Pick a number, and that reactor is described as being near a meltdown. The news coverage coming out of Japan is even more confused when American media deciphers it. Hopefully hard facts come in soon…
Meltdown occurred according to Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency
URGENT: March 12 00:00 PST: Explosion at Nuclear Facility
VIDEO of explosion at nuke plant.
Reuters Live Earthquake News Feed
Several people appear to be injured at Fukushima nuclear plant – NHK
Walls and roof of a building at site destroyed by blast – NHK via Sky News
UPDATE: 22:50 PST: BREAKING NEWS: Pressure successfully released from Fukushima No. 1 reactor: agency
UPDATE: 21:47 PST: Meltdown underway at Reactor #1? http://twitter.com/#!/dicklp
Fukushima fuel cores are melting at 2000C and dropping onto steel floor. Steel melts at 1500C. Could still be brought under control, but Four other Fukushima nuke reactors are struggling with similar problem. If multiple meltdown begins, it will be uncontrollable.
Nuclear reactor coolant systems are running on batteries, and the coolant has reached the boiling point. Extremely critical situation currently at several earthquake affected nuclear reactors. Officials are concerned that a Three Mile Island 1979 meltdown could happen here. Reuters Link
From the LA Times:
Conditions appear to be worsening at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture in northeastern Japan, according to local media.
The Kyodo news agency reported that the cooling system has failed at three reactors of Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant. The coolant water’s temperature had reached boiling temperature, the agency reported, citing the power plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power.
The cooling system failure at the No. 2 power plant came after officials were already troubled by the failure of the emergency cooling system at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which officials feared could cause a meltdown.
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From: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Massive_earthquake_hits_Japan_1103111.html?je
and
I have been following this pretty closely.
1. Current worker exposure inside the plants is 2% above normal … or negligible.
2. Pressure buildup in containment vessels is thermal and not due to coolant leaks. Basically, the HVAC has stopped working and the air in there is getting hot which builds pressure so they are venting it. Radiation released so far is negligible.
3. Backup power has arrived at the one plant and is being installed.
4. External grid power is now available at the second plant.
So it looks like this is going to be a non-event. The problem is that these reactors are the 1970’s – 1980’s design that requires external power, HVAC, and a lot of other control systems to operate its myriad of valves, pumps, controls, etc. Modern plants don’t need all that.
Also, looks like the reason the diesel generators failed is because they were at ground level and flooded by the tsunami.
One thing that is never mentioned in the media stories, which are everywhere, is the potential safety difference of a thorium reactor, or alternative design approaches.
There are rail lines nearby. Generators have arrived and wiring is being installed.
More generators are on the way.
The media, as per standard form, is overplaying the situation for ratings.
Let’s appreciate how Reuters is quoting their convenient sources:
“Such a blackout is “one of the most serious conditions that can affect a nuclear plant,” according to experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. based nuclear watchdog group.”
UCS is of course a CO2 bashing global warming group.
“(It’s) a sign that the Japanese are pulling out all the stops they can to prevent this accident from developing into a core melt and also prevent it from causing a breach of the containment (system) from the pressure that is building up inside the core because of excess heat,” said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a private NGO.
It’s almost as if no official atomic energy source could be found to comment here.
Reuters is of course controlled by Thomson Reuters, a company owned mostly by the wealthiest Canadians the Thomson family. Among their Foundation Trustee, Sir Crispin Tickell is global warming advocate connected to the UN UNEP and IPCC since 1991. Also the Woodbridge Company, investment arm of the Thomsons bought last year Point Carbon, providing leadership in Carbon market analysis etc…
imo this Reuters report and the choice of sources is not innocent. Should the situation deteriorate, watch for a full blown attack on nuclear energy from the green lobby.
The USS George Washington (CVN 73) carrier battle group of the 7th Fleet is assigned to Yokosuka as its homeport. With its propulsion provided by two Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors, the George Washington carries not only an engineering department trained in handling damaged light water fission power systems but also primary and secondary hardware created to address loss of coolant accidents (LOCA).
Not to mention the assets of other ships in the battle group, which include electrical generation machinery which could be of great value in stabilizing the situation at Fukushima No. 2.
Has anybody been able to discover the officers and men of the George Washington task group are doing right now?
