Massive Earthquake and Tsunami strikes Japan

[NBAfan]

Keep in mind new nuclear power plant designs can rely on convection cooling or natural circulation and don't need electricity in an emergency. Although that isn't foolproof either, because if a pipe ruptures and all that water leaks out, natural circulation won't do jack squat. So I do believe civilian nuclear power should go bye-bye for that reason. There is no way to protect against a major cooling pipe rupture. It's time to wrap up the nuclear power industry on land (I still fully support naval nuclear power).

So what, just give up? No more research?

 

[Disgustipated]

Uranium is a limited resource anyways. It should be for military use only.

 

[NBAfan]

Uranium is a limited resource anyways. It should be for military use only.

So are coal and oil.
Breeder reactors also make more fuel then they take in.

 

[Monsterzuma]

URGENT: Gov't eyes injecting nitrogen into reactor vessels to prevent blasts
TOKYO, April 1, Kyodo

The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. are considering injecting nitrogen into containment vessels of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's reactors to prevent hydrogen explosions, government sources said Friday.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/82625.html

 

[naterator]

9.0 quakes happen like what? Every 200 years?

5 in the last 50 years.

 

[Disgustipated]

I would like to post some good news for once.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1372506/Safe-hound-Dog-alive-Japan-THREE-WEEKS-tsunami.html

And actually news about the tsunami and not the nuclear plant. Remember it's the tsunami that killed all the people, not the nuclear plant.

I love stories like this. I also love dogs (well most dogs, I hate attack dogs).

It appears almost too good to be true, but this little dog has been found alive and well adrift at sea, an astonishing three weeks after the tsunami that devastated Japan.

Members of the Japan Coast Guard came across the dog on Friday as they were conducting an aerial search of the area.

Against all the odds, the dog appears to have survived by living in a partially submerged house that had been swept out to sea.

 

[GamezRule]

Que dietary jokes.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

Japanese don't eat dog. You're thinking of Koreans.

 

[Monsterzuma]

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...tened-by-heat-bursts-sea-radiation-rises.html

(Updates with Moody&#8217;s downgrade in 18th paragraph. For more on Japan&#8217;s nuclear crisis, see EXT2 <GO>.)

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Japan&#8217;s damaged nuclear plant may be in danger of emitting sudden bursts of heat and radiation, undermining efforts to cool the reactors and contain fallout.

The potential for limited, uncontrolled chain reactions, voiced yesterday by the International Atomic Energy Agency, is among the phenomena that might occur, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo today. The IAEA &#8220;emphasized that the nuclear reactors won&#8217;t explode,&#8221; he said.

Three workers at a separate Japanese plant received high doses of radiation in 1999 from a similar nuclear reaction, known as &#8216;criticality.&#8217; Two of them died within seven months.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant&#8217;s operator, and Japan&#8217;s nuclear watchdog, dismissed the threat of renewed nuclear reactions, three weeks after an earthquake and tsunami triggered an automatic shutdown. Tokyo Electric has been spraying water on the reactors since the March 11 disaster in an effort to cool nuclear fuel rods.

&#8220;The reactors are stopped, so it&#8217;s hard to imagine re- criticality,&#8221; occurring, Tsuyoshi Makigami, a spokesman for the utility, told a news conference today.

A partial meltdown of fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the IAEA, said at a press conference in Vienna. This might increase the danger to workers at the site.

&#8216;Ethereal Blue Flash&#8217;

Nuclear experts call such reactions &#8220;localized criticality.&#8221; They consist of a burst of heat, radiation and sometimes an &#8220;ethereal blue flash,&#8221; according to the U.S. Energy Department&#8217;s Los Alamos National Laboratory website. Twenty-one workers worldwide have been killed by criticality accidents since 1945, the site said.

The IAEA acknowledged &#8220;they don&#8217;t have clear signs that show such a phenomenon is happening,&#8221; Edano said.

Radioactive chlorine found March 25 in the No. 1 turbine building suggests chain reactions continued after the reactor shut down, physicist Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, wrote in a March 28 paper. Radioactive chlorine has a half-life of 37 minutes, according to the report.

Japan&#8217;s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said there&#8217;s no possibility of uncontrolled chain reactions. Boron, an element that absorbs neutrons and hinders nuclear fission, has been mixed with cooling water to prevent this, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the agency, told reporters today.

Ocean Contamination

Contamination of seawater found near the 40-year-old plant has increased. Radioactive iodine rose to 4,385 times the regulated safety limit yesterday from 2,572 times on Tuesday, Nishiyama said. No fishing is occurring nearby and the sea is dispersing the iodine so there is no health threat, he said.

There was 180 becquerel per cubic centimeter of radioactive iodine-131 found in the ocean 330 meters (1,082 feet) south of the plant. Drinking one liter of fresh water with that level would be equivalent to getting double the annual dose of radiation a person typically receives.

Workers have averted the threat of a total meltdown by injecting water into the damaged reactors. The complex&#8217;s six units have been reconnected with the power grid and two are using temporary motor-driven pumps. Work to repair the plant&#8217;s monitoring and cooling systems has been hampered by discoveries of hazardous radioactive water.

