the water level is steady then all it means is that the
inflow is equal to the outflow. It is possible that both are zero but
none of the information I've seen indicates this is so. In fact, it
would seem rather remarkable to me that the leak (or leaks) leading
from the reactors to the turbine buildings fixed themselves although
it is possible that the spraying patterns changed enough to direct
the HRW elsewhere.
I think they should put dye in the HRW they've found because that
would help them determine the flow rate and also find out if this
water is leaking into the ocean. They use dyes to measure ocean
currents so they can be measured even after being highly diluted.
It is certainly not true that the HRW is being contained in the
buildings. Shortly after HRW was discovered in the turbine buildings,
it was also discovered in three tunnels outside the turbine buildings.
For some reason, this fact wasn't widely reported in the Western
media. The tunnels are U-shaped. They go down from the surface about
15 meters, run horizontally about 80 meters and then come up 15 meters
to the surface again. For some strange reason they call these tunnels
"trenches". The HRW level in tunnel #1 was reported to be 10 cm from
the surface. It was 1 meter and 1.5 meters from the surface in
tunnels #2 and #3. The radioactivity of the water in the tunnels
matched that in their associated turbine buildings.
The threat of the HRW in the tunnels overflowing onto the ground was
so severe that they *reduced* the amount of water they were spraying
on the reactors. This caused the outside temperature of the
containment vessel of at least one of the reactors to rise by 20C.
I reiterate, fixing the leak in the concrete in the pit to stop
HRW from pouring directly into the ocean will do nothing to fix the
leak in the containment system. The flooded tunnels prove there
are tons of HRW that have already escaped containment even by
TEPCO's ridiculous definition.
Western media were pretty much ignoring Fukushima when news of the
flooded tunnels broke. Their attention had shifted to Libya.
A day or two after the flooded tunnels were reported, the focus in
Japan shifted to the minuscule amounts of plutonium found outside the
buildings. Now the news in Japan is about the direct leak into the
ocean and the efforts to pump the HRW out of the turbine buildings so
they can get back to work on restoring the cooling systems. It's
been days since I last heard anything about the tunnels. You know,
maybe they are not planning to drain the flooded tunnels right away
and are instead concentrating on the buildings. This might account
for the drop in the estimated total weight of the HRW from 18,000 tons
down to 13,000 tons.
NOTE: This post is mostly recycled from a previous post at the
bottom of a thread under the previous Fukushima story. The thread
started with a post I made warning that most of the radioactivity
leaking from Fukushima was moving downward into the ground and ocean,
not upward into the air.
Filling the crack and fixing this leak won't reduce the amount of
radioactive material spewing from reactor #2 into the environment.
This pit and the concrete with the crack in it were never intended to
be part of the containment system. If they succeed, then the HRW
(highly radioactive water) will either (a) find another way
into the sea, or (b) further contaminant the groundwater, or
(c) flood the ground and then do (a) or (b). Depending on the
total amount of radioactivity released, it *might* actually be better
to pour this HRW into the ocean where it will be diluted down to safe
levels.
The term "containment" has a fairly precise technical meaning (BTW:
I've got a Ph.D. in nuclear physics but not nuclear engineering).
These reactors are basically a bottle in a bottle. The inner bottle is
the pressure vessel and it is used to maintain pressure for the
creation of steam and electricity. The outer bottle is 10cm or 20cm
thick stainless steel. It is called the containment vessel. Its sole
purpose in life is to contain all the radioactivity in the event the
fuel rods melt down. Normally almost all the radioactivity is
contained in the zirconium clad fuel rods. That is why there can be
HRW 100,000x higher than the water found in a functioning reactor.
Almost all of the radioactivity in a functioning reactor of this type
is contained in the fuel rods. When the fuel rods melt down, high
levels of radioactive materials contaminate the water making it highly
radioactive.
Up until last week, the word "containment" had the simple and obvious
meaning of radioactive materials staying inside the massive stainless
steel containment vessel. I believe TEPCO forged a new meaning in order
to downplay the significance of the HRW that was found in the turbine
buildings. I will use the traditional technical definition, not the
new one invented by TEPCO.
You see, the idea was that as long as the radioactivity was kept
inside the containment vessel then you could safely operate the plant
and move around in it. The environment was safe. The control room was
safe. The turbine building was safe. Even the reactor building was
safe (as long as you stayed out of the containment vessel and
storage pool). Everything was safe. One of the difficulties caused by
a loss of containment accident is that it becomes difficult and
dangerous to work on the plant. That is why they need to pump out the
turbine buildings before they work on restoring the cooling. If they
hadn't lost containment (in the traditional sense) this would not have
been a problem.
The pit, the tunnels, and even the turbine buildings were not designed
to contain radioactivity. The buildings were designed, like most
buildings, to keep the rain out, etc. For example, right after they
had those scary hydrogen explosions that blew apart the reactor
buildings, I was assuring people it was not a big deal because those
buildings were never designed to contain radioactivity. TEPCO and the
government were offering the same assurances.
When I heard about the HRW in the turbine buildings I stopped issuing
reassurances and I started to be greatly concerned because it meant
they had lost containment. I was hoping against hope that the HRW in
the turbine buildings was a fluke and that it hadn't spread elsewhere.
When I then then heard the tunnels outside the turbine buildings were
flooded with HRW I knew this was a serious accident, much worse than
Three-Mile Island. When I heard there were 18,000 tons of HRW outside
of containment (that number has now been reduced to 13,000 tons) I
knew this was a big fucking deal and I was surprised that the Western
press were ignoring these developments even though they had been
h
That implies that the water that has got past containment is 100,000x
more radioactive. Following your advice I checked out NHK. They say
that the water found inside the turbine building of the second reactor
is 100,000x more reactive (not the water leaking out). The water found
in "the pit" the facility outside containment where the crack was
found was 10,000x more radioactive. Further, that implies that
they're going to use barges to remove the water that has escaped
containment.
