Groundwater from the hills above Fukushima is leaking into the basements of the reactor buildings, mixing with irradiated water in those basements, and then leaking into the Pacific. After the usual Tepco cluster fuck, the government is stepping in to help with this plan:
Tepco and the industry ministry have been working since May on a proposal to freeze the soil to prevent groundwater from leaking into the reactor buildings.
Similar technology is used in preventing groundwater flooding in subway construction, but Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said on Thursday that the vast scale of Tepco’s attempt was “unprecedented in the world.” […]
Experts say, however, that maintaining the ground temperatures for months, if not years, would be costly. The plan is to freeze a 1.4 km (nearly one mile) perimeter around the four damaged reactors by drilling shafts into the ground and pumping coolant through them, creating a wall of frozen earth that will block the flow of groundwater into the plant.
This is what the head of the government task force said Monday:
Tepco’s “sense of crisis is weak,” Mr Kinjo said. “This is why you can’t just leave it up to Tepco alone”
“Right now, we have an emergency,” he added.
That’s perhaps the most eloquent description of Tepco that I’ve heard so far. Their culture is clearly one of denial–they were in denial about the need for a higher seawall, as well as during the post-tsunami meltdown, so it’s no surprise that their denial has continued during the damage control and cleanup phase.
Baud
Irradiated water in the Pacific around Japan?
Hasn’t anyone in Japan seen Godzilla?
This won’t end well.
fka AWS
The Japanese government should have a Gen. Russell Honore to take charge of this shit.
GregB
We need to put our trust in the wonders of the market and the owners of the plant.
A company wouldn’t do anything to damage their own reputation. It would hurt their bottom line of profitability.
Milton Friedman told me so.
oldster
keeping that much coolant refrigerated is going to be a massive power draw.
They’re going to need to build some new reactors just to power it.
c u n d gulag
Why not nuke the place instead?
*Snark!*
I think…
Cermet
Oh, please; what over reaction … I mean, has any one died yet? As for any workers, you can’t prove any deaths are directly caused by the so-called accident – even the ones crushed by debris and exposure to radiation. Besides, a little radiation is good for you. Japanese should be charged for the privilege of getting some of this healthful radiation. In fact more plants around Japan should be allowed to melt down to provide more free radiation to those “lucky ducks” living nearby … .
By the way, where are all the paid trolls adding their two cents on the safety of nuclear power here on the blog? Shouldn’t those trolls add their knowledge here on the subject for free, now? The koch sucker brothers need all the free help they can get; I mean that AGW thing gets so much free help by fellow suckers, shouldn’t nuclear power share in this, as well? Still, kinda miss all their posts on how wonderful nuclear accidents are and that we all should just STFU and enjoy our free radiation exposure.
Beth in VA
GregB nails the huge flaw of Libertarianism –the environment, the actual planet, is completely dismissed.
MikeJ
@Cermet:
We ought to be hearing about how eating bananas exposes you to more radioactivity than nuke plants any second now.
monkeyfister
I think a possible solution to the TEPCO problem is to publicly execute the entire leadership, and replace them with another group. I think that will send a message, and get some results from the second group. If they follow the old-guard ways of denial, cap them, too. Give them the same sense of real life and death urgency that everyone else has, as that is clearly what is missing in these TEPCO flunkies.
The Red Pen
J. Frank Parnell: Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it’s bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have ’em too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was literally a-burst. The next day nothing. Swept away… But I’ll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.
Otto: Lobotomy? Isn’t that for loonies?
J. Frank Parnell: Not at all. A friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. Ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people. Leaves buildings standing. It fits in a suit case. It’s so small no one knows it’s there until blammo. Eyes melt skin explodes everybody dead. It’s so immoral working on the thing can drive you mad. That’s what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he’s well again.
The Red Pen
On another note, I thought I should mention that there’s a nuclear power plant in Brazoria county (where Ron Paul eked out a series of wins, even though he is considered a liberal). It’s build with the same design as Fukushima. Even though it has fewer safety features than Fukushima, Texas will undoubtedly keep it closely monitored for safety. Also too, nothing really bad ever happens on the Texas Gulf coast.
