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by Nordic » Wed Jun 01, 2011 1:27 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 01, 2011 10:09 pm
Radiated Water at Fukushima Plant May Breach Storage Trenches in Five Days
By Tsuyoshi Inajima - Jun 1, 2011 6:12 PM CT
May 18 (Bloomberg) -- John Price, a former member of the safety policy unit of the British National Nuclear Corporation, currently a principal at Integrity Partners, speaks about Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s efforts to cool reactors at its stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. Price speaks from Melbourne with Rishaad Salamat on Bloomberg Television's "On the Move Asia." (Source: Bloomberg)
Radioactive water accumulating in Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant is set to start overflowing from storage trenches in five days, data provided by the company show.
To prevent leakage into the ocean, the utility has poured concrete and gravel to seal off storage trenches closest to the sea containing water from the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors, according to Hikaru Kuroda, a nuclear facility maintenance official at the company.
“Even as we have sealed these trenches, there is still the risk of radioactive water leaking into the sea,” he said to reporters after a media conference yesterday. The company is seeking additional storage space to move the water from trenches to reduce such risk, he said.
The utility known as Tepco has pumped millions of liters of 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 of reactor and turbine buildings and connected tunnels and storage trenches at the plant, according to Tepco’s estimates.
Water levels are between 26.5 and 33.2 centimeters (10 and 13 inches) below the top of storage trenches for the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors, according to Tepco figures dated June 1. The water levels were 45.6 and 64.1 centimeters on May 27, showing a rate of increase that will reach the lip of the trenches as early as June 6.
Workers will seal off trenches for the No. 2 reactor today in a process that will funnel radiated water to other trenches, Tepco spokeswoman Ryoko Sakai said by telephone yesterday.
Typhoon Season
The contaminated water is a “massive problem,” Tetsuo Iguchi, a specialist in isotope analysis and radiation detection at Nagoya University, said in a phone interview on May 27. Tepco has to ensure the contaminated water doesn’t get into the soil, Iguchi said.
The rate of increase in water level quickened because of three days of rain from typhoon Songda that weakened as it swept pass Japan earlier this week. Namie, a town near the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station, had 112 millimeters of rain on May 30, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Japan is regularly buffeted by typhoons and tropical storms during the northwestern Pacific cyclone season, adding another risk to containing the radiated water at the Fukushima station. Hydrogen explosions at the plant blew the roofs off three reactor buildings, exposing pools containing spent fuel rods.
Tepco said last week it was still considering typhoon measures and that it couldn’t announce detailed plans. Takeo Iwamoto, a spokesman for the utility, said it plans to complete installing covers for the buildings by October.
Plugging Leaks
In early April, Tepco spent days trying to stop a leak of highly radioactive water into the sea from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. It turned to using concrete, sawdust, newsprint and absorbent polymer used in diapers to block the leak.
The efforts failed and drew comparisons with BP Plc’s attempts to plug an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico last year with golf balls and strips of rubber tires. The Tepco leak was eventually sealed with sodium-silicate, known as liquid glass.
Tepco on April 5 said it had dumped almost 10 million liters (2.6 million gallons) of radioactive water into the sea from the Fukushima plant, which led to radioactive cesium being found in fish at levels exceeding health guidelines.
The company said at the time the decision was the lesser of two evils as it needed to find space for storing water that was highly radioactive and more toxic that what was released into the sea.
by Janewas » Wed Jun 01, 2011 11:22 pm
by hanshan » Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:17 am
Janewas wrote:Thank you for this thread and for the regular updates...Im not sure if its a media blackout or what exactly is going on but I am having difficulty finding accurate information about Fukushima and Japan disaster.
Three years ago, financial markets suffered what’s popularly called a “meltdown,” and governments came to the rescue with multitrillion-dollar bailouts. Nearly three months ago, a Japanese nuclear-power installation began to suffer a real meltdown, and now Japan’s response might include a financial bailout of nuclear-power company Tepco. If the bailout happens, it will be at least as damaging as those given to the financial firms, making it more difficult to determine how risky Japan’s nuclear power is and how much it should cost to compensate for that risk.
