Something’s Always Wrong
Today at Fukushima, extremely radioactive water was found outside the reactor buildings, in a trench that is slowly filling:
High levels of radiation exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour were found in water in a trench outside the No. 2 reactor’s turbine building at the troubled nuclear power plant in Fukushima on Sunday afternoon, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday.
One end of the tunnel-like trench is located about 55 meters from the shore, with the surface of the water staying about 1 meter below its ground-level hole. But no trace has been confirmed of the contaminated water having flowed into the sea, an official of the company said.
The radiation from #2 is much higher than the other reactors, indicating that there may be some kind of core containment breach:
The Nuclear Safety Commission said on Monday that the concentration of radiation at the No. 2 reactor was dozens of times higher than the other 2 reactors.
The commission said it assumes that radioactive substances from temporarily melted fuel rods at the No. 2 reactor had made their way into water in the reactor containment vessel and then leaked out through an unknown route.
The Japanese have asked the French for more assistance than already provided. The UCS has a good overview of what the Japanese know about the state of their reactors, which is apparently very little, because of the continuing inability to activate the control rooms of the plants.
I have never seen so much bad luck dumped on one place in my life.
I realize that Japan is an island and it is fairly crowded already, but I think the people around Fukushima really need to move their bodies away from there. I really don’t think that the situation is under control and safe.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:23 am
Basically, we won’t know just how fucked the whole situation is until months from now. But any unshielded source emitting 100 Rem/hr (or 1 Sv/hr for SI units) is bad, bad, very fucking bad news.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:32 am
Slow-mo trainwreck.
Oh, and I like ‘temporarily’ melted.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:36 am
@Jude: Bah! If you think emitting 1Sv/hr is bad you obviously want everyone to live in a soot covered Dickensian nightmare! You’re worse than Hitler if you imply anything is less than perfect with nuclear energy.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:36 am
TEPCO says reactors 1-3 pressure containment breached. Trying to leave the link but getting marked as spam…
March 28th, 2011 at 10:38 am
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201103280144.html
March 28th, 2011 at 10:38 am
The water, which is believed to be mixing with radioactive materials from the fuel rods within, is likely leaking from the pressure containers, they said.
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March 28th, 2011 at 10:40 am
@MikeJ: Well, if we’re going to repeal the child labor laws in this country on a state-by-state basis, why not go all the way into the Dickensian nightmare?
And I don’t know about worse than Hitler. On my best days, I might be worse than Idi Amin. I’m a lazy, ambition-lacking bastard, so I can’t reach the stratospheric standard you’ve outlined.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:40 am
@Linda Featheringill:
Only some of it is “bad luck.” The rest is bad planning, lack of adequate resources, and what can only be described as the inevitability of worse than expected nuclear fiascoes.
Anytime the government tells you not to evacuate, but stay indoors with the windows closed it’s a sure sign that you should probably relocate.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:48 am
I’d be reluctant to point the finger at Japan and accuse them of bad planning, after our experience with Katrina.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:51 am
So as I understand it, they’re pumping in water, it’s leaking right out somewhere near the base of the core containment (picking up loads of radiation from partially melted down fuel rods along the way) into the basements of the turbine buildings … and now outside.
In the meantime, the fuel may be exposed again in any one of these three reactors and they can get no readings on the cores because they can’t even get close to these reactors right now. And sending someone in to stop the leaks would be a suicide mission with radioactivity levels where they are (and really who knows that?).
March 28th, 2011 at 10:52 am
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Yeah, but they are the fucking Japanese. They are supposed to be boring and competent.
New Orleans you can write off as another chapter in the book that is American Exceptionalism.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:54 am
Let’s see if I understand all of this –
For two weeks they have been pouring in as much water as possible. They are (at least now) holding the water in the buildings, in pools, or in tanks. The pumps don’t work.
The buildings are leaking. The tanks and buildings are filling up. If the water continues to cover the fuel it will boil if not circulated – radioactive steam is not good. They can’t fix the pumps now because they can’t send workers in. They say they will bring portable tanks to remove the radioactive water. Where are they going to take it? The ultimate NIMBY.
So what’s the end to this? – even theoretically.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:55 am
I just saw a BREAKING NEWS report at one of those links that plutonium has been detected in the soil.
That would be bad, right?
