Massive Earthquake and Tsunami strikes Japan

[choxorn]

half billion people living in harsh conditions in the north,

I didn't know the number of people in that region was 4 times as high as the number of people in the entirety of Japan.

 

[Singularity]

Obviously. I do not think I said otherwise. But the situation is definitely much better than lots of what I see described in newspapers titles abroad, titles like as "panic", "catastrophe", "people are fleeing the country"... Such things are an awfully wrong depiction of reality here, and I wanted to point that out.

On a personal note, I am actually much more concerned by the half billion people living in harsh conditions in the north, most of them having lost either their home, friends/family, or both. The weather is definitely not making things better

I guess you meant half million. But yeah, I agree. That's a current and very real crisis. The shelters lack warm food, heating and medical care for the people who need that. And the cold weather is making it a lot worse.

You have to remember what catches peoples attention. Large scale panic, potential mass death from the nuclear incident. Sadly that gets all the headlines, and the level of poor journalism seems to know no bounds while trying to get peoples attention.

I've seen live newsblogs that keep using that rubbish fallout map that covered all of the eastern US coast in deadly radiation. It's like a rush to spread phenomenal rubbish news instead of filtering through to the sometimes less eventful but still tragic events taking place.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Hey man, no reason to extract parts of a post that you already replied to.

I replied late in the previous post and I thought you missed it based on your next response.

Those aren't laymen. They're the consensus of the Japanese expertise. I've questioned those experts before and still do, but they're the only ones with people on the ground where the action is taking place and with a mandate to act on it.

You mean like the Japanese government officials aren't laymen? Or do you mean the company spokesmen who have been obviously lying all along instead of telling everybody what was really going on?

They are now talking about enough radiation near reactor #4 to kill you in a matter of minutes.

 

[Singularity]

I replied late in the previous post and I thought you missed it.

No, I got it.

You mean like the Japanese government officials aren't laymen? Or do you mean the company spokesmen who have been obviously lying all along instead of telling everybody what was really going on?

You're preaching to the flock here. I've made numerous posts where I questioned the level of the Japanese alertness and expertise. And I think the escalating situation at the power plant speaks volume of how they've reacted to events instead of dictating them by making the right decisions at an earlier time. Why didn't they install water cannons for the event when the radiation got too high to have people there? Why didn't they make the road for fire trucks to gain access to the plant when the radiation was lower?

But despite the systematic chain of failures they're what we're stuck with for the moment. I hope they can patch up the weakest spots with US expertise without loosing too much face towards the public, which is supposed to be a big thing over there.

So, OK. There is a high chance that they're acting on poor advice when they're not widening the evacuation zone. But it means emptying almost an entire prefecture and the southern and northern parts of another two. There's a real chance that it will get messy if they don't do it. And there's a guarantee that it will put a failing system of care for evacuees under a lot more strain if they do widen the quarantine zone.

 

[Disgustipated]

All the talk of rain being the worst thing to worry about in the case of fallout isn't helping my paranoia; it seems Spring and Summer are Vegas' monsoon seasons. Damnit all.

Hope they can get this chaos under control. We need some sort of cannon that can shoot water in a pressurised line like 100 miles.

Our monsoon season doesn't start until July. And that moisture comes from the gulf of California and down south. Spring and early summer are very dry for us. I'm not worried. I have no plans on getting iodine tablets.

 

[innonimatu]

Why don't they roll a prefabricated cover in there and cover up the rods? Or they could do a Chernobyl-style pile of boron and concrete on top of the rods.

No onw really knows what will happen when those rods get uncovere and melt. Here's the latest assessment from the french institute of nuclear safety:

La piscine du réacteur N°4 est en ébullition. A défaut d’appoint d’eau, un début de dénoyage des assemblages combustibles interviendra sous quelques jours. L’assèchement de la piscine conduirait à terme à la fusion du combustible présent. Dans un tel cas, les rejets radioactifs correspondants seraient bien supérieurs aux rejets survenus jusqu’à présent.

[...]

Les températures des piscines des réacteurs n°5 et n°6 augmentent lentement. Sans refroidissement, ces piscines pourraient entrer en ébullition sous quelques jours. Selon des informations à confirmer, des groupes électrogènes diesels supplémentaires seraient mis en place afin d’assurer le refroidissement de ces piscines.

