IAEA= International Atomic Energy Agency – update here
Story below from the Register:
The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan, badly damaged during the extremely severe earthquake and tsunami there a week ago, continues to stabilise. It is becoming more probable by the day that public health consequences will be zero and radiation health effects among workers at the site will be so minor as to be hard to measure. Nuclear experts are beginning to condemn the international hysteria which has followed the incident in increasingly blunt terms.
Seawater cooling of the three damaged reactor cores (Nos 1, 2 and 3) at the site continues. US officials and other foreign commentators continued to remain focused on a spent-fuel storage pool at the No 4 reactor (whose fuel had been removed and placed in the pool some three months prior to the quake).
Despite this, operations by Japanese powerplant technicians, military personnel and emergency services at the site focused instead on cooling the spent-fuel pool at the No 3 building, and on restoring grid electrical power at the plant. Japanese officials continued to contend that water remained in the No 4 pool and the situation there was less serious than that at No 3. Police riot vehicles mounting powerful water cannon and fire trucks were used to douse the spent-fuel pool at No 3 with water, causing steam to emerge – confirming that some cooling at least was being achieved. One of the fire trucks was reportedly lent by US military units based locally, though operated by Japanese troops.
World Nuclear News reports that radiation levels have generally decreased across the plant, though they remain hazardous in the immediate area of reactors 2 and 3; levels also climb temporarily when technicians open valves to vent steam from the damaged cores in order to allow fresh seawater coolant to be pumped in, prompting teams to retreat before venting is carried out. Nonetheless 180 personnel are now working within the site where and when radiation levels permit them to do so safely.
An external power line has now been laid out to the plant and latest reports indicate that this will be connected to its systems by tomorrow: final hookup has been delayed by steam-venting operations from the cores. Powerplant technicians hope that this will restore cooling service to reactor cores and spent-fuel pools across the plant, in particular to the pools at reactors 3 and 4. If normal water levels can be restored to the pools high levels of radiation above and immediately around the buildings will be cut off by the liquid’s shielding effect. The buildings’ roofs would normally help with this, but both have been blown off in previous hydrogen explosions.
Meanwhile, plant operator TEPCO said that on-site diesel generation serving units 5 and 6 – which are safely shut down, but which also have spent fuel in their storage pools – has been restored. The plant’s diesels were mostly crippled by the tsunami which followed the quake: the wave was higher than the facility’s protective barriers had been designed for. The prospect of any trouble at these reactors now seems remote.
…
The IAEA seems to accept that things are settling down: a senior official at the agency tells Reuters that the situation is now “reasonably stable”.
Radiation readings at the site boundary remained low through Friday morning in Japan, dropping to 0.26 millisievert/hour. Personnel at the site are normally permitted to sustain 20 millisievert in a year: this has been raised to 250 millisievert owing to the emergency.
Normal dosage from background radiation is 2-3 millisievert annually: a chest CT scan delivers 7 millisievert. The highest radiation level detected anywhere beyond the site was a single brief reading of 0.17 millisievert at the boundary of the evacuation zone, but on average (Japanese government PDF/72KB) readings at the zone boundary are hardly above background.
Read the complete and detailed report here
h/t to Bernd Felsche via Facebook
“Nuclear experts are beginning to condemn the international hysteria which has followed the incident in increasingly blunt terms.”
And with good reason. Examples are being collected:
http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Journalist+Wall+of+Shame
The h/t passes to MikeW, whose comment on Ira’s guest post Nuke Tsunami Makes Clean Coal Look Better drew my early attention to ElReg this morning.
The info in the article is consistent with info that I am periodically getting.
Stable is a correct assessment.
John
Doesn’t sound like CNN or FOX News at all. Imagine that!
It was obvious to expert nuclear engineers from the start that the events at Fukushima Daiichi would not and could not lead to a Chernobyl-type accident. It was obvious that the doses to the public would be negligible and harmless. Yet again the media and alarmist greenies have to ask themselves questions. Why do they try and scare the public unnecessarily? Alarmism can cause panic and deaths.
RE: Nuclear experts are beginning to condemn the international hysteria which has followed the incident in increasingly blunt terms.
I don’t think that today’s news media could tell a fair and balanced story if it kicked them in the face. Everything is always made out to be far worse than it really is. Remember Y2K, Killer Bees, … ?
News Media Creditability = ZERO!!!!