Two points:
1) They found tons of 100,000x water *outside* the turbine
buildings.
2) The Japanese government is prevaricating (lying) about the
meaning of the word "containment".
1) A day or so after the HRW (highly radioactive water) was
found in the turbine buildings it was also found in three tunnels
outside the turbine buildings. These tunnels are U-shaped. They go
down about 15 meters then run horizontally in the direction of the
ocean for about 80 meters and then come back up 15 meters to the
surface. For some reason they call these tunnels "trenches".
All three tunnels are filled with HRW. In the tunnel outside
reactor #1 the HRW comes/came to within 10cm of the surface.
It is/was within 1 meter at #2 and 1.5 meters at #3. The
risk of these tunnels overflowing caused them to reduce the
amount of water they spray on the reactors causing the outside
temperature of then containment vessel for at least one reactor
to rise by 20C.
It is easy to remember the levels of radioactivity in the water
in the tunnels because it matched the level in their corresponding
turbine buildings. 10,000x in tunnels #1 and #3 and 100,000x in
tunnel #2.
They haven't talked about the tunnels in the last couple of days
so I assume the situation in the tunnels is static. If it got
substantially better they would probably report it because they
are desperate for good news. The focus now is the direct leak
into the ocean and cleaning up the turbine buildings so they
can restore the cooling systems.
2) The term "containment" has a fairly precise technical
meaning (BTW: I've got a Ph.D. in nuclear physics but not nuclear
engineering). These reactors are basically a bottle in a bottle. The
inner bottle is the pressure vessel and it is used to maintain
pressure for the creation of steam and electricity. The outer bottle
is 10cm or 20cm thick stainless steel. It is called the containment
vessel. Its sole purpose in life is to contain all the radioactivity
in the event the fuel rods melt down. Normally almost all the
radioactivity is contained in the zirconium clad fuel rods. That is
why there can be HRW 100,000x higher than the water found in a
functioning reactor. Almost all of the radioactivity in a function
reactor of this type is in the fuel rods. When the fuel rods melt
down, high levels of radioactivity get into the water.
Up until last week, the word "containment" had the simple and
obvious meaning of radioactive materials staying inside the
containment vessel. I believe they forged a new meaning in order
to downplay the significance of the HRW in the turbine buildings.
I'm not telling you this to say that they are dirty rotten liars.
I'm telling you this because their lie confuses the situation
enormously and makes it very difficult to have a conversation.
Although I didn't rely upon it in my original post, I will now
now use the technical definition, not the new one invented by
TEPCO.
You see, the idea was that as long as the radioactivity was kept
inside the containment vessel then you could safely operate the plant
and move around in it. The environment was safe. The control room
was safe. The turbine building was safe. Even the reactor building
was safe (as long as you stayed out of the containment vessel).
Everything was safe.
One of the difficulties caused by a loss of containment accident
is that it becomes difficult and dangerous to work on the plant.
This is why they need to pump out
Besides keeping people who have no self control in check, there are
safety concerns.. the "illegal" trade already comes up with
concoctions that have things like battery acid and all sorts of other
things that are unpleasant and deadly.
It sounds like you are saying we need to keep drugs illegal because
illegal drugs are less safe than legal drugs. Your argument
against medical marijuana is similar. The problems you point out
would disappear if marijuana were legalized because there would
be no need for people to abuse the medical marijuana system.
Your only potentially viable point is that we need to keep drugs
illegal in order to protect some poor souls from themselves.
This is a matter of opinion and I strongly disagree with yours
even though I'm not a libertarian. The idea that people turn to
drugs merely because they lack self control is naive and
over simplistic.
If removing the profit motive doesn't reduce
drug use to acceptable levels then maybe we can use the
$44 billion per year we waste on the war on drugs to instead
improve social conditions for the segments of society that are
most vulnerable. Or we could use the $33 billion in tax revenues
on legalized drugs to fund the program and reduce the budget deficit
by $44 billion dollars.
For goodness sake, even the
Council on Foreign Relations (pdf) has admitted that the War on
Drugs has been an abysmal failure:
A state-driven, supply-side, and penalty-based approach has failed to
curb market production, distribution, and consumption of drugs. The
assumption that punishing suppliers and users can effectively combat a
large market for illicit drugs has proven to be utterly false. Rather,
prohibition bestows enormous profits on traffickers, criminalizes
otherwise law-abiding users and addicts, and imposes enormous costs on
society. Meanwhile, there has been no real effect on the
availability of drugs or their consumption, and three-quarters of
U.S. citizens believe that the war on drugs has failed.
... While far from being a failed state, Mexico's current trajectory is
dire, and doing nothing will ensure the perpetuation of greater
violence and instability. The danger of recent strategies is that they
have greatly exacerbated extreme violence among DTOs for the near
term, and -- even if successful in the long run -- will merely cause
them to relocate to neighboring countries such as Guatemala,
Nicaragua, and Costa Rica that are less prepared to respond to the
challenge.
... To allow policy experimentation, the federal government should permit
states to legalize the production, sale, taxation, and consumption of
marijuana.
Outlaws are going to become fucking billionaires. They
are going to spend a lot of that money arming their own
private armies. Thousands of innocent people will be
slaughtered and displaced.
Although the pit is small, it contains highly contaminated water with
a radioactivity exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour that is leaking
into the ocean from a 20-cm crack, Tepco said.
... How much water has leaked and for how long were not known as of
Saturday afternoon.
... According to a March 30 sample taken by the technology ministry,
seawater tested about 40 km south of the plant contained 79.4
becquerels per liter of iodine-131, compared with the legal limit of
40 becquerels per liter.
This number shows that the highly contaminated water apparently
draining from the plant has spread.
The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. have been struggling for
three weeks to end the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear crisis but are being
stymied by the need to remove massive amounts of highly radioactive
water.
... Work to remove contaminated water from reactors 2 and 3, however, has
yet to start. The crucial task of restoring electricity for the
reactor cooling systems has meanwhile been delayed.
