These workers can only trust that that is the truth. But there are increasing indications that it is not.
The day we spoke to them, two of their colleagues were sent to hospital with serious radiation burns after contaminated water spilled over the tops of their wellington boots, on to their legs and feet, while they were walking through a coolant pool in reactor 3. A third was spared by his taller boots.
The amount of radiation in that water was an astonishing two to six sieverts – 10,000 times the normal level, and up to 24 times the workers’ entire yearly exposure allowance, even on the elevated emergency limits instituted last week. If the water was absorbed by their bodies in any way, those two workers will almost certainly die.
1 sievert = 100 rad so thats 200 to 600 rads in that "low level water" BTW the workers got burns from stepping in radioactive water puddles in chernobyl, most of them died. 200-600 Rads is not low level by anybodies book. At that level it can be fatal. 1 Rad = 1 Rem From wikipedia Doses of 200 to 1,000 rems will probably cause serious illness with poor outlook at the upper end of the range. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad_%28unit%29
[This message has been edited by dennis_6 (edited 04-14-2011).]
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dennis_6 Member
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"Due to its mode of beta decay, iodine-131 is notable for causing mutation and death in cells which it penetrates, and other cells up to several millimeters away. For this reason, high doses of the isotope are sometimes paradoxically less dangerous than low doses, since they tend to kill thyroid tissues which would otherwise become cancerous as a result of the radiation. For example, children treated with moderate dose of I-131 for thyroid adenomas had a detectable increase in thyroid cancer, but children treated with a much higher dose did not. Similarly most studies of very high dose I-131 for treatment of Graves disease have failed to find any increase in thyroid cancer, even though there is linear increase in thyroid cancer risk with I-131 absorption at moderate doses.[1] Thus, iodine-131 is increasingly less employed in small doses in medical use (especially in children), but increasingly is used only in large and maximal treatment doses, as a way of killing targeted tissues. This is known as "therapeutic use."" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131
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dennis_6 Member
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Radiation level of groundwater up 10-fold at troubled nuke plant: media English.news.cn 2011-04-14 22:42:42 FeedbackPrintRSS
TOKYO, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The radiation level of the groundwater had increased 10 fold in one week at the troubled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, Kyodo News reported Thursday, citing operator sources.
Earlier on Thursday, the country's nuclear safety agency said that the level of contaminated water in its underground trench turned out to be rising again.
The operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., removed some 660 tons of highly contaminated water in the past two days from one of the trenches to a "condenser" inside the No. 2 reactor turbine building. The condenser has a capacity to store 3,000 tons of liquid.
Radioactive water was found in the basements of the Nos. 1 to 3 reactor turbine buildings, and the nearby trenches connected to them. The water totaled about 60,000 tons.
Removing the water to nearby tanks and other storage places is considered vital to the attempt of restoring the key cooling functions at the reactors. Japan's nuclear safety agency on Tuesday had raised the severity level of the accident at the crippled Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant to 7, the worst on an international scale, from the current 5.
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=127294 Japan Mulls to Move Capital over Disaster Worries World | April 14, 2011, Thursday As powerful earthquakes continue to jolt Japan and radiation levels near Tokyo are rising, the Asian country's authorities are considering moving the capital to another city.
The most probable location for a new capital are Osaka and Nagoya, according to ITAR-TASS. Both cities are located near international airports.
The main conditions the new capital has to provide are a population over 50 000 and a sufficient capacity to accommodate the parliament, the government, the Emperor's residency and the foreign diplomatic missions.
According to experts, should a 7.2 magnitude earthquake shake Tokyo, the casualties will be around 11 000, some 210 000 will be injured and the material damage will be worth about USD 1 B
I'm curious. Will one of the requirements be to that the capital be located a long distance up-wind from any nuclear power plants? And no...I'm not being facetious.
[This message has been edited by carnut122 (edited 04-14-2011).]
Officially, no. Unofficially, you bet your radiation-proof booties. It'll just happen to be upwind of the nearest (read: far away) nuclear power plant.
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Doug85GT Member
Posts: 9704 From: Sacramento CA USA Registered: May 2003
So who's paying the fishermen and women's lost income? Cesium has a half life of around 30 years, how long will the ocean food chain be off limits in that area? BTW, primary source of protein in the Japanese diet is fish, http://www.livestrong.com/a...465-a-japanese-diet/
I know you didn't mean to be flippant when you brushed aside this issue as not being really important, but to people in Japan this is critically important (no pun intended). Farmers and fishermen have lost the value of their work, their hard work, and who knows for how many years. Will the Japanese nuclear industry pay these people's property taxes for them, put food on their kid's plates, save up for their retirement for them? Or pay for training into another career besides farming and fishing?
A long time ago I went to a team building seminar put on by my company. The teacher had an impressive curriculum vitae as an engineer, designer, consultant, etc. The one lesson he taught us that day 17 years ago that still sticks with me today centers around an anecdote he told us. Basically, he was hired to try and figure out how to solve a problem that a sewage treatment plant had with unintentional releases of untreated sewage. The plant engineers had tried all sorts of things but still the problem persisted. After studying and analyzing the situation the consultant came up with some suggestions WRT process control, etc, but then he hit them with the bombshell: Rearrange the intake and outflow lines to the river such that the treated water was released upstream of the process water intake. They told him he was crazy, that doing that was stupid because an unanticipated release of untreated sewage would result in contamination of the intake water, a bad, bad thing.
Anyway, it decision was made to rearrange the lines and suddenly the untreated releases went to zero.
The reason wasn't any new technology, it was that now the sewage plant itself was the first to suffer the consequences of a mistake, rather than the towns and farms downstream. The lesson was simple: If the people running the show are the first to suffer the consequences of their mistakes, that responsibility loop will go a long way toward eliminating those mistakes.
I find it highly unlikely that any of the people involved in selling, buying, designing, or building the nuclear power industry are eating the fish, so to speak. No responsibility feedback loop means the problems will continue.
Nice story but I don't think it has anything to do with Japan's nuclear problem at all. This was a result of a once in 1000 year earthquake and tsunami which just happened to kill over 13,000 and still counting people.
Who is at fault in your opinion since your story was about holding people accountable? Who was the idiot that flipped the switch causing the earthquake and tsunami? Who was the cost cutting bastard that only built a 18 ft tall tsunami wall instead 50 ft tall one? Why aren't there any giant meteor shields over the plant?
As far as the fish in the sea, I'll bet they become edible long before 30 years. It wouldn't surprise me if they are edible in less than a year. NOAA says Gulf of Mexico fish are safe for human consumption in less than a year when all of the Chicken Littles said that it would take years for fish to be safe to eat again.
Originally posted by Doug85GT: Nice story but I don't think it has anything to do with Japan's nuclear problem at all. This was a result of a once in 1000 year earthquake and tsunami which just happened to kill over 13,000 and still counting people.
Wasn't my story, I'm just retelling it. The story was meant to illustrate a broader issue than just this particular nuclear disaster, that issue being that proponents and supporters of nuclear power are very rarely in a position to suffer the negative consequences resulting from their decisions and actions. The other issue is that given the consequences of a failure in this technology the engineering has to be perfect, and yes, that includes planning for "once in 1000 year earthquake and tsunami" events. It's obvious the designers and decision makers failed in that regard, plainly obvious that they didn't consider multiple failure modes (or more likely, did but rejected/failed to implement them due to cost/profit reasons).
quote
Originally posted by Doug85GT: Who is at fault in your opinion since your story was about holding people accountable? Who was the idiot that flipped the switch causing the earthquake and tsunami? Who was the cost cutting bastard that only built a 18 ft tall tsunami wall instead 50 ft tall one? Why aren't there any giant meteor shields over the plant?
