Earthquake off Japan

[aerius]

How the fuck is wind so deadly?

Construction and maintenance. Working at the top of those giant towers is not the safest thing in the world.

[Broomstick]

Does anyone seriously think, given the obvious ineptitude of TEPCO and the Japanese government to address issues raised, not only in recent years by their own engineers, but from the 1970s relating to the original reactor designs themselves, that people will trust in this energy form again? I highly doubt it.

I heard that after Three Mile Island.

I heard that after Chernobyl.

Oddly enough, we didn't start scrapping nuclear power plants, and in fact, people have gone on to build more. Somehow, I don't see this situation being any different.

Forget, for a minute, the whole predicament in Japan if you will (I can't. I have friends in a Tokyo suburb).

Well, you're not the only one - my Other Half has a friend he's known for 30 years who lives in Japan. We still have not been able to contact him. Nor has his daughter. No one answers his phones, not for a week now.

We're not out of the woods yet by a long shot, in any case. There is the potential for a FAR larger disaster than even Chernobyl here, which arises not from the reactors themselves, but as another poster mentioned, the hundreds of tonnes of spent fuel rods, which in some cases are relatively new and could include MOX rods too.

Look at what you're saying - "potential", "could". Hypothetical. Please, provide some reputable cites. Explain how this Bad Stuff is going to crawl out of the Fukushima power plant grounds and go elsewhere. Give us a mechanism as to how it might be propelled across the property borders, and if you do, kindly be bothered to do some rough, back-of-the-envelope/cocktail napkin calculations on quantity, distance, and half lives of the Bad Stuff you're claiming will be "worse than Chernobyl", or, if you can't do the math, at least propose the mechanism and politely request someone else help you with it.

The severity of the quake has seriously compromised the structures of the plant, and it is possible the rods are no longer in their fail-safer configuration within the pools, leading to more warming (and in an extreme case, a potential subcriticality if fresher fuel is present and allowed to burn and form alloys with surrounding materials).

OK, I'm a little confused by this. Yes, there has been some damage to the plant. We - those of us sitting here - don't have any way to know how serious it is, what exactly was damaged, and what was damaged by the quake, the tsunami, subsequent explosions at the plant, or some despondent worker getting stinking drunk and pissing into a control panel in the middle of the night (no, I don't have any evidence anyone got drunk at Fukushima - but it's a "solid" as a lot of the "reporting" that's flown around the airwaves the past week).

Regardless of whether the fuel rods are in a "fail safe position" or not, if the pool runs dry it's no longer "fail safe". We know fuel rods have been exposed to the air and got really hot. There isn't any dispute or debate about that, it happened.

What is this "sub-criticality" you mention? Seriously, what is that? Something that's not critical? That's pretty much all the damn time. What's really worrisome is a "criticality" accident, nothing "sub" about it, which puts out a lot of radiation. But the intensity of the radiation falls off very rapidly with distance - in some of the criticality accidents in the early part of the US program only the guy standing practically on top of the reactive lump got blasted - other people in the very same room were unscathed or only minimally affected. See demon core for a description of actual criticality accidents (not the only ones, but that lump of plutonium became infamous). Of course, one important difference is that in a fuel pool it could be a lot more mass going critical, but the point remains that distance equals safety here. All of us reading this - yes, even the folks in Japan itself - are far enough away that a criticality isn't going to hurt any of us. And it's NOT going to explode - the "demon core" actually was a bomb component and when it flashed critical not once but twice no boom. Uranium and/or plutonium do not go >boom< spontaneously, OK? Making them blow up requires some fairly precise engineering. A bunch of fuel rods, even in a bone dry pool, have such low odds of spontaneously self-assembly into such a precise set of circumstances you might as well call it "zero". It's like expecting a random pile of lumber to self-assemble into a house.

That's not to say all the media is going for ratings. I follow the BBC, NHK, Reuters, Al Jazeera and a variety or pro- and anti-nuclear sources, and many come to the same conclusions as the governments which have decided to evacuate expats from the area. If you can't reliably learn what the danger is from the people who, one minute say nothing untoward is happening only for a whole building to explode moments later, then er on the side of caution.