They are going to apply one of these:
http://www.everything-about-concrete.com/images/putzm.JPG
It is one of those concrete pumps with an articulated boom. They can position it pretty accurately. They can probably even mount a camera on the end of the boom if they wanted to in order to get a better idea of where they are putting the water and what impact it is having. I would recommend one of those “self cleaning” cameras they mount on NASCAR vehicles during a race, though.
“And with good reason. Examples are being collected”
I am glad they are including the name of the “journalist” and not just the outlet. I too often hear people who say things like “AP says …” or “Reuters says …” without mentioning the name of the journalist who actually wrote it. This is one of the reasons articles have bylines — so the writer has to take responsibility for the content.
John Hultquist, I can’t believe Fox and CNN only scored 5 and 4. I thought they were bad enough.
Anyway, we haven’t seen the last of this by a long shot. The Japanese were pumping raw seawater directly into the cores, along with lots of tiny little marine organisms, including larvae. Certainly 99.999% of those were killed immediately by the heat and radiation, but a tiny fraction surely survived the intense cellular assault have no doubt grown stronger, their DNA split apart and recombined into fantastically improbable configurations, and their mitochondria adapting to use the atomic energy in radioactive isotopes instead of ordinary chemical compounds. Those larvae where then flushed out to sea, where they will grow – and grow.
Sadly, Drudge Report has been probably the absolute worst I have seen with regard to the reporting. While Matt Drudge is only a news aggregator, he seems to have selected all of the most sensational, outlandish, hysterical articles in a quest for even more page views.
If things are stable then why has Japan’s nuclear safety agency increased levels of nuclear danger from level 4 to level 5?
Stable is as stable does. Don’t believe a word of what they say.
Believe only what the videos are showing.
Examples:
Explosions — I believe we’ve got a problem.
Fires — that’s a problem.
Workers scrambling like hell to get out of there — that’s a problem. Same with evacuating 800 workers.
Helicopters aborting water dropping missions – that’s a problem.
Confucius had an apt saying for this situation: “I used to listen to what [a man] said, and trusted him to keep his word. Now, I still listen to what he says, but I watch very carefully what he does.”
Nuclear industry people cannot be trusted – they know that they have one narrow escape after another and have gotten by solely by sheer luck and a tight code of never talking about the hazards and near-misses.
There’s no guarantee that those grid-powered pumps will even run with the new power from the new lines, after tsunami flooding, after multiple aftershocks, and after multiple and close-by explosions and debris raining on them.
It ain’t over, folks.
It looks like it was the water cannons and not really the helicopters that, both, brought this level of stability and saved the workers from having to go in close to the areas being targeted. Despite reports (by some) that radiation was never high enough to harm humans the need to use helicopters and water cannons shows that it was.
There was also this report, that the Japanese government did say radiation became high enough to kill humans:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367684/Nuclear-plant-chief-weeps-Japanese-finally-admit-radiation-leak-kill-people.html
It is true that every story from the media had been hyped. But it is still true that radiation became dangerously high at times. That report was not from the media or blog commenters. It was from the Japanese government. But again, the distance that was kept by workers during the time radiation became that high may have saved them in the long run.
Here’s the up-to-date status of the two troubled TEPCO plants…
“Fukushima Daiichi plant
Reactor No. 1 (Operation suspended after quake)
Partial melting of core, cooling failure, vapour vented, building housing containment of reactor damaged by hydrogen explosion, roof blown off, seawater being pumped in.
Reactor No. 2 (Operation suspended after quake)
Damage to reactor containment structure feared, cooling failure, seawater being pumped in, fuel rods fully exposed temporarily, vapour vented, building housing containment of reactor damaged by blast at adjacent reactor No. 3, blast sound heard near suppression chamber of containment vessel.
Reactor No. 3 (Operation suspended after quake)
Partial melting of core feared, cooling failure, vapour vented, seawater being pumped in, building housing containment of reactor badly damaged by hydrogen explosion, seawater dumped over spent-fuel storage pool by helicopter Thursday, water sprayed at it from ground three days in a row through Saturday.
Reactor No. 4 (Under maintenance when quake struck)
Renewed nuclear chain reaction feared at spent-fuel storage pool, fire at building housing containment of reactor Tuesday and Wednesday, only frame remains of reactor building roof, temperature in the pool reached 84 C on Monday.
Reactor No. 5 (Under maintenance when quake struck)
Cooling resumed Saturday in spent-fuel storage pools.