March 28th, 2011 at 10:55 am
So, it sounds like they are worried about the water getting to the ocean. But is that not better than leaching into the groundwater? Are they going to vacuum it up and take it away? Where could you put it?
Sorry for the dumb questions, but I though at one time they were saying the ocean was the best place to put contaminated water because the radioactivity dissipated so quickly. Now it seems flowing into the sea is a problem. If not the ocean, what are they going to do with all of the water? They can’t stop spraying or it overheats, and if they keep spraying they end up with what seems to be large amounts of water too contaminated to deal with.
Are they just screwed at this point, or am I missing something?
March 28th, 2011 at 10:58 am
1 Sv/hr is only what you would get flying on a commercial airliner back and forth from New York to LA 33,000 times in one hours. It’s like getting 15,000 chest xrays.
What’s all the fuss about? Everyone claims they want health care and now they act all upset when they get 15,000 free chest xrays.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:59 am
@MikeJ:
OTOH, basing your opinion of the safety of new nuclear power plants on the record of a 40 year old design might be throwing the baby out with the bath water. We can certainly do better than the GE BWR design. Hell, they could do better than the GE BWR design when they were building Fukushima Diichi; the Canadians were already building their much safer CANDU reactors at that point.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:01 am
@Richard R: Well the key is that until today TEPCO had been insisting that the inner containment had not been breached, but today they’re saying well actually it has, so that water got heavily dosed with radiation from the partially melted fuel on it’s way back out.
But you’re right, they now have to take out all the water before anyone can get back in to try and access the control rooms, while at the same time try to figure out how to keep water covering the remaining fuel in the reactors they’ve admitted are now leaking.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:01 am
@J. Michael Neal: Plutonium was fuel in #3 (MOX), but could be a product of the reaction in any of the reactors there. And yes, it’s bad, basically ingesting plutonium will eventually kill you.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:04 am
@Roger Moore:
I would be more comfortable with that if I thought they were going to shut down all of the older nuke plants tomorrow. But they insist that unlike Japan’s, our old plants are safer, because.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:06 am
@patrick II: Radioactivity definitely IS flowing into the ocean as we speak. From what I have read they are taking measurements near the plant’s drainage pipes which are located a few hundred meters from the plant. Apparently even the pipes from reactors #5 & #6 are registering radioactivity. But if there was a complete meltdown the worry is that the groundwater would be contaminated which would have a devastating impact. The radioactivity in the ocean ‘only’ damages the perception and reality of Japan’s fishing industry.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:07 am
It can’t be that bad, because I heard Mary Matalin on the radio say this was all hysteria. Admittedly, her rhetoric would have been way more effective if she were speaking direct from Fukushima.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:08 am
The “temporarily melted” fuel rods mentioned at the second link are worrisome to me. Things that are melted don’t return to their original shape. I’m wondering if there isn’t a big lump of fused fuel sitting in that reactor and fissioning away at its own rate. Pouring water on it may not damp the reaction and instead just yield a lot of irradiated water.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:08 am
@Dennis SGMM: “I think the fuel in the core had surely collapsed,” said Keiji Miyazaki, a professor emeritus of nuclear reactor engineering at Osaka University.
“If a long time has passed since spent fuel was placed in the cooling pool, then the water should not contain high levels of iodine-131.”
Fumiya Tanabe, director of the Sociotechnical Systems Safety Research Institute, said “much of the core should not retain its original shape.” He said fuel rods would be deformed if left uncovered by water for a long time.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:10 am
@patrick II: If they’ve got radioactive water in a trench, you’re damn right they’ve got contaminated groundwater (between the trench and the sea). And yes, all that contaminated groundwater, and all that soil containing the contaminated groundwater, is now radioactive waste. It has to be treated like other rad waste, and that depends on which isotopes it contains.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:11 am
@lonesomerobot: Of Course, ingesting bacon will also eventually kill you, and much faster if you do it in Mecca.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:11 am
@lonesomerobot: Very good – almost as good as the paid trolls – I need to read that post a lot to ever hope to reach that level of snark!
