News Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, & Nuclear Disaster

[Wishbone]

Re: power cable. I am just an amateur, but there is a chance that there is nothing to plug it in other than mobile equipment. Although surely electricity comes in handy in any endeavour.

Re: helos - SAR can be done by light helos, of which there are scores. BTW, I forgot to mention 19 CH-53s from JMSDF. Four sorties are pure PR, for lack of a better word.

EDIT: I am afraid they are stuck in the "fill it with seawater" decision. Wonder if that is due to their command and control structure (another unknown for me). Has anyone heard about any recent detailed heat and radiation maps of the site?

EDIT #2: Maybe our resident waste heat experts could provide an estimate of the amount of water needed to cool down approx. 600 tonnes of molten corium?

---------- Post added at 06:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:54 PM ----------

Addendum. Baltika (a Carlsberg affiliate in Russia) is revising its marketing campaign which promised a free trip to Tokyo as a prize.

 

[RGClark]

Also, these plants were made by GE. Rather than defending the use of
these plants, now is the time for GE's best engineers to work with the
Japanese to find a solution. The plants failing completely and
undergoing a meltdown would be the worst possible advertising for
these GE modeled plants. GE should be doing everything possible to
ensure that doesn't happen, not spending their time sending out press
releases.
But it's not just GE engineers. The President should put out a call
to everyone with expertise in any of the systems involved about how to
come up with solutions to prevent meltdown...

[FONT=Courier, Monospaced]Can't remember if this was discussed here yet: [/FONT]

Experts Had Long Criticized Potential Weakness in Design of Stricken Reactor.
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: March 15, 2011
"Questions about the design escalated in the mid-1980s, when Harold Denton, an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, asserted that Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident.
"Industry officials disputed that assessment, saying the chance of failure was only about 10 percent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html

My intent here is not to beat up on GE, but to get them to actually DO something.


Bob Clark

 

[Belisarius]

To be fair to GE, it was one of their engineers who blew the whistle on TEPCO's 200 falsified production reports in the 2003 case, discussed above.

And if Mr Denton means the containment vessel will burst 9 out of 10 times, that hasn't happened here yet that we know of.

Speaking of whistleblowers, for me the most dramatic case to date is Katsuhiko Ishibashi, who warned of seismic risks and resigned in protest from the Japanese Nuclear Safety Committee in 2007. His 2007 NYT article is prophetic

http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?p=250847&postcount=27

"Industry officials disputed that assessment, saying the chance of failure was only about 10 percent."

Since when do senior people working in companies, who used to be always known as executives or managers, get to be called officials? I always thought only figures in public authority were called officials.

 

[Wishbone]

Public Reach at NISA

Source: http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/files/en20110316-1.pdf

Q.2: How does radiation affect the human body?
A. Depending on the quantity it may be detrimental to public health.

...

Q.4: What should our response be when we hear of an accident occurring?
A. Remain calm and follow instructions broadcast by competent authorities.

Q.5: What should we do in terms of contacting our family or children?
A. You should following {sic} the various instructions in different places and wait until things settle down.

Q.6: about what things should we watch out for?
A. Based on the correct information you must act calmly.
Pay attention not to fall victim of rumors or Demonstrations.
Make sure to check information with neighbours
Please be extra careful if you are in a big crowd

Oh goodness. A troubled mind wrote that pamphlet, methinks. "Check information with neighbours" but "do not fall victim of rumors".

EDIT: Re: Command and control. The March 17 update from NISA (http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/files/en20110317-1.pdf) refers to the decision made on March 16 (at 10:59 JST) to re-locate Local Emergency Response HQ to Fukushima Prefectural Office.

EDIT #2: http://mitnse.com - MIT Nukie students' blog.
From there I got the number for TEPCO etc. workforce at Fukushima: 50 TEPCO and 130 others, including SDF servicemen. 6 reactors...

Also this pic from the NY Times with radiation level graph:

On corium:

In the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, a number of agencies undertook programs to determine experimentally how corium would behave when placed into contact with a concrete reactor pad. These experiments have been used to measure concrete ablation, and also the rate of generation of non-condensable gases. Over the past twenty years, these studies have focused on quenching of the corium with water.

The experiments are performed by producing a melt of un-irradiated uranium dioxide (extremely low levels of alpha radioactivity, easily avoided by the experimenters), zirconium alloy, and structural steel, in the proportions that would be present in a reactor core. This melt is sent through a nozzle used to simulate a pressure vessel lower head breach, and dropped onto concrete. Measurements are taken during the hours-long experiment using thermocouples and camera equipment, and the solidified material is examined after completion.

The experiments have shown that without water quenching, corium under conditions similar to those present at Fukushima Dai-ichi will ablate the meters-thick concrete pad at a rate of just millimeters per minute. Gases would build up within the containment at a rate which would require filtered ventilation of the containment in order to prevent rupture.

