Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[ninakat]

[ninakat]

via Cryptogon:

JAPAN: THREE NUCLEAR REACTORS MAY BE MELTING DOWN
http://cryptogon.com/?p=21134

[thurnundtaxis]

Live translated Japanese TV News stream: NHK World News http://www.justin.tv/iwaworld#/w/966575344

[justdrew]

the rods are at least 50% exposed.
this explosion doesn't seem like it was a hydrogen explosion. so it could well have been an FCI
staff being evacuated from 1-3, skeleton crew staying behind to work the problem as long as possible...

not much other than an FCI is likely, meaning the pressure vessel has been breached by molten corium.

minor good news... #4 is in cold shutdown.

[Ben D]

http://abcnews.go.com/International/japan-earthquake-reactor-fukushima-nuclear-plant-explodes/story?id=13131123

Third Reactor at Fukushima Nuclear Plant Explodes

Blast Came After IAEA Said Containment Vessels at Fukushima Nuclear Reactors Seem to Be Working

By DAVID MUIR and JESSICA HOPPER
March 14, 2011

There was a new explosion Tuesday morning at a reactor the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and the company that runs the plant said water may be leaking from the reactor.

Half of the rods inside the reactor were not immersed in water and the suppression pool, which holds the water used to keep the rods cool, seemed to be damaged, according to Tokyo Electric Co. and government officials.

The level of radiation also rose around the reactor, but a government official said there was no danger.

"The radioactive level near unit 2 has gone up, but at this juncture, the level is not judged to be immediately harmful to human bodies," said Noriyuki Shikata, a spokesman in the prime minister's office.

The blast is the third at the plant in the three days since a powerful earthquake struck Japan on Friday.

[seemslikeadream]

Why is the world letting Japan continue to oversee this catastrophe? Obviously they do not have the ability, they are in a full scale panic. This is the planet Earth's crisis.

The Idiocy and Hubris of Engineers: Will GE Get Whacked for the Catastrophic Failure of its Nuk Plants in Fukushira?
Mon, 03/14/2011 - 12:44 — Anonymous
by:
Dave Lindorff


GE, the company that boasts that it “brings good things to life,” was the designer of the nuclear plants that are blowing up like hot popcorn kernels at the Fukushima Dai-ichi generating plant north of Tokyo that was hit by the double-whammy of an 8.9 earthquake and a huge tsunami.

The company may escape tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in liability from this continuing disaster, which could still result in a catastrophic total meltdown of one or more of the reactors (as of this writing three of the reactors are reported to have suffered partial meltdowns, and all could potentially become more serious total meltdowns with a rupture of the reactor container), thanks to Japanese law, which makes the operator--in this case Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) liable. But if it were found that it was design flaws by GE that caused the problem, presumably TEPCO or the Japanese government could pursue GE for damages.

In fact, the design of these facilities--a design which, it should be noted, was also used in 23 nuclear plants operating in the US in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont--appear to have included serious flaws, from a safety perspective.

The drawings of the plants in question, called Mark I Reactors, provide no way for venting hydrogen gas from the containment buildings, despite the fact that one of the first things that happens in the event of a cooling failure is the massive production of hydrogen gas by the exposed fuel rods in the core. This is why two of the nuclear generator buildings at Fukushima Dai-ichi have exploded with tremendous force blasting off the roof and walls of the structures, and damaging control equipment needed to control the reactors.

One would have thought that design engineers at GE would have thought about that fact, and provided venting systems for any hydrogen gas being vented in an emergency into the building. But no. They didn’t.
There goes the neighborhood: A second GE nuclear reactor building at Fukushima Dai-ishi suffers a hydrogen gas explosion.

There is a worse problem though. Probably in an effort to keep the problem of nuclear waste hidden from the public, these plants feature huge pools of water up in the higher level of the containment building above the reactors, which hold the spent fuel rods from the reactor. These rods are still “hot” but besides the uranium fuel pellets, they also contain the highly radioactive and potentially biologically active decay products of the fission process--particularly radioactive Cesium 137, Iodine 131 and Strontium 90. (Some of GE's plants in the US feature this same design. The two GE Peach Bottom reactors near me, for example, each have two spent fuel tanks sitting above their reactors.)

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."

Adding to that worry, Alvarez says photos of Reactor 3 seem to show white steam rising from the damaged facility, from a location where the spent fuel pond would likely be. (See photo below)

Steam appears to be billowing up from the damaged Reactor 3 at the Fukushima Dai-ishi plant, suggesting the pool containing spent fuel has been compromised

But it gets worse. According to news reports, the Reactor 3 unit was being fueled with a controversial mixed oxides fuel rod, which includes, in addition to uranium, a significant amount of plutonium--a far more dangerous element both chemically as a toxin, and in terms of its radioactivity.

You have to ask, what kind of numbskull would put a waste “pond” for spent fuel right above the reactor of a nuclear plant, thus insuring that in the event of a meltdown, not only would the core of the reactor blow up into the environment, but also all of the spent fuel from prior years? All that "Six Sigma" quality culture stuff at GE and they came up with this?

I don’t know. I heard about those waste “pools” in the past, and always assumed they were somewhere on the plant grounds away from the reactor itself, but now it turns out they put the damned things right in the line of fire of any meltdown. Boy, that’s just brilliant!