While there is always the potential for deception, saving face, and other less than truthful means of talking, I'm more inclined to think part of the problem is that no one knows exactly what's going on. It's not like anyone can just pop into the reactor room, open a panel, and have a look inside. Some of the remote sensing equipment has been damaged. Situations can change rapidly. We have multiple agencies monitoring the place now and still no one is completely sure what's up inside the more dangerous areas of the plant. While I have no doubts about the ability of the Japanese to display bravery and self-sacrifice such nobility should be spent sparingly, and only when there is truly no other choice. That means having to "look" inside the damaged areas indirectly right now. That means a certain level of uncertainty.

It is very hard to see how the nuclear lobby can win the public over when the idea of decentralised, utterly safe power generation is an issue these days, especially with climate change.

What, pray tell, is this "utterly safe" source of energy? Really, what is it? Solar? There are rules in place on how to install power generating solar panels so you don't electrocute yourself while doing so. Wind power requires safety equipment to disable it/cut off generation during periods of extremely high winds, and then there's the problem of electrical hazards after the power is generated. Geothermal requires siting near geothermically active areas - which sometimes erupt into volcanoes and such. Bummer. Hydrogen... well, it can explode. Hydro? The impact on the environment can be bad and, oh yeah, people die when damn fail, sometimes by the thousands.

Really, WHAT is this "utterly safe power generation" you speak of? The world would like to know.

Wind turbines and PV/solar thermal plants do not risk irradiating large swathes of land for centuries when they pass their fail-safe limits. On top of that, it's rather hard to wipe out ALL power generation from such a network of systems working as one. There's that idiom regarding eggs and baskets, only here, they glow with a distinctly eerie blue tinge.

Let's see... TMI: no swathes of land irridiated at all.

Chernobyl: Yeah, exclusion zone. However, it's not a lifeless wasteland. People do work in the zone. There are elderly people living there and yes, they're exposed to radiation but it's now believed they'll pretty much die of old age before getting cancer from their vegetable gardens. Even with new estimates, based on cesium being more persistent in the environment than previously supposed (they've also run into that with Bikini atoll, site of atomic testing) you're looking at 180 to 320 years. Yes, that's a bit fuzzy a range, but that's for the worst areas, much of the current "exclusion zone" will be safe for long-term human habitation much sooner than that. That IS our worst scenario, from an accident where not only was a core exposed but ejected into the environment.

Fukushima: As already noted, the cores will NOT explode. They're going to stay in the building they're currently in. The fuel rods will stay in their pools. That's a very localized situation. So, worst case you won't be able to live permanently on the Fukushima plant grounds for awhile. Not sure if that qualifies as "huge swathes of land." If necessary, we can entomb everything at Fukushima - unlike Chernobyl, where stuff was flung into the enviroment in such a manner we can't gather it all up - and dump contaminated ground into the box. This is MUCH more containable, even if a nasty mess.

[Duckie]

One of the arguments I seem to see now is relating the potential risk of a nuclear disaster, with the daily damage caused by coal, as if someone said coal was something we should aspire to. While this is an obvious false dichotomy, I can't for the life of me see how anyone can rate wind or solar anywhere near nuclear in terms of danger without extrapolating all the way back to mining rare earths and up to someone getting gangrene from stubbing their toe during assembly.

And yet that guy's stats clearly say the exact opposite, probably because Wind produces about as much power as rubbing a cat with a stick of amber so if there's even a chance a single turbine will kill one guy during operation it'll be deadlier than nuclear to power a city.

[Broomstick]

Actually, it's my understanding construction accidents are a more common means of getting killed with a wind turbine, rather than post-installation accidents. Even so - my area has had a couple modern turbines knocked over by high winds, in one instance a microburst and in another straight-line 160 kph gusts.

[MKSheppard]

Construction and maintenance. Working at the top of those giant towers is not the safest thing in the world.

They also massacre scores of migrating birdies too.

[Sea Skimmer]

Most migrating birds fly high enough to be unaffected, but stuff like the following video sure can happen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NAAzBAr ... re=related

[Thanas]

More safety issues/regulation failures:

Part 1:

THE Japanese owner of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant falsified safety data and "dishonestly" tried to cover up problems there.

Tokyo Electric Power Co injected air into the containment vessel of Fukushima reactor No 1 to artificially “lower the leak rate”. When caught, the company expressed its “sincere apologies for conducting dishonest practices”.