Again, not my story. I have no idea who is ultimately responsible for engineering systems not able to withstand worst-case natural disasters, I'm sure the investigation will bring that to light. From what I can tell, the primary trigger for the nuclear disaster was the fact the backup generators weren't particularly well protected. The plant reactors were, but not the generators. But again, the final investigation report will make that clear, and have recommendations to prevent this failure sequence from happening again. For sure, the next nuclear disaster will happen for different reasons.
The "meteor shields" comment was specious and irrelevant.
quote
Originally posted by Doug85GT: As far as the fish in the sea, I'll bet they become edible long before 30 years. It wouldn't surprise me if they are edible in less than a year. NOAA says Gulf of Mexico fish are safe for human consumption in less than a year when all of the Chicken Littles said that it would take years for fish to be safe to eat again.
You're comparing oil to long-lived radioactive isotopes? BTW, though considered "safe to eat" by testing standards, fish and oysters from the region still contain low levels of hydrocarbons and heavy metal contamination, and large areas are still not producing at levels that existed prior to the spill. Some oyster beds are predicted to recover within 5 years. Fish and other products will continue to be tested for the indefinite future, and presumably contaminated products will be purchased and destroyed by BP. The new normal is contaminated down here, it would seem...which is why I don't eat gulf seafood products anymore. I have that right, I have that choice, and I so choose.
Now offered at lunch at a Japanese government restaurant: a rich curry and rice, topped with Fukushima vegetables fresh from the nuclear-emergency zone.
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It is part of an unlikely twist in the eat-local movement as the government presses a skeptical public to accept that food from the contaminated northeastern coastline should be purchased, roasted and devoured, not avoided.
“Damage by perception,” reads a poster promoting the revamped menu at Sakuna, located inside a government ministry. “Let’s fight against it.”
When the restaurant opened for business Friday, politicians rushed in, filling a table of 12. Three parliamentarians were there. Same with the foreign minister, Takeaki Matsumoto. Within minutes, waitresses presented the meals. Each curry dish was topped with two button-size cuts of carrot and broccoli, a few mushroom slivers and two silver-dollar slices of purple potato. Cameras clicked, and politicians sampled their lunches and nodded their approval.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has also been doing his part, urging people to eat food from the disaster-hit areas as a show of support. So has Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, who went to a farmers market and ate a Fukushima strawberry.
“Only safe produce is being distributed,” Edano said. “Please eat it.”
To be sure, no one is pretending that all Fukushima food is absolutely safe; many products from the nuclear zone are indeed contaminated. But the message from the government is that the Japanese should have faith in a monitoring system intended to keep cesium- and iodine-tained products off the shelves.
The officials hope that their promotion of Fukushima food can end the growing confusion about what is safe and what is dangerous. Four weeks ago, people here heard the first reports that spinach and milk had radiation levels exceeding the nation’s standards, and shipments were restricted. Since then, radioactive elements have continued to leak from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving vast areas of farmland unusable, perhaps for decades.
Farmers from Fukushima and surrounding prefectures now fit into two categories. Some cannot be helped by promotion of any kind, because they have products that truly are unfit for sale or consumption. The rest have products that pass inspection, but they are finding that wholesalers are reluctant to buy them, figuring shoppers will still resist.
“When you talk about Fukushima, it’s a vast area,” said Takanobu Tsuda, a food safety investigator from Japan Agriculture, a powerful union of co-ops. “Some areas farther inland — their food is fine. But some places won’t even put it on the shelves. Even food that has cleared the tests is being left untouched.”
Japan faces consumer fears that stretch beyond its borders. South Korea has temporarily banned vegetables from Fukushima and four other prefectures. China and the United States have banned certain produce and seafood from around the Fukushima area. And earlier this month, India placed a blanket ban on all food from Japan, although it later called that decree “unwarranted” and narrowed the restrictions.
Each day on its Web site, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare publishes a list of tested food products, detailing where it was grown and the level of contamination. The latest list has 98 items, everything from mackerel to rapeseed. Seventy-six of those products had levels of iodine or cesium below restriction level. But several varieties of Fukushima spinach were laced with cesium. And a sand lance fish, caught 22 miles away from the crippled nuclear plant, contained 12,500 becquerels per kilogram of cesium — about 25 times the legal limit.
Farmers, furious at the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the Fukushima plant, are demanding compensation. Mamoru Moteki, the Japan Agriculture chairman, submitted a letter to Tepco on Thursday that called the utility’s disaster response “unacceptable.”
“The foundation of agriculture in the Tohoku and Kanto regions itself is threatened,” Moteki wrote.
As for the uncontaminated food, Fukushima farmers tried to sell some of it last week at an open-air market in Tokyo. One Japan Agriculture executive even tested rice and vegetables with a Geiger counter, trying to prove they were safe.
On Friday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sponsored a smaller indoor farmers market, selling produce from across the northeastern region. A folding table displayed a cornucopia of vegetables: cucumbers from Gunma prefecture, strawberries from Ibaraki, parsnips from Chiba.
Just before noon, parliamentarian Hiroshi Hamamoto walked into the market and grabbed a shopping basket. He stuffed it with tomatoes and leafy greens. Then he reached for a carton containing a bundle of asparagus.
“That’s from Fukushima,” a vendor told him.
Hamamoto nodded and grabbed a second bundle.
harlanc@washpost.com
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.
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dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
Japan Plant Fuel Melted Partway Through Reactors: Report Friday, April 15, 2011
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Nuclear fuel has melted in three reactors at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and fallen to the lower sections of their container vessels, raising the specter of overheated material compromising a container and causing a massive radiation release, the Atomic Energy Society of Japan said in a report released on Friday (see GSN, April 15).
(Apr. 15) - Abandoned flowers wilt on Tuesday in the exclusion zone surrounding Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Nuclear fuel has melted inside three reactors at the severely damaged facility, says an expert assessment published on Friday (Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images).
The group played down the possibility of a container breach, though, noting that only a small amount of fuel had melted so far and affected material had assumed a granulated structure and remained relatively cool, Kyodo News reported. The six-reactor plant was crippled by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and devastating tsunami that hit Japan on March 11; the confirmed death toll from the events now exceeds 12,000 people.
The melted fuel was thought to have dispersed uniformly across the lower portions of the containers of reactors No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, making the material highly unlikely to resume the fission process in a "recriticality," according to the organization, which said fuel rods in all three reactors had been harmed. Fuel in the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors has made contact with air, while the No. 3 reactor's rods have remained underwater, the group said.
Bringing the fuel under control could take between two and three months if restoration work moved forward as expected, said Takashi Sawada, the group's deputy chairman. The organization based its assessment on information provided by the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and by Tokyo Electric Power, the plant's operator.
Plant personnel pressed ahead in efforts to prevent additional radioactive material from escaping the site, deploying steel barriers around a No. 2 reactor pipeline and proceeding with the insertion of nitrogen gas into the No. 1 reactor to prevent additional hydrogen blasts. Pressure in the No. 1 reactor has fallen to a certain degree, pointing to the possible escape of air, but radiation in the area has remained largely unchanged.
Tokyo Electric Power indicated it could drop sandbags filled with zeolite into the nearby ocean as soon as Friday to help curb the spread of radioactive contaminants (Kyodo News I, April 15). Silt fencing was deployed in front of screening at the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors for containing radioactive water, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Thursday (International Atomic Energy Agency release, April 15).
