Earthquake off Japan

[Broomstick]

Was it posted here? I must have missed it - I've seen it posted in several other places, as well, and in one of them the hysterical were pushing it as TRUTH! TRUTH! TRUTH!

::::looks back in thread:::

Yeah, that one.

[salm]

The media is only interested in scaremongering because scaremongering sells papers and boosts ratings.

Yeah, but even the media that is not dependant on high sales like tv and radio channels regulated by public law who are financed my the public are doing this bullshit.

[Broomstick]

Those who do not get high ratings do not continue to receive high paychecks.

I will praise my local media, who seem to be a LOT less freaked out than the national level. Then again, my area is probably more pro-nuclear (or at least less anti-nuclear) than most of the US.

[salm]

PS - it's a completely valid point. It really makes me sick because it's so glaringly obvious that (at least american) news outlets are just absolutely sucking the cock of the "ZOMG NUCLEAR" headline and just gagging on it as they ram it down the throats of the uninformed uninformed trogolodyte eye holes of the average western viewer/reader, while simultaneously pre-wiriting the articles that will be published after the power plant is dealt with. I can see it now "Oh, while the world was so closely following the nuclear DISASTER/CRISIS/APOCALYPSE - 10,000 people died from a combination of disease/hunger/hypothermia" (Incinuating that you, the vewier/reader are to blame for their deaths) Shame on you for consuming every syllable of NUCLEAR that the news outlets regurgitated and hunkering oin your bunker because it's the end times when we told you to and you should've been sending campbell's soup to those poor dead babies.

The few real experts that are interviewed, like people responsible for reactor safety and nuclear engineers/physicist are tsunamied out by screeching politicians/greenpeace/Concerned Citizens and other hysterical laymen.

I can understand the general mistrust of the public though. After all, the nuclear experts are also the same ones who lobby or work for nuclear power so it's in their own intrests to defend it.

Don't get me wrong, despite its strong disadvantages (nuclear waste & safety*), I still take nuclear over coal/oil. Perhaps the main downside of nuclear power is that because we have cheap and relatively clean power available from nuclear, there is less politicial will to invest into greener power/technologies.

(*) I'm not saying nuclear power plants are unsafe, but Japan again shows that they're not immune against disaster.
Whatever the cause (natural disaster, human error, terrorist attack), if something goes wrong with a nuclear plant, the consequences may be devastating. I live in a small but densely populated country (Belgium) which lies in an area riddled with nuclear power plants. If an area of a 20 km radius was to be depopulated because of such a disaster, the socioeconomic consequences would be devastating.
So yeah, nuclear power should go away, but not to replace it with an even more poluting energy source.

Hm.... one of the drained out experts i heard was a phd from a university so it´s not like there are no independant experts at all.
Also, there´s nothing wrong with inviting people with a possible bias. After all they broadcast interviews with the anti atom lobby all the time.

[Rightous Fist Of Heaven]

In relation to the media concentrating on the "OMFG NUKULAAR DISASTA!" headlines, the same can be said for a couple of widely read Finnish papers. Some of the headlines are in fact so brilliant as to proclaim that the radiation from Fukushima is now "threatening" California and glaringly implying that the accident that Tokyo is a ghost town thanks to all the RADIATION thrown up from the plant

There is a bogus and faked map of "radiation dispersion" making the rounds on the internet that does, indeed, show such a thing. I won't link to it because I refuse to publicize it even further, but I can't help but think it is playing into this sort of hysteria (though probably not the only cause). I don't know if someone thought it would be "funny" or if it was a deliberate attempt to scare people.

This dispersal map was apparently from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization which was showing how prevailing winds would carry the radiation cloud over the Pacific to the coast of California. The news headline here was intelligently titled "Japanese radiation already threatening California!". Helpfully, the news piece mentions how "Health and nuclear experts claim that radiation intensity decreases the further it travels". Nevertheless, the piece seemed to have been obviously written to induce more paranoia and hysteria amongst the already panicking idiots who wont bother to make a deeper study into the subject at hand.

[Magis]

So, what would be ways to quake-proof a spent fuel pond? Could you just keep a huge pile of neutron absorbent materials on hand to dump into the thing?