The misconduct came to light in 2002 after whistleblowers working for General Electric, which designed the reactor, complained to the Japanese government. Another GE employee later confessed that he had falsified records of inspections of reactor No1 in 1989 - at the request of TEPCO officials. He also admitted to falsifying other inspection reports, also on request of the client. After that incident TEPCO was forced to shut down 17 reactors, albeit temporarily.

Dale Bridenbaugh, a GE employee who was not the whistleblower, resigned 35 years ago after becoming convinced that the design of the Mark 1 reactor used at Fukushima was seriously flawed. Five of the six reactors were built to that design.

Mr Bridenbaugh told ABC News: “The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant.”

In a document entitled Lessons Learned from the TEPCO Nuclear Power Scandal, released by the company and seen by The Times, TEPCO blamed its “misconduct” in 2002 on its “engineers' overconfidence of their nuclear knowledge”. Their “conservative mentality” had led them to fail to report problems, the company said, resulting in an “inadequate safety culture”.

In 2007, TEPCO ran into trouble again after misinforming government officials about breakdowns at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, which had been damaged after a magnitude 6.8 quake. In a cable released by WikiLeaks, a US official said: “TEPCO issued a corrected statement on July 18 in which it admitted it miscalculated the amount of radiation leakage.”

WikiLeaks cables also reveal that Japan was warned in 2009 that its power plants could not withstand powerful earthquakes.

The US was highly critical of Japan's senior safety director at the International Atomic Energy Association “particularly with respect to confronting Japan's own safety practices”, according to confidential documents obtained by WikiLeaks. In July 2009, in a cable to Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, the US mission at the IAEA said Tomihiro Taniguchi, the deputy director of the IAEA department of nuclear safety and security, was a “weak manager” and in a cable sent later that year said that the department had suffered because of his “weak management and leadership skills”.

Part 2:

The Japanese government has said it is doing all it can to contain the crisis at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which was critically damaged in last week's earthquake. But according to U.S. diplomatic papers released by WikiLeaks, that atomic disaster might have been avoided if only the government had acted on earlier safety warnings.

An unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency is quoted in a 2008 cable from the American embassy in Tokyo as saying that a strong earthquake would pose a "serious problem" for Japan's nuclear power stations. The official added that the country's nuclear safety guidelines were dangerously out of date, as they had only been "revised three times in the last 35 years."

Following that warning, Japan's government pledged to raise security at all of its nuclear facilities, reports The Daily Telegraph, which published the cable. But questions are now being asked about whether authorities really took the nuclear watchdog's worries seriously.

A new emergency response center was built at the Fukushima power plant. However, that facility was only designed to withstand 7.0-magnitude tremors. Friday's seismic activity measured 9.0, and the plant has been rocked by three explosions in the past five days. It is now believed that the containment system around one of Fukushima's reactors has cracked, allowing radioactive steam to escape into the atmosphere.

Other documents published by WikiLeaks also shine a light on Japan's seemingly relaxed approach to nuclear safety. A 2006 cable from the Tokyo embassy detailed how a district court ordered a nuclear plant shut down in western Japan "due to safety concerns over its ability to withstand powerful earthquakes."

The judge argued that local people might suffer radiation poisoning if there was a quake-caused accident at the Shika plant. That power station was only built to survive a 6.5-magnitude earthquake, in line with outdated regulations written two decades earlier.

However, the country's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency didn't share those concerns, the cable reports. It argued that "the reactor is safe and that all safety analyses were appropriately conducted." And in 2009, the high court overturned the closure order and declared that the reactor's safety measures satisfied "the government's quake resistance guidelines."

Another cable sent from Tokyo to Washington in October 2008 alleged that the government had hidden past nuclear accidents. In 2008, Taro Kono -- a senior member of Japan's lower house of parliament -- told U.S. diplomats that the ministry of economy, trade and industry was "covering up nuclear accidents, and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry."

Kono also raised the issue of earthquakes and nuclear safety in the meeting. Citing "Japan's extensive seismic activity" and "abundant groundwater," he doubted government assurances that "a safe place to store nuclear waste" could be found in the "land of volcanoes."