Workers earlier this week transferred roughly 660 tons of radiation-tainted water out of an underground passage, but fluid flooding the area reached its original depth by Friday morning, Kyodo News quoted the atomic safety agency as saying. Contaminated water has hindered efforts to restore cooling mechanisms needed to help prevent additional radioactive material from escaping the site.
A nuclear waste treatment area intended to receive the water was still undergoing inspection for possible weak points in pipelines."'I'm hoping that work to stop water leaks at the (facility) is finished as soon as possible to start channeling the water there," said Industry Minister Banri Kaieda said on Friday (Kyodo News I).
Fresh water continued to be transferred into reactors No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said. Conditions remained consistent at the No. 5 and No. 6 reactors (International Atomic Energy Agency release).
Soil samples taken at the facility between March 31 and April 4 contained small amounts of plutonium, Kyodo News reported on Friday. The finding marked the third detection of plutonium traces at the site (Kyodo News I).
Radioactive iodine and cesium levels might increased dozens of times over in groundwater close to the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors between April 6 and 13 (Kyodo News II, April 15). Strontium also turned up in soil close to the facility for the first time, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Friday.
Tokyo Electric Power was still developing a longer-term strategy for stabilizing plant conditions, company president Masataka Shimizu said (Danielle Demetriou, Sydney Morning Herald, April 15).
Specialists with Toshiba, one supplier of plant components, said conditions could be brought under control "in several months," Norio Sasaki, the firm's chief executive, said on Thursday. A plan developed by the company calls for the removal of fuel from reactor containers to start after five years and for decontamination to take place over another five years, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
Hitachi, which has developed a separate plan to decommission the facility, said Toshiba's proposal was too hopeful and suggested the fuel removal process alone could take a decade to complete.
The status of the nuclear fuel at the site would affect the speed of dismantlement, said Tetsuo Matsumoto, a nuclear engineering professor with Tokyo City University. “Will it still be shaped like rods? Or will it have melted and collapsed into a big mass?” the expert asked. “It could be 10 years or it could be 30. You just won’t know until you open up the reactor” (Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times, April 14).
Tokyo Electric Power on Wednesday said the deterioration of spent fuel stored in the No. 4 reactor's cooling pond appeared confined, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Fuel in the reactor was only partly compromised, the company indicated (Asahi Shimbun I, April 15).
The Japanese government on Friday indicated a smaller quantity of radioactive contaminants had been poured into the ocean in a controlled dump of low-level radioactive water than previously suspected, Kyodo News reported. Tokyo Electric Power suggested the 10,393 tons of water jettisoned between April 4 and 10 contained up to 170 billion becquerels of contaminants, but the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency estimated the total amount released to fall around 150 billion becquerels (Kyodo News III, April 15).
The U.S. Energy Department was sending five massive steel containers and a tractor trailer for holding contaminated water from the plant, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo indicated on Thursday (Kyodo News IV, April 14).
Fukushima University experts have plotted out the spread of air-based radioactive materials from the plant using samples taken late last month from 370 points around Fukushima prefecture, the Asahi Shimbun reported on Friday (Asahi Shimbun II, April 15).
In excess of 100 academic specialists intend next month to launch an investigation of the ecological and safety implications of radioactive contaminants released from the facility, Kyodo News reported. Members of the team are expected to help the Fukushima government gather soil samples from 1,500 points along 62 miles of coastline and as far as 37 miles from the ocean (Kyodo News V, April 14).
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday said specialists in his country "will assess the impact of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident on the environment and will also conduct environmental monitoring" (Kyodo News V, April 15).
Participating agencies would include the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry and Russian Meteorological Service, ITAR-Tass quoted Russian Geographical Society Vice President Artur Chilingarov as saying. The monitoring "starts on April 22 and will continue 24 days," he said (ITAR-Tass, April 15). http://www.globalsecurityne...nw_20110415_5020.php
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dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
Interesting... "The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to one mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed. " http://www.nytimes.com/2011...nuclear.html?_r=3&hp
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dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
Kenichi Matsumoto, a consultant to Prime Minister Naoto Kan's Cabinet Secretariat, initially told Japanese media that the remarks had been made by Kan when they met at his official residence earlier in the day.
But the 65-year-old academic, who has written many books on wide-ranging subjects including modern history and philosophy, said later the remarks were his own.
"You may not be able to live there for the time being," Mr Matsumoto first quoted Mr Kan as telling him about the areas from where residents have been evacuated, according to the Jiji and Kyodo news agencies and the TBS network.
"It would be something like 10 years and 20 years."
The government has set a 20-kilometre exclusion zone outside the plant.
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* Nuclear crisis elevated The Daily Telegraph, 3 days ago * Japan PM visits tsunami struck area The Daily Telegraph, 5 days ago * PM's pledge to survivors Herald Sun, 5 days ago * DFAT warning on Tokyo may be lifted The Australian, 8 days ago * Japanese, US troops look for dead The Daily Telegraph, 1 Apr 2011
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It said on Monday it was to widen the evacuation area due to radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which was crippled by a massive quake and tsunami on March 11.
Matsumoto later told media that he received a call from the prime minister about the comment.
"It was my own. The Prime Minister may share the perception but he did not say such a thing at all," Matsumoto said.
Mr Kan also told reporters later he did not make such a comment.
Matsumoto said he had proposed to Kan the idea of building an ecologically-friendly town inland with space for 50,000 to 100,000 people to help resettle evacuees who may have to abandon their homes near the plant.
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Apr 16th, 2011
dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
Nuclear Cleanup Plans Hinge on Unknowns By HIROKO TABUCHI Published: April 16, 2011
TOKYO — Even before the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been brought under control, two conglomerates vying for contracts in an eventual cleanup are estimating that the effort could take 10 years — or 30.
The widely divergent outlooks underscore the basic uncertainties clouding any forecast for Fukushima. It is far from clear when the cooling system will be restored and radiation emission halted; how soon workers can access some parts of the plant; and how bad the damage to the reactors, their fuel and nearby stored fuel turns out to be. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned that at least one reactor’s fuel may even have leaked out of the reactor pressure vessel.
A global team led by Hitachi said Thursday that it would take at least three decades to return the site to what engineers refer to as a “green field” state, meaning within legal limits of radiation for any residents. Toshiba, Japan’s biggest supplier of nuclear reactors, said it could take as little as 10 years.
Both companies have large nuclear-related businesses and appear to be eager to speak about endgame possibilities for a crisis that has heightened global public mistrust of nuclear power. Billions of dollars are likely to be at stake in the cleanup, which could help Hitachi and Toshiba buoy their sinking bottom lines. The two said last week that annual profits would fall short of their forecasts because of the widespread disruptions in production and supply chains caused by the disaster.
At a roundtable with reporters on Thursday, Toshiba’s chief executive, Norio Sasaki, wielded an inch-thick proposal outlining the dismantlement plan submitted to the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, this month. Hitachi has presented a competing plan.
The scale and complexity of the challenge are unprecedented. No nuclear reactor has ever been fully decommissioned in Japan, let alone the four certain to be dismantled at Fukushima Daiichi after being flooded with seawater to avert meltdowns and after suffering explosions and other damage. The final fates of the two other reactors there have not been announced, but they, too, may need to be decommissioned.