... Tepco estimates the vessel can store about 10,000 tons of water, while
the amount of water detected in the plant has reached around 13,000
tons.
... Misawa said it is highly possible the No. 2 reactor's pressure
vessel is damaged, since the water in its turbine building is
extremely contaminated, showing surface-level radiation in excess of
1,000 millisieverts per hour.
Radionuclide analysis of that water showed it contains not only
volatile iodine-131 and cesium-134, but also the more stable
lanthanum-140 and barium-140. All four substances are believed to have
come from atomic fission, meaning "some part of the pressure vessel is
probably damaged," Misawa said.
I believe these two articles are pretty much saying exactly what
I reported and what I predicted. One person's stupid is another
person's prescient.
Eh? Current explanation is that the iodine-131 detected at levels
_10,000_ times the normal legal limit where found in a pumping station
used to remove underground water to prevent the reactor being moved
around due to water buoyancy.
If you had been watching the Japanese news you would know what you are
reporting is both old news and garbled. There were many highly
inaccurate reports in the Western media. IMO the Western media is
completely unreliable re Fukushima.
The comparison is not the legal limit but rather to the level of
radioactivity found in the water of a functioning reactor. The
radioactive water was originally found in turbine buildings, not a
pumping station. The radioactivity in water in the turbine buildings
for reactors #1 and #3 was 10,000 times higher than water inside a
working reactor. The water in the turbine building for reactor #2 was
100,000 times higher. This is why most people think it is reactor #2
that is leaking.
According to a pdf chart directly from TEPCO there is a complete
cocktail of radioactive isotopes in the highly radioactive water
including substantial amounts of Cesium-137 that has a half-life of 30
years. The same highly radioactive water was subsequently found in
tunnels outside the turbine buildings.
Or it didn't. So far the water that is going to be pumped is the water
that has pooled in the pump room. The pump room is inside the
containment It's believed that it leaked out of broken pipes between
the reactor and the cooling pump. No need to panic about a breached
containment. Monitoring is slowly coming back online (keep in mind the
hugely difficult conditions they're working in). As more monitoring
comes online we should get a clearer picture. Until then we've just
got speculation.
Your news is almost a week old. The highly radioactive water was
originally found in the turbine buildings (not pump rooms) when
three workers got burned when they stepped into it. But a few
days later it was found in tunnels *outside* the buildings and
*outside* the containment. The tunnels were close to overflowing
so they reduced the amount of water they were spraying on the
reactors to cool them. This in turn caused the outside temperature
of the containment vessel of at least one reactor to rise 20C.
Yesterday,
The Japan Time Online reported that highly radioactive water
leaking from reactor #2 was going directly into the ocean. The
level of radioactivity was measured at over 1 sievert per hour.
Water 40 km away from the plant had over two times the legal limit
of iodine-131.
If you want to know what is going on, please monitor the Japanese
media and listen to what TEPCO and the head of the Japanese Cabinet
are saying. The Western media has been worse than useless which
in turn has led to some folks on Slashdot spreading misinformation.
I watch NHK World. You can find it on the web or stream
it directly. I use:
The news I'm reporting comes directly from the Japanese government and
TEPCO via NHK World and the Japan Times Online. Are you seriously saying
these are the most alarmist sources?
I'm not in a panic. I'm reporting what is being broadcast by the
Japanese government and TEPCO on Japanese television.
I have a feeling the problem is that you don't like the news I'm
reporting so you're attacking the messenger.
NHK World just reported that TEPCO says highly radioactive water from
reactor #2 is going directly into the ocean. They say the level of
radioactivity of the water is greater than 1 sievert per hour.
IMO it really is the best source for finding out what is really going on.
NHK World just reported that TEPCO says highly radioactive water from
reactor #2 is going directly into the ocean. They say the level of
radioactivity of the water is greater than 1 sievert per hour.
The Japanese government is actually a much better source for news about
Fukushima than the Western press is. Also, if you keep watching NHK World,
you will see news break and you generally get the straight story when
it is 4 AM in Japan.
In a thread above I got called a sensationalizing idiot trying
to cause a panic for merely reporting what the Japanese government
(and their experts) have been saying.
Earlier this week I saw them first break the news that thousands of
tons of highly radiactive water filled tunnels outside the reactors.
This was the first report of massive loss of containment. They then
cut to a clip from earlier in the day where the head of the Cabinet
was saying there had been no substantial loss of containment.
So sure, the actual situation might be worse than what the Japanese
government is saying but I think it is a safe bet that the situation
isn't a lot better than what they are saying. Yet here on Slashdot
it is considered sensationalist garbage.
Here is a typical news report from Japan
It is a few days old but it gives you a feel for what they are saying.
From
Kyodo News
The government has been reported that HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE WATER detected
at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is due to a
PARTIAL MELTDOWN OF FUEL RODS there, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio
Edano said Monday.
Emphasis added. Please don't panic. If you feel the highlighted words
are over sensationalizing the situation then I suggest you address your
concerns directly to the Japanese news media and the Japanese government.
The world's largest concrete pump, deployed at the construction site of the
U.S. government's $4.86 billion mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site,
is being moved to Japan in a series of emergency measures to help stabilize the
Fukushima reactors.
... Initially, the pump from Savannah River Site, and another 70-meter Putzmeister now at a construction site in California, will be used to pump water -- and later will be used to move concrete.
"Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to next phase and it will
require a lot of concrete," Ashmore said, noting that the 70-meter pump can
move 210 cubic yards of concrete per hour.
Putzmeister equipment was also used in the 1980s, when massive amounts of
concrete were used to entomb the melted core of the reactor at Chernobyl.
... Ashmore said officials have already notified Shaw AREVA MOX Services, which
is building the MOX plant for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear
Security Administration, that the pump was being moved and will not be returned
because it will become contaminated by radiation.
The two main sources I use for news about Fukushima are
The Japan Times Online and streaming
NHK World.