The overall picture that emerges from the cables is of a government afraid of interfering with the powerful nuclear industry, which supplies about one-third of Japan's electricity. In his discussion with U.S. diplomats, Kono suggested that Japan's culture of deference to authority and corporate power prevented officials from changing the country's soft-touch regulation. He argued that industry ministers were "trapped" as they "inherited policies from people more senior to them, which they could then not challenge."

Japanese officials who went on to work for the IAEA apparently shared this fear of confrontation. In 2009, the U.S. embassy in Vienna, Austria, labeled the IAEA's outgoing safety director "a disappointment," in part because of his failure to boost safety at home.

"[Tomihiro] Taniguchi has been a weak manager and advocate, particularly with respect to confronting Japan's own safety practices, and he is a particular disappointment to the United States for his unloved-step-child treatment of the Office of Nuclear Security," said the cable. "This ... position requires a good manager and leader who is technically qualified in both safety and security."

Taniguchi served as the executive director of Japan's Nuclear Power Engineering Corp. -- which is charged with addressing nuclear plant security in the aftermath of earthquakes -- before becoming the deputy director general for the IAEA's Department of Nuclear Safety and Security in 2001. Taniguchi left his job with the nuclear watchdog in September 2009, when another Japanese official, Yukiya Amano, was appointed director general of the IAEA.

Before leaving office, Taniguchi told a meeting of nuclear officials in 2008 that the international community needed to push for more nuclear power safeguards, according to a separate Vienna cable. "We should avoid another Chernobyl or nuclear 9/11," he said. Unfortunately, such a disaster is now unfolding in Fukushima.

[Magis]

Fascinating. So enlighten us, how safe are all the other hundreds of spent fuel ponds across the world. independent of their supporting reactors and infrastructure?

That's actually something that I'm not really sure about. In CANDU units, wet storage bays are located within containment. In BWRs, they are outside primary containment but within secondary containment, not that secondary containment is particularly robust. In the case of PWRs, wet storage pools are outside containment entirely. Of course, that's not necessarily a good or a bad thing. In the case of a severe accident, containment can be flooded with radiation which would make servicing the spent fuel pools difficult or impossible. It really comes down to a trade-off between containment and accessibility. I'm not sure which way is best. In any case, loss of station power for 5 days is way beyond any nuclear facility design-basis, so it's hard to say what the consequences would be for reactor cores, spent fuel bays, or anything else.

I also have some new info about the Fukushima situation in particular. The wet storage bay contains between 20 and 30 years of spent fuel, bringing the inventory up to about 3,000 tons. The radiation inside the storage bay is 1,000 rem/hour = 10 sV/hour, which is life-threatening and immediately so.

Regarding the hydrogen explosions, normally containment pressure is vented through a hard vent line to the atmosphere. For some reason, at Fukushima the decision was made to instead vent the steam through the building's normal HVAC system, at a pressure of about 120psi. Naturally, this pressure burst the HVAC ducts and spilled the vented gas into the refueling floor above containment, which subsequently exploded at several units. Secondary containment seems breached at one unit, and primary containment is likely breached at two units.

[phongn]

More safety issues/regulation failures

Over on ArsTechnica, a nuclear engineer outlined some of the many changes that European operators made to their BWRs after TMI - changes he implied were also applied to American plants but not Japanese ones. These include 96-hour battery backups, vents that can be manually operated, the ability to vent out H2 from secondary containment, bypassing the torus ... all sorts of fun that would've come in decidedly handy.

WikiLeaks cables also reveal that Japan was warned in 2009 that its power plants could not withstand powerful earthquakes.

Well, this one stood fairly high loads (it was the tsunami that screwed them over).

[Thanas]

Over on ArsTechnica, a nuclear engineer outlined some of the many changes that European operators made to their BWRs after TMI - changes he implied were also applied to American plants but not Japanese ones. These include 96-hour battery backups, vents that can be manually operated, the ability to vent out H2 from secondary containment, bypassing the torus ... all sorts of fun that would've come in decidedly handy.

Yeah. Too bad the Japanese were cheapskates and/or incompetent.

[phongn]

Over on the old warships1 forum, Fermi2 goes into some detail on what he might do as head of a plant (to be a bit fair, he has the luxury of not being under huge amount of stress).