The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania involved just one reactor, and though there was a partial meltdown of the nuclear fuel rods, the chamber holding them did not rupture. The cleanup there still took 14 years and cost about $1 billion. (Two reactors that continue to operate at the site are set to be decommissioned in 2014.)
Recovery from the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine, meanwhile, is an example engineers are not eager to follow. Following explosions and a fire that sent huge radioactive plumes into the atmosphere, workers covered the remains of the reactor with sand and lead and eventually entombed it with concrete to halt the release of radiation. The concrete coffin still remains at Chernobyl, and the area is uninhabitable.
For now, workers in Japan are still trying to stem leaks of highly radioactive water from the plant even as they add to the flow by continuing to pump in water — now fresh, not saltwater. They are also racing to revive the contained cooling systems that circulate water and do not bleed contaminants.
But serious challenges remain, including what Japan’s nuclear regulator said Thursday were rising temperatures at one of the units, as well as a series of strong aftershocks. Later, Hidehiko Nishiyama, the deputy director general of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said the situation at the plant remained “difficult.”
Still, Toshiba’s engineers expect the plant to stabilize “in several months,” Mr. Sasaki said, and for full-scale cooling to resume. It would be five years before engineers would be able to open the pressure vessels to remove the nuclear fuel, he said, and dismantling the reactors and cleaning up radiation at the plant would take at least another five years.
Toshiba’s team includes engineers from Westinghouse, whose majority owner is Toshiba, and the Babcock & Wilcox Company, an energy technology and services company that handles the disposal of hazardous materials. The two companies helped shut down the damaged reactor at Three Mile Island.
A Hitachi spokesman in Tokyo, Yuichi Izumisawa, said that the 10-year projection was overly optimistic. He said that Hitachi’s engineers expected it to take that long just to remove the nuclear fuel rods from the plant and place them in casks to transport to a safe storage facility.
Only then can the dismantling of the plant’s structures begin, he said, followed by the cleanup of the remaining radiation.
Hitachi, the country’s second biggest supplier of reactors, has a team of 50 experts working on its dismantling plan. It has a joint nuclear venture with General Electric and is also working with the American nuclear operator Exelon and Bechtel, an engineering company.
“You basically need to dismantle the plant from the inside, and the inside is still very radioactive,” Mr. Izumisawa said. “At Hitachi, we are baffled over what kind of technology would allow everything to be finished in 10 years.”
Tetsuo Matsumoto, a professor of nuclear engineering at Tokyo City University, said that how long the decommissioning process would take depended heavily on the state of the nuclear fuel.
“Will it still be shaped like rods? Or will it have melted and collapsed into a big mass?” he said. “It could be 10 years or it could be 30. You just won’t know until you open up the reactor.”
..I listen to a lot of itell stuff & often there are many boring uninteresting reports like Nuclear leaks ,radiation,ect. may get all of us!! from the get go Nuclear intel people said it was far worse than was reported . let me know if any glowing people are spotted in west coast La La land,,maybe we can direct the comming clouds of flaming HOT radiated particles away from LA onto San Francisco.seed them!!.Hmmmm better tell my adopted daughter to clear out of Frisco Bay area ..
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12:55 PM
dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
..I listen to a lot of itell stuff & often there are many boring uninteresting reports like Nuclear leaks ,radiation,ect. may get all of us!! from the get go Nuclear intel people said it was far worse than was reported . let me know if any glowing people are spotted in west coast La La land,,maybe we can direct the comming clouds of flaming HOT radiated particles away from LA onto San Francisco.seed them!!.Hmmmm better tell my adopted daughter to clear out of Frisco Bay area ..
Sorry stan, not expecting any glowing people on the west coast, unless somehow all the plants exploded or something.
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dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
Levels of Radioactive Materials Rise Near Japanese Plant By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: April 16, 2011
TOKYO (AP) — Levels of radioactive materials have risen sharply again in seawater near the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan, raising the possibility of new leaks at the complex, the government said Saturday. Enlarge This Image Tokyo Electric Power Company, via Reuters
The exposed floor of the No. 4 reactor at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, in a photo taken by a drone Friday.
Workers have been struggling to deal with contaminated runoff at the plant that resulted from makeshift efforts to cool reactors and spent fuel rod pools after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out regular cooling systems.
Much of the tons of water that has been sprayed on the reactors and pools has been stored, but the company that operates the plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, recently discovered and eventually plugged a leak that could have been gushing for days. The levels of radioactive materials in the ocean near the plant dropped after that.
But the government said Saturday that levels of radioactive materials in the seawater have risen again in recent days. The level of radioactive iodine 131 jumped to 6,500 times the legal limit, according to samples taken Friday, up from 1,100 times the limit in samples taken the day before. Levels of cesium 134 and cesium 137 rose nearly fourfold. The increased levels are still far below those recorded earlier this month before the initial leak was plugged.
The government said the new rise in radioactivity could have been caused by the installation on Friday of steel panels intended to contain radioactive materials. The construction may have temporarily stirred up stagnant waste in the area, Hidehiko Nishiyama, the deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told reporters. However, the increase in iodine 131, which has an eight-day half life, could signal the possibility of a new leak, he said.
“We want to determine the origin and contain the leak, but I must admit that tracking it down is difficult,” he said.
The authorities have insisted that the radioactivity will dissipate and poses no immediate threat to fish outside the waters nearest to the plant or to the people who might eat them. The government has banned fishing close to the shore there.
Both cesium and iodine can increase the long-term risk of cancer with exposures to high levels.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, says it detected 260 becquerels of iodine-131 per cubic centimeter in samples taken on Friday. That is 6,500 times the legal limit. Source : http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_01.html
Now lets do the math, since 1 liter = 1000 cubic centimeters, 260 bequerels x 1000 = 260,000 bequerels per liter. Thats not exactly low level sea water.
Radiation Poses Barrier To Nuclear Plant Work By HIROKO TABUCHI Published: April 18, 2011
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TOKYO — Robots deployed inside two reactors at the Japanese nuclear plant overrun by last month’s devastating tsunami have detected radiation levels too high for workers to enter, posing immediate challenges for a new plan to bring the ravaged complex under control by year’s end. Multimedia Interactive Feature Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Multimedia
Workers have not been able to enter four of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant since the days immediately after the earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11. Vital cooling systems at the plant were knocked out, and the ensuing hydrogen explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors blew off their roofs and littered the site with radioactive debris.
On Sunday, two robots made their way into two of the reactor units, opening doors and navigating radioactive debris and puddles of water to return with temperature, pressure and radioactivity readings. The readings, released Monday, showed continued high radiation levels.
At Unit 1, robots detected up to 49 millisieverts per hour; at Unit 3, the reading was 57 millisieverts per hour. In recent weeks far higher readings have come from areas where contaminated water has accumulated, like the turbine building at Unit 2, where experts say the reactor pressure vessel may be cracked and leaking nuclear material.
Still, exposure for emergency workers in Japan is currently capped at 250 millisieverts of radiation annually. So the current levels effectively limit a worker to just a few hours of labor.
“It is a harsh environment for humans to work in,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
He said the levels would require the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to be “creative” in bringing the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown within six to nine months, as the company laid out in a timetable on Sunday.
The Japanese government continues to face severe challenges, both technical and political, in the aftermath of a multifaceted disaster that has left 13,800 people dead and 14,000 missing. At least 137,000 people remain in evacuation centers, some driven from their homes by radiation leaks from the Fukushima plant.