In early May, a top Japanese government official, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, had an idea: rescue Tepco. Japan would borrow money through a government-guaranteed, special-purpose vehicle and then give that money to Tepco, which would use it to pay victims as well as to clean up and rebuild. Tepco’s creditors, Edano gently added—in return for this rescue of a company that owed them so much money—should offer some debt forgiveness. It would be “impossible,” he said, to garner public support for the bailout package unless the creditors shared the pain. The nation’s finance minister, Yoshihiko Noda, added that the government had to “minimize the burden for the Japanese public.”
The remarks sparked controversy. Katsunori Nagayasu, head of banking giant Mitsubishi UFJ, called the government’s request for creditors and investors to take a limited hit “unreasonable.” Yasuchika Hasegawa, the chief of a corporate-lobbying group, criticized Edano for being “rash.” They’re right, but not in the way they mean. Japan should refrain from any kind of bailout and let free-market capitalism work by allowing the bondholders, lenders, and shareholders in a profit-seeking enterprise to shoulder that enterprise’s losses without government interference. If Tepco doesn’t have the resources to compensate victims, the Japanese government can do that job directly.
by hanshan » Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:58 am
The radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi reactors poisoned farmlands, contaminated the sea, and sent invisible mists of radiation wafting around the world. The latest – and it’s just the latest – atomic accident has raised new concerns about the risks of nuclear energy. But still the question remains: Are we wise enough to finally understand that nuclear reactors are a fool’s technology?
Authorities in the U.S. insist that there is no danger to public health or the environment from the Fukushima nuclear crisis, and that levels of radiation that have been detected in water, air, soil and food in North America since the accident are in such minuscule quantities as to present little to no danger. EPA discontinued its Fukushima radiation monitoring efforts, and FDA says there is no danger to our food or seafood and therefore testing is not necessary. There have been no calls since the accident for heightened nuclear safety inspections or to upgrade or decommission aging nuclear power plants in the U.S.
Source: Red Green & Blue (http://s.tt/12zuo)
by Peachtree Pam » Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:58 pm
by hanshan » Thu Jun 02, 2011 4:55 pm
The disaster at Fukushima No. 1 was due almost entirely to an act of unbelievable stupidity — placing a nuclear plant with its emergency power and pumping equipment on a coastline protected by a mere 5.7-meter sea wall in an area with a far-from-distant history of double-digit-size tsunamis.
Admittedly the plant had been designed mainly by the U.S. General Electric Co., which, one assumes, would not have been quite as tsunami-conscious as its Japanese partners. But why did the Japanese side say or do nothing either then or later — despite frequent warnings of tsunami vulnerability, one reportedly only three years before the fatal accident?
by smoking since 1879 » Thu Jun 02, 2011 8:19 pm
by hanshan » Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:06 pm
...smoking since 1879 wrote:interesting article Hanhsan...
The take-home-message:
The Japanese mentality allowed this to happen... we can place the blame squarely the workers (politicians etc.).)
My take-home-message...
Nuclear power stations make bomb material, that is why they were conceived, and that is why they exist.
This technology is neither safe nor sustainable.
The legacy of this event will taint this world for decades, if not centuries.
It's about time we stopped this nonsense.
[edit for clarity (if indeed there is any)]
Agreed. Given my long, complex, tortured, & tortuous relationship w/to Japan
the article saddens me. Above all.
Radiation: Expedition samples Pacific OceanFukushima (global-adventures.us): A new 15-day scientific expedition aboard the University of Hawaii’s research vessel Kaimikai-O-Kanoloa will measure radioactive substances in the Pacific Ocean that leaked from the Fukushima nuclear power plant over the past months. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will lead the first international, multidisciplinary assessment.
“This project will address fundamental questions about the impact of this release of radiation to the ocean, and in the process enhance international collaboration and sharing of scientific data,” said Vicki Chandler, Chief Program Officer, Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “It is our hope that
through this adverse event, we can increase our current knowledge about various natural and man-made sources of radioactivity in the ocean, and how they might ultimately impact ocean life and health around the world.”
http://www.global-adventures.us/2011/06/02/radiation-expedition-pacific/
Gov't halts shipment of tea leaves in 4 prefectures over high radiation levelsThe government on June 2 ordered a halt to shipments of tea leaves produced
throughout Ibaraki Prefecture and parts of Kanagawa, Chiba and Tochigi prefectures, after detecting radioactive cesium in leaves exceeding the legal limit.