[Broomstick]

While I do expect some level of noncompliance/violations/error in any system as complex as a nuclear reactor, I also expect those problems to be on a minor level, the level of petty human failings that the system as a whole is robust enough to absorb. Part of the purpose of multiple-redundancy is to compensate for human failings which, no matter how good your screening process, are going to occur from time to time.

However, Thanas seems to be presenting evidence of something beyond the normal or background level of human failing in any complex endeavor.

I also find it disturbing that improvements made after the analysis of TMI that seem to have been adopted everywhere else were not adopted and installed in Japan. While those changes may not have prevented all the serious stuff that's occurred over the past week they might have mitigated the problems and resulted in less damage to the facility and less damage to human beings. I don't know if it was being cheap or some sort of arrogance, perhaps an assumption that their engineering was already sufficient to withstand whatever was likely to occur. In any case, as demonstrated, serious problems can arise not only from what we can predict but from what we are unable to predict.

Regardless, this is still early in the game as far as accident review and analysis goes. I expect we'll be hearing bits and pieces for years.

[Broomstick]

Link to an article about those left homeless by the devastation, and some very poignant and even upsetting pictures. I'm a bit tired and lazy so I won't do the usual nicely formatted post for this sort of thing, just a link. It describes the humanitarian disaster that's largely been ignored these past few days because of nuclear hijinks.

[Sea Skimmer]

From what I’ve been reading and seeing on TV, Japanese have supplies, the transportation system seems to have near completely broken because of major shortages of refined fuels of all kinds. Truck drivers especially will not go anywhere near the nuclear accident site without being assured they have enough fuel to leave promptly. A lot of Japanese refineries are down, but my understanding had been that Japan was one of the few nations which actually had a strategic reverse of refined fuel. Not just gasoline. Maybe they’ve run that down in recent years? It looks like the disaster planning system simply did not anticipate total leveling of such outlaying areas.

Its getting absurd that Japan hasn’t asked for more US helicopter support when they have doctors eating a few small riceballs each day. They risk making Katrina no longer look so incompetence; and certainly China’s parachute commando recoilless rifle attacks on landslides the other year put everyone to shame.

[Sea Skimmer]

I found some specifics on the fuel tonnages at the plant I don't think have been posted before

How Much Spent Nuclear Fuel Does the Fukushima Daiichi Facility Hold?
As Japan attempts to cool overheating nuclear fuel with seawater, experts worry that the damaged spent-fuel pools pose the greatest threat
By Katherine Harmon | Thursday, March 17, 2011 | 6
INTACT REACTORS: Several of the reactors (pictured here before the March 11 earthquake) at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have sustained damage, making it difficult for crews to get close enough to stem the spread of radioactive material. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport
Helicopters and fire trucks proved unsuccessful at replenishing damaged nuclear fuel pools at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant on Thursday. The spent-fuel pools contain a large amount of radioactive material that is not contained as well as that in the reactor cores. And although information has been spotty, nuclear experts worry that this fuel—which should be submerged in circulating water to keep it from overheating—has been at least partly exposed in the pools belonging to reactor Nos. 3 and 4.

In an early attempt to refill the vital pools with water Thursday, the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF) dispatched a cargo helicopter—specially outfitted with lead plates to help shield crewmembers from direct radiation—to drop seawater on the plant's reactor No. 3. The unit houses MOX (mixed oxide) fuel, which can melt at lower temperatures and could release some of its plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years.

Later that day, the country's National Police Agency attempted to use fire trucks to pump water into No. 3's spent-fuel pools, but owing to high radiation levels, operators were not able to get close enough. Five, more robust pump trucks, sent later by the JSDF were able to move in close enough for 24 minutes to inject some 30 tons of water into the low pools. As of 9:30 P.M. local time, the "effect of this operation [was] still under evaluation," the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (JAIF) reported.

As of 10 P.M. local time on Thursday, the JAIF listed the following status of the six Fukushima Daiichi reactors:

• Buildings around reactor Nos. 1, 3 and 4 were "severely damaged"; the building housing reactor No. 2 was "slightly damaged";
• Cooling was not working for reactor Nos. 1, or 3;
• Water levels were covering more than half of the fuel in reactor No. 2; reactor Nos. 1 and 3 water levels were covering only about half of the fuel.
• Structural integrity of the spent fuel pools was unknown for reactor Nos. 1 and 2;
• Reactor Nos. 3 and 4 had low water levels; pool temperature was continuing to rise for reactor Nos. 5 and 6.

