News Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, & Nuclear Disaster

[Belisarius]

This is a phenomenon called "denial" - it basically means that in front of a huge problem, either personal or in this case a catastrophe in society, people convince themselves that the problem doesn't exist.
We all do it - nobody is 100% honest with him/herself. When you're educated about a risk, as you are in NZ about nuclear risks, you have more chance of taking a rational and objective view of that risk.
Between the EU Commissioner's "It's an apocalypse!" reaction and this person's "Everything will be fine!" reaction lies the correct response. Objective reasoning based on best available data on risks and the present and future situation.
Based on what's known so far, I would get the hell out of that zone as soon as possible. If I were there with my family, I'd spend all the money I had to do so if necessary.

 

[RGClark]

And leave all other nuclear power stations without personnel?
And when you hear about 50 do you really think that they are same 50 men from one hour ago?

The Fukushima plant had 750 employees in all. There are about 50 nuclear plants in Japan. You would need only about 20 emergency trained workers from each plant to make an emergency force of 1,000 workers.
I saw some reports the total crew of men working at Fukushima now is 180 who rotate in and out.This number can still be greatly exceeded by bringing in workers from all over Japan. This crisis should be regarded as on a level as the country being under attack.

Bob Clark

 

[Belisarius]

This crisis should be regarded as on a level as the country being under attack.

Which it clearly isn't. If you're under attack, do you open the Stock Markets only to get a battering from international investors?

I mention this example only because I have no real idea of how the emergency effort in the plant is progressing. But the continuing "business as usual" operation of Tokyo Stock Market is a public sign of the government's refusal to take the situation seriously. And very unwise from a financial perspective.

 

[Notebook]

This has prompted me to look at the UK safety record for nuclear "events". I had a bit of a shock when I read this:
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire"]Windscale fire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Before my time(I'd be five years old), but I had thought the UK had a good safety record, this looks like it could have been a real catastrophe.

There was no doubt that the reactor was now on fire, and had been for almost 48 hours. Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy[4] donned full protective equipment and breathing apparatus and scaled the 80 feet to the top of the reactor building, where he stood atop the reactor lid to examine the rear of the reactor, the discharge face. Here he reported a dull red luminescence visible, lighting up the void between the back of the reactor and the rear containment. Red hot fuel cartridges were glowing in the fuel channels on the discharge face. He returned to the reactor upper containment several times throughout the incident, at the height of which a fierce conflagration was raging from the discharge face and playing on the back of the reinforced concrete containment—concrete whose specifications required that it be kept below a certain temperature to prevent its disintegration and collapse.[5]

Scary stuff.

The use of waterOn the morning of Friday 11 October, when the fire was at its worst, eleven tons of uranium were ablaze. Temperatures were becoming extreme (one thermocouple registered 1,300°C) and the biological containment around the stricken reactor was now in severe danger of collapse. Faced with this crisis, the operators decided to use water. This was incredibly risky: molten metal oxidises in contact with water, stripping oxygen from the water molecules and leaving free hydrogen, which could mix with incoming air and explode, tearing open the weakened containment. Faced with a lack of other options, the operators decided to go ahead with the plan. About a dozen hoses were hauled to the charge face of the reactor; their nozzles were cut off and the lines themselves connected to scaffolding poles and fed into fuel channels about a metre above the heart of the fire.

Tom Tuohy then ordered everyone out of the reactor building except himself and the Fire Chief. All cooling and ventilating air entering the reactor was shut off. Tuohy once again hauled himself atop the reactor shielding and ordered the water to be turned on, listening carefully at the inspection holes for any sign of a hydrogen reaction as the pressure was increased. Tuohy climbed up several times and reported watching the flames leaping from the discharge face slowly dying away. During one of the inspections, he found that the inspection plates—which were removed with a metal hook to facilitate viewing of the discharge face of the core—were stuck fast. This, he reported, was due to the fire trying to suck air in from wherever it could.

