Nuclear Meltdown Watch

[eyeno]

Things that make you go hmmmmm...


http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/fukushima.html

Companion story.

Researchers Cancel SCADA Hacking Presentation After Department of Homeland Security’s ICS-CERT and Siemens Raise Concerns
May 19th, 2011

Via: NSS Labs Press Release:

Dillon Beresford, security researcher at NSS Labs, who was scheduled to present at TakedownCon 2011 on SCADA vulnerabilities chose to withdraw his presentation at the 11th hour after collaborative discussions with ICS-CERT and Siemens regarding the serious consequences it may have to human lives and the world at large. The vulnerabilities and PoC exploit code were provided to ICS-CERT and Siemens, and has been verified.

http://cryptogon.com/?p=22431

[eyeno]

"Fuel Rods Most Likely Melt[ed] COMPLETELY at Reactors 1, 2 AND 3 in the Early Hours of the Crisis, Raising the Danger of More Catastrophic Releases"

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/05/ ... etely.html

[seemslikeadream]

Tepco Confirms Meltdown of Reactors
By Takeshi Awaji and Yuji Okada -

Tepco Confirms Meltdown of No. 2, 3 Reactors at Fukushima

The Unit 1, left, and the Unit 2 reactor buildings at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station in Fukushima, Japan, on May 6, 2011. Source: Tokyo Electric Power Co. via Bloomberg
Japan, China, Korea Agree to Ensure Nuclear Safety May 23

May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Japan, China and South Korea agreed to improve cooperation on ensuring safe atomic power as well as boost economic ties two months after Japan’s record earthquake and tsunami triggered the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years. Mike Firn reports from Tokyo on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)

Tokyo Electric Power Co. confirmed a meltdown of fuel rods in two more reactors at its Fukushima nuclear plant, which has been emitting radiation since an earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and cooling systems.

[82_28]

Jesus Christ, it seems we're living in a nightmare we haven't quite got to the scary parts of. Just living a dream. Heh, seemslikeadream indeed.

[Nordic]

The building was damaged by a hydrogen explosion on March 12.

Damaged? It was blown to Kingdom Come! Smithereens!

What an insulting level of understatement in that article.

And in the middle of it, the stock price for TEPCO. Like anybody gives a rats ass about that bullshit.

It's like listing the stock price for Smith and Wesson in the middle of a story about a shooting rampage/massacre.

[seemslikeadream]

When Will Governments Act to Protect Us From Fukushima's Spreading Radiation?
Fukushima Goes Global

By ROBERT ROTH

To a limited extent, you can protect yourself and others against cancer from radiation.(1) But such means offer limited protection at best, and meanwhile massive amounts of irreparable damage are being caused ongoingly by the Fukushima disaster. Here are the high points of the latest disclosures and findings:

First, there was a coverup, and that there were one or more meltdowns at the Fukishima site very early on, one of them even before the tsunami hit. Besides confirming the usual about reliability of official sources, a key conclusion to draw from that is that many reactors are even less safe than previously thought. Besides the four on the California Coast plus a number of smaller research reactors in their vicinity, all in line to be damaged by the earthquake and possible tsunami likely to happen sooner or later and possibly any time, there is at least one that was in danger of damage from the Mississippi flooding that just occurred last week.(2)

Second, it becomes clearer all the time that we don't have to wait for one of the reactors in the U.S. to blow to create serious danger and harm. Among nuclear experts not paid by the industry or employed by government sources essentially in league with the industry, one suggests that fuel rods were blown into the air and vaporized by early events at Fukushima, others may or have already melted down through their containment structures and are going who knows where, and massive amounts of radioactive water have been and continue to be released into the ocean. It also appears that far greater harm could yet be done by the Fukushima reactors, and neither TEPCO nor the Japanese Government are up to the task of preventing that. Harvey Wasserman, a longtime activist who edits the nukefree.org website, calls for an international effort to devise and implement a plan to contain the damage to the extent possible.(3)

Third, part of the reason it's so hard to tell exactly what's going on is that the Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) and the Japanese Government are being a lot more effective at controlling the flow of information than at containing the disaster at Fukushima. The Japanese Government has refused to let Greenpeace conduct testing inside its territorial waters. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory [sic: Marketing and Promotional] Commission has stopped monitoring the situation. The U.S. EPA and the Canadian Government have shut down much of their monitoring. And no one in an official position is talking straight. So we have a combination of independent experts saying the situation is grave and worsening, and official sources refusing not only to disclose what they know but declining to find out the truth. So you get people like me trying to figure out and sum things up instead of the systematic disclosure and analysis we should be getting from official sources.(4)