I don't have the Microsoft plugin needed to stream from that site
so I use vlc instead. This works for me:
Let me try to explain it in a way that you can understand.
Suppose you have a neighbor who has a brush fire on their land. You can see
the flames, you can see the smoke, you can measure ash in the air and on
the ground. With that information you can make a reasonable estimate of
how much ash was released. I'm not saying you will be able to make an
incredibly accurate estimate but it should be pretty easy to get within
an order of magnitude.
Now suppose you have another neighbor who is trying to make his car
blue using some blue dye and a whole heck of a lot of water. One
day you go down into your basement and you notice that it now contains
two feet of dark blue water. You don't know how the water got into
your basement. The next day you go in your back yard and visit your
ornamental wishing well. It is 20 feet deep. Normally it is dry
as a bone but you discover it is filled almost to the top with dark
blue water. You don't know how it got there. You also know that
blue water is leaking into another neighbor's pool.
Given the volume of water in the basement and the volume of water in
the well, please give us an order of magnitude estimate of the total
amount of blue water that is now in your neighborhood. The lower limit
is simply the combined volumes of basement and well but what is the
upper limit? Maybe it is magic blue water that only shows up in the
places were it is easy to look for it. My guess would be that the
basement and well only contain a small fraction of the total. What's
your guess?
I've been getting my news about Fukushima from the English translation
of NHK World. They have generally been much less sensational than the
foreign press. The term the Japanese officials and nuclear experts
have all been using day in and day out is "highly radioactive water".
I may be an idiot but I will trust their terminology over the rant
of an anonymous coward on Slashdot.
The level of radioactivity at the surface of the water near reactor #2
is over one sievert per hour. This will give a worker their lifetime
dose in 10 to 15 minutes. It will kill anyone who is next to the
water for 8 hours. All work on reactor #2 was halted when the highly
radioactive water was discovered about a week ago and it hasn't started
up again. The analysis TEPCO did on some of the less highly contaminated
water showed a significant fraction of the radiation coming from Cesium-137
which has a half-life of 30 years. Sure, all radioactive materials have
a half-life, and the shorter lived materials emit more radiation per unit
time. But that doesn't mean that all levels of radiation are benign, nor
does it mean that all highly radioactive substances will soon become safe.
Perhaps it is a judgment call but AFAIAC, water that is radioactive enough
to hamstring efforts to fix the leaking reactor for a week and is radioactive
enough to kill anyone who is near it for 8 hours is some pretty damned
highly radioactive water.
My point was that containment at Fukushima has been seriously breached
and the full extent of the breach is unknown. Fukushima made headlines
in the US before it was known the containment was breached
releasing significant amounts of radiation into the environment.
Now that the breach has been discovered, the US press isn't covering
the situation nearly so much. I believe this has led people here on Slashdot
to make completely erroneous claims that the containment has not been breached
and the situation is evolving according to plan. These posts were modded +5
informative. I'm trying to correct the record with information coming
directly from Japanese officials as reported on NKH World.
Jeeze Louise. Literally thousands of tons of highly radioactive water
have gotten past containment already. They are planning to pump it into
barges and ships with a total capacity of 15,000 tons. A lot of the
radioactive water is 100,000 times more radioactive than water found
in a functioning nuclear reactor. The only way this radioactivity
could have escaped is if the fuel rods melted or broke contaminating
the water and then the water escaped through leaks in the secondary
stainless steel containment vessel.
The authorities don't know how the water is leaking out and don't know
the upper bound on the total amount of radioactivity released. The lower
bound is already rather staggering. In addition, radioactive materials
have already leaked into the ocean and the ground water. TEPCO said
the level they measured in the ground water was the similar to the
high levels found in the turbine buildings and the tunnels outside
the plants. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said
those readings were way too high so they asked TEPCO to measure again
more carefully.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of
highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that
it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There
are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with
graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted
fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more
than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors
that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the
bottom of the containment vessel.
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl escaped upward into the air.
This made it easier to get a handle on the magnitude of the total
amount of radioactivity released. The release at the light
water reactors at Fukushima is for the most part traveling downward,
to basements, tunnels, ground water, and the ocean. This makes
it extremely difficult to get a handle on the total amount of radioactivity
that has been released. They really don't know of the bulk of it is in the
thousands of tons they have already discovered or if that is just the tip of
the iceberg.
I understand they have an excess of neutrons and such over at the
Fukushima nuclear facilities. You can probably get all the neutrons
you want at bargain (turbine building) basement prices. In fact,
since it sounds like you are entrepreneurial, you could probably
get them to pay you to haul the stuff away. It's a mixed bag of
goodies but since the fuel rods have melted down, you might be
able to collect enough fissionable material out of the tons of
highly radioactive water available to get your own chain reaction
going, cutting out the middle man, allowing you to pass on
savings to your customers. Everybody wins!
NHK World was reporting that each tunnel contains 6,000 tons of water
but I think they missed a decimal point either in their calculation
or in their translation to English. The tunnels are about 100 meters
long. If they had a rather spacious cross section of 2 meters by
3 meters then they would each hold 600 cubic meters of water which
weighs about 600 tons. This is still a big problem and it is proof
positive that all levels of containment have failed since large
quantities of radioactive material have already left the plant
and will now enter the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I smell Microsoft.
Go here to download the Android source code. Then read the license here:
The preferred license for the Android Open Source Project is the Apache Software License, 2.0 ("Apache 2.0"), and the majority of the Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project will strive to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions which will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions, which can be found on kernel.org.
As others have already suggested, the FSF friendly way to "gain control of and final say over customization" is through the trademark, not the software license. There is no evidence in this article that this is not the path Google is taking, yet we got a plethora of posts saying "On noes! Google has become evil!".