If, however, water is supplied to quench the corium as it spreads onto the reactor floor, the ablation occurs at 5-7% of the pre-quench rate, and production of gases is suppressed. The rate of ablation continues to undergo fits and starts, as the corium forms a solid crust, and then this crust is broken and re-formed.

 

[dimo_stoianov]

When I hear from Japan tv station about FOUR injured, I know that things are very very bad. They don't have room number four in hospitals, or floor No.4 they have 3A.

42 42 564
shi ni, shi ni, goroshi, or literally, "death, death, kill"

 

[MeDiCS]

When I hear from Japan tv station about FOUR injured, I know that things are very very bad. They don't have room number four in hospitals, or floor No.4 they have 3A.

42 42 564
shi ni, shi ni, goroshi, or literally, "death, death, kill"

It's not that the number four is forbidden, but just avoided. It doesn't mean anything bad when Japanese people say it.

(really, life without any specific number would be hell)

 

[Izack]

No worse than the triskadekaphobes around here.

 

[JEL]

It is like the people who died inside this Russian submarine while working in deadly radiation doses to rescue the ship. They knew in advance that they will die, but also that they have to do it. Again people who needed to wait for a long time until somebody even remembered their fate.

Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, and others, eternalize them in this movie of that event:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267626/

 

[Urwumpe]

Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, and others, eternalize them in this movie of that event:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267626/

I know. Highly fictionalized, but great movie.

 

[RGClark]

More on the danger of the spent fuel rods:


Will General Electric Get Whacked for the Catastrophic Failure of Its
Nuke Plants in Fukushima?
Monday 14 March 2011
...

"As Robert Alvarez, a former nuclear energy adviser to President Bill
Clinton, has written, if these waste containers, euphemistically
called “ponds,” were to be damaged in an explosion and lose their
cooling and radiation-shielding water, they could burst into flame
from the resulting burning of the highly flammable zirconium cladding
of the fuel rods, blasting perhaps three to nine times as much of
these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor
disaster. (And that’s if just one reactor blows!) Each pool, Alvarez
says, generally contains five to ten times as much nuclear material as
the reactors themselves. Alvarez cites a 1997 Nuclear Regulatory
Commission study that predicted that a waste pool fire could render a
188-square-mile area “uninhabitable” and do $59 billion worth of
damage (but that was 13 years ago)."
"Another nuclear scientist agrees with Alvarez, quoted in an article
in the Christian Science Monitor:
"There should be much more attention paid to the spent-fuel pools,"
says Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the anti-
nuclear power Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "If
there's a complete loss of containment [and thus the water inside], it
can catch fire. There's a huge amount of radioactivity inside – far
more than is inside the reactors. The damaged reactors are less likely
to spread the same vast amounts of radiation that Chernobyl did, but a
spent-fuel pool fire could very well produce damage similar to or even
greater than Chernobyl."

http://www.truth-out.org/will-gener...rophic-failure-its-nuke-plants-fukushima68465


It has been said that this accident won't be as bad as Chernobyl
because the reactor is contained in a thick containment vessel, unlike
at Chernobyl. But the spent fuel rods which typically contain more
radioctive material than the reactor aren't held within a containment
chamber at Fukushima.
Another argument that has been made for why this won't be as bad as
Chernobyl is that Chernobyl used graphite control rods, unlike at
Fukushima, that caught on fire, thus spreading the radiation.
However,the zirconium cladding used on the fuel rods, including those
spent fuel rods not held within a containment chamber, can also catch
on fire at high enough temperatures, so the result can be just as bad
as or worse than Chernobyl.


Bob Clark

 

[Keatah]

Yeah it was definitely one sortie because the total operation was only 12 minutes in duration.

From the videos of the drops, the water dispersed so much that it would be useless.

But we might take some comfort from the fact that the latest video posted by Tiger is crystal clear in video resolution, if there were high levels of radiation I understand that the image would become foggy.

So nuke radiation makes ccd/cmos imagers produce a foggy image? I hadn't thought that though though it does make perfect sense.


---------- Post added 03-18-11 at 12:21 AM ---------- Previous post was 03-17-11 at 11:35 PM ----------

And for anyone thinking that a nuclear powerplant could explode like a bomb you might wanna read up on this. Nukes need so many things to go 'right' and in-sequence before they blow up. You needn't worry about an explosion blowing Japan off the face of the earth.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

I always found the Teller-Ulam design to be fascinating, and when I studied it years ago, just as today, I'm *still* astounded that X-ray ablation can create 6,400 TPa of pressure! That is when you irradiate a material and it starts ablating like a heatshield, the newtonian force of kickback hits with 465,000 tons on every inch of the backside of the material. Like a rocket engine, really. Not only that, for an instant, the whole bomb assembly, casing, metals, internal structure, everything, is converted into a gas and still continues to function as if it were a solid!

So those are some of the conditions inside a modern MIRV or cruise missile warhead. These things are small, you could stuff one under your desk easily.

And finally, the fusion bomb needs the fission bomb to get it cranked up to speed. No other manmade force can set of a "hydrogen" bomb except for a fission bomb.