Fourth, there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation. So the figures about readings in excess of legal limits, while they are disturbing, are also misleading in that they imply there are levels below which radiation would not be harmful. I recently found an article that confirms what I had guessed at myself (although, to be clear, I am not a health professional or formally trained in biology or related sciences): The reason there is no safe dose is that cancer begins at the molecular level: "Several lines of evidence convince most cancer biologists that cancer starts its development from ONE genetically abnormal cell."(5)

The probability of developing cancer is quantitative, that is, the greater the number and volume of exposures to cancer-causing substances or radiation, the greater the probability that cancer will occur. Conversely, it would seem, the greater the number and volume of protective activities or substances we can accumulate, the lower the probability that the carcinogens we encounter will actually cause cancer to develop. But at the same time, the exposure of large populations to carcinogens is likely to cause a large number of cancers. The threat here is that seawater, seafood, soil, air, and rain can all carry radioactive materials, and apparently are doing so increasingly, with the continual release of radiation from Fukushima, and that these cancer-causing material are reaching the United States. So while the meltdown of a reactor located in the U.S. would cause a quantitatively greater exposure to residents here, we are already being exposed as a result of radiation released by Fukushima.

Although it may seem Quixotic to speak of protecting ourselves in the face of the planetary-level onslaught on our health and wellbeing and indeed, on all life forms on the Earth, I return to the fact that the risk of cancer is quantitative, that we are exposed to numerous carcinogens on a daily basis, and it is possible to counteract to some extent their effect, through exercise, nutrition, and by other means. Both red wine (a glass a day) and dark chocolate (an ounce a day) are among the many protective substances available to us.(6)

However, there is a limit to how much red wine, dark chocolate, or even Justice, can heal. It seems clear that massive amounts of irreparable damage are being caused ongoingly by the Fukushima disaster. My purpose in sharing this information and analysis is to inform you of the threat to your own health and that of your children and grandchildren, born, unborn or maybe just hoped for, to give you the tools to do as much as can be done to protect yourself and those you love, and to attempt to motivate you and others to become vocal and otherwise active in advocating that the U.S. Government begin behaving responsibly, first, by monitoring and disclosing accurate information about the situation at Fukushima, the ongoing releases of radiation and where the various radioactive elements are traveling; by cutting off (rather than continuing, as President Obama has proposed) the billions of dollars in subsidies, including the limitations of liability, without which nuclear power could not continue to operate; and by seeing to the shutdown and responsible decommissioning of nuclear reactors in the U.S. and the development of replacement sources of power, including conservation, and excluding biomass incineration, as the governments of Japan and Germany are now beginning to do.

[Jeff]

More New Normal:

Outrage as Japan lifts radiation limit for kids

By Tokyo correspondent Mark Willacy

Posted Tue May 24, 2011 12:43pm AEST

Outraged parents have held a rowdy demonstration outside Japan's education ministry in Tokyo to protest against the government's decision to weaken nuclear safety standards in schools.

Under new guidelines, Japanese children are allowed to be exposed to 20 times more radiation than was previously permissible.

The new regulation means children can now be exposed to as much radiation as a German nuclear worker.

The government argues the change is essential to keeping schools open in the Fukushima region.

According to Nobel Prize-winning group Physicians for Social Responsibility, the new limits mean exposed children now have a one-in-200 risk of getting cancer, compared with a one-in-500 risk for adults.

The decision provoked outrage from within Japan's government, with the prime minister's chief scientific adviser resigning in protest.

The government says it had no choice but to raise the legal exposure limit, saying about three-quarters of the schools in Fukushima have radiation levels above the old safety level of one millisievert.

...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011 ... 225435.htm

[crikkett]

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105240141.html

More radioactive water may leak from Fukushima plant
2011/05/25PrintShare Article
Tokyo Electric Power Co. is fast running out of places to stash highly radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and may soon be unable to prevent leaks into the ocean.

About 744 tons of water a day was being pumped into the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors as of May 22.

Some of that is evaporating into the atmosphere, but most appears to be ending up in pools of radioactive water at the plant.

TEPCO has been trying to contain that water by transferring it to storage areas around the site, but the containers for the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors are expected to reach full capacity in about four and three days, respectively.