A criticality accident in the spent fuel pond really isn't in play here, and with the water levels dropping in the pool, the reactivity will decrease even more. Note that the reason* these rods are in storage is because they're sufficiently poisoned with fission products that criticality can't even be maintained in the reactor core, which has designed assembly lattice spacing to optimize reactivity.

*It is possible that fresh fuel gets dumped in the storage bay for a variety of reasons, but this is not common.

The big problem with the spent fuel bay at unit #4 is that the unit #4 reactor recently had a fuel change, meaning that the stuff in the storage bay is about as active as spent fuel can be. As a consequence, the thermal burden in storage bay #4 will be very high - much higher than in units 1-3. During a station blackout, the active cooling in the spent fuel bays will have failed just like the primary heat transport system pumps, so temperatures will be steadily rising eventually boiling away the coolant reservoir. The potential catastrophe with the spent fuel bay coolant loss (and I don't use the word catastrophe lightly) is if the rise in temperatures lead to a zirc/steam reaction on the spent fuel sheath. That would be pretty fucking disastrous.

[Zixinus]

Does anyone know what is happening in other regions of Japan?

[Todeswind]

Does anyone know what is happening in other regions of Japan?

Which one do you want to know about? Hokkaido and Kyushu are more or less unaffected so far, as are most of the southern islands. The southern tip of the mainland is ok-ish, or at least it was as of this morning.

[Julhelm]

A criticality accident in the spent fuel pond really isn't in play here, and with the water levels dropping in the pool, the reactivity will decrease even more. Note that the reason* these rods are in storage is because they're sufficiently poisoned with fission products that criticality can't even be maintained in the reactor core, which has designed assembly lattice spacing to optimize reactivity.

*It is possible that fresh fuel gets dumped in the storage bay for a variety of reasons, but this is not common.

The big problem with the spent fuel bay at unit #4 is that the unit #4 reactor recently had a fuel change, meaning that the stuff in the storage bay is about as active as spent fuel can be. As a consequence, the thermal burden in storage bay #4 will be very high - much higher than in units 1-3. During a station blackout, the active cooling in the spent fuel bays will have failed just like the primary heat transport system pumps, so temperatures will be steadily rising eventually boiling away the coolant reservoir. The potential catastrophe with the spent fuel bay coolant loss (and I don't use the word catastrophe lightly) is if the rise in temperatures lead to a zirc/steam reaction on the spent fuel sheath. That would be pretty fucking disastrous.

How disastrous are we talking here? Enough that my in-laws in Tokyo should be seriously worried about being contaminated?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Tokyo will be fine. You could drop a NUCLEAR BOMB on the plant and Tokyo would be fine.

[Julhelm]

I thought as much but I don't want to give them any false assurances.

[Magis]

Tokyo will be fine. You could drop a NUCLEAR BOMB on the plant and Tokyo would be fine.

In terms of radiation, a large hydrogen explosion in a spent fuel bay would be orders of magnitude worse than a nuclear bomb detonation. Firstly, air-burst nukes tend to disperse radioactive material at high speeds into the upper atmosphere, effectively diluting it.

Also, nuclear weapons typically have a fuel inventory of a few hundred pounds, while a BWR reactor core has a fuel inventory on the order of 150 tons. It's unclear exactly how much spent fuel is in the storage bay, but it's safe to say that it's several full-cores worth of spent fuel, so 300 to 500 tons is not an unreasonable minimum bounding estimate. Also, nuclear detonation remnants are almost devoid of higher actinides, which exist in abundance in spent reactor fuel. It's the decay of actinides that poses very long-term radiological risk, since their half-lives are very long (millions to billions of years). Dispersion of actinides in the environment would result in the establishment of long-term exclusion zones like exists today near Chernobyl. Of course, with hundreds of tons of spent fuel there will be plenty of short-lived, high-activity fission products to cause short-term exposure danger as well.

If a storage bay were to go up in a hydrogen blast, depending on the magnitude of that blast, it could very well increase radiation in the vicinity of the plant to levels that would make any further repair efforts there impossible, which leads to the possibility of additional releases. The releases from spent fuel alone could potentially constitute a radiological disaster far worse than Chernobyl, and in the case of Chernobyl, the world's largest urban area wasn't a few hundred kilometres away.