Mike,
I work at a nuke in the USA for AEP. I speak for myself not AEP. I have held both a reactor operator and senior reactor operator license. My experience is with Westinghouse PWR design and this is a GE BWR design but the basics don’t change much. As water level lowers rad levels will rise even if no fuel damage has occurred yet because water is a pretty effective radiation shield. As I said on a previous thread, the public safety issue would only occur if fuel damage occurs due to lack of heat removal AND a significant failure of containment occurred also. Your last sentence may or may not be true we can’t tell yet.
For others,
The chain reaction ended when the plant tripped during the earthquake. Heat is still generated from the decay of fission fragments. As was stated up thread, although values were overstated, this amounts to few percent power immediately after trip to a fraction of a percent an hour later decaying slowly after that. However, some form of heat removal is required for a long time or system will heat up……it’s just a matter of how fast it heats up. Lots of energy will be absorbed heating up and evaporating/boiling the water away. As I understand they also still have some capability to remove heat via a heat exchanger that would extend time to fuel damage even further. A year from know the specifics of this event will be disseminated throughout the nuke industry. I look forward to finding out the specifics.
What we may learn from this tragedy is that we just can’t engineer our society to withstand magnitude 9 earthquakes. Measly 7’s, yes, and the ocasional 8.0. But, maybe not 9.x.
Jim
I am assuming they are talking about the ECCS here:
Kakizaki, the safety agency official, said the emergency cooling system is intact and could kick in as a last line of defense. “That’s as a last resort, and we have not reached that stage yet,” he added.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/11/japan-issues-emergency-nuke-plant-leak/
Utter NONSENSE!
Sorry, worked in Nuclear Power for 20 years. This is pure crap.
Running the cooling systems on “batteries”. B.S. Not happening.
Unable to start emergency generators? ALSO B.S., you can fly them in.
The reactors “shut down” as soon as the earthquake was above about 8.0 on the R. scale. Control rods in, reactors shut down.
Then the only “power” is decay heat.
At this time the decay heat is about 1/1000 the reactor capacity. I believe these are 1000 MW Electric, or 3,000 MW Thermal. That means decay heat is 3 megawatts.
That’s 10,000,000 BTU per hour. Divide by 1000 that means the need to vaporize 10,000 lbm per hour or 20 gallons per minute.
You could HAND PUMP 20 gallons per minute into the reactor. Dump the steam through the plant Xenon stack. It will have primarily Xenon in the output, with a little radioactive nitrogen, and a minor amount of trace radioactive elements aside from Xenon. NOT a crisis! Oh, wait, were the Japanese running with a bunch of failed fuel rods? UNLIKELY. Japanese BWR’s have been some of the cleanest in the world.
I just don’t trust the completely moronic media about this matter.
Max
After the deepwater horizon fiasco and this – let’s hope that anyone that has a battery powered fail safe, for which there is no simple backup system, is quadruple checking and testing…regularly.
PS: Radiation level’s 1000 times above “normal” is also NOT A PROBLEM.
If your background is .005 mR per hour and you vent Xenon and have a local dose of 5 MR per hour, you are 1000 times above background. If the integrated dose to any member of the public is less than about 1000 mR you are within acceptable guidelines.
That would take 200 hours, and it is UNLIKELY that any Xenon release would continue for that amount of time.
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has transported coolant to a Japanese nuclear plant affected by a massive earthquake and will continue to assist Japan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday.
“We just had our Air Force assets in Japan transport some really important coolant to one of the nuclear plants,” Clinton said at a meeting of the President’s Export Council.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110311/pl_nm/us_japan_quake_nuclear_clinton
Some aide to the SoS let her step in it. A bit like the Russia ‘Reset’ button.
These are BWR’s (boiling-water), made by GE(1,2&6), Toshiba(3&5) and Hitachi (4). BWR’s have the reactor steam go thru the turbines, so they have extra filtering capacity.
TMI’s reactor problem, in addition to the loss of coolant, was a high pressure hydrogen bubble which if I remember right from our Power Group VP, ‘used up about 6 of the 7 safety factors for reactor pressure.’
From: http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/blog/japan_quake_media_mischief-77102
and
Source quoted: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_24.html
Not that anybody would want to alarm anyone. (/sarc)
“I hope they get it under control and pull the rods out too.”
All of the reactors were stopped. What happened is about an hour after they shut down, the stations lost external power due to the tsunami. Without external power, they can not run the cooling systems. One site now has external power restored, the second site is operating on battery backup and will have generator power running shortly (generators are on site being installed).