You know the funny thing? This is yet another example when Google does something very good (standing against software patents in this case) and then gets slamed with make-believe charges that they are doing something evil. It is clear, to me at least, that is is just another foray in Microsoft's attacks on Google because they know they can't complete technically. It's like this decade's version of what was reported in the Halloween documents
I thought you were going to suggest preventing the contaminated water from moving inland. If the total radioactivity is small enough so that it can be diluted to safe levels in the ocean then maybe it is better to let the highly radioactive water (HRW) go into the ocean in order to protect the groundwater inland.
I honestly don't know which option is better. They're dumping shitloads of HRW into the ocean now and I think it is diluted to safe levels within 100 km. I worry that if a significant amount of HRW gets into the water table, it could make areas of Japan uninhabitable. OTOH, dumping all of the HRW into the ocean could have consequencs far away from the plant. Also, it may take years for the HRW to percolate into the water table inland.
The HRW reminds me of the big pink spot in The Cat in the Hat comes Back. They seem to be creating hundreds or thousands of tons of HRW every day. Where is the best place to put it all?
It might be better than making Fukushima Prefecture uninhabitable by contaminating the ground water.
But to put it simply... you do not know very well what you are talking about.
You know, it's a funny thing, people were saying that and worse when I warned that most of the radioactivity was leaving the plant downward in the water, not upward in the air. What was a crackpot idea a few days ago is now obvious today:
If they can get the contaminated water under control then a big piece of the wider impact will be more or less under control.
Exactly my point. But that's a very big "if".
This is why they are trying to pump this stuff out of the basements, because nobody thinks they will be strictly water tight.
This is not what TEPCO and the Japan government have been saying. They have consistently said that they are pumping out the turbine buildings to make them safe enough so they can go back to work restoring the primary cooling systems. Never once have a seen them express a concern about water leaking out of the turbine buildings although I've seem them talk about pumping out the turbine buildings so they can restore the cooling systems dozens of times.
As for your point about layers of containment, of course there are layers of containment. As I stated, the first layer is the zirconium clad fuel rods. When this layer fails we don't say there was a loss of containment, we say there was a meltdown (assuming the failure mode was melting).
I also agree with you that the reactor buildings and turbine buildings were designed to be able to safely vent steam from a functioning reactor. In other words, steam from water that is 100,000 times less radioactive than the water that is pouring out of reactor #2.
For the rest of it, I think you are, at best, picking nits. As long as either the fuel rods stay intact or the containment vessel doesn't leak then it is still possible to safely operate the plant. In other words, the containment vessel was specifically designed to contain almost all of the radioactivity in the case when the fuel rods fail, most likely via a meltdown. On the other hand, while the buildings were designed to contain small amounts of radioactivity, they were not designed to contain the bulk of the radioactivity when both the fuel rods melt down and the containment vessel fails.
... if they can plug a few leaks they can reduce (not yet stop) the external impact, so that's what they are trying to do.
I disagree. If there are 100 holes in the bottom of your boat, plugging 10 of them will have almost no impact on the overall situation. If they can plug a few leaks then it *might* reduce the amount of radioactivity leaving the plant but it is equally likely that it might not. They don't know how the highly radioactive water (HRW) got into the turbine buildings and they don't know how it got into the tunnels outside the buildings. I guess it is possible that the majority of the HRW leaving the reactor building has already been discovered but no one really knows. I think it is equally likely, perhaps more likely, that they have only discovered a small fraction of the total. How do you find out if HRW is leaking into the ground underneath the plants. Or, more challenging, how do you determine it is not?
As to secondary containment, the pressure vessel you are talking about, there is no indication that it failed. Current temperature readings are lowish (100-200C) and have remained there for almost 2 weeks now.
They have found at least 13,000 tons of highly radioactive water (HRW) *outside* of the secondary containment systems. They know it is continuing to pour out. ISTM this HRW either came from melted spent fuel in a storage pool or melted fuel from inside one (or more) of the reactors. ISTM this means that the secondary containment is either useless (because the HRW is coming from a storage pool) or it is breached. If the secondary containment was working then there would be no HRW in the turbine buildings or the tunnels outside. Am I missing something?
So finally, the emergency appears to be over, but plant remains in very precarious semi-stable state. Things will have to be repaired caused by the hydrogen explosion and cooling water in the secondary containment will be very radioactive.
!!!! The emergency is certainly not over and the plant is certainly not stable unless you consider a steady stream of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water pouring out of the plant "stable". The leak is massive and ongoing and they don't know its full extent. See my post above that starts with Excellent point about the fortified basement ...
I disagree that a constant level of HRW in the basements indicates that the basements are water-tight. Remember that they are pouring literally thousands of tons of water on the reactors in order to cool them. If the water level is steady then all it means is that the inflow is equal to the outflow. It is possible that both are zero but none of the information I've seen indicates this is so. In fact, it would seem rather remarkable to me that the leak (or leaks) leading from the reactors to the turbine buildings fixed themselves although it is possible that the spraying patterns changed enough to direct the HRW elsewhere. I think they should put dye in the HRW they've found because that would help them determine the flow rate and also find out if this water is leaking into the ocean. They use dyes to measure ocean currents so they can be measured even after being highly diluted.
It is certainly not true that the HRW is being contained in the buildings. Shortly after HRW was discovered in the turbine buildings, it was also discovered in three tunnels outside the turbine buildings. For some reason, this fact wasn't widely reported in the Western media. The tunnels are U-shaped. They go down from the surface about 15 meters, run horizontally about 80 meters and then come up 15 meters to the surface again. For some strange reason they call these tunnels "trenches". The HRW level in tunnel #1 was reported to be 10 cm from the surface. It was 1 meter and 1.5 meters from the surface in tunnels #2 and #3. The radioactivity of the water in the tunnels matched that in their associated turbine buildings.
The threat of the HRW in the tunnels overflowing onto the ground was so severe that they *reduced* the amount of water they were spraying on the reactors. This caused the outside temperature of the containment vessel of at least one of the reactors to rise by 20C.