If Houston ends up under a foot of radioactive water, would anyone notice?
The Red Pen
@monkeyfister:
I am actually surprised that no one has committed sepukku — at least metaphorically — over this.
monkeyfister
@The Red Pen:
If Houston ends up under a foot of radioactive water, would anyone notice?
Better question: Would anyone care?
monkeyfister
@The Red Pen:
The days of Japanese Honor are long, long gone.
handsmile
Seppuku is a venerable tradition in Japan for such serious offenses, and one that TEPCO officials might wish to avail themselves of to redeem their public honor. How sad that such a practice has never caught on among this country’s business and financial leaders. Here’s hoping!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku
ETA: I see The Red Pen and monkeyfister are of a similar mind, and faster-fingered.
jheartney
The massive amounts of contaminated water on-site is just one of many problems at Fukushima. Apparently Unit 3 is getting hot enough to boil water, and no one knows why.
Persia
@Baud: I’m more concerned about the ice-nine, myself.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
The judges would also have accepted, “Your Emergency-fu is weak, Tepco.”
peach flavored shampoo
He is?
gene108
@Cermet:
I’m not a paid troll, but have family that worked in engineering in the 1970’s and 1980’s on nuclear plants. They say the safety is good. I trust them.
By the logic of people wanting to ban nuclear plants, we should also ban automobiles because of the Ford Pinto and fertilizer plants because of the Union Carbide Bhopal tragedy and West, Texas tragedy.
This doesn’t excuse Tepco, but to paint Tepco or the Fukushima plant getting damaged by a tsunami as the default position of what happens with nuclear power is absurd. This is a very abnormal situation, which still does not come close to the human tragedy of when fertilizer plants fuck shit up.
So please start petitioning to ban the industrial production of fertilizer. It’ll save more lives from industrial accidents than anything that’s happened with nuclear plants.
Punchy
THIS.
NonyNony
@Cermet:
Why? Have we seen any movement by Congress or the EPA to actually change how nuclear energy is handled in the US? To add more restrictions or controls on things? Or is there any kind of election coming up that they need to throw a cloud of squid ink up to mess with?
Nope. So the paid trolls are off earning their lucre by astroturfing about fracking and public school closures on various local newspaper comment sections. Also even paid trolls need a vacation, and hey it’s August.
Botsplainer
What if you bite the bullet, detonate a focused explosive on the thing to split the melted rods and thus kill off the reaction?
Yes, the short term rad spread is massive and catastrophic, but the situation is more manageable long term. I’m thinking that containment may be leading to uglier problems over the long term.
When you have two lousy choices, you choose the one which is least bad.
NonyNony
@gene108:
The safety WAS good. We’ve had 3 decades of deregulation since then.
I have a family member who worked on military nuke plants. After getting out of the service and touring civilian plants for job interviews he refused to work in the industry because he didn’t think his conscience could handle the responsibility of helping to operate nuke plants with the shit they told him they were doing that ran so counter to his day-to-day experience in the military. He went back to school instead and he’s become an advocate for either passing some laws to properly regulate their management or shutting them all down immediately.
So you’ll have to forgive me if your anecdote about family members from 30 years ago doesn’t calm my fears based on my anecdote about a family member from 10 years ago…
RaflW
When it comes to environmental issues in general, the world’s “sense of crisis is weak.”
In the specific case, though, yes it does seem that Tepco is singularly unable to grasp the seriousness of their own horrible mess. And the global fruit-fly attention span has moved on.
Wait till Godzilla wakes up and lets us know we’ve been foolish….
RaflW
@The Red Pen: Just read up a bit on that (I visited the site in the 80s before the reactor was online on a school trip).