[AniThyng]

Tokyo will be fine. You could drop a NUCLEAR BOMB on the plant and Tokyo would be fine.

In terms of radiation, a large hydrogen explosion in a spent fuel bay would be orders of magnitude worse than a nuclear bomb detonation. Firstly, air-burst nukes tend to disperse radioactive material at high speeds into the upper atmosphere, effectively diluting it.

Also, nuclear weapons typically have a fuel inventory of a few hundred pounds, while a BWR reactor core has a fuel inventory on the order of 150 tons. It's unclear exactly how much spent fuel is in the storage bay, but it's safe to say that it's several full-cores worth of spent fuel, so 300 to 500 tons is not an unreasonable minimum bounding estimate. Also, nuclear detonation remnants are almost devoid of higher actinides, which exist in abundance in spent reactor fuel. It's the decay of actinides that poses very long-term radiological risk, since their half-lives are very long (millions to billions of years). Dispersion of actinides in the environment would result in the establishment of long-term exclusion zones like exists today near Chernobyl. Of course, with hundreds of tons of spent fuel there will be plenty of short-lived, high-activity fission products to cause short-term exposure danger as well.

If a storage bay were to go up in a hydrogen blast, depending on the magnitude of that blast, it could very well increase radiation in the vicinity of the plant to levels that would make any further repair efforts there impossible, which leads to the possibility of additional releases. The releases from spent fuel alone could potentially constitute a radiological disaster far worse than Chernobyl, and in the case of Chernobyl, the world's largest urban area wasn't a few hundred kilometres away.

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?

[Raj Ahten]

It seems to me that even governments like the US and UK are overreacting to the nuclear crises with evacuation flights on non-essential personal and movement of embassies in a couple of cases. They seem to be acting like Japan has turned into Libya. It's also sending mixed signals to the Japanese. "Well we are giving all the help we can to you, but have so little confidence in your government that we are telling all our citizens to flee as fast as possible."

Even if only done in an abundance of caution such actions only serve to make people think the worst.

Edit: for Clarity

[General Zod]

It seems to me that even governments like the US and UK are overreacting to the nuclear crises with evacuation flights on non-essential personal and movement of embassies in a couple of cases. They seem to be acting like Japan has turned into Libya. It's also sending mixed signals to the Japanese. "Well we are giving all the help we can to you, but have so little confidence in your government that we are telling all our citizens to flee as fast as possible."

Even if only done in an abundance of caution such actions only serve to make people think the worst.

Edit: for Clarity

It's not just a matter of the reactors. A significant deal of Japan's infrastructure has been crippled thanks to this event and it's not really fair to ask Japan to take care of foreign citizens on top of their own when their resources are stretched thin.

[Raj Ahten]

It seems to me that even governments like the US and UK are overreacting to the nuclear crises with evacuation flights on non-essential personal and movement of embassies in a couple of cases. They seem to be acting like Japan has turned into Libya. It's also sending mixed signals to the Japanese. "Well we are giving all the help we can to you, but have so little confidence in your government that we are telling all our citizens to flee as fast as possible."

Even if only done in an abundance of caution such actions only serve to make people think the worst.

Edit: for Clarity

It's not just a matter of the reactors. A significant deal of Japan's infrastructure has been crippled thanks to this event and it's not really fair to ask Japan to take care of foreign citizens on top of their own when their resources are stretched thin.

There might very well be a need for evacuation flights, especially for expats from the north, but all everyone seems to be talking about is the radiation threat. Every interview of people leaving Japan I've seen all say they are leaving because of radiation fears.


The plant situation is having a huge Business effect as well. Nikon for instance has all of its Japanese production shut down because of it. (Which is pretty much all their high end items.) Their biggest plant is something like two miles from the reactors. I heard from a US employee of the company and he was told he couldn’t work for the time being as it was totally unknown if they’d even be able to start production again.