I reiterate, fixing the leak in the concrete in the pit to stop HRW from pouring directly into the ocean will do nothing to fix the leak in the containment system. The flooded tunnels prove there are tons of HRW that have already escaped containment even by TEPCO's ridiculous definition.
Western media were pretty much ignoring Fukushima when news of the flooded tunnels broke. Their attention had shifted to Libya. A day or two after the flooded tunnels were reported, the focus in Japan shifted to the minuscule amounts of plutonium found outside the buildings. Now the news in Japan is about the direct leak into the ocean and the efforts to pump the HRW out of the turbine buildings so they can get back to work on restoring the cooling systems. It's been days since I last heard anything about the tunnels. You know, maybe they are not planning to drain the flooded tunnels right away and are instead concentrating on the buildings. This might account for the drop in the estimated total weight of the HRW from 18,000 tons down to 13,000 tons.
NOTE: This post is mostly recycled from a previous post at the bottom of a thread under the previous Fukushima story. The thread started with a post I made warning that most of the radioactivity leaking from Fukushima was moving downward into the ground and ocean, not upward into the air.
Filling the crack and fixing this leak won't reduce the amount of radioactive material spewing from reactor #2 into the environment. This pit and the concrete with the crack in it were never intended to be part of the containment system. If they succeed, then the HRW (highly radioactive water) will either (a) find another way into the sea, or (b) further contaminant the groundwater, or (c) flood the ground and then do (a) or (b). Depending on the total amount of radioactivity released, it *might* actually be better to pour this HRW into the ocean where it will be diluted down to safe levels.
The term "containment" has a fairly precise technical meaning (BTW: I've got a Ph.D. in nuclear physics but not nuclear engineering). These reactors are basically a bottle in a bottle. The inner bottle is the pressure vessel and it is used to maintain pressure for the creation of steam and electricity. The outer bottle is 10cm or 20cm thick stainless steel. It is called the containment vessel. Its sole purpose in life is to contain all the radioactivity in the event the fuel rods melt down. Normally almost all the radioactivity is contained in the zirconium clad fuel rods. That is why there can be HRW 100,000x higher than the water found in a functioning reactor. Almost all of the radioactivity in a functioning reactor of this type is contained in the fuel rods. When the fuel rods melt down, high levels of radioactive materials contaminate the water making it highly radioactive.
Up until last week, the word "containment" had the simple and obvious meaning of radioactive materials staying inside the massive stainless steel containment vessel. I believe TEPCO forged a new meaning in order to downplay the significance of the HRW that was found in the turbine buildings. I will use the traditional technical definition, not the new one invented by TEPCO.
You see, the idea was that as long as the radioactivity was kept inside the containment vessel then you could safely operate the plant and move around in it. The environment was safe. The control room was safe. The turbine building was safe. Even the reactor building was safe (as long as you stayed out of the containment vessel and storage pool). Everything was safe. One of the difficulties caused by a loss of containment accident is that it becomes difficult and dangerous to work on the plant. That is why they need to pump out the turbine buildings before they work on restoring the cooling. If they hadn't lost containment (in the traditional sense) this would not have been a problem.
The pit, the tunnels, and even the turbine buildings were not designed to contain radioactivity. The buildings were designed, like most buildings, to keep the rain out, etc. For example, right after they had those scary hydrogen explosions that blew apart the reactor buildings, I was assuring people it was not a big deal because those buildings were never designed to contain radioactivity. TEPCO and the government were offering the same assurances.
When I heard about the HRW in the turbine buildings I stopped issuing reassurances and I started to be greatly concerned because it meant they had lost containment. I was hoping against hope that the HRW in the turbine buildings was a fluke and that it hadn't spread elsewhere. When I then then heard the tunnels outside the turbine buildings were flooded with HRW I knew this was a serious accident, much worse than Three-Mile Island. When I heard there were 18,000 tons of HRW outside of containment (that number has now been reduced to 13,000 tons) I knew this was a big fucking deal and I was surprised that the Western press were ignoring these developments even though they had been h
That implies that the water that has got past containment is 100,000x more radioactive. Following your advice I checked out NHK. They say that the water found inside the turbine building of the second reactor is 100,000x more reactive (not the water leaking out). The water found in "the pit" the facility outside containment where the crack was found was 10,000x more radioactive. Further, that implies that they're going to use barges to remove the water that has escaped containment.
Two points:
1) A day or so after the HRW (highly radioactive water) was found in the turbine buildings it was also found in three tunnels outside the turbine buildings. These tunnels are U-shaped. They go down about 15 meters then run horizontally in the direction of the ocean for about 80 meters and then come back up 15 meters to the surface. For some reason they call these tunnels "trenches".
All three tunnels are filled with HRW. In the tunnel outside reactor #1 the HRW comes/came to within 10cm of the surface. It is/was within 1 meter at #2 and 1.5 meters at #3. The risk of these tunnels overflowing caused them to reduce the amount of water they spray on the reactors causing the outside temperature of then containment vessel for at least one reactor to rise by 20C.
It is easy to remember the levels of radioactivity in the water in the tunnels because it matched the level in their corresponding turbine buildings. 10,000x in tunnels #1 and #3 and 100,000x in tunnel #2.
They haven't talked about the tunnels in the last couple of days so I assume the situation in the tunnels is static. If it got substantially better they would probably report it because they are desperate for good news. The focus now is the direct leak into the ocean and cleaning up the turbine buildings so they can restore the cooling systems.
2) The term "containment" has a fairly precise technical meaning (BTW: I've got a Ph.D. in nuclear physics but not nuclear engineering). These reactors are basically a bottle in a bottle. The inner bottle is the pressure vessel and it is used to maintain pressure for the creation of steam and electricity. The outer bottle is 10cm or 20cm thick stainless steel. It is called the containment vessel. Its sole purpose in life is to contain all the radioactivity in the event the fuel rods melt down. Normally almost all the radioactivity is contained in the zirconium clad fuel rods. That is why there can be HRW 100,000x higher than the water found in a functioning reactor. Almost all of the radioactivity in a function reactor of this type is in the fuel rods. When the fuel rods melt down, high levels of radioactivity get into the water.