Quite interesting, in a creepy sort of way, that Tepco had invested in a plan to install two new reactors there. Which has now been cancelled due in part to (surprise!) cost overruns.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I have to say, as cynical as I am about how things have gotten in the US I find it hard to believe an American corporation or the US government would be as blase as Tepco and the Japanese government are about a reactor melt down. At the very lest the US corp would be spining it in the media 24/7
Their apathy is even more bizarre when you consider these people grew up with stories of Hiroshima and watching Godzilla movies.
sparrow
@The Red Pen: I think the 3 million people living in the metro area would notice, yeah. It’s also an important commercial port.
… although I did get a slight chuckle out of the fact that in the movie Armageddon, it’s Houston that they decide to nuke to get rid of the alien ship. Because obv. you want to hit a major city, but not one that people on the East or West coast are fond of…
sparrow
@monkeyfister: Houston is an international, progressive city with an openly lesbian mayor. It has a great medical center, and of course the Johnson Space flight center as well as some top Universities. But hey, they’re in a red state, so fuck ’em. har har.
The Red Pen
@peach flavored shampoo:
To be fair, Ron Paul is only considered a liberal in his home town of Lake Jackson. Lake Jackson acquired its first black family in 1980; they were welcomed with a burning cross. The Knight of the Ku Klux Klan are not invisible in Lake Jackson. If you move there, they’ll stop by with some recruiting literature.
Ron Paul is against all that, hence: liberal. Ron Paul doesn’t hate black people, he just doesn’t know very many, so he’s like that well-meaning, but still clueless and racist, old uncle. A lot of Lake Jackson is like that flat-out-racist n-word-using old uncle.
In neighboring Clute, which was actually founded on a policy of racial integration in the post-Civil-War period, and has, as a result, a much more diverse population, Ron Paul is not considered a liberal. He is, however, well-liked because he’s a genuinely nice guy who — underneath the kookiness — genuinely cares about people. When people couldn’t pay for his medical services in cash, he’d always work something out, which might include barter in chickens, car repair, free meals at Vicky’s Chat and Chew (real place) or pot.
Oh yeah, the pot thing makes him a liberal, too.
Punchy
Alien ship? Isn’t this the Bruce Willis flick where they go to an asteroid and blow it up? Where were the aliens?
Shrillhouse
Has anyone else noticed that the “plan” to deal with the catastrophe at Fukushima seems to be nothing more that one crazy idea after the next?
sparrow
@Punchy: Shit, wrong movie. I meant the Will Smith one… Independence Day. That one.
The Red Pen
@sparrow:
I take it that you’ve never lived there. Houston being under a foot of water isn’t as unusual as it sounds. If the water was radioactive, what regulatory agency would tell you that? I suspect that the Invisible Hand of the Free Market has failed to equip the average Houstonian with a Geiger counter. At least it hadn’t when I lived there.
Rafer Janders
@gene108:
I’m not an opponent of nuclear power, but no, not by the same logic. The same logic would be if when a Ford Pinto blew up, it irradiated the ground it was standing on and made it uninhabitable for human or animal life for the next 10,000 years.
It’s not that nuclear meltdowns can kill people that’s the problem, it’s that they can fuck up the land we live on and the air we breathe and the food and water we consume FOREVER AND EVER FROM THEN ON. If a Ford Pinto had the ability to do that, we might have taken them a bit more seriously.
sparrow
@The Red Pen: I lived there for 10 years.
Rafer Janders
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
You’ve never been on hold with Time Warner Cable customer service, have you?
Walker
@sparrow:
I think you mean Independence Day, not Armageddon.
The Red Pen
@sparrow:
That’s not living, that’s surviving.
Anyway, you know what a shithole Houston is regardless of it’s notable merits (e.g. some glimmers of progressive local politics, Medical City, and… oh there’s at least three things… um… University of Houston?). Houston combines everything bad about Los Angeles without any of the good things about Los Angeles (e.g. … the Getty Center? Um… someone help me out here).
Tone In DC
@Shrillhouse:
Kinda like BP’s reactions to the Deep Water Horizon three years ago (the junk shot, et cetera).