Tests carried out in the wake of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, from which large amounts of radioactive materials have leaked, detected radiation exceeding the legal limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram of tea leaves.
It is the first time for the government to halt shipments of tea under the Special Law on Nuclear Disaster Countermeasures. Since the concentration of cesium changes during each of the steps in which tea is produced -- from drying the leaves to create unrefined tea to processing them and making them into a drink -- the government had been considering which stages of the production process to halt.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110603p2a00m0na004000c.html
Recent disaster in Japan has consumers examining the food they eat
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/default/artic ... z1OEU21RhrThe Shining Rainbow has long lured sushi lovers to downtown Albany, with dishes like the spicy salmon roll and maki combo.
But on April 1, two weeks after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the popular Chinese-Japanese restaurant slapped this announcement on its menu: "Because (of) the RADIATION in JAPAN, for our quality (customers), we will stop serving Japanese food until we can get FRESH sources of food from Japan. Sorry for the inconvenience."
"We are worried about the people," Justin Chi, the manager at Shining Rainbow, said of the series of accidents that released radiation into the atmosphere over Japan in March. "Some of our fish came from there, so we worry about it. We might still serve it in the future, but not now."
The decision on the part of Shining Rainbow, and other restaurants....
snip
http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Fact-or-myth-1399358.php#ixzz1OETcf82X
National News: Greens demand more information about possible radiation risks
Published on Jun 02, 2011 - 12:39 PM
Footnote: Written by: Green Party of Canada
OTTAWA -OTTAWA - The Green Party of Canada wants to see Canada take action to increase transparency around possible radioactive contamination in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The Ombudsman of the European Union has launched an investigation into the lack of information European citizens have received about potential radioactive contamination of food due to fallout from the meltdown. This highlights the even greater lack of communication from the Government of Canada about potential risks.
Health Canada monitors the level of radiation in the air and posts the results on its web site. However there is no information posted to indicate whether the government is checking for radionuclide levels in Canadian food.
“We know that fallout from Fukushima reached our shores, but monitoring of airborne levels gives only a partial picture of the potential risk to Canadians,” said Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party and MP for Saanich Gulf Islands. “Radionuclides become concentrated in foods, particularly dairy. Is Health Canada monitoring this? If so, why is that information not being communicated to Canadians? If not, then why not?”
It is now known that damage to the coolant system from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami resulted in the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Starting March 21, Canadian radiation monitors picked up an increase in radiation levels. Health Canada says the increase in airborne levels has not posed a health risk to Canadians.
Europe has seen small increases in airborne radiation since the disaster, but has also been monitoring contamination levels in foods. The European Union Ombudsman launched an investigation after numerous complaints regarding the lack of information about changes to maximum permissible levels of contamination. The US government is also monitoring and publishing more data on radioactive fallout than that available to Canadians. The US EPA and FDA are publishing data from rainfall and dairy.
“Europeans are concerned about the lack of transparency surrounding potential contamination. Canadians are receiving even less information than Europeans or Americans. We should be very concerned,” said May.
by 82_28 » Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:28 pm
by StarmanSkye » Sun Jun 05, 2011 11:15 am
Didn't hear about THAT in the corporate 'news', eh?)by hanshan » Mon Jun 06, 2011 8:10 am
StarmanSkye wrote:Very informative, at-depth recap w/ analysis of ongoing technical, environmental and health issues by Nuclear insider, whistleblower/activist Arnie Gunderson from Fairewinds Associate on the Chris Martenson Program. Among the insightful, eye-opening discussion & noteworthy tidbits, Gunderson cited a US scientific study that disclosed that at the height of the initial Fukushima melt-down contamination, Seattle residents were inhaling an average of 10 hot particles per day. (WoW!