Up until last week, the word "containment" had the simple and obvious meaning of radioactive materials staying inside the containment vessel. I believe they forged a new meaning in order to downplay the significance of the HRW in the turbine buildings. I'm not telling you this to say that they are dirty rotten liars. I'm telling you this because their lie confuses the situation enormously and makes it very difficult to have a conversation. Although I didn't rely upon it in my original post, I will now now use the technical definition, not the new one invented by TEPCO.
You see, the idea was that as long as the radioactivity was kept inside the containment vessel then you could safely operate the plant and move around in it. The environment was safe. The control room was safe. The turbine building was safe. Even the reactor building was safe (as long as you stayed out of the containment vessel). Everything was safe. One of the difficulties caused by a loss of containment accident is that it becomes difficult and dangerous to work on the plant. This is why they need to pump out
Besides keeping people who have no self control in check, there are safety concerns.. the "illegal" trade already comes up with concoctions that have things like battery acid and all sorts of other things that are unpleasant and deadly.
It sounds like you are saying we need to keep drugs illegal because illegal drugs are less safe than legal drugs. Your argument against medical marijuana is similar. The problems you point out would disappear if marijuana were legalized because there would be no need for people to abuse the medical marijuana system.
Your only potentially viable point is that we need to keep drugs illegal in order to protect some poor souls from themselves. This is a matter of opinion and I strongly disagree with yours even though I'm not a libertarian. The idea that people turn to drugs merely because they lack self control is naive and over simplistic.
If removing the profit motive doesn't reduce drug use to acceptable levels then maybe we can use the $44 billion per year we waste on the war on drugs to instead improve social conditions for the segments of society that are most vulnerable. Or we could use the $33 billion in tax revenues on legalized drugs to fund the program and reduce the budget deficit by $44 billion dollars.
For goodness sake, even the Council on Foreign Relations (pdf) has admitted that the War on Drugs has been an abysmal failure:
A state-driven, supply-side, and penalty-based approach has failed to curb market production, distribution, and consumption of drugs. The assumption that punishing suppliers and users can effectively combat a large market for illicit drugs has proven to be utterly false. Rather, prohibition bestows enormous profits on traffickers, criminalizes otherwise law-abiding users and addicts, and imposes enormous costs on society. Meanwhile, there has been no real effect on the availability of drugs or their consumption, and three-quarters of U.S. citizens believe that the war on drugs has failed.
Hence the mention of propulsion signatures.
Outlaws are going to become fucking billionaires. They are going to spend a lot of that money arming their own private armies. Thousands of innocent people will be slaughtered and displaced.
Go back and read the later articles, anyway.
Fair enough. Here are two articles from today's Japan Times Online
Tepco dumps concrete to plug radiation leak at No. 2
Sea contamination traced to cracked storage pit connected to reactor
Although the pit is small, it contains highly contaminated water with a radioactivity exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour that is leaking into the ocean from a 20-cm crack, Tepco said.
This number shows that the highly contaminated water apparently draining from the plant has spread.
Irradiated water swamps Tepco
Restarting cooling systems takes a back seat to storage, disposal
The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. have been struggling for three weeks to end the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear crisis but are being stymied by the need to remove massive amounts of highly radioactive water.
Radionuclide analysis of that water showed it contains not only volatile iodine-131 and cesium-134, but also the more stable lanthanum-140 and barium-140. All four substances are believed to have come from atomic fission, meaning "some part of the pressure vessel is probably damaged," Misawa said.
I believe these two articles are pretty much saying exactly what I reported and what I predicted. One person's stupid is another person's prescient.
Eh? Current explanation is that the iodine-131 detected at levels _10,000_ times the normal legal limit where found in a pumping station used to remove underground water to prevent the reactor being moved around due to water buoyancy.
If you had been watching the Japanese news you would know what you are reporting is both old news and garbled. There were many highly inaccurate reports in the Western media. IMO the Western media is completely unreliable re Fukushima.
The comparison is not the legal limit but rather to the level of radioactivity found in the water of a functioning reactor. The radioactive water was originally found in turbine buildings, not a pumping station. The radioactivity in water in the turbine buildings for reactors #1 and #3 was 10,000 times higher than water inside a working reactor. The water in the turbine building for reactor #2 was 100,000 times higher. This is why most people think it is reactor #2 that is leaking.
According to a pdf chart directly from TEPCO there is a complete cocktail of radioactive isotopes in the highly radioactive water including substantial amounts of Cesium-137 that has a half-life of 30 years. The same highly radioactive water was subsequently found in tunnels outside the turbine buildings.
Or it didn't. So far the water that is going to be pumped is the water that has pooled in the pump room. The pump room is inside the containment It's believed that it leaked out of broken pipes between the reactor and the cooling pump. No need to panic about a breached containment. Monitoring is slowly coming back online (keep in mind the hugely difficult conditions they're working in). As more monitoring comes online we should get a clearer picture. Until then we've just got speculation.
Your news is almost a week old. The highly radioactive water was originally found in the turbine buildings (not pump rooms) when three workers got burned when they stepped into it. But a few days later it was found in tunnels *outside* the buildings and *outside* the containment. The tunnels were close to overflowing so they reduced the amount of water they were spraying on the reactors to cool them. This in turn caused the outside temperature of the containment vessel of at least one reactor to rise 20C.
Yesterday, The Japan Time Online reported that highly radioactive water leaking from reactor #2 was going directly into the ocean. The level of radioactivity was measured at over 1 sievert per hour. Water 40 km away from the plant had over two times the legal limit of iodine-131.
If you want to know what is going on, please monitor the Japanese media and listen to what TEPCO and the head of the Japanese Cabinet are saying. The Western media has been worse than useless which in turn has led to some folks on Slashdot spreading misinformation.