As the disaster response teams continue pumping water into the reactors to cool down the fuel rods, water will accumulate in the turbine buildings and trenches around the buildings, raising the risk of further radioactive leaks into the sea.

A total of about 25,000 tons of highly radioactive water has been found in the turbine building and a trench at the No. 2 reactor. In early April, 500 tons (4,700 terabecquerels) leaked into the sea from a work pit near the reactor's water intake.

Twenty-two thousand tons of radioactive water has also accumulated at the No. 3 reactor. A leak of 250 tons (20 terabecquerels) was discovered near its water intake on May 11.

Ten thousand tons (0.15 terabecquerels) of relatively low-level radioactive water was also intentionally discharged into the sea and, by the morning of May 23, 8,676 tons had been transferred to a building within the disposal-and-treatment facility with a capacity of about 10,000 tons. That building is expected to reach full capacity by midnight on May 27.

Water at the No. 3 reactor is being transferred to a different building at the disposal-and-treatment facility with a capacity of about 4,000 tons. By the morning of May 23, 2,660 tons of water had been transferred. Full capacity was expected to be reached in three days.

The "megafloat," a huge floating structure that arrived at the nuclear plant May 21, has a capacity of about 10,000 tons, but can only store water with relatively low radioactivity levels.

To avoid the continual accumulation of water, the team at Fukushima is trying to put in place a purification system that would allow them to clean water pumped into the reactors and reuse it. However, that facility is not expected to be completed until mid-June.

Extra makeshift storage tanks for the radioactive water are expected to be installed in July at the earliest.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/busin ... nted=print

May 24, 2011

Risk From Spent Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is Greater in U.S. Than in Japan, Study Says

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study released on Tuesday by a nonprofit institute.

The report, from the Institute for Policy Studies, recommends that the United States transfer most of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel from pools filled with cooling water to dry sealed steel casks to limit the risk of an accident resulting from an earthquake, terrorism or other event.

“The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future,” the report’s author, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the institute, wrote. “In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.”

At one plant that is a near twin of the Fukushima units, Vermont Yankee on the border of Massachusetts and Vermont, the spent fuel in a pool at the solitary reactor exceeds the inventory in all four of the damaged Fukushima reactors combined, the report notes.

After a March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the Japanese plant, United States officials urged Americans to stay at least 50 miles away, citing the possibility of a major release of radioactive materials from the pool at Unit 4. The warning has reinvigorated debate about the safety of the far more crowded fuel pools at American nuclear plants.

Adding to concern, President Obama canceled a plan for a repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert last year, making it likely that the spent fuel will accumulate at the nation’s reactors for years to come.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintains that both pool and cask storage are safe, although it plans to re-examine the pool issue in light of events at Fukushima.

Nearly all American reactors, especially the older ones, have far more spent fuel on hand than was anticipated when they were designed, Mr. Alvarez, a former senior adviser at the Department of Energy, wrote.

In general, the plants with the largest inventories are the older ones with multiple reactors. By Mr. Alvarez’s calculation, the largest amount of spent fuel is at the Millstone Point plant in Waterford, Conn., where two reactors are still operating and one is retired. The second-biggest is at the Palo Verde complex in Wintersburg, Ariz., the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, with three reactors.

Companies that run reactors are generally reluctant to say how much spent fuel they have on hand, citing security concerns. But Mr. Alvarez, drawing from the environmental impact statement for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, estimated the amount of radioactive material at all of the nation’s reactors.

In the 1960s, when most of the 104 reactors operating today were conceived, reactor manufacturers assumed that the fuel would be trucked away to factories for reprocessing to recover uranium. But reprocessing proved a commercial flop and was banned in the United States in the 1970s out of concerns that the plutonium could find its way into weapons worldwide.

Today roughly 75 percent of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel is stored in pools, the report said, citing data from the Nuclear Energy Institute. About 25 percent is stored in dry casks, or sealed steel containers within a concrete enclosure. The fuel is cooled by the natural flow of air around the steel container.

But spent fuel is transferred to dry casks only when reactor pools are nearly completely full. The report recommends instead that all spent nuclear fuel older than five years be stored in the casks. It estimated that the effort would take 10 years and cost $3.5 billion to $7 billion.

“With a price tag of as much as $7 billion, the cost of fixing America’s nuclear vulnerabilities may sound high, specially given the heated budget debate occurring in Washington,” Mr. Alvarez wrote. “But the price of doing too little is incalculable.”

The casks are not viewed as a replacement for a permanent disposal site, but as an interim solution that would last for decades.