The spent fuel pools are of significant concern, Marvin Resnikoff, a radioactive waste management consultant, said in a Wednesday press briefing organized by the nonprofit organization Physicians for Social Responsibility. Resnikoff noted that the pools at each reactor are thought to have contained the following amounts of spent fuel, according to The Mainichi Daily News:

• Reactor No. 1 fuel pool: 50 tons of nuclear fuel
• Reactor No. 2 fuel pool: 81 tons
• Reactor No. 3 fuel pool: 88 tons
• Reactor No. 4 fuel pool: 135 tons
• Reactor No. 5 fuel pool: 142 tons
• Reactor No. 6 fuel pool: 151 tons
• Also, a separate ground-level fuel pool contains 1,097 tons of fuel; and some 70 tons of nuclear materials are kept on the grounds in dry storage.

The reactor cores themselves contain less than 100 tons of fuel, Resnikoff noted.

The fuel had been moved from reactor No. 4's core to its spent-fuel pool recently, so "that fuel is relatively fresh and hotter, thermally," Resnikoff explained. "So it's not surprising that when the water [was] no longer circulating that the water was actually boiled off in a zirconium exothermic reaction, that the zirconium burned" (occurring at about 1,800 degrees Celsius).

Scientists are not confident that they will be able to assess just how much radioactive material will have been released as this event unfolds, David Richardson, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Public Health, said in the press briefing. It might not be until people can safely take stock of all of the fuel that is left, and then only "by that we can make a reckoning of what was lost," he said.

As of midday Thursday, the country's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency spokesperson Yoshitaka Nagayama, noted that "because we have been unable to go to the scene, we cannot confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at reactor No. 4," The New York Times reported. As of March 16, there had been at least two fires suspected at that reactor.

If the burning-hot fuel is not covered by adequate water, the heat from the ongoing nuclear reactions can cause the water to boil off. "Water in the pool serves as shielding and cooling, and when that water is gone, that direct gamma radiation is very high," Resnikoff said.

Resnikoff was skeptical at the briefing that helicopters would be an effective way to stave off overheating in the spent-fuel pools. "Part of the roof still remains, and they cannot just dump water into the fuel pools" from the air, he said.

In a congressional testimony yesterday, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said of the conditions at the plant: "We believe that radiation levels are extremely high."

In any case, the NRC recommended Wednesday that U.S. residents in Japan within 80 kilometers of the facility should evacuate. American military personnel were being kept at least at this distance from the site. The Japanese government had evacuated residents within a 20-kilometer radius (and recommended those 20 to 30 kilometers away to remain indoors).

Yukio Edano, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, said that the U.S.'s "more conservative decision" to move U.S. residents farther away from the plant is "understandable," CNN reported.

Governments, agencies and many in the public have complained about the paucity of data being made available by the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power, the company that owns and operates the facility. But as Resnikoff pointed out, many of the radiation sensors are located on the nuclear plant's site and may well have been damaged during or since the March 11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake. "So it's not surprising that we're not getting the numbers we want."

And whether or not the 50 tons of water dumped on reactor No. 3 was enough to temporarily cool the spent fuel pool, the efforts will need to continue to avoid a significant release of radiation. "This is a several-months problem," Resnikoff said. "The heat values will be high for months—high enough to cause an exothermic reaction. So this is going to be a continual problem."

At least, the threat of radioactive release in Japan seems to be contained to the Fukushima Daiichi facility (Japan has a total of 54 nuclear reactors at various facilities). "Other nuclear power plants in Japan are in normal operations or safely shutdown," the JAIF reported Thursday.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -fukushima

[Pelranius]

Speaking of fuel, China donated 20,000 tons of diesel and gasoline. Don't know how quickly it will get there (or be distributed).

BEIJING, March 16, Kyodo

The Chinese government decided Wednesday to donate 20,000 tons of fuel to Japan in the wake of last week's massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated the northeastern part of the country, Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday.

The donated fuel consists of 10,000 tons of gasoline and 10,000 tons of heavy oil, Xinhua said.