I watch NHK World. You can find it on the web or stream it directly. I use:
vlc 'mms://nhk-world.gekimedia.net/nhkw-highm'
I'm not in a panic. I'm reporting what is being broadcast by the Japanese government and TEPCO on Japanese television.
I have a feeling the problem is that you don't like the news I'm reporting so you're attacking the messenger.
IMO it really is the best source for finding out what is really going on.
NHK World just reported that TEPCO says highly radioactive water from reactor #2 is going directly into the ocean. They say the level of radioactivity of the water is greater than 1 sievert per hour.
Earlier this week I saw them first break the news that thousands of tons of highly radiactive water filled tunnels outside the reactors. This was the first report of massive loss of containment. They then cut to a clip from earlier in the day where the head of the Cabinet was saying there had been no substantial loss of containment.
So sure, the actual situation might be worse than what the Japanese government is saying but I think it is a safe bet that the situation isn't a lot better than what they are saying. Yet here on Slashdot it is considered sensationalist garbage.
The government has been reported that HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE WATER detected at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is due to a PARTIAL MELTDOWN OF FUEL RODS there, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Monday.
Emphasis added. Please don't panic. If you feel the highlighted words are over sensationalizing the situation then I suggest you address your concerns directly to the Japanese news media and the Japanese government.
The world's largest concrete pump, deployed at the construction site of the U.S. government's $4.86 billion mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site, is being moved to Japan in a series of emergency measures to help stabilize the Fukushima reactors.
"Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to next phase and it will require a lot of concrete," Ashmore said, noting that the 70-meter pump can move 210 cubic yards of concrete per hour.
Putzmeister equipment was also used in the 1980s, when massive amounts of concrete were used to entomb the melted core of the reactor at Chernobyl.
"It will be too hot to come back," Ashmore said.
vlc 'mms://nhk-world.gekimedia.net/nhkw-highm'
Suppose you have a neighbor who has a brush fire on their land. You can see the flames, you can see the smoke, you can measure ash in the air and on the ground. With that information you can make a reasonable estimate of how much ash was released. I'm not saying you will be able to make an incredibly accurate estimate but it should be pretty easy to get within an order of magnitude.
Now suppose you have another neighbor who is trying to make his car blue using some blue dye and a whole heck of a lot of water. One day you go down into your basement and you notice that it now contains two feet of dark blue water. You don't know how the water got into your basement. The next day you go in your back yard and visit your ornamental wishing well. It is 20 feet deep. Normally it is dry as a bone but you discover it is filled almost to the top with dark blue water. You don't know how it got there. You also know that blue water is leaking into another neighbor's pool.
Given the volume of water in the basement and the volume of water in the well, please give us an order of magnitude estimate of the total amount of blue water that is now in your neighborhood. The lower limit is simply the combined volumes of basement and well but what is the upper limit? Maybe it is magic blue water that only shows up in the places were it is easy to look for it. My guess would be that the basement and well only contain a small fraction of the total. What's your guess?
The level of radioactivity at the surface of the water near reactor #2 is over one sievert per hour. This will give a worker their lifetime dose in 10 to 15 minutes. It will kill anyone who is next to the water for 8 hours. All work on reactor #2 was halted when the highly radioactive water was discovered about a week ago and it hasn't started up again. The analysis TEPCO did on some of the less highly contaminated water showed a significant fraction of the radiation coming from Cesium-137 which has a half-life of 30 years. Sure, all radioactive materials have a half-life, and the shorter lived materials emit more radiation per unit time. But that doesn't mean that all levels of radiation are benign, nor does it mean that all highly radioactive substances will soon become safe. Perhaps it is a judgment call but AFAIAC, water that is radioactive enough to hamstring efforts to fix the leaking reactor for a week and is radioactive enough to kill anyone who is near it for 8 hours is some pretty damned highly radioactive water.
My point was that containment at Fukushima has been seriously breached and the full extent of the breach is unknown. Fukushima made headlines in the US before it was known the containment was breached releasing significant amounts of radiation into the environment. Now that the breach has been discovered, the US press isn't covering the situation nearly so much. I believe this has led people here on Slashdot to make completely erroneous claims that the containment has not been breached and the situation is evolving according to plan. These posts were modded +5 informative. I'm trying to correct the record with information coming directly from Japanese officials as reported on NKH World.
The authorities don't know how the water is leaking out and don't know the upper bound on the total amount of radioactivity released. The lower bound is already rather staggering. In addition, radioactive materials have already leaked into the ocean and the ground water. TEPCO said the level they measured in the ground water was the similar to the high levels found in the turbine buildings and the tunnels outside the plants. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said those readings were way too high so they asked TEPCO to measure again more carefully.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl escaped upward into the air. This made it easier to get a handle on the magnitude of the total amount of radioactivity released. The release at the light water reactors at Fukushima is for the most part traveling downward, to basements, tunnels, ground water, and the ocean. This makes it extremely difficult to get a handle on the total amount of radioactivity that has been released. They really don't know of the bulk of it is in the thousands of tons they have already discovered or if that is just the tip of the iceberg.
I understand they have an excess of neutrons and such over at the Fukushima nuclear facilities. You can probably get all the neutrons you want at bargain (turbine building) basement prices. In fact, since it sounds like you are entrepreneurial, you could probably get them to pay you to haul the stuff away. It's a mixed bag of goodies but since the fuel rods have melted down, you might be able to collect enough fissionable material out of the tons of highly radioactive water available to get your own chain reaction going, cutting out the middle man, allowing you to pass on savings to your customers. Everybody wins!
NHK World was reporting that each tunnel contains 6,000 tons of water but I think they missed a decimal point either in their calculation or in their translation to English. The tunnels are about 100 meters long. If they had a rather spacious cross section of 2 meters by 3 meters then they would each hold 600 cubic meters of water which weighs about 600 tons. This is still a big problem and it is proof positive that all levels of containment have failed since large quantities of radioactive material have already left the plant and will now enter the environment.