And there is no information about the spend fuel pools which are on the top floors of the buildings (1-3) which already exploded. Plus there's another, larger pool with thousands of spend fuel assemblies (think thousands of reactor cores) on another damaged building, which also must be keep actively cooled, or else they will also eventually melt. All this nuclear fuel was protected by nothing more than water, which is now evaporating fast or (in building 4) already evaporated. And TEPCO may have been stacking more spend fuel (more densely packed) in those pools than allowed by the safety norms. When the rods melt (if they melt, but it's being assumed they will or are already) they may fuse together and go critical. Probably not quickly enough and for long enough to "explode" and spread into the atmosphere, but who the hell knows? In any case they'll burn and release radioactive materials to the atmosphere.

So, the worst case is is not just another Chernobyl: it's the equivalent of thousands of Chernobyls!

Really the organization of the whole nuclear industry is insane! To assume that spent fuel can always be maintained under safe conditions, always with active cooling, is to court disaster. And this is a feature or every single commercial nuclear reactor in the world! It took this ongoing catastrophe in Japan for me to realize the level of insanity involved in this industry.

Even if they manage to avoid a meltdown of those spent rods (we can always hope), there's no grantee it won't happen again, in some other place, because some unforeseen event disrupted the cooling of these fuel assemblies. We're talking thousands of tons in each nuclear power station, there are no "containment buildings" for this stuff, there can't be for those quantities, and it turns out that it is just as dangerous as a live reactor!

 

[cybrxkhan]

Obviously. I do not think I said otherwise. But the situation is definitely much better than lots of what I see described in newspapers titles abroad, titles like as "panic", "catastrophe", "people are fleeing the country"... Such things are an awfully wrong depiction of reality here, and I wanted to point that out.

Unfortunately I can only rely on foreign news sources because I don't know Japanese myself, and most of the English-language Japanese sources I know usually don't provide enough information for me to get anything.

I'll (cautiously) take your word for it that Tokyo isn't going apocalyptic (though I never really said that... I was thinking that people were starting to get real scared, that's all, but whatever), but I do wonder if this situation keeps up and worsens whether the residents of Tokyo will start to panic, with serious repercussions therefore.

 

[Singularity]

Quick update: US experts are at a loss trying to get accurate numbers from the actual fallout/radiation in Japan.

The Japanese government's radiation report for the country's 47 prefectures Wednesday had a notable omission — Fukushima, ground zero in Japan's nuclear crisis. Measurements from Ibaraki, just south of Fukushima, were also blanked out.

Radiation experts in the USA say that the lack of information about radioactivity released from the smoldering reactors makes it impossible to gauge the current danger, project how bad a potential meltdown might be or calculate how much fallout might reach the USA.

Source: USA Today

And perhaps as both a lack of accurate Japanese data and public concerns there is this news on deploying additional radiation monitors on US territory in the far west:

Officials with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they do not expect harmful radiation levels to reach the U.S. from Japan.

"The agency decided out of an abundance of caution to send these deployable monitors in order to get some monitors on the ground closer to Japan," said Jonathan Edwards, director of EPA's radiation protection division.

California already has 12 monitoring stations scattered throughout the state that test the air for radiation levels. EPA also has 40 so-called "deployable" monitors that can be moved around in cases of emergency.

EPA told The Associated Press it is adding two more stations in Hawaii and two in Guam. In Alaska, officials are setting up three new monitors in Dutch Harbor, Nome and Juneau.

The idea is to get a better geographic spread of monitoring equipment than currently exists, Edwards said.

Source: Yahoo News

 

[innonimatu]

I was looking at this photo here, and just can't believe that those reactors and the fuel elements which are (were?) in the buildings can be brought under control:



I there were any on building three, they're blown to bits. And building 4 is a pile of rubble held together by a steel frame.

 

[JujuLautre]

I didn't know the number of people in that region was 4 times as high as the number of people in the entirety of Japan.

Yeah, that was million, my bad

Unfortunately I can only rely on foreign news sources because I don't know Japanese myself, and most of the English-language Japanese sources I know usually don't provide enough information for me to get anything.

I'll (cautiously) take your word for it that Tokyo isn't going apocalyptic (though I never really said that... I was thinking that people were starting to get real scared, that's all, but whatever), but I do wonder if this situation keeps up and worsens whether the residents of Tokyo will start to panic, with serious repercussions therefore.