Reactor No. 6 (Under maintenance when quake struck)
Emergency power generator restored Saturday, some fuel rods left in reactor cores.
Fukushima Daini plant
Reactors No. 1, 2, 3, 4 (Operation suspended after quake)
Cold shut-down, not on emergency status any-more.”
(Courtesy allvoices.com)
The nuclear safety authority are optimistic that power will be restored in reactor buildings 1-4 by Sunday. Status of reactor cooling pumps and associated equipment is not known.
Large satellite image of plant…
http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/6145/japanearthquaketsufukus.jpg
Not to mention evacuating everyone for 20 km radius.
Not to mention dooming another large group of people beyond the 20 km radius to “shelter in place” inside hermetically sealed buildings, for day after day after day.
Or the US decision to have all US nationals withdraw to at least a 50 mile distance from the glowing nuclear cores and their overheating spent toxic fuel pools that sprung a rather large leak. The leaks that, oh by the way, came as a complete surprise.
Or the US decision to evacuate any US personnel from the country.
Or the Seventh Fleet moving out to sea to a safe distance.
When everyone is allowed to go home, and school children are given tours of the oh-so-safe nuclear power plants at Fukushima Dai-ichi, then the situation will be stable. Until then, don’t trust a word the nuclear advocates have to say. Their credibility has long ago been completely shot.
“international hysteria” . . . . Now that is scary!
Re: evacuations.
That is the law in Japan whenever a “level 4” event is triggered. It isn’t to be taken to mean “there is a problem that will contaminate the local area”, it means “this could possibly develop into a problem that could contaminate the local area”. If you wait until something actually bad happens, you aren’t going to get the people out in time, especially when there is no train service, the roads are blocked, little electrical power, people might not be able to listen to radio, etc. So you evacuate ahead of time.
Radiation levels inside the evacuated area are currently only a little elevated from background. Even 20x background is a tiny amount. 20x “almost nothing” is still “almost nothing”.
I read an article today that the health impacts of the irrational radiation hysteria is actually worse than the actual health impact of the radiation. Yes, radiation can be dangerous but so can the electricity, natural gas, and gasoline that you come into daily contact with. About 100 people a day die in automobile accidents in the US, too. Nobody died today from radiation in the US and believe me, if ONE person had, it would be in every paper on the planet. The hysteria sells papers and generates ad views on web sites. That is the point of it.
Once upon a time, over 30 Chinese workers were killed when they were digging a railroad tunnel in the Santa Cruz mountains. They sparked methane gas from naturally occurring gas in the tunnel. But we didn’t give up building railroads, or tunnels. This incident has killed exactly 0 from radiation and made exactly 0 people sick from it. Yet we have a great hue and cry. It is irrational.
“Or the US decision to evacuate any US personnel from the country. ”
That is actually a pretty stupid decision because you are going to expose them to more radiation on the flight out than they would if they stayed. You get more radiation on a high altitude airline flight than you would get sitting in a park in Tokyo. If you have to endure a TSA scan along your way, you end up with much more radiation than you would get sitting in a home inside the evacuated area.
And about the fleet. There is no sense sitting directly downwind of the plant when you can just move a few miles and get out of the way. Radiation exposure is cumulative. Why expose your people now when they might be needed later if something bad happens? Better to keep their exposure down in case they need to be exposed later.
@crosspatch, interesting. And the school children’s tours? Are the reactors safe enough for the children?
Did those explosions occur by divine intervention? Spontaneous combustion of air and … and… well, nothing?
Why didn’t the helicopters fly directly down onto the spent fuel pool, and gently and slowly pour the water into the pool? No cause for alarm surely!
This is a disaster of epic proportions. All nuclear people should realize that the party is over. The nuclear experiment is over. Now the world must find a way to safely clean up the toxic, deadly, radioactive mess that the industry has created. And somehow do it in a way that does not kill people or shorten their lifespans or give them horrible cancers.
Even if natural hazards are properly identified (unlikely), and those hazards are quantified properly (unlikely), and nuclear plants are designed properly (unlikely), and built to specification (unlikely), and maintained properly (unlikely), and all personnel are properly trained (unlikely), and all personnel exert adequate vigilance (unlikely), one is left with a toxic mess of spent radioactive fuel that must be dealt with.
Roger Sowell
It could be they stopped using helicopters because they had to fly so high above the radiation that when they dropped the water the wind would blow it so that they couldn’t be accurate.