[Pendleton]

Indeed. This is already a major disaster, and focusing on potential body counts doesn't alter that, although the earthquake and tsunami combination have, regrettably, made that issue arise anyway. The Japanese economy has lost some $200bn, there are growing concerns about nuclear energy around the globe, with some even going to far, in the case of Germany, as to cancel any future plans to even upgrade existing plants. This is, no matter how you spin it, a critical blow to nuclear power. It can be argued that, yes, the Fukushima plant wouldn't be in this state had it not been built exactly to plan as the GE Mk. I units had been in the US (i.e. having the diesel generators in a basement combined with a low tsunami wall etc.). However, this is like saying had one not crashed their car into a brick wall, then driving fast is safe. Nuclear is inherently unsafe, which is why it is so expensive to have this industry in the first place. 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.

This then leads on to a second tragedy. Forget, for a minute, the whole predicament in Japan if you will (I can't. I have friends in a Tokyo suburb). Remember, the reason nuclear is being used is because of the lack of fossil fuel sources Japan can properly, and securely, utilise. They're not alone in relying on such powerful, proven technologies to produce base loading electricity supply. The UK, US and France are others. If, as I fear, the kneejerk reactions from Germany's Oettinger pan out and cause a dramatic retardation in nuclear build out, then we run into a situation where simply keeping the lights on becomes a concern. You then have to ask whether the government's sympathetic ear is leaning towards the nuclear industry (or, indeed, any industry) when it comes to power generation, or whether it's directed at the public who will cry foul of using nuclear for our energy needs.

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. 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).

I will also join in the chorus regarding rampant scaremongering in the media, or just plain inaccurate reporting. The pet peeve of mine right now is the use sieverts to denote dose, without the use of an appropriate temporal qualifier. If the workers are being subjected to "a chest X-ray", then that's fine, so long as it's one a year, or every few months. I very much doubt they are getting that. We have seen spikes where this statement is clearly meant to be misleading, or just the product of a bad journalist/government or TEPCO official. Getting 400 millisieverts a year isn't bad. Getting it every hour, is.

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.

Final word: I see renewables are skyrocketing in interest now, with many stocks up since last Friday. 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. There was a man, I forget his name, on Radio 4 at the BBC today, who said had Japan had this disaster with renewables, they'd be in the same situation. I must disagree strongly. 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.

[General Zod]

There might very well be a need for evacuation flights, especially for expats from the north, but all everyone seems to be talking about is the radiation threat. Every interview of people leaving Japan I've seen all say they are leaving because of radiation fears.

Frankly I can't blame anyone who's actually near the reactors to run out of concern over the radiation if they can.

The plant situation is having a huge Business effect as well. Nikon for instance has all of its Japanese production shut down because of it. (Which is pretty much all their high end items.) Their biggest plant is something like two miles from the reactors. I heard from a US employee of the company and he was told he couldn’t work for the time being as it was totally unknown if they’d even be able to start production again.

When several of your main power sources go offline a lot of businesses are going to temporarily shut down in order to prevent brownouts and conserve what energy there is. This doesn't have anything to do with radiation concerns.

[Thanas]

Hm.... one of the drained out experts i heard was a phd from a university so it´s not like there are no independant experts at all.
Also, there´s nothing wrong with inviting people with a possible bias. After all they broadcast interviews with the anti atom lobby all the time.

Werner Eckert also has a pretty good blog - maybe a bit simplistic, but a strong factual basis.

[Broomstick]

A calm and understandable blog from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nuclear Science and Engineering that seeks to answer some of the serious questions brought up by recent events.

A couple of airplanes showed up at Chicago's O'Hare airport with signs of radiation contamination - from transporting medical equipment, NOT because it had been to Japan!

There is a group of ex-pat Americans in the Sendai region who are being evacuated by the US government - because of the mess in Sendai. They're trying to work out a route that keeps its distance from the Fukushima complex, but worst case they'll make sure the doors and windows are closed and drive through the edges of the evacuation zone as quickly as is safe.

In other cases, the US government is assisting citizens wishing to leave Japan at least in part to appease fears - no point forcing people to stay in areas affected by quakes, tsunami, and concerned with radiation (even if the latter is overblown in most cases - but certainly no harm in people leaving the immediate area of Fukushima). Better to assist an orderly exodus out of the country than to leave people to their own devices and risk greater chaos than already exists. Sometimes you just have to deal with the fact that peoples' emotions can run away with them.

I'm sure other nations are weighing similar factors in their decisions regarding assisting their citizens in departing Japan.

