EPA turns off monitoring of radiation, air radiation in tokyo poor, Soil Radiation not good at all, corium outside of reactor, dosimeters not being
distributed, radiation in plants, TEPCO seeks to scapegoat employees for reactor loss
H/T to Ex-skf who is totally on this.
Lyrics | Thomas Dolby lyrics - She Blinded Me With Science lyrics
http://www.reuters.com/...
The magnitude 9 earthquake that struck a Japanese nuclear plant in March hit with almost 30 percent more intensity than it had been designed to withstand, raising withstand, raising the possibility that key systems were compromised even before a massive tsunami hit.
Embattled operator Tokyo Electric Power said Monday that partial data recovered from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant showed the ground acceleration during the quake exceeded its design specifications at three of the six reactors.
"This was clearly a larger earthquake than we had forecast," said Junichi Matsumoto, a Tepco spokesman for nuclear issues. "It would have been hard to anticipate this."
true if you are ignorant of japanese history, like the
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
apanese officials have previously said the meltdown that took place in three of the reactors at Fukushima was caused by the loss of power to cooling systems when the tsunami knocked out backup diesel generators. Tepco has repeatedly called the combined disaster an event "beyond expectations."
But new details released this week have called some of that account into question. At the same time, new data and inspections at the site have shown that the reactors suffered far more serious damage than previously thought and forced officials to abandon their initial approach to bringing the plant to a shutdown.
Officials said it was not clear whether the Fukushima plant had been damaged by the quake and said an immediate inspection was impossible because of the all-hands effort to stabilize the reactors.
But a finding that the reactors or key safety equipment were damaged by the quake itself could complicate the growing debate on the future of nuclear power in Japan at a time when Tokyo is under pressure to tighten safety standards.
Officials have said they will stick with a goal of shutting down the reactors by January. At that point of "cold shutdown," the fuel in the reactors would be cool enough so that it would not be at risk of boiling off the water being pumped in as a coolant and radiation barrier.
Once workers have gained control of Fukushima, attention could shift to the effort to retrieve the fuel from the site, including the melted uranium in three of the reactors, and send it to a more permanent storage site. Experts have said that could take a decade or more.
9 months just to get to cold shutdown? I"m not sure if they ever will,
and a decade to clean the site? NFW. It took 14 years to break down TMI and that was one unit 30% melted. Figure this is 7 times worse. so more like a century to get the site cleaned.
Hosono said outside experts had also told him that the fuel in the No. 1 reactor appeared to have leaked out of the steel vessel designed to contain it at the core.
The effort to shut down the plant has also been complicated by the growing pool of radioactive water backing up inside the reactors and attached buildings because of leaks, officials have said.
Japan's government has promised an independent audit of the Fukushima disaster, including whether a faster response or a quicker venting of radioactive steam could have prevented powerful hydrogen explosions and the meltdowns.
"We can certainly say that if the venting took place a little earlier, we could have prevented the situation from worsening," Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told parliament.
In another instance of an apparent error in judgment, Tepco said that a worker may have shut down a cooling system known as the isolation condenser shortly after the earthquake when he saw that the No. 1 reactor was losing temperature quicker than the utility's guidelines allowed.
"At the time, we could not have known that the tsunami was coming and that we would lose power," Matsumoto said.
I once saw a pretty bad movie with Jeff Bridges called "The Door in the Floor", now
we expect there will be a sequel, The corium in the floor.
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/...
40,000 units of Geiger counters and dosimeters donated by the United States, France, and Canada after the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident still sit in a warehouse at Narita International Airport, according to a Japanese blogger (yougen).
The blogger says in his/her post (in Japanese) these Geiger counters and dosimeters are under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Donations from foreign countries are handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Distributing the Geiger counters and dosimeters to the plant workers is done by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
Distributing the Geiger counters and dosimeters to civilians is done by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/...
One of the readers of my Japanese blog that has the Japanese translation of the video got curious and did some research using the data from the government agency (the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan), and came to a conclusion that the area where the plant sits may indeed have moved quite a bit, not just vertically but also horizontally.
His conclusion:
Vertical: - 50 centimeters (it sank 50 centimeters)
Horizontal: 220 to 250 centimeters to the east.
the units moved 8 feet... wow....
[ corrected to 8 foot from 3 foot, Thanks for the comment pointing that out,
I was thinking 3 meters and then didn't bother correcting when i decided to
put it into english]
SKFs readers areawesome
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday that its 24-hour operations center had stopped monitoring the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because the situation there had improved. “The conditions at the Japanese reactors are slowly stabilizing,” said William Borchardt, the agency’s chief staff official. “As conditions have continued to improve and the Japanese continue to implement their recovery plan, the N.R.C. has determined that it is time to adjust our response,” he said. The agency still has a team of engineers in Tokyo, he said. Mr. Borchardt said last week that the condition of the reactors was “static but not stable.”
wow, what horsehockey...