Dismantling the plant and decontaminating the site may take 30 years and cost Tokyo Electric more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. The government hasn&#8217;t ruled out pouring concrete over the whole facility as one way to shut it down, Edano said. Tokyo is 135 miles (220 kilometers) south of the Dai-Ichi power plant.

Dumping Concrete

Dumping concrete on the plant would serve a second purpose: it would trap contaminated water, said Tony Roulstone, an atomic engineer who directs the University of Cambridge&#8217;s masters program in nuclear energy.

&#8220;They need to immobilize this water and they need something to soak it up,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You don&#8217;t want to create another hazard, but you need to get it away from the reactors.&#8221;

The process will take longer than the 12 years needed to decommission the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania following a partial meltdown in 1979, said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University.

Investors Wiped Out

Moody&#8217;s Japan K.K. cut its rating on Tokyo Electric and warned it may reduce it further, saying the problems at Fukushima &#8220;appear far from being resolved&#8221; and the company is likely to remain unprofitable for a long time. Senior secured and long-term issuer ratings were downgraded to Baa1 from A1, Moody&#8217;s said in a statement.

Tokyo Electric&#8217;s shareholders may be wiped out by clean-up costs and liabilities stemming from the nuclear accident, the worst since Chernobyl. The company, known as Tepco, faces claims of as much as 11 trillion yen if the crisis lasts two years and potential takeover by the government, according to a March 29 Bank of America Merrill Lynch report.

Radiation &#8220;far below&#8221; levels that pose a risk to humans was found in milk from California and Washington, the first signs Japan&#8217;s nuclear accident is affecting U.S. food, state and Obama administration officials said.

The U.S. is stepping up monitoring of radiation in milk, rain and drinking water, the Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration said yesterday in a statement.

Radiation levels in the U.K. are normal and extra testing isn&#8217;t needed to protect the food supply, the Food Standards Agency said.

The number of dead and missing from the earthquake and tsunami had reached 27,690 as of 10 a.m. today, Japan&#8217;s National Police Agency said.

--With assistance from Shigeru Sato, Yuji Okada, Tsuyoshi Inajima, Michio Nakayama, John Brinsley and Go Onomitsu in Tokyo, Tara Patel in Paris, Kari Lundgren and Alex Devine in London, Jim Snyder and Simon Lomax in Washington, Jim Polson in New York and Simeon Bennett in Singapore. Editors: Alex Devine, Will Kennedy

To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net; Sachiko Sakamaki in Tokyo at ssakamaki1@bloomberg.net; Yuriy Humber in Tokyo at yhumber@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Patrick Chu at pachu@bloomberg.net -0- Mar/31/2011 13:23 GMT

Link to video.

 

[Monsterzuma]

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/03/30/has-fukushimas-reactor-no-1-gone-critical/

Has Fukushima's Reactor No. 1 Gone Critical?

On March 23, Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a Research Scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies saw a report by Kyodo news agency that caught his eye. It reported that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had observed a neutron beam about 1.5 km away from the plant. Bursts of neutrons in large quantities can only come from fission so Dalnoki-Veress, a physicist, was faced with an alarming possibility: had portions of one of Fukushima's reactors gone critical?
To nuclear workers, there are few events more fearful than a criticality accident. In such a scenario, the fissile material in a reactor core--be it enriched uranium or plutonium--undergoes a spontaneous chain reaction, releasing a flash of aurora-blue light and a surge of neutron radiation; the gamma rays, neutrons and radioactive fission products emitted during criticality are highly dangerous to humans. Criticality occurs so rapidly--within a few fractions of a second--and so unpredictably that it can suddenly kill workers without warning. There have been 60 criticality incidents worldwide since 1945. The most recent occurred in Japan in 1999, at an experimental reactor in Tokai, when a beam of neutrons killed two workers, hospitalized dozens of emergency workers and nearby residents, and forced hundreds of thousands to remain indoors for 24 hours.
Dalnoki-Veress did not see any further reference to a neutron release. But two days after the Kyodo agency report, on March 25, TEPCO made public measurements of different isotopes contributing to the extremely high measured radioactivity in the seawater used to cool reactor No 1. Again, a piece of the data jumped out at Dalnoki-Veress: the high prevalence of the chlorine-38 (CL-38) isotope. CL-38 has a half-life of 37 minutes, so would decay so rapidly as to be of little long-term safety concern. But it's very presence troubled Dalnoki-Veress. Chlorine-37 (CL-37) is part of natural chlorine that is present in seawater in the form of ordinary table salt. In order to form CL-38, however, neutrons must interact with CL-37. Dalnoki-Verress did some calculations and came to the conclusion that the only possible way this neutron interaction could have occurred was the presence of transient criticalities in pockets of melted fuel in the reactor core.
Yesterday, he published those calculation in a paper for the blog ArmsControlWonk. The paper makes clear that if a criticality accident occurred at Fukishima, it could happen again—and while such a possibility poses minimal danger to Japanese citizens outside of the 20km exclusion zone, it means the emergency workers at Fukushima are operating in even more dangerous conditions than anyone realized. "It is important for TEPCO to be aware of the possibility of transient criticalities when work is being done; otherwise workers would be in considerably greater danger," the paper concludes. "This analysis is not definitive proof but it does mean that we cannot rule out localized criticality."
The paper is now open for comments at the ArmsControlWonk website and can be found here.
Update: Edwin Lyman, a nuclear safety expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Ecocentric that he is skeptical of Dalnoki-Veress's thesis, not because the math or physics was faulty but because he does not trust the accuracy of TEPCO's reporting of high levels of CL-38. In an email, he wrote, "I think, given the error they committed in Unit 2 (first reporting a huge concentration of I-134, which wasn't actually there), I'd be wary of attributing too much significance to a single anomalous measurement."