No problem; I wasn't specifically targeting you, but I'm kind of sick of seeing this kind of panic reaction. People and media should take care with their vocabulary. People are leaving the area, that's a truth, but saying "everyone" is no good.
I don't really read Japanese news either, but I live on Tokyo now, so I trust what I see. Stress is here for sure, but global panic? No. Although I have to say that I have no idea about what would happen is the situation worsens much more (even though I'm here since 5 years this is - quite obviously - the first crisis of this kind that I face)

 

[cybrxkhan]

No problem; I wasn't specifically targeting you, but I'm kind of sick of seeing this kind of panic reaction. People and media should take care with their vocabulary. People are leaving the area, that's a truth, but saying "everyone" is no good.
I don't really read Japanese news either, but I live on Tokyo now, so I trust what I see. Stress is here for sure, but global panic? No. Although I have to say that I have no idea about what would happen is the situation worsens much more (even though I'm here since 5 years this is - quite obviously - the first crisis of this kind that I face)

Yeah, no problem; I can see how having newspapers scream out the apocalypse is annoying when nothing that insane is happening where you live. I agree it is ultimately an issue of vocabulary and word choice - I mean I would find it highly likely that much if not all of the population is extremely worried, especially since not everybody is a nuclear physicist, but I'll agree with you here that there hasn't been a zombie apocalypse thing where everybody's fleeing for their lives.

It's also hard for us outside of Japan (and even within Japan, I guess?) to know what the hell is going on with the nuclear situation because there are so many conflicting reports not only from news sources, but from scientific and government ones as well, concerning the seriousness of the situation and what might happen. Obviously it's understandable that different people say different possibilities can happen, since, well, we can only hypothesize right now, but still, it's a bit unnerving when one source says it's going to be just a minor hassle when another says it's the next Chernobyl (or worse).

 

[Formaldehyde]

Here is a surprise from the article Innonimatu posted above:

Reporting from Sendai and Tokyo, Japan Japanese authorities embarked Thursday on a series of desperate new measures to try to avert full reactor meltdowns at a stricken nuclear complex. At the same time, survivors of last week's earthquake and tsunami said shortages of food, water, medicine and other essentials were becoming extreme and called government relief efforts woefully inadequate.

This is the first criticism I have seen of the relief effort.

 

[mangxema]

Here is a surprise from the article Innonimatu posted above:

This is the first criticism I have seen of the relief effort.

Flaws in Japan’s Leadership Deepen Sense of Crisis

TOKYO — With all the euphemistic language on display from officials handling Japan’s nuclear crisis, one commodity has been in short supply: information.
...
Foreign nuclear experts, the Japanese press and an increasingly angry and rattled Japanese public are frustrated by government and power company officials’ failure to communicate clearly and promptly about the nuclear crisis. Pointing to conflicting reports, ambiguous language and a constant refusal to confirm the most basic facts, they suspect officials of withholding or fudging crucial information about the risks posed by the ravaged Daiichi plant.
...
Evasive news conferences followed uninformative briefings as the crisis intensified over the past five days. Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more — and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed. With earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis striking in rapid, bewildering succession, Japan’s leaders need skills they are not trained to have: rallying the public, improvising solutions and cooperating with powerful bureaucracies.

“Japan has never experienced such a serious test,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University. “At the same time, there is a leadership vacuum.”
...
In a telling outburst, the prime minister, Naoto Kan, berated power company officials for not informing the government of two explosions at the plant early Tuesday morning.

“What in the world is going on?” Mr. Kan said in front of journalists, complaining that he saw television reports of the explosions before he had heard about them from the power company. He was speaking at the inauguration of a central response center of government ministers and Tepco executives that he set up and pointedly said he would command.
...
The less-than-straight talk is rooted in a conflict-averse culture that avoids direct references to unpleasantness. Until recently, it was standard practice not to tell cancer patients about their diagnoses, ostensibly to protect them from distress. Even Emperor Hirohito, when he spoke to his subjects for the first time to mark Japan’s surrender in World War II, spoke circumspectly, asking Japanese to “endure the unendurable.”

There are also political considerations. In the only nation that has endured an atomic bomb attack, acute sensitivity about radiation sickness may be motivating public officials to try to contain panic — and to perform political damage control. Left-leaning news outlets have long been skeptical of nuclear power and of its backers, and the mutual mistrust led power companies and their regulators to tightly control the flow of information about nuclear operations so as not to inflame a spectrum of opponents that includes pacifists and environmentalists.
...
“There’s a clear lack of command authority in the current government in Tokyo,” said Ronald Morse, who has worked in the Defense, Energy and State Departments in the United States and in two government ministries in Japan. “The magnitude of it becomes obvious at a time like this.”

 

[Formaldehyde]

That was referring to criticism of the earthquake and tsunami relief effort, not the onging disinformation nonsense regarding nuclear plant.

 

[Singularity]

Some additional links of potential interest:

Radiation plume chart from New York Times. It will reach so-cal on friday. It's still stressed that the values will be extremely low and cause no threat at all to the people there. But what it does show is how fast it spreads across the pacific...