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/...
As this blog has reported both in English and Japanese, the official number for the air radiation level in Tokyo is measured at only one location in Shinjuku, on top of the building about 18 meters from the ground.
However, there are many unofficial numbers, i.e. measured by concerned citizens and residents at the level where most people live and work - 1 meter above the ground.
Looking at the numbers in different locations in Tokyo (PDF file for download), the radiation level varies significantly. To measure only at the Shinjuku location and tell the residents in Tokyo that the radiation level in Tokyo is back to normal range is highly misleading.
Here's some numbers from the "Environmental radiation monitoring" latest PDF file that exceed the "official" number (0.0629 microgray/hour, or microsievert/hour, 5/17/11)
Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku: 0.124 microsievert/hour, 100 cm above the side walk, 5/10/11
Kyobashi, Chuo-ku: 0.071 microsievert/hour, 100 cm above concrete, 5/10/11
Hongo, Bunkyo-ku: 0.14 microsievert/hour, 100 cm above asphalt, 5/10/11
Kanamachi, Katsushika-ku: 0.359 microsievert/hour, 100 cm above sand, 5/10/11
he number in Kanamachi, 0.359 microsievert/hour, would translate to more than 3 millisieverts per year. (8.61 microsieverts per day x 365 = 3.142 millisieverts per year)
http://xkcd.com/...
3millisieverts is like giving everyone in kanamichi a CT Scan....
http://takedanet.com/...
Fukushima measured using an image of it, "eyes" and "guy" Take a look. First, the ground one meters. Is approximately 2.7 microseconds.
Second, increasing radiation dose and gradually closer to the ground, five micro- 10 micro and, placing their equipment on the road measuring 20 micro- (19.9) was.
"He" was on the ground is! !
in Fukushima prefecture its 60X higher ....
so thats a CT scan wekly in Fukushima and schools still open...
http://moribin.blog114.fc2.com/
the above is a semi busted blog post by professor binmori. He's
taken new plants and is running radiographs on them.
i wish the jpgs were working, but something broke the links to them SKF says they
are very disturbing. The JPGs work on SKFs blog, but, I'm just too lazy to
put up the images. But anytime you can take plants, lay them between film
and they self develope, has to be awful.
http://mainichi.jp/...
workers enter Unit 2 for the first time in 8 weeks. Oh boy, it's probably going to
be a shambles in there. I expect there will be lots of radiation, lots of damage,
and, no chance they can get the cooling systems up there.Oh they are wearing
Tungsten suits, so they must look like knights.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/...
http://www.tepco.co.jp/...
TEPCO has a roadmap and plan. I am reminded of the military axiom, a average plan violently executed now beats a great plan in two weeks.
TEPCO has spent 8 weeks designing a plan. What a joke.
If they had stopped lying at the start, they could have gotten a lot of help from the outside.
http://www.jaif.or.jp/...
TEPCO reports 70 Generator trucks proved worthless at getting power back up
at the site.
About 70 generator trucks from the Self-Defense Forces and other entities
headed to the plant after the quake knocked out external power and the tsunami
disabled the facility's backup generators.
But plant operator TEPCO says debris strewn across the compound and flooded
switchboards hampered the trucks' set up.
The utility says a switchboard for the No.2 reactor was finally wired to one of the
generator trucks about 24 hours after the disaster.
But moments later, a hydrogen explosion at the neighboring No.1 reactor fried
the wiring and cut off the power supply from the truck.
Another hydrogen explosion 2 days later at the No.3 reactor damaged generator
vehicles with chunks of flying concrete.
Electricity was finally restored to the plant through the regular power grid on
March 21st --- 10 days after the quake and tsunami.
EDIT: FOYI has some very cool video of the reactor site.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Note the extensive non structural damage in the buildings. Busted windows,
busted ceilings, etc...
Also the scale of operations are way too small. They need an army.
Look at Chernobyl the Russians sent in thousands of men to shut in the racs,
the Japanese have dozens. Now the water damage inside the site is pretty amazing.
4-5 feet of water in the turbine buildings?
The trick is they need to focus on fixing systems and trying to get a handle on this.
Spraying resin everywhere won't help. the resin breaks up and gets thrown around later.
I do like the positive pressure rooms and the workers have dust suits.
They need to start ripping out the damaged stuff, so that they can clean and cap the site. Instead of resin they need to cap with 4 inches of concrete.
now given there is a core melt and we have corium in the basements, they
need to get the robots a free path so they can try scooping up the corium.
If the reactors are burned out, they should stop screwing around and open them up.