TIME INDEX 2:35

And -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller–Ulam_design

So don't worry. The power stations aren't gonna blow Japan into the next century or anything like that..

---------- Post added at 12:24 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:21 AM ----------

I suppose the inside of a nuke is the only place where you can you styrofoam to crush high-density metal!

 

[Linguofreak]

So nuke radiation makes ccd/cmos imagers produce a foggy image? I hadn't thought that though though it does make perfect sense.


---------- Post added 03-18-11 at 12:21 AM ---------- Previous post was 03-17-11 at 11:35 PM ----------

And for anyone thinking that a nuclear powerplant could explode like a bomb you might wanna read up on this. Nukes need so many things to go 'right' and in-sequence before they blow up. You needn't worry about an explosion blowing Japan off the face of the earth.

I don't think there's much worry about that being mooted on this forum.

The big danger is that you'll get a steam explosion like you could get from any overpressurized boiler and it will spew the remains of the fuel rods over the surrounding countryside.

 

[Wishbone]

On truth in advertising: http://www.iaea.org/press/?p=1369

 

[Keatah]

No worse than the triskadekaphobes around here.

You're starting to use words I don't understand.

 

[Artlav]

You're starting to use words I don't understand.

Because it's Triskaidekaphobia.
Triskaideka-phobia
Tris-kai-deka--phobia
three-and-ten fear

 

[Ghostrider]

Fear of the number 13, in short words. Some numbers do screw minds up. Some other win you the lottery.
And then they strand you on that darn island with the polar bears and fog monster.

 

[Belisarius]

On truth in advertising: http://www.iaea.org/press/?p=1369

That is extraordinary - by using crossed-out text, the IAEA seems to be protesting, in a very low key way, against the misinformation proceeding from the Japanese authorities.
Otherwise they might issue a more normal and conventional correction statement.

OK, now it's been 3 days since we had any data at all on emission levels around the plant. The US team was supposed to independently verify these readings but nothing so far has yet been heard. Circumstantial evidence as we've discussed above (levels too high to deploy water cannon trucks or helo overflights, imaging on video cameras, casualty reports) just don't give anything like a clear picture.

Has anyone seen anything at all resembling radiation measurements during this time?

---------- Post added at 10:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:58 AM ----------

BBC live log

UTC 0900: Japan raises its level of nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi from 4 to 5, Reuters news agency reports quoting the IAEA.

So the info chain goes something like this
Japanese govt ----> IAEA ------> Reuters -------> BBC ------> public

I can't get info from earlier in the chain, the IAEA bulletins are delayed quite a long time and Reuters seems to have different channels for media clients and for the public.

 

[manh]

Interesting fact i came across. Why did the diesel generators fail after tsunami.

source

This satellite photo of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant before and after the quake/tsunami tells a damning story. The red box shows where the fuel tanks for the entire site were placed, powering the generators counted on to pump water into reactors and spent-rod wells to keep the rods from overheating and going critical. Only a dike separated the tanks from the wrath of the ocean. What kind of genius planners locate fuel tanks at the edge of a tsunami-prone sea? We’re talking a matter of yards here. A small shed a few meters behind the tanks was left unharmed. This whole disaster was compounded 100x by bad design.

comments below the article are also interesting...

The problem is unlikely to have been the electrical power. Loss of coolant due to the earthquake seems to me the more likely scenario. A nuclear facility would definitely be equipped with security cameras at all angles of the plant, yet no images of the tsunami have surfaced. There is not a single image from a press source showing the generators. It’s been postulated that the generators are located within wells seaward of the reactors. Not a single graphic depicting the effect of the tsunami on the generators has been produced, as far as I can find. In fact it does appear that the tsunami washed away two tanks from dockside, but each of the generator wells at each of the 6 reactors at Fukushima 1, have a storage tank adjacent to the

 

[Screamer]

Why does it took so long to cool down? I am by no means an expert on nuclear reactors. If the rods went into a shut down position, why is there still heating of the reactor core? Please be patient with me on this one.

 

[garyw]

Why does it took so long to cool down? I am by no means an expert on nuclear reactors. If the rods went into a shut down position, why is there still heating of the reactor core? Please be patient with me on this one.

I'm no expert either but all the rods do is absorb neutrons. Without the water to cool the reactors there are still enough neutrons bouncing around (decay heat) to require a system to cool down the fuel. As I understand it, as the heat increases the amount of neutrons increase eventually you get to a point where it's over 1,200c and the fuel rods themselves start to melt (a fuel rod 'meltdown'). This leads to even more neutrons being released and at this point you reach criticality.

This is my understanding and I'll welcome any corrections.

---------- Post added at 12:19 ---------- Previous post was at 12:16 ----------

What kind of genius planners locate fuel tanks at the edge of a tsunami-prone sea?

One who didn't know, expect or plan for a Tsuamni. How many tsunamis has Japan seen? You say it's Tsunami prone and if it's true then those fuel tanks have survived many because they have been there since the 1970's. This event was a one off that you can expect every 1,000 years and 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.