March 28th, 2011 at 11:11 am
@lonesomerobot:
That is something which I did not want to be right about.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:11 am
I’m getting this information from
asahi dot com slash english
March 28th, 2011 at 11:12 am
every time I try to post a link to this Japanese newspaper’s web site it gets trapped in the spam filter…
March 28th, 2011 at 11:14 am
@catclub: but bacon is much tastier than plutonium. Although plutonium is nitrate-free.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:15 am
@lonesomerobot: I released one of them. Here’s the link:
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201103280144.html
March 28th, 2011 at 11:19 am
@lonesomerobot:
Promise not to tell anyone, but you can also get nitrate free bacon. It’s sold as “uncured” and is available at most highbrow supermarkets.
ETA: Besides, how do you know your plutonium is nitrate free? Are you going to take the government’s word for it? Wake up sheeple! Your plutonium oxide is probably contaminated with loads of Pu(NO3)3.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:19 am
@lonesomerobot: And what’s wrong with nitrates? Many water systems offer that nutrient as a bonus extra at no charge!
March 28th, 2011 at 11:19 am
Patrick II—earlier, when the reports were that they were dealing with pretty much nothing but Iodine-131, venting to the ocean wouldn’t have been a problem, because I-131 has such a short half-life that it wouldn’t have any long-term effects (i.e., the nasty stuff decays away quickly). When you’re dealing with longer-lived fission products or the fuel itself, that stuff basically never decays. U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years; that shit ain’t decaying away. Pu-239 from the MOX fuel “only” has a half-life of 24,200 years. U-238, though, is the granddaddy of them all, with a 4.5 billion year half-life.
Translation: things are fucked. With the exception of the large explosion and release of core material, this looks about like Chernobyl WRT the level of what’s gone wrong in the cores.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:19 am
>Plutonium in soil.
Game over. Japan needs to stop fucking around, evacuate the area, and figure out how to save Tokyo’s water supply (if necessary).
They won’t though.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:21 am
@mistermix: my favorite quote from that story is “They said they did not know what caused the possible damage.”
I’ll give them three guesses, AND multiple choice.
A) Earthquake
B) Tsunami
C) Hydrogen Explosions in the buildings themselves
D) All of the above
March 28th, 2011 at 11:22 am
@Jude:
It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they’re going to simply fill the whole thing with cement. Just as they did with Chernobyl.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:22 am
@4tehlulz: Yes, pretty much the biggest travesty now is that the Japanese government is sticking to the 12 mile (20km) evacuation zone. It should be 50 miles. But then, that’s right up to Tokyo city limits, isn’t it?
This is a tricky game. The full scale evacuation won’t just cause a Japanese panic, it could start a world-wide investor panic that could very well lead to the Great Re-Depression. Japan is not only the 3rd largest economy, but the top exporting economy as well.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:26 am
@lonesomerobot:
You left out corrosion from being filled with hot seawater.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:27 am
From the Japanese/English site:
Sigh. Melt is becoming a 4-letter word.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:28 am
@Jude: I agree with the issues of long lived daughter products being a very dangerous issue but this isn’t even close to a Chernobyl level contamination and without a major explosion releasing a significant part of a core, can’t see how it could become one – currently (and hopefully it stays that way) only a very small area around the plant will be lost and while the ocean isn’t a great place to let this stuff flow, I recall us amerikans had no issues with losing two reactor cores in the ocean via sub disasters. Hope it can be contained but I really don’t see them saving the reactors 1-3.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:28 am
@Dennis SGMM: Yes, but they can’t do that until the thing’s cooled down enough. They’re nowhere near that point from what I can glean.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:30 am
@Cermet: Oh, I wasn’t talking about outside contamination. I was talking about damage to the core material. Agreed—there’s no way you could get an RMBK-type explosion from a BWR.
Regarding the Thresher and Scorpion cores—those reactor vessels stayed intact all the way down to the ocean floor, and, once there, even when they are eventually compromised by corrosion, you’ve got a good mile-and-a-half of shielding between them and anything on the surface. Since there wasn’t any melting of those cores, the cladding and the reactor vessels themselves should keep all the fuel and long-lived decay products in one place for a long, long time.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:32 am
@Roger Moore: That is the very bad issue (well over forty tons in a few reactors and storage pools.) That has killed/is killing tons of critical components/wires/sensors and even pumps. That has been the really bad long range problem but for the life of me, what else could they have done? Let the dirty fuel elements burn? Reactors burn thru the containment vessels? Once they reached the point of no pumps and no fresh water, game was over – the seawater has bought time but to what end? Where do they go from here?