"I have no doubt it was even sucking air in through the chimney at this point to try and maintain itself," he remarked in an interview.

Finally he managed to pull the inspection plate away and was greeted with the sight of the fire dying away.

"First the flames went, then the flames reduced and the glow began to die down," he described, "I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out. I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully," he went on to say, "but if you're staring straight at the core of a shut down reactor you're going to get quite a bit of radiation."

Water was kept flowing through the pile for a further 24 hours until it was completely cold.

The reactor tank itself has remained sealed since the accident and still contains about 15 tonnes of uranium fuel - which, due to the presence of pyrophoric uranium hydride formed in the original water dousing, could still reignite if disturbed. "Nobody has touched it for almost 50 years because of a fear that it could either catch fire again or go critical and explode."[6] The pile is not scheduled for final decommissioning until 2037.

Sounds familiar...

N.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Notebook, do you have any info on how badly Tom was affected by radiation?

 

[Sky Captain]

The footage of a helicopter water dump shows cloud of steam rising after water is dumped. Could this mean that spent fuel pool is dry and water flashes to steam when hitting red hot fuel in the pool.

 

[Urwumpe]

The footage of a helicopter water dump shows cloud of steam rising after water is dumped. Could this mean that spent fuel pool is dry and water flashes to steam when hitting red hot fuel in the pool.

Yes, the spent fuel pool is reported to be already completely dry. You can only try filling water faster into it than it evaporates.

 

[Notebook]

Notebook, do you have any info on how badly Tom was affected by radiation?

He died in 2008, into his 90's!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/o...oused-the-flames-of-the-1957-fire-800546.html

Nothing much there about his health, but going by his age, he couldn't have had much wrong. Guess he was just lucky?

N.

 

[Belisarius]

Notebook, do you have any info on how badly Tom was affected by radiation?

Here's an obituary of him (he died in 2008, 51 years after the incident, aged 91). No mention of any health effects from the incident.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/o...oused-the-flames-of-the-1957-fire-800546.html

EDIT: Ooops, repeat

Interesting bit from the article:

But the forthright, decisive style of Tuohy's direction was ill-accepted by the fledgling company [Urenco, a German-Dutch-British nuclear power firm]. While his ideas were forcing the partners to face up to their own weaknesses, Tuohy's bluntness was alienating him from his shareholders. They proposed a new corporate structure which he saw as completely unacceptable because of the power it gave the shareholders over his decision-making. He resigned in October 1974, still only 54. It would be the end of his career in nuclear energy.

Once again someone who speaks his mind (and in this case has first-hand experience of a nuclear emergency) gets sidelined by the nuclear industry.

 

[Artlav]

Once again someone who speaks his mind (and in this case has first-hand experience of a nuclear emergency) gets sidelined by the nuclear industry.

It appears to be common in every area - there aren't much examples when competent people rule for long.

 

[Sky Captain]

The No3 reactor spent fuel pool didn't have any fresh spent fuel from reactor yet the water managed to dissapear during few days. From what I read about those pools they are fairly big and have a lot of water inside and are supposed to be able to maintain safe water levels for several weeks if left unattended. Could there be a crack in the bottom of the floor allowing water to leak out?

 

[Urwumpe]

Shareholders should never be involved in safety decisions. The responsibility of the shareholders is rarely accounting the risks behind such decisions properly in the current economic system. Simply said: As long as the government pays most of the damages and still a large part of the damage remains not compensated but has to be accepted by the affected citizens, shareholders will never be properly responsible and share prices will not represent proper responsibility.

 

[Belisarius]

... the continuing "business as usual" operation of Tokyo Stock Market is a public sign of the government's refusal to take the situation seriously. And very unwise from a financial perspective.

BBC live log

1012: Japan's speaker of the upper house has suggested the country should consider closing the Tokyo stock market and foreign exchange market for a week.