The security of spent fuel pools also drew new attention after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, partly because one of the planes hijacked by terrorists flew down the Hudson River, over the Indian Point nuclear complex in Westchester County, before crashing into the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Indian Point has pressurized water reactors with containment domes, but its spent fuel pools are outside the domes. The pools themselves are designed to withstand earthquakes and other challenges, but the surrounding buildings are not nearly as strong as those that house the reactors.

In a 2005 study ordered by Congress, the National Academy of Sciences also concluded that the pools were a credible target for terrorist attack and that consideration should be given to moving some fuel to dry casks.


More in Energy & Environment (3 of 29 articles)
Company Believes 3 Reactors Melted Down in Japan

"Believes"

[seemslikeadream]

Fukushima Faces ‘Massive’ Radioactive Water Problem
By Stuart Biggs and Yuriy Humber -

As a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency visits Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled nuclear plant today, academics warn the company has failed to disclose the scale of radiation leaks and faces a “massive problem” with contaminated water.

The utility known as Tepco has been pumping cooling water into the three reactors that melted down after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. By May 18, almost 100,000 tons of radioactive water had leaked into basements and other areas of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, according to Tepco’s estimates. The radiated water may double by the end of December.

“Contaminated water is increasing and this is a massive problem,” Tetsuo Iguchi, a specialist in isotope analysis and radiation detection at Nagoya University, said by phone. “They need to find a place to store the contaminated water and they need to guarantee it won’t go into the soil.”

The 18-member IAEA team, led by the U.K.’s head nuclear safety inspector, Mike Weightman, is visiting the Fukushima reactors to investigate the accident and the response. Tepco and Japan’s nuclear regulators haven’t updated the total radiation leakage from the plant in northern Japan since April 12.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency estimated in April the radiation released from Dai-Ichi to be around 10 percent of that from the accident at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986, while a Tepco official said at the time the amount may eventually exceed it.
Full Disclosure

“Tepco knows more than they’ve said about the amount of radiation leaking from the plant,” Jan van de Putte, a specialist in radiation safety trained at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, said yesterday in Tokyo. “What we need is a full disclosure, a full inventory of radiation released including the exact isotopes.”

The government plans to release details on the radiation released at the “appropriate time,” said Goshi Hosono, an adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan who is overseeing the crisis response and appears at daily briefings at Tepco’s headquarters.

Radiation leakage from Fukushima was raised at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week. U.S. regulations may need to be changed after the Fukushima meltdown, William Ostendorff, a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

The Japanese utility is trying to put the reactors into a cold shutdown, where core temperatures fall below 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), within six to nine months. Ostendorff rated the chance of Tepco achieving that goal at six or seven out of 10.
‘Fundamentally Incorrect’

Tepco took more than two months to confirm the meltdowns in three reactors and this week reported the breaches in the containment chambers. The delay in releasing information has led to criticism of Prime Minister Naoto Kan for not doing more to ensure Tepco is keeping the public informed.

“What I told the public was fundamentally incorrect,” Kan said in parliament on May 20, referring to assessments from the government and Tokyo that reactors were stable and the situation was contained not long after March 11. “The government failed to respond to Tepco’s mistaken assumptions and I am deeply sorry.”

Public disagreements emerged this week between Tepco and the government over whether orders were given to halt seawater injection into reactors to cool them the day after the tsunami.
Order Ignored

Tepco is considering whether to sanction the manager of the Fukushima plant, Masao Yoshida, after he ignored an order to stop pumping seawater, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the company, said yesterday.

He was commenting after Kyodo News cited Tepco Vice- President Sakae Muto saying Yoshida will be removed for disobeying the order. Hosono said Yoshida is needed at the plant to contain the crisis.

The earthquake and tsunami knocked out power in the Fukushima plant, depriving reactor cooling systems of electricity. Fuel rods overheated, causing fires, explosions and radiation leaks in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency on April 12 raised the severity rating of the Fukushima accident to 7, the highest on the global scale and the same as Chernobyl. The partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 is rated 5.
‘Desperate Measure’

The government needs to investigate the total amount of radiation leaked from the plant to ascertain damage to the ocean from contaminated water, said van de Putte, also a nuclear specialist at environmental group Greenpeace International.

The group found seaweed and fish contaminated to more than 50 times the 2,000 becquerel per kilogram legal limit for radioactive iodine-131 off the coast of Fukushima during a survey between May 3 and 9.