China, meanwhile, was unaffected by radioactive leaks from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant damaged by Friday's magnitude 9.0 quake, Xinhua said in a separate dispatch, quoting the nuclear watchdog's air monitoring survey.

Test results as of 4 p.m. found ''nothing unusual,'' the National Nuclear Safety Administration under the Ministry of Environmental Protection was quoted as saying in a statement.

Air monitoring stations in 41 cities across China tested levels of radioactive material absorbed in the air.

The ministry began nationwide radiation monitoring after leaks of radioactive substances were reported at the Fukushima plant in northeastern Japan.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78658.html

[phongn]

Its getting absurd that Japan hasn’t asked for more US helicopter support when they have doctors eating a few small riceballs each day. They risk making Katrina no longer look so incompetence; and certainly China’s parachute commando recoilless rifle attacks on landslides the other year put everyone to shame.

Speaking of badness ...

The devastating impact of the Japanese earthquake on the country's ageing population was exposed on Thursday as dozens of elderly people were confirmed dead in hospitals and residential homes as heating fuel and medicine ran out.

In one particularly shocking incident, Japan's self-defence force discovered 128 elderly people abandoned by medical staff at a hospital six miles from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. Most of them were comatose and 14 died shortly afterwards. Eleven others were reported dead at a retirement home in Kesennuma because of freezing temperatures, six days after 47 of their fellow residents were killed in the tsunami. The surviving residents of the retirement home in Kesennuma were described by its owner, Morimitsu Inawashida, as "alone and under high stress". He said fuel for their kerosene heaters was running out.

Almost a quarter of Japan's population are 65 or over, and hypothermia, dehydration and respiratory diseases are taking hold among the elderly in shelters, many of whom lost their medication when the wave struck, according to Eric Ouannes, general director of Doctors Without Borders' Japan affiliate.

This comes after Japan's elderly people bore the brunt of the initial impact of the quake and tsunami, with many of them unable to flee to higher ground.

Although the people from the hospital near Fukushima were moved by the self-defence forces to a gymnasium in Iwaki, there were reports that conditions were not much better there. An official for the government said it felt "helpless and very sorry for them". "The condition at the gymnasium was horrible," said Cheui Inamura. "No running water, no medicine and very, very little food. We simply did not have means to provide good care."

(article continues)

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Its getting absurd that Japan hasn’t asked for more US helicopter support when they have doctors eating a few small riceballs each day. They risk making Katrina no longer look so incompetence; and certainly China’s parachute commando recoilless rifle attacks on landslides the other year put everyone to shame.

How much can helicopters really do honestly? The scale of devastation far exceeds that of Katrina anyway. Plus, with the fuel shortages, how many can they keep flying?

[MKSheppard]

It's called a supercarrier with logistics support and lots of jet fuel.

[Sea Skimmer]

How much can helicopters really do honestly? The scale of devastation far exceeds that of Katrina anyway. Plus, with the fuel shortages, how many can they keep flying?

Actually Katrina messed up just as long as stretch of coastline, around 300 miles of heavy damage in both cases, and it had effects deep inland that blocked roads. The damage in Biloxi is directly comparable to the tsunami, though of course the US had evacuation time and so only about 1,900 people were killed in total. Japan is worse for certain, but Katrina was pretty damn big. We just got lucky a big lake was a lot of the inland area.

Fuel is a problem but clearly not impossible to get, take it from the Tokyo airports if you have too; no one seems to be having any problems gassing up airliners to move people out, and anyone who wants to flee the radiation can go to a more southerly airport. Enough of the trains are running again for that to be possible. Only 20% of Japans refineries are down, that should leave more then enough fuel for any possible EMERGENCY use if anyone was giving enough real orders to shuffle it around. Japan only has about 30 Chinooks in its fleet, and precious few other heavy lift helicopters, bringing in 24 US Chinooks would make a huge difference. You haul up to 14 tons of cargo on each mission, making six to eight missions a day or even more. That's 1,680 tons moved a day at least, exactly to the points it is required bypassing roads and other problem areas with a 200nm mission radius. If only food was carried and not water or other supplies you could provide daily rations to a million plus people. The US also has swarms of C-130s which could be drawn on to make air drops from remote bases, the Japanese have a number too which I would presume are already busy.