And they spun that story 100 ways for MONTHS after that spill. I heard a rumor recently that many of the people directly affected in the Gulf can’t even sue now.
Riley's Enabler
@The Red Pen: The Menil Collection. Still free to tour.
Museum of Fine Arts, Contemporary Arts, Holocaust Museum, The Children’s Museum. All in a walkable area.
Low cost of living, inexpensive housing, cheap amazing eats, a vibrant cultural diversity (you want Thai, Vietnamese, Korean food? yeah, we got it. Cheap and yummy). Green year round. Temperate winters.
If this is “surviving” I’ll take it. Speaking of, any other Houstonians up for a meet up?
RaflW
@gene108:
As bad as West, TX was, it won’t be leeking radioactive groundwater into the Pacific for some unknown (but probably generational) timeframe.
Bhopal was indeed horrific and does come closer to a nuclear-scale incident: the site is still contaminated and needs an estimated $50M in cleanup, but that still pales in comparison to the size and scale of the exclusion zone and the estimated $1 billion dollars for “final” cleanup and a new super-containment structure for Chernobyl.
Cermet
I am not against nuclear power just any Amerikan designed fission based nuclear plant (or the far worse French plants.) The Candu reactor I’d feel reasonably safe near (but not down wind!) to that type of plant and consider it a very safe design (for melt down issues.)
Still, no sane person wants to live next to nuclear plant waste of any storage mode – that stuff is deadly beyond belief. As for the on sight storage of waste that really needs to be addressed very soon (the ten thousand year time frame for long term storage is silly – really; in a few hundred years that stuff will be easy to convert into low level waste by neutron activation – by then, if AGW hasn’t killed us other energy sources will be have to be available – or else we wouldn’t be around any way, so again, the issue of long term storage would be irrelevant.)
Also, the boron used in those thirty year old reactors (in the coolant fluid if memory serves) is a danger even professionals have no idea except that it is VERY bad – all the SS is corroding away at rates that just can’t be predicted but is destroying all the piping/fittings and even reactor housings! That issue is the number one safety problem no one has addressed on these old Amerikan plants that scares me more than most other issues.
Relative to Amerikan plants, both the Fermi accident (few in the field care to recall and even fewer people out of the field even know but that little ‘accident’ could have caused the total destruction and lost of Detroit along with most its people) and the more famous Three-mile Island plant accident were all big deals and do indicate that we need to be highly critical of the nuclear industry and its supporters (and me as well since I support the Candu reactor – that has issues, too. But it might help reduce AGW issues along with better energy conservation, solar, wind and maybe some other possible sources that exclude coal.
sparrow
@The Red Pen: Decent Mexican food? I actually can be kind of nostalgic for it now that I’m in super-corrupt Baltimore. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to local politics, but I thought Bill White and Annise Parker were/are good mayors. I found Houstonians (at least in my local bubble) to be straightforward, kind, and (surprisingly?) less provincial than I find around here in MD. And the public transit was decent. …West Alabama Ice House is still one of the best bars, period (along with La Carafe). The museum district (where I lived for some of that time) is nice. There’s a lot of quirk in Houston that I found charming once I had been there long enough to find it. And Rice is a good school. All that said, it was a red state, and I was pretty ready to leave when I moved. But I am a bit defensive about Houston. It’s kind of like the greek saying “it’s not shit, my grandmother made it”… if that translates… :)
Chaplain Weasle
I grew up in a small town in South Texas, near a nuclear plant… i have stories I could share (too many & too long to type on my small phone keyboard) but the one I like best is it was the prototype for the Fukushima plant’s reactors, and some of the same people built both, but in the Fukushima plant they added backup generators and other safety features that the plant in TX doesn’t have. Also, the plant uses water from a bay & the Gulf of Mexico for cooling water – if/when something blows, its gonna be worse for the Gulf than the Deepwater Horizion… although I hate Houston and a lot of South Texas (more long stories) and I frankly wouldn’t give a damn if it all became radioactive. fuck it.