Japan’s Finance Ministry has said the damage from the earthquake and tsunami alone could reach $300 billion, making it the world’s most costly natural disaster. The toll from the nuclear disaster — which has disrupted farming and fishing, curtailed power supplies across eastern Japan, and inflicted other wounds on the economy — is yet to be tallied.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan came under fire on Monday from opposition lawmakers who accused him of bungling the initial response to the nuclear crisis.
“Many Japanese feel that Prime Minister Kan has no leadership,” Masashi Waki, a lawmaker of the main opposition, the Liberal Democratic Party, said at an unusually heated parliamentary session. Sadakazu Tanigaki, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, last week called on Mr. Kan to resign.
“I do not think that my response has been inadequate, as many say,” a flustered-looking Mr. Kan said, amid heckling. “Nonsense!”
A poll released Monday by The Nikkei, Japan’s largest business daily, appeared to back the opposition’s claims. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said Mr. Kan should be replaced, while 70 percent said the government’s response to the nuclear crisis was unacceptable. The Nikkei said it surveyed 983 people across the country from April 15 to 17, excluding some areas where phone lines remained down.
Tokyo Electric’s ambitious plan for bringing the reactors to a cold shutdown has also been criticized. The plan, drawn up at the government’s order, is meant to give residents evacuated from the area around the plant an idea of when they might be able to return home.
But experts question the viability of the plan, which calls for swiftly building critical new cooling systems. Tokyo Electric faces “substantial barriers” in following the timetable, said Haruki Madarame, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, an independent panel of experts appointed by the government to oversee the nuclear industry.
Mr. Madarame, a former professor in nuclear engineering at Tokyo University, told reporters Monday that the presence of highly radioactive water at Unit 2 posed a particular challenge. There and at other units, workers have been cooling nuclear fuel at the reactor’s core and in storage pools by pumping in hundreds of tons of water a day, producing dangerous amounts of runoff.
“We must make sure that the tight schedule does not lead to a neglect of safety,” Mr. Madarame said.
Robots could help tackle some of the challenges. The remote-controlled PackBots used Sunday, built by the iRobot company of Bedford, Mass., are 60-pound contraptions with steel arms and caterpillar tracks. They can lift about 30 pounds, go up and down steps, send images back to an operator and carry a hazardous materials kit that senses radiation.
IRobot, which also makes the popular Roomba vacuum, has delivered over 3,800 PackBots, primarily to the government and military, according to Tim Trainer, an iRobot vice president.
After arriving in mid-March, the robots were programmed to open reactor doors and navigate narrow passageways, said Mr. Nishiyama of the nuclear safety agency.
Robots, along with remote-controlled hovering drone aircraft made by Honeywell called T-Hawks, have let engineers survey and take measurements at the plant while minimizing workers’ exposure to harmful radiation. A PackBot entered a third reactor building late Sunday.
He said the levels would require the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to be “creative” in bringing the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown within six to nine months, as the company laid out in a timetable on Sunday.
Tokyo Electric’s ambitious plan for bringing the reactors to a cold shutdown has also been criticized. The plan, drawn up at the government’s order, is meant to give residents evacuated from the area around the plant an idea of when they might be able to return home.
At least 137,000 people remain in evacuation centers, some driven from their homes by radiation leaks from the Fukushima plant.
Hopefully these people will get to start cleaning up their homes and restarting their life by Christmas 2011, assuming TEPCo's "ambitious" and "creative" plans are successful. The earthquake and tsunami were over in 60 minutes, but the nuclear power plant disaster will continue for months, years, decades, perhaps even centuries.
Japan’s battle to contain four damaged reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has reignited the debate about Chernobyl, whose makeshift shelter has five years left in its lifespan and still leaks radiation. The Ukrainian government warned aid may fall short as governments cut spending and balk at a fund-raising effort that has been going on since 1997.
And the hits just keep on coming...
Edit to add, You and me, US taxpayers, have "donated" 261 million dollars toward the fund to build a new 100 year structure around Chernobyl. Just a billion more to go.
Russia, the builders of Chernobyl, have donated 22 million. Gee, why does the country that built the mess in the first place only donate one dollar for every eleven of our dollars? Hmmm... methinks they don't want to "eat the fish"...
[This message has been edited by JazzMan (edited 04-19-2011).]
How far is the "exclusion zone" right now? I used this handy little website to see how far a 30km one would be if something similar happened "in my backyard". Shocking. http://www.freemaptools.com...ius-around-point.htm
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dennis_6 Member
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YOKKAICHI, Japan — When lead-lined Japanese military helicopters took to the sky last month to dump water onto the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, Kazunori Hasegawa watched the desperate and highly risky cooling operation on television with dismay.
“It was so inefficient, so inefficient,” recalled Hasegawa, president of Chuo Construction. The Chinook helicopters had to fly high to avoid potentially lethal radiation and much of the 8,000 gallons they dropped during the day’s operation landed wide of the mark.
He had an idea: Might not two huge German-made contraptions he had sitting outside his office here in Yokkaichi do a better job? The devices, truck-mounted concrete pumps, had maneuverable arms 52-yards long and could blast water directly onto Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s perilously overheated reactors and spent fuel rods.
“I was ready to move right away,” Hasegawa said. Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, wasn’t.
More than a month after he first offered to help, his machines still hadn’t been put to use. Instead, Tokyo Electric, with help from the Japanese government, brought in similar, albeit slightly longer, pump trucks from Germany, China and the United States. Two with especially long arms arrived by air from Los Angeles and Atlanta last week.
The episode illuminates some of the headaches that plagued Japan’s critical early response to the world’s biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Initially reluctant to acknowledge the gravity of the crisis, Tokyo Electric played down the danger as it struggled to keep pace with an escalating and ever-shifting catastrophe at the six-reactor complex. The plant had been built to harness complex laws of nuclear physics, but the damage it sustained in a March 11 tsunami generated a chaos of often mundane logistical problems involving trucks and pumps, fire and water.
Dealing with a massive operation
The world’s largest private electric utility, Tokyo Electric supplied a third of all Japan’s electricity before the quake and has dozens of subsidiaries abroad, including a uranium producer in Canada, a company in Delaware and a shipping firm in the Bahamas. Its size, combined with a rigid top-down hierarchy and a commitment to proven procedure, made the company a steady pillar of Japan’s corporate establishment but crimped its capacity for swift and innovative action.
When radiation spiked dramatically at its Fukushima plant on March 15 following an explosion in Reactor 3 — one of several blasts at the complex — and the exposure of highly radioactive spent fuel rods, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces sent helicopters to dump water scooped from the sea. An initial attempt on March 16 had to be aborted because radiation was just too high.
On the same day at Tepco’s Tokyo headquarters, the company’s boss, Masataka Shimizu, vanished. His health cracking under the strain, he quit an emergency command center on the second floor and secluded himself in his office upstairs.
When the military helicopters tried again the following day, Hasegawa, Chuo Construction’s chief, sat glued to his television like much of Japan. After watching a spray of water drift aimlessly toward the nuclear plant, he knew that every minute mattered.
The businessman contacted a local politician, Eikei Suzuki, who had contacts in Tokyo and asked him to offer Chuo Construction’s machinery for immediate use. It was early afternoon on March 17, just two days after radiation levels skyrocketed, and Japan teetered on the edge of a full-scale nuclear catastrophe.
Suzuki, the local politician, who at the time was running for governor of Mie Prefecture against the ruling party, got in touch with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, or METI, in Tokyo, and passed on Chuo Construction’s offer. Suzuki used to work at the ministry, a big promoter of nuclear power and also the industry’s regulator. Later the same day, the nuclear safety agency, which is under METI, called Chuo Construction: “Please wait a while for a call from Tokyo Electric.”