Update 2: The IAEA has said that the Fukushima nuclear power plant may have achieved re-criticality. “There is no final assessment,” IAEA nuclear safety director Denis Flory said at a press conference on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News. “This may happen locally and possibly increase the releases.”


Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/03/30/has-fukushimas-reactor-no-1-gone-critical/#ixzz1ILzxZC9x

 

[Disgustipated]

That's very bad news for the workers. I don't know about the dosimeters they use over there, but our dosimeters primarily measured gamma radiation (the most common type outside the secondary shielding), and not neutron radiation. If their instruments are only reading gamma radiation, that means they are getting a much larger dose than what's being reported. They may indeed die in a few months.

 

[Formaldehyde]

TEPCO apparently doesn't even have enough alarming dosimeters to give to all the workers.

Tokyo, Apr 1: The Japanese government's nuclear regulatory agency has issued another warning to Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPC) over concerns that the management workers are constantly getting exposed to high levels of radiation at the earthquake-cum-tsunami hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, after it was found that there were not enough dosimeters to cover all of the workers.

The Kyodo news agency quoted the agency's spokesman, Hidehiko Nishiyama, as saying that some workers have been found sharing dosimeters while doing the same job because many of the devices were destroyed in the March 11 disaster, adding that this trend is unsafe for the workers.

"From today, all of the workers will wear dosimeters. And if each individual cannot get one, the work should not take place," he added.

TEPCO officials have that said the number of dosimeters had declined from 5,000 to 320 after the tsunami damaged the devices at the plant.

This blatant disregard for human life likely caused the first deaths from exposure to radiation.

Earlier today, the mother of one of the workers at plant had revealed that her son and his colleagues believe that they have been exposed to high levels of radiation and would die from radiation sickness 'within weeks' or 'cancer in the long-term.'

"My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation. He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long-term," the woman had said.

"They have concluded between themselves that it is inevitable some of them may die within weeks or months. They know it is impossible for them not to have been exposed to lethal doses of radiation," she added.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Link to video.

 

[onedreamer]

Why, were there more 9.0 quakes I don't know about?
A car accident killed someone today. More cars are also destroying out environment with CO2. I guess it's time to stop using all cars.

That CO2 is harmful is widely recognized and at least formally the world is trying to lower the emissions if not completely eliminate them and move to another type of engines.
I don't see the same wide recognition for the dangers associated with nuclear plants especially when built in highly sismic areas, as is evident from your reply, so your comparison is misplaced and your sarcasm and cynicism are really out of place.

 

[onedreamer]

That's very bad news for the workers.

TEPCO apparently doesn't even have enough alarming dosimeters to give to all the workers.

This blatant disregard for human life likely caused the first deaths from exposure to radiation.

I read in an interview that most workers aren't actually workers in the strict acception of the term or how you (or at least I) would expect them to be. Most of them are common people, volounteers mostly former residents of the area struck by the double disaster who probably think they have not much more to loose. Their work consists in cleaning the area from all the debris caused by the tsunami and from the later explosions, watering the radioactive materials, rebuilding power cable lines, etc. They do 48 hours shifts and then fall exhausted on lead "beds". They aren't even trained personnel so the situation is completely surreal, they are literally kamikaze.

 

[choxorn]

They aren't even trained personnel so the situation is completely surreal, they are literally kamikaze.

Being literally kamikaze would make them literal wind sent by the gods to do something.

 

[Greizer85]

Being literally kamikaze would make them literal wind sent by the gods to do something.

He just used the word 'literally' figuratively. I'm not saying it's something you should do, just that you can.

Anyway. Put nuke plants on hold 'til we figure out that thorium stuff. Or combined fission/fusion (not sure if it really exists in any viable form; I read about it in a fairly dubious pop-science magazine). The reactors' safety systems must be based on natural laws, not active machinery that needs constant powering.

And for Heaven's sake, educate people about radiation. I feel ashamed to live in a country where people buy iodine pills although the disaster is literally (correct use this time ) half the globe away.

 

[Bill Clymer]

If I can help you with information on nuclear accidents just contact me