It's staying crazy out there.
Seeing the Dem challenger unseat a career GOPer in Wisconsin will likely make Thursday even worse.
Meanwhile Tokyo area is back into the XXXXXX range for radiation.
Below the fold, s'il vous plait.
Today featured echoes off one Glow In The Dark congress critter and a Fukushima fuel rod blasted out further than Tim McVeigh's truck parts.
That "XXXXX" in the intro translates to "Normal." Boring facts. Boring, boring, boring.
Barring the appearance of Muammar Gaddafi's head on a Tripoli stick, the best we've got for news junkies is a raft of fake threats and Foxy trash blurbs.
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Congressman Edward Markey got all full of himself Wednesday and announced that our Nuclear Regulatory Commission had slipped info to him that the end of the world is nigh.
"I have been informed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the core of Unit Two has gotten so hot that part of it has probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel," said Markey, a prominent nuclear critic in the House of Representatives.
This ran around the blog and print worlds in seconds. The denial from NRC ? Well, that's probably a conspiracy to cover up for TEPCO don'tcha know.
"That's not clear to us, nor is it clear to us that the reactor has penetrated the vessel," said Martin Virgilio, deputy executive director for reactor and preparedness programs at NRC.
Markey Fever got 99% of the play.
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Then there's that sky rocket fuel rod.
This started as a radioactive cloud story: Dating to before the Fukushima story went big on plutonium:
Plutonium has a hazardous-life of 240,000 years. It moves in the environment much more rapidly than previously believed by the federal government. At the Nevada test-site plutonium has been found moving in a plume more than a mile away from an underground test that was set off only about 30 years ago. Previous estimates were that it would take more than 10,000 years for this deadly substance to travel this far.
Like other radioactive materials, in addition to initiating cancers, plutonium is highly mutagenic and can disrupt reproductive cells. It threatens the entire web of life, upon which we depend for food, oxygen, water purification and materials for most of our products.
thisbluemarble.com/showthread.php?t=35831
and a reference to:
www.nirs.org/factsheets/plutoniumfuelfabrication.htm
That is solid information. And no way is Fukushima an underground test site. The temperatures generated during a thermonuclear explosion belong on the Sun. No way anything like that is happening in Japan.
This reference set was turned into pieces of the fuel rods getting blown more than a mile from the reactors. ZeroHedge got lost on that one. Then they chickened out and edited the article to remove the claim. (Seems there's more than a little of that slipperiness going on over there.)
Comments picked this up and spread it. There's no end.
That's further out than the parts went to from the Oklahoma City bombing Ryder truck.
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The boring truth is that the plant crew at Fukushima plugged the crack, they got 12,000 tons of low-rad water shifted to the ocean (to avoid endangering personnel with cartage operations), the robots are working 24/7 for contact spotting, and aerial radiation continues to decline.
Big whoop. Here's the highest reading site in Japan at Hitachinaka City, Ibaraki:
-- 437 nanoGrays/hour - 10:30 AM local time on the 7th
-- 441 nGy/h - 10:30 PM local time on the 6th
-- 464 nGy/h - 10:00 PM local time on the 5th
-- 463 nGy/h - 9:00 PM local time on the 4th
-- 480 nGy/h - 9:00 PM local time on the 3rd
-- 499 nGy/h - 9:40 PM local time on the 2nd
-- 536 nGy/h - 5:10 AM local time on the 1st of April
-- 556 nGy/h - 9:40 AM local time on the 31st
-- 575 nGy/h - 11:00 PM local time on the 30th
-- 597 nGy/h - 4:40 AM local time on the 29th
-- 646 nGy/h - 6:50 PM local time on the 28th
-- 684 nGy/h - 10:20 PM local time on the 27th
-- 786 nGy/h - 11.00 PM local time on the 25th
-- 866 nGy/h - 8:20 PM local time on the 24th
-- 957 nGy/h - 7:30 PM local time on the 23rd
-- 1012 nGy/h - 1:10 AM local time on the 23rd
-- 1221 nGy/h - 7:20 PM local time on the 22nd
-- 1178 nGy/h - 9:20 PM local time on the 21st
-- 1145 nGy/h - 6:10 PM local time on the 21st
-- 1160 nGy/h - 4:30 PM local time on the 21st of March
FNPP is back to being an engineering project. The TEPCO crew are flushing water into the reactors and storage tanks. They got the basic cooling equipment powered and running. Damage from the earthquake totaled the site from production use -- they knew that on the first day, March 11th.
Tokyo is back in the normal range for background radiation: 95 nanoGrays/hour.
That is the maximum reading. Most monitors are reading much lower.
5,700 nanoGrays/hour = 35,000,000 nGy/year = 5 REM/year. That's the IAEA safety limit. So Tokyo is maxxed for 2% of the safety limit -- if you stand outside 24/7/365.
It has been very exciting. In another decade this crisis following a major catastrophe would have sold a lot of daily newspapers.
Now it's like the space program. We'll watch reruns of fatal disasters -- but that's about all. There have been two deaths at Fukushima NPP. Hopefully that will be the end of losing people.