Mol, Belgium-based Nuclear Research Centre and Herouville- Saint-Clair, France-based Association pour le Controle de la Radioactivite dans l’Ouest confirmed they conducted analysis of the samples supplied by Greenpeace.

Ascertaining the cumulative volume of radiation emitted by the plant is possible, van de Putte said.

“Perhaps the government will speak about this matter after the detailed accident analysis,” the University of Nagoya’s Iguchi said. “It’s possible to calculate this with the time- series plant data recorded in the control room. The most important thing we need to know is the amount of fuel left in the reactor core.”

Tepco is planning to treat the contaminated water at Dai- Ichi with a unit supplied by Areva SA (CEI) from mid-June. The decontamination equipment can process 1,200 tons of water a day, Tepco said.

The company had little choice in pouring water on the reactors because the risk of contamination was outweighed by the risk of leaving fuel rods exposed, Peter Burns, a nuclear physicist with 40 years of radiation safety experience, said in an interview.

Burns, the former representative for Australia on the United Nations’ scientific committee on atomic radiation, added pumping in the water “was a desperate measure for desperate times.”

[justdrew]

air

[ninakat]

The Implications of the Fukushima Accident on the World's Operating Reactors



Arnie Gundersen explains how containment vents were added to the GE Mark 1 BWR as a "band aid" 20 years after the plants built in order to prevent an explosion of the notoriously weak Mark 1 containment system. Obviously the containment vent band aid fix did not work since all three units have lost containment integrity and are leaking radioactivity. Gundersen also discusses seismic design flaws, inadequate evacuation planning, and the taxpayer supported nuclear industry liability fund.

[Nordic]

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/super- ... ower-plant

Super Typhoon Songda Projected To Pass Over Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant

So far the only good news to accompany the Fukushima catastrophe has been that for all the fallout, the radiation has been mostly contained due to Northwesterly winds which have been blowing any radioactivity mostly out and into the Pacific (coupled with relatively little rainfall), as well as the dispersion of irradiated cooling water which promptly enters the Pacific after which it is never heard of or seen again (there is at least a several year period before 3 eyed tuna fish feature prominently in restaurants across the country). This may be changing soon now that Super Typhoon Songda, which according to Weather Underground will form shortly as a Category 5 storm with 156+ mph winds, will take a northeasterly direction and 2 days later will pass right above Fukushima. The good news: by the time it passes over Fukushima, Songda will be merely a Tropical storm. The bad news: by the time it passes over Fukushima, Songda will be a Tropical storm. As the latest dispersion projection from ZAMG shows, over the next two days the I-131 plume will be covering all of the mainland. Although judging by how prominent this whole topic is in the MSM lately, it seems that conventional wisdom now agrees with Ann Coulter that radioactivity is actually quite good for you.

[82_28]

April 1st, 1951

http://classifiedhumanity.com/post/5893 ... pectacular

To this now defunct Seattle department store's credit, there was a creepy puppet show you could go to stoned and totally have your mind blown. Fuck goddamn, if only people had cellphone video cameras back then. Jesus. What I wouldn't do to see footage of this bullshit. Not just the puppet show, but everything else. Puppets named "Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong during an atomic bombing"?!?!?!? Okay. . .

[eyeno]

Zero Hedge
May 27, 2011

Editor’s note: TEPCO now sheepishly admits that nearly 60 tons of radioactive water leaked out of the crippled nuclear power plant.

So far the only good news to accompany the Fukushima catastrophe has been that for all the fallout, the radiation has been mostly contained due to Northwesterly winds which have been blowing any radioactivity mostly out and into the Pacific (coupled with relatively little rainfall), as well as the dispersion of irradiated cooling water which promptly enters the Pacific after which it is never heard of or seen again (there is at least a several year period before 3 eyed tuna fish feature prominently in restaurants across the country). This may be changing soon now that Super Typhoon Songda, which according to Weather Underground will form shortly as a Category 5 storm with 156+ mph winds, will take a northeasterly direction and 2 days later will pass right above Fukushima. The good news: by the time it passes over Fukushima, Songda will be merely a Tropical storm. The bad news: by the time it passes over Fukushima, Songda will be a Tropical storm. As the latest dispersion projection from ZAMG shows, over the next two days the I-131 plume will be covering all of the mainland. Although judging by how prominent this whole topic is in the MSM lately, it seems that conventional wisdom now agrees with Ann Coulter that radioactivity is actually quite good for you.