This thing is NOT going away anytime soon, and in fact there is a large, continuing concern about further aftershock damage causing more large radioactive releases, and the immense challenge of containing the still-hot spent-fuel pool in Unit 4. For Japanese citizens Gunderson reccomends avoiding ALL Pacific seafood, including seaweed and shellfish -- at least until a RIGOROUS screening program is established. He thinks its only a matter of time until the top of the Pacific foodchain like Tuna concentrate radioactive substances, possibly triggering a sea-or-air port dirty-bomb detector.
The US's EPA, FDA et al. regulatory agency ignoring, denial and avoidance of rigorous, ongoing monitoring -- essentially a defacto cover-up -- clearly reveals the gov/bureaucracy's immense corporate-driven pro-nuclear bias, a la' 'out of sight, out of mind' -- tho I undertstand its even worse in Canada (these are my observations/comments, not those of Gunderson. Tho he may share this POV, he hasn't come right-out and said so, perhaps 'cause he's being diplomatic in not antagoning the corporate/gov PTB. -- starmanskye)"Exclusive Arnie Gundersen Interview: The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think"
Friday, June 3, 2011
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/excl ... hink/58689
Track 1 Podcast
http://media.chrismartenson.com/audio/a ... -part1.mp3
Track 2 Podcast:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/martenson ... on-worsens
Transcript for Track 1:
Chris Martenson: Let’s just briefly review – if we could just synopsize – I know you can do this better than anybody. What happened at Fukushima – what happened and I really would like to take the opportunity to talk about this kind of specifically, like where we are with each one of the reactors. So first of all, this disaster – how did it happen? Was it just bad engineering, was it really bad luck with the tsunami? How did this even initiate – something we were told again and again – something that couldn’t happen seems to have happened?
Arnie Gundersen: Well the little bit of physics here is that even when a reactor shuts down; it continues to churn out heat. Now, only five percent of the original amount of heat, but when you are cranking out millions of horsepower of heat, five percent is still a lot. So you have to keep a nuclear reactor cool after it shuts down. Now, what happened at Fukushima was it went into what is called a “station blackout,” and people plan for that. That means there is no power to anything except for batteries. And batteries can’t turn the massive motors that are required to cool the nuclear reactor. So the plan is in a station blackout is that somehow or another you get power back in four or five hours. That didn’t happen at Fukushima because the tidal wave, the tsunami, was so great that it overwhelmed their diesels and it overwhelmed something called “service water 2” But in any event, they couldn’t get any power to the big pumps.
Now, was it foreseeable? They were prepared for a seven-meter tsunami, about twenty-two feet. The tsunami that hit was something in excess of ten and quite likely fifteen meters, so somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five feet. They were warned that the tsunami that they were designed against was too low. They were warned for at least ten years and I am sure that there were people back before that. So would they have been prepared for one this big? I don’t know, but certainly, they were unprepared for even a tsunami of lesser magnitude.
Chris Martenson: So the tsunami came along and just swamped the systems and I heard that there were some other design elements there too, such as potentially the generators were in an unsafe spot or that some of their electrical substations all happened to be in the basement, so they kind of got taken out all at once. Now, here’s what I heard – the initial reports when they came out said, “Oh, nothing to fear, we all went into SCRAM,” which is some kind of emergency shutdown and they said everything is SCRAMed and I knew that we were in trouble in less than twenty-four hours, they talked about how they were pumping seawater in. Which I assume, by the time you are pumping seawater you have a pretty clear indication from the outside that there is something really quite wrong with this story, is that true?
Arnie Gundersen: Yes. Seawater and as anybody who has ever had a boat on the ocean would know, saltwater and stainless steel do not get along very well. Saltwater and stainless steel at five hundred degrees don’t get along very well at all. You are right, they had some single points of vulnerability – the hole in the armor and the diesels were one of them. But even if the diesels were up high, they would have been in trouble because of those service water pumps I talked about. And they got wiped out and those pumps are the pumps that cool the diesels. So even if the diesels were runnable, cooling water that runs through the diesels would have been taken out by the tsunami anyway. So it's kind of a false argument to blame the diesels.