Certainly people are being encouraged not to go to Japan right now because of all the trouble, but that was requested before the nuclear concerns hit the news. Fact is, people should stay out of the affected areas as much as possible at this point. The only people with business there are rescuers, relief personnel, and those with actual need/reason to be there. That applies to ex-pats and even the Japanese themselves right now. Resources are very strained right now, the fewer people that need to be served in the affected areas the better. At least for now.

[Ekiqa]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... -radiation

From the Guardian, but key information seems to be regarding the pools:

The storage pools are supposed to be kept below 25C to keep the spent fuel rods from heating up, but temperature readings at the ponds in reactor buildings 4, 5 and 6 show temperatures have been rising this week, to around 60C in pools 5 and 6 and at least 84C at reactor 4.

The storage pools are located in the top level of the reactor buildings and are exposed at reactors 1 and 3 because hydrogen explosions have torn their roofs off.

Which seems to be why they've tried dropping the water from helo's.

And regarding the reactors themselves:

The water levels in all three reactors are dangerously low, exposing between 1.4m and 2.3m of the fuel rods, according to Nisa

The Japanese government has also raised the maximum milisievert level from 100 to 250.

[Steel]

I'm not convinced by the "Nuclear is dangerous" arguments. Everything is dangerous. We live in a world where we need a certain level of power generation, and we should seek to achieve that power generation by whatever means we can to minimise human suffering and environmental damage. With this in perspective the relevant figures to look at would be these:

Wind: 0.15
Nuclear: 0.0009

Those are the figures for deaths caused per TW hr generated. The nuclear figure includes Chernobyl. If we were to generate all our nuclear energy by wind power we would have over 150 times the fatalities from that power generation.

Other sources of energy such as coal are also worse than nuclear, releasing over 100 times the radiation of a nuclear power plant per unit energy generated, and devastating the environment with both mining for resources and disposal of waste products. Places like West Virginia have been totally fucked by this and will probably never recover.

To expect anything to be totally safe is ridiculous, consider the 21 fatality molasses example earlier. We can minimise harm, and this is done with a well regulated (as with everything) nuclear industry rather than listening to the ignorant screechings of people who have no idea what is actually going on.

[Phantasee]

How the fuck is wind so deadly?

Anyway, Nikon isn't alone in shutting down operations. Toyota and other major manufacturers are shutting down to conserve what little electricity there is available for use by the people who need it: the emergency crews and rescue workers.

[Pendleton]

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.

When a wind farm gets smashed, it's just a lot of twisted metal, with some grumpy people sans-power. This is quite simply not the case with nuclear, and the nuclear lobby would do well to address these image problems rather than try and sell the idea that it is somehow on the same level as green energy, which is simply false. It is no secret that the industry is fraught with corruption and safety concerns as it is, regardless of future designs that are far safer and inherently more efficient. As a counter, we hear very little about the dam that burst in Japan and washed away a whole village after the quake. The green hydro route is not much safer or environmentally sound given the very nature of dams.

Of course, no one has suggested the simpler and cheaper answers of using less energy and improving efficiency with our present use. These cost a fraction of a nuclear or wind turbine build out, and don't require any venture capital or environmental risks.

[Steel]

How the fuck is wind so deadly?

Anyway, Nikon isn't alone in shutting down operations. Toyota and other major manufacturers are shutting down to conserve what little electricity there is available for use by the people who need it: the emergency crews and rescue workers.

Wind isn't particularly deadly, it just produces fuck all power for the effort that goes in.

This is quite simply not the case with nuclear, and the nuclear lobby would do well to address these image problems rather than try and sell the idea that it is somehow on the same level as green energy, which is simply false.

Indeed it is false; nuclear energy is significantly safer and more efficient with less environmental damage than other forms of 'green energy'. The image problem is a severe one.

Of course, no one has suggested the simpler and cheaper answers of using less energy and improving efficiency with our present use. These cost a fraction of a nuclear or wind turbine build out, and don't require any venture capital or environmental risks.

Indeed, but that doesn't change the fact that per unit of energy generated nuclear is safer and less environmentally damaging. No matter how much energy you generate you are much better off doing it with nuclear than other sources. Obviously if you need to generate less power then you are better off, but you'll still be worse off using less efficient means to do so.