Interactive map from MSNBC. It shows very well how the earth continue to bleed energy along the entire slab of land that snapped free from the pacific plate.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Some additional links of potential interest:

Radiation plume chart from New York Times. It will reach so-cal on friday. It's still stressed that the values will be extremely low and cause no threat at all to the people there. But what it does show is how fast it spreads across the pacific...

Darn, so I'll be done by a radioactive mass by this Friday. Thanks for the chart, anyways, it's pretty informative.

Anyhow, what are the "arbitrary units" used for this thing? As in it doesn't seem to be any kind of measurement that makes sense to me. Does anybody know any comparable radiation levels in other objects using this kind of measurement? As in like what would a cell phone typically emit in these units, or a banana, or what not?

 

[Disgustipated]

Some additional links of potential interest:

Radiation plume chart from New York Times. It will reach so-cal on friday. It's still stressed that the values will be extremely low and cause no threat at all to the people there. But what it does show is how fast it spreads across the pacific...

Interactive map from MSNBC. It shows very well how the earth continue to bleed energy along the entire slab of land that snapped free from the pacific plate.

yuck, right into my city. I was hoping it would go north into Canada.

 

[BasketCase]

No onw really knows what will happen when those rods get uncovere and melt.

Why didn't you simply ask me?

Here's what will happen. When the rods melt, they can only go supercritical if they melt into a pool of around 56 kilograms contained within (for pure uranium 235) a sphere 17 centimeters across. With plutonium, depending on the isotope, it's 10 kg within 10 cm or 40 kg within 15 cm (if the mass isn't spherical, the amount required for a criticality event goes up). And uranium-238 cannot cause a supercritical event at all. Further, the above numbers are for pure fissile metals--which are not used in fuel rods. Fission reactors use uranium or plutonium oxides (fuel-grade plutonium is anywhere from 7 to 20 percent plutonium). So the amount of melted fuel required for a criticality event is actually a lot higher than the numbers above. Also: you said you were worried about fuel fires? Guess what--fuel rods made of metal oxides can't burn (they're already oxidized).

Whatever the shape of the containment vessel floor is, determines how critical it will go. If the metal just puddles in a flat pool at the bottom, critical mass may not be possible at all. Now, if the fissile fuel does go critical, there will not be an explosion of any kind; a nuclear explosion is only possible when the required amount of uranium is brought together at extremely high speed (basically bullet speed). As the metal passes above critical, it will simply heat up--and the heat will cause it to expand until it's no longer critical mass. A nuclear explosion will not be possible.

There's a common misconception about Chernobyl hidden in there--Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion (in fact, my research indicates Chernobyl never went supercritical at all). It was a steam explosion. The initial overheat caused the coolant to start boiling into steam, the steam voids in the coolant reduced its cooling capacity, and the reactor did a runaway. That's what caused nuclear crap to go flying all over the surrounding terrain: a steam explosion inside the core.

The whole Chernobyl thing resulted from a crappy reactor design--something Japanese reactors don't suffer from.

So, the worst case is is not just another Chernobyl: it's the equivalent of thousands of Chernobyls!

Nope. Not gonna happen.

 

[Singularity]

I was looking at this photo here, and just can't believe that those reactors and the fuel elements which are (were?) in the buildings can be brought under control:



I there were any on building three, they're blown to bits. And building 4 is a pile of rubble held together by a steel frame.

If I was a Japanese politician with executive power in the neighboring prefectures of the power plant I would demand a 24/7 streaming video like the one BP had in the gulf of mexico. The only webcam seem to be conveniently going in and out of service all the time just like their radioactive measurements.

It's can't be that hard to cobble together a remotely operated vehicle with a camera, power supply and a mobile network connection. Japan is supposed to be a beacon of robotics and camera technology in the world, but curiously the images released from the latest explosions seem to be heavily filtered - and dare I suggest censored.

If BP can do it at 1500 meters depth then TEPCO can do it in the "light radiation" at Fukushima 1.

 

[BasketCase]

If it was so easy to make a remote-camera vehicle, why hasn't somebody done so already? Possibly the needed parts are buried under collapsed earthquake rubble???

On the side: what good would 24/7 images be? They're images of the outside of the buildings, and it's the inside that's worrisome. Innonimatu himself said he doesn't know where in the building the fuel rods are, in the photos he posted. And finally: the initial overheat at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was caused by a snapped power line. Could you point to the break in the photo for me? For all you know, the actual break in the power line is five miles away from the reactor.

There's armchair warriors, armchair quarterbacks, and now apparently armchair nuclear physicists.