While Hasegawa waited, military fire trucks and police water cannons were called in to squirt water from a distance. They sometimes hit their target but released so much water that the crippled nuclear facility was soon awash with contaminated liquid.
Only this week did Tokyo acknowledge that radioactive material released in these early days made the disaster a level-7 event on an international scale, putting it on a par with Chernobyl. And it took until Sunday for Tepco to admit that cooling systems crippled by the tsunami were beyond repair and will have to be replaced. This and other work to halt radioactive emissions and bring Fukushima-Daichi to a stable state and will last six to nine months, the company announced.
Three full days after his initial offer, Hasegawa received a late-night call from Tokyo Electric asking him to send his machines as soon as possible. He dispatched them the same night. Tepco, however, then decided it would wait for the arrival of similar devices from elsewhere.
Noriyuki Shikata, deputy cabinet spokesman, confirmed that Chuo Construction offered its machinery on March 17 and said this was passed on to Tepco the same day. “Due to the situation,” he added, “some loss of time” might have occurred, but this was due to “operational reasons” and the confusion attending Japan’s gravest crisis since World War II.
A Tepco spokesman, Yoshimi Hitosugi, declined to comment on the utility’s dealings with Chuo Construction. He said German and Chinese-made pump trucks are now in use at Fukushima Daiichi but added that “it is extremely difficult to confirm the process of how decisions for each individual activity were made on the ground.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id...ld_news-asiapacific/ Japan consumers may bail out nuke plant owner Government looks at tax hikes to pay for damages, rebuild quake-stricken region TOKYO — Japanese consumers would be on the hook for nuclear damage payments and earthquake reconstruction costs under two tax plans the government is considering, officials said Tuesday.
The Kyodo News agency said one plan would raise electricity customers' charges to help cover claims against Tokyo Electric Power Co. from people who suffer losses from the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The increase would come in the form of a higher electricity source-development tax, which is collected from customers as part of their electricity bills.
TEPCO must pay people forced to evacuate from the region surrounding the nuclear plant, but officials said the power company may not be able to pay all the claims.
"While TEPCO will be primarily responsible for damages payments, the government may have to support the firm," Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda told a press conference Tuesday. "We are considering taxation, the electricity charge and other measures to enable the government to shoulder some of the burden."
A second plan would raise to 8 percent Japan's current 5-percent consumption tax for about three years, Kyodo said. The extra $273 billion ($22.5 trillion yen) would pay for reconstruction of the country's northeastern region, said senior lawmakers in the Democratic Pary of Japan.
The March 11 earthquake and ensuing tsunami caused about $300 billion in damage, experts have estimated.
The quake disaster left 27,000 people dead or missing, made tens of thousands homeless and damaged the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima, leading to widespread evacuations. About 135,000 people are living in nearly 2,500 shelters set up in schools, gymnasiums and community centers along the northeast coast, while the government races to build temporary homes and prepare public housing units for them, a process expected to take five months. Internal Affairs Minister Yoshiro Katayama told reporters it had been clear even before the disaster that "some sort of reform of spending and revenues was necessary. The debate over the fiscal situation is not something that began with this disaster."
The government hopes to avoid issuing new bonds to fund an initial emergency budget, expected to be about $48 billion (4 trillion yen), due to be compiled this month.
But bond issuance is likely for subsequent extra budgets, which will only make it harder for Japan to rein in its debt, already running at twice the size of the $5 trillion economy.
Katsuya Okada, secretary-general of the ruling Democratic Party (DPJ), said on Sunday taxes had to rise to repay new government bonds that will be needed to pay for reconstruction.
A poll by the Nikkei business daily showed about 70 percent of Japanese voters would support a tax hike, but want unpopular Prime Minister Naoto Kan to be replaced.
The Yomiuri newspaper reported that the government had ruled out raising income and corporate taxes.
Nuclear plant progress The tax ideas were floated as TEPCO took a significant step toward easing the nuclear plant crisis by pumping highly radioactive water from the basement of one of its buildings to a makeshift storage area.
Removing the 25,000 metric tons (about 6.6 million gallons) of contaminated water in the basement of a turbine building at reactor No. 2 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant will help allow access for workers trying to restore vital cooling systems that were knocked out in the March 11 tsunami. Slideshow: A month of misery (on this page)
It is but one of many steps in a lengthy process to resolve the crisis. TEPCO projected in a road map released over the weekend that it would take up to nine months to reach a cold shutdown of the plant. But government officials acknowledge that setbacks could slow the timeline.
The water will be removed in stages, with the first third of it to be handled over the coming 20 days, said Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. In all, there are 70,000 tons (about 18.5 million gallons) of contaminated water to be removed from the plant's reactor and turbine buildings and nearby trenches, and the entire process could take months.
TEPCO is bringing the water to a storage building that was flooded during the tsunami with lightly contaminated water that was later pumped into the ocean to make room for the highly contaminated water.
The operator plans to use technology developed by French nuclear engineering giant Areva to reduce radioactivity and remove salt from the contaminated water so that it can be reused to cool the plant's reactors, Nishiyama said, adding that this process would take "several months."
Once the contaminated water in the plant buildings is safely removed and radioactivity levels decline, TEPCO hopes, workers can begin repairing the cooling systems for the reactors Nos. 1, 2 and 3, which were in operation at the time of the tsunami. Workers must also restore cooling functions at the plant's six spent fuel pools and a joint pool for all six units.
When the tsunami struck, units 5 and 6 were going through a regular inspection. On March 20, they were put in cold shutdown, which is when a reactor's core is stable at temperatures below 212 Fahrenheit.
Worst may be over Also Tuesday, a senior official at the U.N. nuclear agency suggested the worst may be over as far as radiation leaks at Japan's stricken reactor complex are concerned.
Denis Flory said he expects the total amount of radiation releases to be only a "small increase from what it is today" if "things go as foreseen." Flory, a deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasized Tuesday that his forecast was based on TEPCO's roadmap.
Flory told reporters the IAEA would work in a consultative role with Japan to help meet its targets and details of that role are being discussed.
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Apr 20th, 2011
dennis_6 Member
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Tepco Must End ‘Whack-a-Mole,’ Cover Fukushima Reactors as Typhoons Loom By Tsuyoshi Inajima and Yuji Okada - Apr 20, 2011 10:01 AM CT
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Tokyo Electric Power Co. must speed up plans to cover reactors at its crippled nuclear plant and drain tainted water to prevent more radiation leaks as Japan’s cyclone season approaches, engineering professors said.
In 2004, eight cyclones passed over or skirted Japan’s Tohoku region, where the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station is spewing radiation after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The earliest was in May that year, according to Japan’s weather agency data. The eyes of two storms passed within 300 kilometers of Tohoku last year, the data show.
Last month’s disaster wrecked the plant’s cooling systems, triggering the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. The roofs of three buildings were damaged in blasts as water inside reactor cores and spent-fuel ponds boiled away. The utility known as Tepco plans to install temporary covers within nine months, and concrete ceilings over the “medium term.”
“The buildings should be covered at least before the typhoon season is in full swing by late July,” said Tadashi Narabayashi, a professor of nuclear engineering at Hokkaido University. “Tepco’s actions are like a game of Whack-a-Mole because the company keeps reacting after the event.”