A bit late IMHO

---------- Post added at 11:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:28 AM ----------

Latest news

1032: Japanese police were unable to use a water cannon to help release water on the Fukushima nuclear power plant because of high radiation levels, the country's NHK broadcaster reports, according to AFP.

That's not only bad, it very much indicates extremely high levels. I saw the riot police cannon trucks on TV last night and they're heavily armoured.

 

[Urwumpe]

But Police water cannons don't have NBC protection. They should get Russian firefighting planes as support, these are jet propelled and pretty fast on site, and spend only short times in the radiation cloud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_Be-200

 

[Belisarius]

I'm really trying hard to figure out why everything happens at least 24 to 48 hours after it should happen if action is to be made in a timely way. In this regard this quotation from the Japanese govt is very revealing:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_24.html

Japan's Defense Minister says Self-Defense Forces helicopters carried out the first water spraying operation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Thursday after the government judged it should not be delayed any further.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Toshimi Kitazawa said an SDF helicopter unit poured a total of four loads of seawater on the Number Three reactor building to cool a storage pool for spent fuel rods.

Kitazawa said the government's disaster task force decided that the cooling operation could not be put off any longer while the decision to begin spraying water from the ground had yet to be made.

This seems to indicate (reading between the lines somewhat) that the default option in all decisions is to delay/put off the final decision until the situation becomes undeniably urgent and that decision is forced. There is no reason to put off any action if it is judged to be of use, rather the decision must be made before the situation becomes critical.

To me, this little quotation says a lot about the thinking at the highest levels.

 

[SiberianTiger]

But Police water cannons don't have NBC protection. They should get Russian firefighting planes as support, these are jet propelled and pretty fast on site, and spend only short times in the radiation cloud.

I think it will be nearly useless, because at the speed a plane travels it's hard to dump a tank load of water so accurately that it mostly hits target as large as several tens of meters across. In Chernobyl, they used heavy helicopters to hover over the open mouth of the blown reactor and dump water and later dolomite rubble, BUT pilots and firefighters aboard the helicopters received lethal dose of radiation and died.

Maybe a hardened heavy helicopter drone could do the job, but I don't expect they locate one in the stock.

I don't think they have a real option rather then restoring diesel pumps of ground one way or another.

 

[Belisarius]

Winds stronger to the east, which is a relief:

New York Times has a simulation on radioactive dispersion based on current met conditions.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/16/science/plume-graphic.html?ref=science\r

NOTE: The radiation units are arbitrary, there are no actual numbers to stick on them yet.

 

[Wishbone]

Who owns TEPCO?

EDIT: Question #2. Can anyone find the numbers of personnel involved in the Fukushima Daiichi emergency operation, preferably with subdivision into TEPCO, subcontractors, SDF, police, others? I'm looking for comparative buildup numbers at Chernobyl and Fukushima, day by day.

 

[Urwumpe]

Who owns TEPCO?

Owner | Number of shares
Japan Trustee Services Bank, Ltd.(Trust Account)|59,845
The Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company, Limited|55,001
The Master Trust Bank of Japan, Ltd.(Trust Account)|54,850
Nippon Life Insurance Company|52,800
Tokyo Metropolitan Government|42,676
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation|35,927
Mizuho Corporate Bank, Ltd.|23,791
Employees Shareholding Association|22,179
SSBT OD05 Omnibus Account-Treaty Clients|17,627
Japan Trustee Services Bank, Ltd.(Trust Account 4)|16,405

 

[SiberianTiger]

Who owns TEPCO?

By the end of financial year '09, the distribution of shares was:

Individuals 37.87%
Foreign Companies 17.37%
Japanese Companies, except for below categories 4.73%
Life insurance companies 9.84%
Trust Bankings 17.84%
Banks 6.45%
Central & Local Governments 3.21%
and the tiny rest of stock went to others.

See more info at http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/corpinfo/ir/tool/factbook-e.html