By Wednesday afternoon it looked like the situation was only getting worse. That’s when the US government started getting worried and all the talk about evacuating Americans started. But by late Thursday night and Friday morning things came a little bit under control. The talk by the Japanese government about pouring cement on the most dangerous areas must have started before Friday morning. I wonder if they have put that plan on the back burner now.
The leak in the cooling pond may be from the collapse of the cement lining that left only the steel. But if the reports can be believed that pool’s radiation level is in better shape now.
There’s still a big mess there.
“Doug in Seattle says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:35 pm
Doesn’t sound like CNN or FOX News at all. Imagine that!”
I do not know about CNN-TV, but their homepage was one of the least hysterical (honest!) compared to what european media were publishing; and these were almost “cool” compared the the supergreatest Germans, who were completely out of their supergreatest mind about the Supergreatest Accident ever. The supergreatest soccercoach of Schalke 04, which consider themselves the supergreatest club of them all, was fired (and hired by Wolfsburg the next day).
Ok, lets get things in the proper perspective:
It has now been a week since shutdown of reactors 1, 2 and 3. The decay heat is much less now than it would have been the first few days afterward. They were able to dump the first critical hour’s decay heat normally. That is what saved this from becoming a disaster right off the bat. The heat that is being generated now an be safely eliminated with the current process of flood and vent. Last report I read was that temperatures inside the reactors are dropping. This is probably evidenced by it taking longer to build pressure that needs to be vented. As long as they can continue with the pump and vent process, they can maintain temperatures indefinitely inside those reactors. At this point there aren’t likely to be any more hydrogen explosions in those units.
The primary problem now is spent fuel rods in the holding pools on the refueling floors of the reactors. Unit 1 would have the least problem as if there are any rods in there, they are at least a couple of years old. Unit 4 would be the worst as it was only recently unloaded (about a month ago). Units 5 and 6 had been about 1/3 unloaded but those units now have power to manage the water level and circulate the water to eliminate heat.
Also note that there are about 200 total workers on the site right now. 50 are directly involved with the management of the reactor cores in units 1 – 3 and the other 150 or so are working on repairing infrastructure. This number will probably increase if radiation levels continue to subside. Radiation levels are subsiding. It will subside further if one source of that radiation is gamma radiation from exposed fuel rods in the pools and the pools are refilled with water.
So … the problems with the reactors are stable and manageable. The main problem is the spent fuel. Last information I read said that there is likely cladding damage to the fuel rods but if there is any fuel melt, it would be a very small amount, less than 5%, and not nearly anything as bad as Three Mile Island which had 85% melt and a puddle of core material on the concrete containment basement floor.
We had beautiful spring-like weather here in Tokyo today. I went jogging over by the imperial palace and it was packed with other runners. There were also tourists and retired couples out for a stroll. Then I went and bought some groceries in the busy Shinjuku district where there was plenty of food available despite the hoards of shoppers.
When I got home I turned the TV to CNN International and learned that most Tokyo streets are deserted due to the fear of radiation. I also learned that food supplies are dangerously low (as I unpacked the several bags of food that I had just bought). Then they announced that fuel supplies were also critically low and they showed a random gas station with a long line of cars waiting to get their gasoline rations. I peeked out the window at the gas station across the street and noticed that there were two cars waiting for their turn at the pump.
Does CNN International exist in a parallel universe?
Roger Sowell says:
March 19, 2011 at 12:40 am
Until then, don’t trust a word the nuclear advocates have to say.
I do agree with you in that nuclear advocates do have their own product to sell thus making very difficult for them to be unbiased. And I think also those that feel nuclear is a good way to go will be biased in their defending of nuclear advocates.
If Fukushima doesn’t scare someone about nuclear power then they have a bias. To me it’s the similar the global warming believers that were unmoved by ClimateGate and found ways to explain it away.
There is also a bias in the people that say newer nuclear plants are safe. They leave the letter ‘r’ off the end of the word safe. Newer plant are safer than the older ones. But they are not safe. How much safer than the older ones can be debated. But it cannot be said they are safe. To be that convinced as to say ‘safe’ is to be as convinced as the global warmers that say the science of global warming is ‘settled’.
Phillip Bratby says:
March 18, 2011 at 11:41 pm
Yet again the media and alarmist greenies have to ask themselves questions. Why do they try and scare the public unnecessarily? Alarmism can cause panic and deaths
As usual, follow the money. The greenie organizations make their money from speading panic, not from spreading facts. So they won’t ask themselves questions.