Chris Martenson: Okay, so take us through. Reactor number one, it was revealed I think about a week ago now that they finally came to the revelation that I think some of us had come to independently, that there had been something more than a partial meltdown, maybe even a complete meltdown. What is your assessment of reactor one and where is it right now?
Arnie Gundersen: When you see hydrogen explosions, that means that the outside of the fuel has exceeded 2,200 degrees and the inside is well over 3,500 degrees. The fuel gets brittle, it burns, and then it plops to the bottom of the nuclear reactor in a molten blob like lava. It was pretty clear to a lot of people, including apparently to the NRC, but they weren’t telling people back in March, that that had occurred in reactor one. There was essentially a blob of lava on the bottom of the nuclear reactor. So I have to separate this – a nuclear reactor - and that is inside of a containment. So there is still one more barrier here. But the problem is that the reactor had boiled dry and they were using fire pumps connected to the ocean to pump saltwater into the reactor. Now, if this thing were individual tubes, the water could get around the uranium and completely cool it. But when it's a blob at the bottom of the reactor, it can only get to the top surface and that would cause it to begin to meltdown. Now, on these boiling water reactors, there are about seventy holes in the bottom of the reactor where the control rods come in and I suspect that those holes were essentially the weak link that caused this molten mass. Now it's 5,000 degrees at the center, even though the outside may be touching water, the inside of this molten mass is 5,000 degrees. It melts through and lies on the bottom of the containment.
That’s where we are today. We have no reactor essentially, just a big pressure cooker. The molten uranium is on the bottom of the containment. It spreads out at that point, because the floor is flat. And I don’t think it's going to melt its way through the concrete floor. It may gradually over time; but the damage is already done because the containment has cracks in it and it's pretty clear that it is leaking. So you put water in the top. And the plan had never been to put water in the top and let it run out the bottom. That is not the preferred way of cooling a nuclear reactor in an accident. But you are putting water in the top and it's running out the bottom and it's going out through cracks in the containment, after touching directly uranium and plutonium and cesium and strontium and is carrying all those radioactive isotopes out as liquids and gases into the environment.
Chris Martenson: So this melting that happened, is this just a function of the decay heat at this point in time? We’re not speculating that there has been any sort of re-criticality or any other what we might call a nuclear reaction – this is just decay heat from the isotopes that are in there from prior nuclear activity – those are just decaying and giving off that heat. That’s sufficient to get to 5,000 degrees?
Arnie Gundersen: Yes, once the uranium melts into a blob at these low enrichments, four and five percent, it can’t make a new criticality. If criticality is occurring on the site - and there might be, because there is still iodine 131, which is a good indication - it is not coming from the Unit 1 core and it's not coming from the Unit 2 core, because those are both blobs at the bottom of the containment.
Chris Martenson: All right, so we have these blobs, they’ve somehow escaped the primary reactor pressure vessel, which is that big steel thing and now they are on the relatively flat floor of the containment – they concrete piece – and you say Unit 2 is roughly the same story as Unit 1 – where’s Unit 3 in this story?
Arnie Gundersen: Unit 3 may not have melted through and that means that some of the fuel certainly is lying on the bottom, but it may not have melted through and some of the fuel may still look like fuel, although it is certainly brittle. And it's possible that when the fuel is in that configuration that you can get a re-criticality. It's also possible in any of the fuel pools, one, two, three, and four pools, that you could get a criticality, as well. So there’s been frequent enough high iodine indications to lead me to believe that either one of the four fuel pools or the Unit 3 reactor is in fact, every once in a while starting itself up and then it gets to a point where it gets so hot that it shuts itself down and it kind of cycles. It kind of breathes, if you will.
To read the rest of the transcript go to Part 1, http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/tran ... -lived-we-
Access Track 2 Transcript, podcast:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/martenson ... on-worsens
by vanlose kid » Mon Jun 06, 2011 1:31 pm
by crikkett » Tue Jun 07, 2011 10:26 am
StarmanSkye wrote:"Exclusive Arnie Gundersen Interview: The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think"
Friday, June 3, 2011
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/excl ... hink/58689
by StarmanSkye » Tue Jun 07, 2011 10:41 am
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