Tepco said on April 17 it will start erecting temporary covers for the damaged building within three months provided radiation falls to levels at which workers can begin construction. The work is expected to be completed in the next three to six months, according to the action plan, which lists the “possibility of the cover being damaged by a big typhoon” as a risk. ‘Quite Possible’
The Japan Meteorological Agency doesn’t make forecasts for how many tropical storms or typhoons are expected to approach Japan, Hajime Takayama, a weather forecaster at the bureau, said by telephone.
“It’s quite possible for a typhoon to hit the Tohoku region while maintaining its strength, although most tend to make landfall in the south,” Takayama said.
The temporary covers are the only measures planned at the moment to protect against typhoons, Takeo Iwamoto, a Tepco spokesman, said by phone. The company may install them faster than the plan announced on April 17, he said.
The Fukushima plant, 220 kilometers (137 miles) north of Tokyo, has six reactors, three of which were shut for maintenance when the earthquake and tsunami struck, leaving almost 28,000 people dead or missing.
Reactor buildings weakened by explosions may suffer further damage if a typhoon hits them, while strong winds and rain could scatter radioactive materials and water, said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University. Pouring Water
Tepco has been pouring millions of liters of water to cool the reactors and spent fuel after the accident, which has flooded basements and trenches near the buildings that house them. Some highly contaminated water leaked into the sea and the utility has dumped less toxic fluids into the ocean.
“Heavy rain may cause radioactive materials to soak further into the ground and enter the water table," Unesaki said. ‘‘This could affect drinking water.’’
Tepco started pumping contaminated water out of trenches near one of the reactor buildings that were damaged by the blasts, Junichi Matsumoto, a Tepco general manager, said April 19. The company aims to move 10 million liters (2.6 million gallons) of the contaminated water to a storage unit and expects to complete the transfer in 26 days.
‘‘It will be too late to start preparations once a typhoon approaches,’’ said Narabayashi of Hokkaido University. ‘‘It’s a basic risk principle that you proactively take measures against circumstances that are predictable.’’
To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Yuji Okada in Tokyo at yokada6@bloomberg.net
"Only this week did Tokyo acknowledge that radioactive material released in these early days made the disaster a level-7 event on an international scale, putting it on a par with Chernobyl. And it took until Sunday for Tepco to admit that cooling systems crippled by the tsunami were beyond repair and will have to be replaced."
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
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Apr 21st, 2011
dennis_6 Member
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Japan Prohibits Access to Nuclear Evacuation Zone By KEITH BRADSHER Published: April 20, 2011
TOKYO — After weeks of trying to prevent the Japanese public from panicking about the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the government now has the opposite problem: worries have faded so much that people are slipping back into the evacuation zone.
Workers who have been operating to stabilize the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant rested at a gymnasium inside the grounds of the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, a few miles away.
Yukio Edano, the chief secretary of Japan’s cabinet, said Thursday morning that beginning at midnight, no one would be allowed to enter the 12-mile zone around the reactors without official permission. He made the announcement after residents began returning to retrieve belongings from their homes and as local and foreign journalists began exploring the area.
Noriyuki Shikata, a senior government spokesman, had earlier issued an appeal asking people to stay out of the zone until the government gave legal force to an evacuation that had been voluntary until now. “The situation at Fukushima Daiichi is still not sufficiently stable,” he said. The 12-mile zone around the reactors was imposed in stages in the 30 hours after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
The government has also encouraged people to leave communities about 12 to 18 miles from the reactors as well as five towns farther away that happened to receive extra fallout because of wind and rain patterns. The government is not drafting a legal plan to ban people from entering those areas, officials said.
Radiation releases spiked in the first week of the nuclear accident but have declined steeply since then, according to government-run monitoring stations inside and outside the evacuation zone. The experience at Chernobyl in Ukraine after the nuclear accident there in 1986 was that wind and rain patterns tended to concentrate radiation in certain “hot spots.” The Japanese authorities have not yet identified any invisible hot spots in the evacuation zone.
Government officials took pains not to suggest that they had identified any new dangers at the power plant. But they have warned with increasing urgency that the site remains extremely vulnerable to aftershocks, which could be powerful enough to set off another tsunami.
In addition, Hidehiko Nishiyama, the deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said that the authorities were looking for ways to shore up the bottom of the spent uranium fuel-rod storage pool at Reactor No. 4 to prevent it from collapsing.
A spokesman for the Fukushima Prefecture police, whose jurisdiction encompasses the evacuation zone, said the police had done spot checks on 3,378 addresses in the area over the past three weeks and found people at 63 sites; they were urged to leave. Media reports have suggested that as many as 200 households are still occupied in the zone, mainly by elderly people who refuse to live at evacuation centers or by farmers who refuse to abandon their livestock.
According to the Japanese cabinet, 78,200 people lived inside a 12-mile radius before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. Many of them have been staying at evacuation centers for nearly six weeks, after fleeing the tsunami without time to gather their valuables; growing activity in the evacuation area has prompted concern among evacuees that their homes may be robbed while they are away, although there have been no documented cases of looting.
Mr. Shikata said the government was sensitive to the needs of residents who had fled with nothing more than “the clothes on their backs.” One person from each evacuated household would be allowed to enter the zone as part of two-hour bus trips to recover belongings, Mr. Edano said, but not even the buses would be allowed within two miles of the reactors. Mr. Nishiyama said the government’s main concern in drafting legal measures to bar entry to the evacuation zone involved public health and safety. But he said a secondary concern was that interlopers could spread the hot spots of radiation. Decontamination of a large area after a nuclear accident consists of very carefully mapping the hot spots. Contaminated objects are then sent to a specially lined landfill; even the dirt may have to be dug up if contamination is high enough.
Michael Corradini, the chairman of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, said that with power crews already setting up electricity transmission lines across the evacuation zone to the plant, and with heavy repair equipment being brought in as well, the movement of private individuals and their vehicles would probably not have much additional effect in spreading out the hot spots.
But Matthew Kozak, a principal consultant at Intera, an environmental consulting firm in Denver that has worked on radioactive waste management issues in Japan since the late 1980s but is not involved in the Fukushima cleanup, said that workers could be trained to minimize disruption to hot spots and be confined to easily traceable routes. Finding and cleaning up the radiation spread by interlopers would be more costly, he said in an e-mail, although he doubted residents would spread enough contamination to pose a serious health risk.
“Bottom line for me is that it is a good idea to keep people out of the controlled area, at least for now,” he said.
About 62,400 people lived about 12 to 18 miles from the power plant before the accident. They were initially told to stay indoors but have since been asked to leave voluntarily, along with residents of the five other communities that received some radioactive fallout because of wind and rain patterns. The cabinet has not released an estimate for the population of the other communities.
After the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet Union established a more stringently enforced exclusion zone, with an initial radius of about 18 miles. .
In Japan, weather patterns appear to have pushed much of the radiation from the coastal Fukushima reactors straight east and out to sea.
Japan: Fukushima 50 criticise 'inconsistent' information The Fukushima 50, emergency nuclear plant workers in Japan, have accused the government of inconsistent handling of data in relation to radiation exposure.
By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo 7:04PM BST 22 Apr 2011
Workers at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant claim to have been risking their health to battle around the clock in order to regain control following severe damage caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
However, concerns have been raised over the fact that the Japanese government took a "special measure" to raise radiation exposure levels from the normal total of 100 millisieverts up to 250 millisieverts in order to deal with the current crisis.
There were further claims that some workers were not being required to register their radiation exposure, which they feared could create future issues if health problems arose.
"In the end, we are the workers who are exposed," one emergency worker told the Mainichi newspaper.