Actually they should also be asking Russia for help, Russia has endless helicopters too, but they'll certainly not do that. I'd be amazed if it happens, though Putin did order that Japan be given priority for natural gas imports. Japan needs energy of all forms like crazy now; the refined fuel shortage will go away but they need hoards of natural gas and coal to run the remaining power plants as hard as possible. Rumor has had it that the rolling blackouts could last MONTHS! Really now, Japan renounces a formal military and deliberately limits defense spending (its huge but it doesn’t buy much!) in ordered to keep the SDF to minimal standards. That’s simply hurting them right now because they do not have the depth of capability we would expect out of such a wealthy nation. The US is obligated to defend Japan as part of that renunciation; this is exactly when that should be put into effect.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Actually, the rolling black outs are likely to last for months, as far as one of the official lines goes. They lost something like 20% of their electricity production capability, and delivery of electricity to affected areas is impossible due to the substantial destruction of infrastructure.

It's called a supercarrier with logistics support and lots of jet fuel.

Didn't they move the carrier a fair distance away to avoid any possible fallout from a meltdown?

[Lonestar]

Not that far.

[mr friendly guy]

Its getting absurd that Japan hasn’t asked for more US helicopter support when they have doctors eating a few small riceballs each day. They risk making Katrina no longer look so incompetence; and certainly China’s parachute commando recoilless rifle attacks on landslides the other year put everyone to shame.

What do you mean by the parachute commando rifle attacks. Thats the first time I heard of it, and what where they exactly thinking?

[AndroAsc]

We're not out of the woods yet by a long shot, in any case. There is the potential for a FAR larger disaster than even Chernobyl here, which arises not from the reactors themselves, but as another poster mentioned, the hundreds of tonnes of spent fuel rods, which in some cases are relatively new and could include MOX rods too.

Look at what you're saying - "potential", "could". Hypothetical. Please, provide some reputable cites. Explain how this Bad Stuff is going to crawl out of the Fukushima power plant grounds and go elsewhere. Give us a mechanism as to how it might be propelled across the property borders, and if you do, kindly be bothered to do some rough, back-of-the-envelope/cocktail napkin calculations on quantity, distance, and half lives of the Bad Stuff you're claiming will be "worse than Chernobyl", or, if you can't do the math, at least propose the mechanism and politely request someone else help you with it.

The lack of information does not mean that there is no danger. Because of the Japanese information blackout, I am inclined to believe that the situation is much more seriously fucked that the mainstream media is reporting.

Let's try to do some calculations. There is about 1100 tons of nuclear fuel in the entire nuclear complex, thanks to those Japanese idiots who decided to store their spent fuel rods in the nuclear power plant (doesn't protocol dictate that these radioactive waste be transported to some remote and safe location for long term storage)?

So... out of that 1100 tons of nuclear fuel, what is the percentage purity of radioactive isotopes? I have no idea... if we have any nuclear engineers on board please feel free to chip in. For discussion sake I'll assume 10% purity, so we have 110 tons of nuclear isotopes.

Now, assume all of them are the benign Iodine-131 isotope (note that one of the plants have the long lasting PLUTONIUM isotope but we shall ignore that fact in this discussion), that means we have (110 x 1000) / 0.131 = 839694 mol of Iodine-131 isotopes. Because of the Japanese incompetence which has been displayed from Day 1, let's assume that 20% of them got combusted away and everything gets blown across the Pacific to the US West Coast. So we have 167938 mol of Iodine-131 at the source.

NY times recently published a simulation about the radioactive fallout and its movement across the pacific. Some parts of California will be hit with a maximum of 0.1 units of radiation where 1.0 units is the radiation intensity at the source. Unfortunately, their methodology was not disclosed, but let's assume it is legitimate and accurate for now.
(See: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011 ... ef=science)

So now can anyone offer to convert what levels of radioactivity we would get if exposed to 16793 mol of Iodine-131? That's about 2.2 tons of pure Iodine-131 isotopes if you'd like that in mass.

[PeZook]

You forgot to account for land area. Nobody's going to inhale a cloud of 2.2 tonnes of Iodine-131 dust, it's going to be spread in the atmosphere even if we assume the rest of your assumptions are correct.

EDIT: By comparison, Chernobyl released from 6 to 15 tonnes of material into the atmosphere with very minor results to the general population (or even statistically insignificant, depending on the study)