Chaplain Weasle
@Walker: @The Red Pen: thanks for typing what I wanted to say ;)
Shakezula
@The Red Pen: You laugh, but just wait until a 50′ radioactive Rick Perry is rampaging all over the place, demanding a tanker of hair conditioner.
Chaplain Weasle
@sparrow: Yeah, I went to school there… luckily I got to be part of several ethnic enclaves: VietNamese (with the Cao Dai Temple, Buddhist Temple, & a “Little VietNam”), Jamacian, Mexican, Guatamalan, Ethiopian, Saudi & Jordanian, the Aeros (Hockey team & the fans, players and staff), etc. the peoblem to me is its a city made up of enclaves & bubbles, which are hard to find or get into if you aren’t in group or have someone ingroup to introduce you & let ppl know you’re cool… I’m an anthropologist, so it was great for me! it is now OFFICIALLY the MOST ETHNICALLY DIVERSE city/place in the US. Also: the Texas Medical Center is FUCKING AWESOME and I know many ppl who are alive today because of treaments they got there (incl. me personally)…so yeah I get what u r saying, but the Red State BS is just too fucking much for me… and after hurricane Ike literally wiped a lot of the places I used to live/grew up in, i just said “fukkit” and got out… I miss it sometimes, but I have FaceBook & keep in touch with all mah peepz from there, and I just find a Taqueria and chow down & use my crappy Texas Spanish, lol.
Lawrence
What are they going to freeze it with? Liquid nitrogen? Ice-9?
Chaplain Weasle
@Shakezula: Oh LOL! You know “Good Hair” Perry!!!! LoL!!!
man, that comment just made my day! :D
Tone In DC
@Shakezula:
LULz.
Ain’t that much mousse/gel/pomade/whatever in all of the lower 48.
Just sayin’.
fka AWS
Houston was built on a swamp. It’s muggy, hot as hell, and the poster child for urban sprawl and constant highway construction. used to be, on the east side, Houston sprawl pretty much began when you hit Baytown.
It has redeeming qualities, like any major city, but I would never want to return to the gulf coast to live. Period. I like seasons.
sparrow
@Chaplain Weasle: LOL @ crappy Texas Spanish. But boy, that taco truck outside of West Alabama, I have dreams about…seriously. Ike hitting my house was also kind of a knell for me to leave, too. But I did like having freakish bell pepper plants that stayed alive for 3 years running cuz the winters are so mild… who knows. If Texas turns blue and I got a job offer, I’d probably go back. Just be sure to buy something sturdy for when the hurricanes come… :)
Roger Moore
@monkeyfister:
FTFY.
The Red Pen
@Riley’s Enabler:
@sparrow:
All excellent points. How could I have forgotten to put Niko Niko’s on the list? I’ll have to say that most major cities I can name have some worthy food offerings, but I have yet to find a place like that — although I haven’t delved much into Chicago.
The winters are not worth the summers. People can be friendly, although I’m sure it helps if you are white, or otherwise a member of whatever ethnic enclave you are in. While the city is diverse, it is extremely segregated.
As far as provincial goes, I think that’s a function of how well integrated you are. That’s a big complaint about Dallas. I know what people are talking about, but those people were just background noise for me. I noticed them a lot more in Houston, where I didn’t stay long enough to really learn who to hang out with and where to hang out. I met a lot of trust fund assholes and “30K millis” hanging around them — and more acclimatized Houstonians would know how to avoid them.
That said, Houston (and Dallas, to be honest) are two cities where you can live for years and still not figure out where the really cool stuff and people are. Other major cities’ diversity is more visible, in my experience.
Villago Delenda Est
@GregB:
Friedman was talking about the long term, which is something that no MBA has the slightest clue about.
