Nordic wrote: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.
The second worst in less than a year.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by The Consul » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:08 pm
Nordic wrote: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.
by anothershamus » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:09 pm
by nathan28 » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:16 pm
Nordic wrote:We sit here, watching something analogous to of the Towers falling on live TV, not with thousands but millions of people in them, and not in seconds but over the course of days.
Exactly. And right now seems analogous to the time during 9/11 when they told the workers to go back into the buildings, because they were oh so "SAFE".
Ya know?
StarmanSkye wrote:I simply don't 'get' why this situation has been allowed to get progressively worse.
Jeff wrote: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
by justdrew » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:18 pm
Meltdown in the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima
Possible spread of radioactivity (Update: March 13, 2011)
After the severe earthquake in Japan yesterday arrived in Japan Fukushima nuclear power plant by about 8:30 Universal Time (UTC) to an explosion. The ZAMG calculates the spread of a possible radioactive cloud.
The amount of radionuclides that were released is unclear, the calculations are therefore interpreted qualitatively. It is assumed a continuous release at ground level (0-30 m). This corresponds to the reported emission technology scenario of a partial core melt with containment intact.
Currently, possible radiation clouds move out to sea. Inhabited areas with the exception of the perimeter of the plant would not be affected. From Tuesday possible emissions could be transported more to the south.
A neat air masses arrived from Japan to Europe and Austria is ruled out because of Meteorology.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:27 pm
by 23 » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:28 pm
by Canadian_watcher » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:30 pm
Nordic wrote: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.
by justdrew » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:35 pm
Canadian_watcher wrote:Nordic wrote: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.
I'm with you. I felt literally sick watching the talking head 'expert' with his smarmy smile telling everyone that there was nothing to worry about even in a worst case scenario. He wasn't in Japan.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:43 pm
Japan has asked IAEA for expert help: UN watchdog
Official in protective gear talks to a woman who is from the evacuation area near the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant in Koriyama this past weekend.
Japan has officially asked the UN atomic watchdog to send a team of experts to help in the current nuclear crisis, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said Monday.
"Today, the government of Japan asked the agency to provide expert missions. We are in discussions with Japan on the details," Amano told IAEA member states in a closed-door technical briefing at the watchdog's Vienna headquarters.
by justdrew » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:55 pm
Fission Criticality In Cooling Ponds Threaten Explosion At Fukushima
Monday, 14 March 2011
Written by Joseph Trento
The threat of a fission explosion at the Fukushima power facility emerged today when the roof of the number three reactor exploded and fears that a spent fuel pool, located over the reactor, has been compromised. The pool, designed to allow reactor fuel to cool off for several years, was constructed on top of the Fukushima reactors instead of underground. As of 2010, there were 3450 fuel assemblies in the pool at the number three reactor. The destruction of the number three reactor building has experts concerned about whether the spent fuel storage pool, which sits just below the roof, could have survived intact the hydrogen explosion. The explosion was much more severe than Saturday’s blast at the number one reactor.
As massive amounts of seawater are pumped by fire trucks into Fukushima’s failing nuclear reactors and cooling ponds, the radioactive waste water, now laden with a variety of radioisotopes, is being flushed into the sea.
Just how much danger the spent fuel pool raises is made clear in a November 2010 powerpoint presentation from the Tokyo Electric Company detailing how fuel storage works at the huge complex.
The fuel inventory in the pool is detailed on page 9. According to TEPCO, each reactor generates 700 "waste" fuel assemblies a year, and there are 3450 assemblies in each pool at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, plus another 6,291 in a common pool in a separate building.
As shown in slide 10, the common pool building sits at ground level, with the pool itself above ground. The building also has windows on at least one side, and experts fear these were broken out by the tsunami which would have flooded the building.
According to Albert Donnay, a former nuclear engineer, “This means the common pool is now full of radioactive and corrosive seawater that will cause the fuel assemblies to fail and burst open, as they are doing inside the reactor cores that have been deliberately flooded with seawater. If the pool drains or boils away, the fuel will melt, burn and even possibly explode if the fuel collapses into a sufficiently critical mass.”
This may explain why the Japanese government began adding boric acid to the reactor spent fuel pools at the facility shortly after the earthquake and tidal wave.
The Japanese government has not explained why it is adding boric acid and if the acid is being used to prevent criticality in the reactor or in the spent fuel pool. A spokesman for the Embassy of Japan, in Washington, D.C., said the boric acid was being only added as a “precautionary measure,” but said the Embassy did not know why. Because the GE reactor’s control rods are made of boron, and they were automatically inserted when the earthquake struck to end fission in the reactor, there should have been no need for additional boric acid. But if fuel rods had been compromised and the damaged fuel bundles were not properly separated, they can become critical and boric acid could be used to help prevent a far more serious meltdown in the spent fuel pools.
When the power was lost at the site, the cooling system for the pools would have run out of water in about a day. The water in these pools would heat up and evaporate to the point where the tops of the fuel bundles would be exposed about 24 hours after the cooling system shut down.
Experts fear the explosion rained debris into the pool that stopped natural cooling of the fuel bundles or knocked the bundles together, damaging them, sending the irradiated fuel chunks to the bottom of the pool where they could reach critical mass. “They got a one-two punch,” said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a consultant to both industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Lockbaum told Roger Witherspoon on newjerseynewsroom.com, “If it had just been the earthquake, or just the tsunami, we wouldn’t even be talking about this. But the combination of nature was more than they could handle. It doesn’t seem that they have lost control yet. But they have definitely run out of options.