Another nuclear industry source added: "If the radiation data is handled vaguely, workers may not be able to have proof of their exposure to radiation if they need to fight court battles." Patience among residents of northeast Japan who have been evacuated from their homes as a result of the nuclear crisis was also running increasingly thin this week.
On Friday, families criticised Masataka Shimizu, the head of Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant operators, as he visited an evacuation centre 30 miles from Fukushima Daiichi.
As he bowed deeply in apology to the displaced families, a growing number of evacuees expressed their growing frustration by questioning the actions of the company.
Among them was an elderly woman who asked him: "TEPCO has always said 'It's all right, it's all right'." Another demanded: "You've got to bring this back to normal as soon as possible." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...ent-information.html
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dennis_6 Member
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http://www.huffingtonpost.c...ar-acc_b_852666.html April 26, 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Until the recent Fukushima nuclear accident, Chernobyl was considered the worst nuclear accident in history. A month after the initial Fukushima accident began, Japan and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finally admitted that enormous amounts of high level radioactive carcinogens were released from the nuclear plant on March 11, and that the accident assessment should be raised from a "Level 5-Accident with Wider Consequences," like Three Mile Island, to a "Level 7-Major Accident". Level 7 is the highest international rating for a nuclear accident and 20 times more severe than Level 5. As the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan continues, it is highly likely that Fukushima will far surpass Chernobyl in terms of its human death toll and environmental damage.
Since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident at Fukushima first began, we've heard a constant chorus of lies and misinformation from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), Japanese government officials, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Obama Administration. First, we were assured that the radiation released by the Fukushima nuclear plant "is safe and poses no health risk". Then, the drum beat changed to, "there's no immediate danger" from the radiation, whatever that means, as cancer can take decades to develop. Soon, residents were ordered to evacuate their homes within 12 miles and stay indoors within 20 miles, as if wind born radiation can't infiltrate around doors and windows. Days later, President Obama cautioned U.S. citizens living within 50 miles of the nuclear plant to leave the area. Imagine trying to evacuate Boston if the Seabrook or Pilgrim Nuclear Plants were melting down or worse, New York City, if a Fukushima type nuclear accident occurred at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, just 35 miles from Manhattan. Meanwhile, radiation released from Fukushima in early March was discovered days later in tap water 140 miles away in Tokyo and not long after, more than 8,500 miles away in Boston.
Still, Japanese and U.S. officials continued to claim that the increasingly high levels of radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear reactors and multiple spent fuel pools was "safer than normal background levels, dental x-rays or flying coast to coast in an airplane." Further, weeks after the initial nuclear accident, as TEPCO desperately poured water onto the four damaged reactors and spent fuel pools, it became necessary to dump thousands of tons of highly contaminated radioactive water into the ocean. We were assured that the radiation would "be diluted by the ocean" and everything would be fine "because no one is allowed to fish in the offshore evacuation area"; as if fish don't migrate and ocean currents don't circulate the planet.
While utility and government officials have spread dangerous misinformation, an untold number of people worldwide have been exposed to invisible and deadly radiation from the nuclear reactor and spent fuel pool explosions at Fukushima. The implication that Fukushima now rivals Chernobyl is chilling. Even the most conservative estimates from the International Atomic Energy Agency, established by the UN in 1957 "to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy," projected that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl nuclear accident would be 4,000 people, mostly from cancer. Other scientific estimates put the Chernobyl death toll much higher.
A book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences, entitled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, puts the Chernobyl death toll at 985,000 people between 1986 and 2004. Authored by three noted Russian scientists including the former director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the book is based on health data, radiological surveys and over 5,000 scientific reports detailing the spread of radioactive poisons following the explosion of the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986. It reports that Chernobyl emitted "hundreds of millions of curies of radiation, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
The most extensive radioactive contamination from Chernobyl was in the Ukraine. Like Fukushima, Chernobyl released radioactive poisons including Iodine 131, Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and Plutonium (a millionth of a gram causes cancer in laboratory animals), with half lives ranging from 8 days to thousands of years, which were dispersed into the air and water throughout the globe. The book states, like Fukushima, "areas of North America were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10km. Some 1% of all Chernobyl radiation fell on North America." It goes on to claim that there have been as many as 170,000 cancer deaths in North America alone, from the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Similar to the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster, major radiation releases from Chernobyl continued for a month, until the plant was finally brought under control. Unlike Chernobyl, where just one nuclear reactor exploded and there were 860 tons of spent fuel on site, Fukushima has 4 nuclear reactors still "out of control" and 1,760 tons of spent fuel rods in "temporary pools", some of which have been severely compromised and continue to leak into the environment. In short, the Fukushima nuclear accident dwarfs the potential health risk and environmental damage caused by Chernobyl. Given the enormity of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster, it's certainly not alarmist to assume that the Fukushima could be far worse than Chernobyl.
Radiation is invisible and knows no boundaries. It's commonly accepted in scientific circles that there is no safe level of radiation and all radiation, including low doses, is cumulative and can cause cancer. Nuclear power is the most dangerous and expensive way to boil water to make electricity. The disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima demonstrate the nuclear power industry's willingness to needlessly risk the health of humanity and our environment. The U.S. could easily replace the 20% of nuclear generated electricity with clean and renewable energy sources like cogeneration, solar, wind and conservation without risking our lives to do it.
Meanwhile, as we blindly accept the lies and misinformation about nuclear power, we're force-fed the nuclear industry's invisible and deadly radiation without even knowing it or being able to prove where our cancer, potentially years down the road, came from.
This article is from the huffington post and is anti nuclear, I just posted it for the bit about a millionth of a gram causing cancer in lab animals, found that interesting.
[This message has been edited by dennis_6 (edited 04-22-2011).]
To avoid giving the pro-nuke lobby any leverage I would have just excerpted that (and some other) interesting bit rather than paste the article here in its entirety. Just a thought...
And it's been, what, forty some odd days and this situation is still not under control? Not even a little bit? I'm still hoping the almost 60+ thousand residents displaced not by the earthquake and tsunami but instead by a single power plant malfunction will be allowed back home to start rebuilding their lives by Christmas 2011.
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04:07 PM
dennis_6 Member
Posts: 7196 From: between here and there Registered: Aug 2001
To avoid giving the pro-nuke lobby any leverage I would have just excerpted that (and some other) interesting bit rather than paste the article here in its entirety. Just a thought...
And it's been, what, forty some odd days and this situation is still not under control? Not even a little bit? I'm still hoping the almost 60+ thousand residents displaced not by the earthquake and tsunami but instead by a single power plant malfunction will be allowed back home to start rebuilding their lives by Christmas 2011.
Thought about that, but someone may have accused me of trying to hide bias. So I just posted the article with a disclaimer.
I'm a bit surprised to see that article from the Huffington Post. Their contributing editors have in the past, espoused nuclear power over coal and oil as being the way to the future. Interesting, that so many prior nuclear power supporters have now chosen nukes as the bad guy---almost to the same extent they hammered away at coal and crude oil. I haven't looked at The Oil Drum lately, but suspect some of their numerous more vocal nuke power/Peak Oil advocates have now abandoned ship when it comes to this issue.
The fact is, that every single energy source has a downside if you look at all the parameters involved. Nuclear power gets a lot of it's really bad rep from the fact it is a silent, long lived, invisible, "mysterious" (to the uninformed) killer, and then something significant like Fukishima jumps up, and everyone suddenly jumps on the "anti" bandwagon.