Cement might be the only temporary issue and make no mistake – cement will not cure the issue – at least Chernobyl was a very low density core mix – these are amerikan designed ultra-high density, enriched uranium cores that will heat and burn even when caped – they are screwed until this mess is removed and cleaned.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:34 am
The surface of the water is 1 m below ground level, in an unprotected “tunnel-like trench” only 55 m from shore?
With all due respect to the “company official”, I have a hard time seeing how radioactive water hasn’t made it to the sea, given that evidence. There is some damage control going on in saying there is “no confirmation” of this – because what’s been acknowledged is indirect evidence of it.
The burden is on officials to show that a trench below sea level fifty meters from the shore filled with radioactive water DOESN’T mean radioactive water moving into the sea – that is, if they decline to acknowledge it as fact.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:35 am
@Jude: Yes on the issue of the sub losses – their cores are on the bottom, and sorry if I implied something about the reactor cores undergoing an explosion – you never indicated any such thing.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:37 am
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
If I were personally responsible for any of the response to Katrina, then I’d still be hiding in a deep, dark hole and I wouldn’t say anything to anyone ever about disaster planning. But since I played no role in that, I don’t feel uncomfortable making an observation that is nothing more—an observation.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:38 am
I just checked out The Oil Drum. They are about as optimistic as we are. Ugh. They seem to think that finding plutonium in the soil means it’s time to get the hell out.
[Of course, they don’t say WHERE the people are supposed to go.]
March 28th, 2011 at 11:39 am
Definitely plutonium detected in the soil at five different places at the site-
http://english.kyodonews.jp/ne.....81589.html
March 28th, 2011 at 11:45 am
Even worse, “TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto told journalists at the company’s latest briefing that test results showing the plutonium came from samples taken a week ago.”
http://www.reuters.com/article.....XS20110328
A WEEK AGO!!
March 28th, 2011 at 11:49 am
@lonesomerobot: Can’t see how it could ever have been possible not to get plutonium in the area – all the fuel rods stored in the pools have plutonium (to some extent) and the main pool in reactor #3 is a U/Pu MOX system. The hydrogen explosions and water steam would release some plutonium – maybe the core in #3 isn’t yet releasing any Pu but then again, not a big difference either way. The amount is critical and so far, I haven’t seen if deadly levels are there, yet.
Sill, having 1 Sv of radiation outside the reactor shielded cores is extremely bad news and I am lost what they will do – if they cement the place, they had better do it so they can come back and clean the site; otherwise, I wouldn’t want to be living in Tokyo ten years from now.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:52 am
@Cermet: There’s a plan for the new Chernobyl sarcophagus that might work.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:59 am
@lonesomerobot: Whoops. Did we forget to tell you that?
This is your daily reminder that TEPCO has no credibility.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:59 am
I say we nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be s . . . Dammit!
March 28th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
@4tehlulz: Oh, I know. At what point does some sort of “governing body” (NSC? IAEA?) step in and take over this mess? Or is the real truth that everyone really knows the situation is screwed and no one wants to touch it?
Maybe someone has decided it’s best for the world if we’re just fed the sweet, delicious lies from TEPCO, for our own good.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
@Cermet:
Any plan to save the reactors in the hopes of bringing them back online should have been tossed in the garbage weeks ago. They should only be working on shutting that place down and then sealing it up for the next umpteen millenium.
It might be time to start talking to the Russians about what sort of suicide mission will be needed to get this thing taken care of.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
@Chrisd:
What is this right wing insistence that everything’s fine? My brother has it, too. It’s a political thing, if you say it could be bad or scary, you’re an evil liberal wanting to destroy the good people.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
@Roger Moore:
Yes, but if you look at the ingredients, you’ll see celery—and celery is full of “natural” nitrates.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
@Cermet:
I didn’t mean to suggest that the seawater was a mistake; it was the only practical course available to them. I was just pointing out that using it caused all kinds of additional problems like corroding the hell out of everything. I’ll take a leaky, corroded containment structure over one that’s melted through, but that’s like saying I’d rather be beheaded than drawn and quartered.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:24 pm
@lonesomerobot: And do what exactly? Seems to me that the situation is FUBAR. It’s not a matter of poor crisis management, but a crisis that cannot be managed.
March 28th, 2011 at 6:39 pm