It’s all about the current fiscal quarter. Profit a year from now is just totally outside the realm of reality.
sparrow
@The Red Pen: Absolutely true about the “visibility” factor of cool stuff. Anytime I had a friend from out of town coming in, I would basically offer to set them up with an itenerary. Otherwise you could have a really boring (or worse) time in H-town. I also lived most of my time in the Museum district or medical center, which are basically the parts of Houston that are all mixed up, ethnically. It’s funny that now I’m in a nice East Coast state, but living in a super-white (blah!) neighborhood. Interestingly, I thought Houston was more mixed up than Dallas, but apparently it was just my local bubble. They look about the same.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4982043082/in/set-72157624812674967
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4982037274/in/set-72157624812674967
The Red Pen
Back on topic: the reactor meltdowns at Fukushima were controlled pretty well, and other plants may do even better, in terms of handling emergencies.
The real problem is the accumulation of nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain may have been our best bet for finding a long term place to dump this waste, but the politics of using it have proven insurmountable. There are safer reactor designs that generate waste even faster, so we’re stuck in a catch-22.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Red Pen:
Oh, Red, you’re such a comedian!
Roger Moore
@Cermet:
Memory does not serve. Boron is a very effective neutron absorber, so you don’t want it in your ordinary coolant. It’s used in control rods and in any kind of special scram coolant they’d use in the event of a dire emergency.
monkeyfister
@Roger Moore:
Works for me! Same end for them… only slower.
cvstoner
I believe the proper term here is “moral hazard.”
This company, and just about all others, are in denial of anything that might impact profits, and will continue to do so as long as the government will step in and save them with no consequences.
cvstoner
@The Red Pen:
Yes, and I imagine with the same sense of urgency as the local fertilizer plants.
cvstoner
The USN has more operating reactors that the rest of the US combined, and these reactors are the propulsion systems of sea-going vessels.
The question is not if the reactors can be operated safely. The USN has proven they can. The question is can they be operated profitably. I think the answer to that is probably “no.”
Villago Delenda Est
@cvstoner:
In the current MBA driven “current fiscal quarter is all that matters” environment, the answer is most assuredly “no”.
The fact that the profit is the utility of the product does not compute for Ferengi.
Bill Arnold
I thought this whole ground water moving through the site from higher uphill was well known, as was the frozen soil ground water barrier idea.
Richard Garwin’s “Learning From Fukushima Dai-ichi” is worth a read; it doesn’t mention the ground water movement flow issues but I believe he has talked about it.
Cermet
@Roger Moore: It would be best if you knew what you were talking about before answering – first off, I fully know boron absorbs neutrons and your assumption I didn’t proves you talk without thinking.
Next, if you did your homework before trying to show your lack of knowledge on a subject you’d know they do in fact use boron – in the form of boric acid in the coolant. The form was what I didn’t remember. I knew that they did not use pure boron which is why I noted that issue and coundn’t remember that part.
So, to educate someone like you who knows very little on the subject but likes to tell people they are wrong, try learning about the subject first. Relative to that issue, the purpose of the boron, in the form of the acid, IS to absorb neutrons – that is now they fine tune the reactor. See the wiki on BWR and Google before you show everyone your ignorance.
jc
When three hundred tons of highly radioactive water are leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day, doesn’t that become a very serious problem pretty damn quick?
Cermet
@cvstoner: I believe the Thresher might indicate that their record isn’t as perfect as you indicate – a reactor presure line issue started the mess that sank the sub … . If memory serves (moore, here you can jump in since I may not have this one right – feel free to google it and add a correction), a bad gauge started a chain of events that they say is what started the Three mile Island failure … amerikan nuclear reactors offer little room for errors of any type – even very minor ones. That is another reason I like the Candu design – even loss of coolant flow will not hurt the reactor and it can tolerate loss of coolant for fairly long times without melting down from what I understand.
This from the Navy:
“During the 1963 inquiry Admiral Hyman Rickover stated:
“I believe the loss of the Thresher should not be viewed solely as the result of failure of a specific braze, weld, system or component, but rather should be considered a consequence of the philosophy of design, construction and inspection that has been permitted in our naval shipbuilding programs. I think it is important that we re-evaluate our present practices where, in the desire to make advancements, we may have forsaken the fundamentals of good engineering.”