“If those solutions – the sea water and the boric acid – don’t work, there are no more arrows in the quiver. They have shot everything they have, they have run out of options and there is nothing left.”
The problem for the Tokyo Electric Company engineers is water containing boric acid has to circulate in the pools to keep the bundles from going critical.
Both United States and Japanese governments have for decades allowed re-racking of the pools to reduce the originally-designed minimum safe distance between the assemblies so that more rods can be stored in each pool. Utilities complained they were running out of storage space on site at the reactors. The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material.
According to Donnay, “Several cores worth of spent fuel are usually stored in these pools until they are cool enough to transfer into dry cask storage. In comparison, the reactor itself contains only one core, and its total radioactivity is less than that in each spent core.”
Nuclear Information Resource Service led a coalition of groups that petitioned the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005 requesting emergency enforcement action on the vulnerability of the Mark I and II elevated nuclear waste storage pool. The coalition’s petition to the NRC was denied.
Another worry for engineers is that in 2009 plutonium-based mixed oxide fuel produced by the huge French nuclear power company AREVA was loaded into reactor number three.
Correspondent Celia Sampol spoke to AREVA and the company spokesman said AREVA will not make a specific statement on the issue or on the possible losses for its activities in Japan because "today the priority is for the Japanese authorities to save people and help victims". AREVA's employees in Japan were contacted on Friday, all are safe and some of them left Japan. Anne Lauvergeon "will talk about that in France soon".
Nathalie Bonnefoy, from the MELOX Division of AREVA La Hague, France, said, "Today, the type of fuel used in the reactor is absolutely not involved in the problems at the Fukushima facility...It's not a matter of the MOX fuel exploding; the problem is if you have a loss of cooling, you have a risk of fusion and the hydrogen released could generate difficulties in contact with air, but it is independent from the type of combustible used.”
"In this site, all the MOX fuel has been already loaded in the reactor (it started in October 2010)," no MOX fuel is stored on site here. On others sites, a part of the MOX fuel is stored on site (every 18 months you have to renew one third of the MOX fuel because it has lost efficiency). According to Bonnefoy, four reactors in Japan are burning MOX fuel fabricated by AREVA; the first loading took place in December 2009; AREVA signed contracts with eight (out of eleven) Japanese electric companies to supply MOX fuel, but the French group has no reactors of its own in Japan. The company does have about 100 employees in Japan.
According to NIRS (Nuclear Information Resource Service) at http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/brownsferryfactsheet.pdf"In the GE Mark I design, the irradiated fuel pool, containing billions of curies of high-level atomic waste, sits atop the reactor building, outside primary containment and vulnerable to attack, according to both NRC documents (2001) and the National Academy of Sciences (2005)."
The same diagram appears in the Sunday New York Times, pA11, with the uppermost rectangular chamber just to the left of the reactor top identified as the spent fuel storage pool, but the accompanying article does not discuss it.
Donnay said, “If these pools are breached (as could have happened in the explosions, Fukushima #3 looks worse than #1) and can no longer hold water, the spent fuel racked inside them will start to overheat, and eventually melt and burn. And since there is no longer any roof above these pools in reactors 1 and 3, all the radioactivity they contain is directly open to the atmosphere.”
According to a Defense Department source, the cesium detected in the atmosphere around the plant could be coming from the spent fuel pools.
According to Donnay, there is an additional danger from used fuel being stored in casks: “I'm also worried about the dry cask storage pods that were on the site before the tsunami.
Full casks are very heavy and probably would not be carried away by the flood, but some were probably not full. Any that were only partially filled with spent fuel would have air locked into the unfilled chambers, making them able to float in water. Did the tsunami carry any of these casks away? Are they all still onsite? Before and after satellite photos should be able to show this clearly, but Google Earth is not showing after photos of the Fukushima plant.
by justdrew » Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:13 pm
justdrew wrote:justdrew wrote: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.
by anothershamus » Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:18 pm
by Ben D » Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:21 pm
by DrVolin » Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:25 pm
by justdrew » Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:44 pm
The spent fuel rods that were launched into the air last night have been out in the open and un-cooled long enough that they are starting to burn. Expect more fires shortly.
This is verfied anti?..that Uranium spent fuel has been scatered amongst the debris?
Might the additon of exploding spent fuel have been the reason for the darker smoke associated with the second and third explosions?
Obviously there was more damge with the second I haven't seen any coverage (video or images) of the third building.
Go back and look at the video of 3# exploding last night. Watch the large object fall back down to the left of the plume. The proximate height was 2000ft. Look at the satellite image that allows you to look down and see the actual top of the containment structure, then read the articles describing where the pools are placed.
I have been informed by a knowledgeable source that as of earlier today the pool above #1 was intact and "safe", however the contents of the #3 pool are only partially accounted for. Much stayed anchored to the pool, but an un-known amount broke free. The rods remaining in the pool are racked in somewhat safe containers and only damaged containers will burn. Many of the "racks" that broke free will be damaged. Between 24 and 48 hours after open air exposure they will self immolate unless cooled or submerged. They are also insanely radioactive and cant possibly be approached by humans without severe protection and limited exposure.
Radiation levels now being measured in milliisieverts not smaller Microsieverts
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