It’s as if you put the oil tank or propane tank for your furnace right above the burner in your basement, so that if there was some problem with the furnace it would ignite the tank, or as if you put the gas tank of your car right above the engine, so that if you had an engine fire, it would explode the gas tank!

This may explain why people in India are reportedly rethinking GE’s bid for a big piece of the country’s proposed market for $150 billion in new nuclear power plants in that country, and why it may not be so easy for GE and other nuclear plant builders to escape liability for their products in the future.

Back in November, President Obama was in India pushing that country’s government to pass legislation exempting GE from liability for nuclear “accidents.” That idea is probably not going to go very far now.

Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and CEO of GE and a big friend of Obama’s (he was named to an unpaid post as “jobs czar” by the president earlier this year, despite the company’s long record of exporting US jobs to places like China and India), says it’s “too soon” to assess the impact on the company’s nuclear business prospects of the nuclear “accidents” in northern Japan.
Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE

He’s certainly right about that (though investors aren’t waiting: the stock was down 3.5% today alone by noon, following the second hydrogen gas explosion). At this point only two of the buildings housing the six troubled reactors has blown up, and TEPCO has only lost control of the cooling systems in three of the six, and also, so far, only three have suffered partial meltdowns. Things could get a lot worse if one or more goes into full meltdown, or if one or more of those waste “ponds” blows up.

GE may end up having to change its motto to: “GE brings death to things.”

[justdrew]

Why is the world letting Japan continue to oversee this catastrophe? Obviously they do not have the ability, they are in a full scale panic. This is the planet Earth's crisis.

well, it may well be there's not better choices anyone could make (since the accident)

the basic design was entirely insufficient, just like so many American nuke plants. It SEEMS to be US policy that these reactors be improperly defended. It's clear lots of engineers and policy deciders like to pat themselves on the back about how fail-safe and redundant they're designed, but clearly, protection planning was insufficient.

So. California's San Onofre nuclear plant, near fault line and sea, built to withstand less than Japan plant

---

#
0013: An article in the Japan Times says: "The radioactive fuel rods at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 power station were fully exposed at one point Monday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said, raising the possibility that it suffered a partial core meltdown."

[seemslikeadream]

How long do you think the world will let Japan make the decisions on this one? Or maybe Japan could be convinced to let go

[Canadian_watcher]

How long do you think the world will let Japan make the decisions on this one? Or maybe Japan could be convinced to let go

this may be entirely too practical, but if you were among TPTB, who would you send to die taking care of radioactive waste? Given that this is very, very likely much worse than they are reporting, what personnel from other countries would actually go there, and what could they do?

[barracuda]

seemslikeadream, I'm trying to figure out who exactly you are referring to when you say, "the world". Usually, in general parlance, when I hear that phrase it means, "the United States Armed Forces".

[StarmanSkye]

WhaT? Even MORE incredibleness! The spent-fuel pools sitting right above the reactor was something that sure stuck-out in my reviews of the obsolete Mark I reactor design, basically derived from early nuke submarines -- But I thought, surely they're only temporary storage, or else some of the commentaries I've read would have noted how vulnerable and dangerous they are. Turns out, they are MAJOR liabilities. Which together with the resulting damage to control equipment from the hydrogen gas explosions, makes this a wannabe dirty-bomb terrorist's wet-dream. I thought reactors were supposed to be 'protected' against stuff like this?

Who would or could have imagined these reactors being such huge, ticking time-bomb disasters waiting for an inevitable accident to turn critical?

Well DuH, I guess a LOT of people, tho obviously NOT the officials and corporate execs who were actually in-charge and whose job is supposed to be pro-active preventing these one-in-a-million crises, but whose loyalty to the almighty profit-incentive has now resulted in the world having to deal with the tragic results of their unconscionable, calculated cold-blooded idiocy.

If GE was sued for faulty design and bankrupted, it would probably serve them right. Besides top managers & CEOs being indicted for manslaughter.

I think I read that gamma radiation has now been detected ...

Still the officials are blathering about 'no danger'.

[Jeff]

NHK: explosion, suppression pool pressure drop, 10,000X increase (over normal) radition levels, partial evac of TEPCO staff - reactor 2 36 minutes ago via Seesmic Web

http://twitter.com/Joi

[justdrew]

BBC live update feed has been silent for a half hour

---

0052: Details are now emberging about radiation levels after the blast at Fukushima's reactor 2 at 0610 local time (2110 GMT Monday). Tokyo Electric officials say that one hour of exposure at the nuclear plant would be equivalent to eight times at what a person might experience naturally during the year.

so 8 years background radiation in one hour.

[Nordic]

This has seemed from the very beginning like it was not going to end well. It's not. This is probably going to be the worst environmental disaster in our lives.

I really hate seeing all these rather glib "experts" talking about how it ain't really that bad, no way could it be worse than Chernobyl, yadda yadda yadda.

These are all the same kind of "experts" who built the damn plants in the first place.

[Jeff]

Couldn't be worse.

The wind over a radiation-leaking nuclear plant in northern Japan will blow inland from the northeast and later from the east on Tuesday, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/ ... DA20110314