It takes time to get the heat out of those reactor cores even after the reaction stops. One thing to note: NONE of the reactors have gone to their emergency cooling system. They are all still operating with the normal cooling systems. The problem at the moment is the lack of HVAC allowing the environment to heat up in the containment vessel and build pressure.
If your monitoring systems don’t have power, you can’t add makeup coolant because you can’t monitor coolant levels. They apparently lost the ability to monitor/control coolant levels when they lost power. I would expect the situation at the one plant to settle fairly soon. The other plant is a little more dicey and is still waiting that generator install.
Seems to be a bunch of misinformation out there.
Rods don’t get “pulled”, the control rods are inserted to add a neutron “poison” that absorbs neutrons. This is called a “scram” or automatic shutdown. Rods inserted, no more sustainable fission reaction.
Decay heat is produced by radiocative decay of fission products. This will continue for days.
If a plant is not producing power on its own, it then needs external power to operate pumps. You have to remove heat from the source, to a sink (which is usually the ocean or big heat exchangers.)
This was an 8.9 earthquake with 7. something aftershocks.
Is anyone really surprised there wouldn’t be some damage?
My mother worked for BofA and visited the Northridge branch after the 1993 earthquake. The safety deposit boxes were propeled from the ground and hit the ceiling. And these things are not light by any stretch of the imagination.
I suspect the diesel generators tried to aspirate water when their building was over-topped by the Tsunami. Without AC power from offsite or from the DG’s, the station batteries would deplete in a few hours. This would result in a loss of all control room electronics. There is no battery-powered emergency cooling system. There is battery-powered control (solenoid valves, etc.) to control a turbine-driven pump that would inject water into the core. The steam for this would come from the reactor and exhaust into the suppression pool. This, in addition to relief valve discharge from the reactor, would result in the suppression pool (torus) water heating up and eventually reaching saturation pressure, as the news reports indicate. This would require venting to relief the pressure that would build up as the temperature builds up and as more and more water from outside the cycle is added.
Reports have continued to state the core has remained covered. If true, I suspect the high radiation levels are from damage the fuel assemblies sustained from the 8.9 magnitude shake.
I’ve been following reports from the Tepco website but it has been several hours since the last update. Unless they have brought temporary generators in, all batteries are likely dead now, meaning the turbine-driven pump would only be able to be controlled by some makeshift actuation of its governor.
Hopefully, sufficient external power to re-power the emergency core cooling systems is being provided. The TMI accident was only stopped because the operators eventually re-started the high pressure injection and put water in the core.
If water isn’t put in the core, the core will melt and eventually melt its way through the vessel and into the bottom level of containment. If this slag encounters water, it wall cool and solidify in a coolable geometry.
5 nuclear reactors have problems after power outage.
All back up failed
There is only one possible explanation
Windows Vista [sarcastic / off]
After reading some of the comments here, knowing how hysterical fears are about radiation and how useless the media is, and reading this here recently:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/16/going-bananas-over-radiation/
I’m wondering how serious this leak is? No doubt the anti-nuclear power gang is going to make it seem as scary as possible.
“Three Island Meltdown”, the great nuclear disaster that never occurred!!!!!
There never was a meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The steam pressure got large enough that a minor amount of slightly radioactive steam from the cooling system got past the emergency pressure valve. Yellow journalism at its nastiest.
And . . . they don’t build them like that, and have not for a long, long time now.
The April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyla nuclear power plant in Ukraine was the product of a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes, complete meltdown, and there was no “China Syndrome”.
France gets 80% of its electrical power from nuclear power plants, sells a lot of the power generated to other nations, and there has not been even a hint of radioactive material escaping from those nuclear power plants in France that I am aware of.
Any source of power goes wrong when there is an earthquake of this magnitude. I am just hoping that the large aftershocks don’t light up a serious volcano.
@max Hugoson
At 24 hours after shutdown the decay heat would still be around 15 megawatts. After a couple of weeks it would be around 4-5 megawatts.
crosspatch says:
March 11, 2011 at 8:54 pm
Also, looks like the reason the diesel generators failed is because they were at ground level and flooded by the tsunami.
Drain the oil and fuel lines, bring in fresh diesel, reprime the injectors and fire up. I’m sure the plant operators are already on it.
@max Hugoson
The hand driven pump would need to discharge into somewhere around 1000 psig.
BREAKING NEWS: Radioactive Cesium detected near Fukushima plant: nuke safety commission
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/
BREAKING NEWS: Fukushima nuke plant might be experiencing nuclear meltdownNote