It pains me to see large parts of the media still hyperventilating over the very modest amounts of radioactive material coming from the Fukushima Daiichi plant on the east coast of Japan.
Nothing has been made more plain that most journalists and editors have no ability to evaluate risk, especially when it comes to radioactive measurements in very unfamiliar units (millisieverts anyone?). Everything they appear to know about radioactivity appears to come from poorly understood science reports and 1950s era B-movies.
You wouldn’t know from the coverage that that very same reactor survived a truly massive earthquake and a towering tsunami with barely a scratch even though it was built around 40 years ago in the expectation of surviving much lesser events.
You wouldn’t know that Japanese people are struggling to survive in the bitter cold, while coming to terms with the loss of family members, friends and entire neighbourhoods. You won’t hear that some survivors are being housed in other nuclear plants, everything else having been washed away.
Witness the BBC reporting today:
Japan nuclear plant: Radioactivity rises in sea nearby
The BBC’s Chris Hogg in Tokyo says the Japanese government has tried to reassure people about the plant’s safety
Levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are 1,250 times higher than the safety limit, officials say.
The readings were taken about 300m (984ft) offshore. It is feared the radiation could be seeping into groundwater from one of the reactors.
But the radiation will no longer be a risk after eight days, officials say.
There are areas of radioactive water in four of the reactors at the plant, and two workers are in hospital.
The plant’s operator says the core of one of the six reactors may have been damaged.
It has announced that fresh water rather than seawater will now be used to cool the damaged reactors, in the hope that this will be more effective.
Why eight days? Because that’s the half-life of radioactive iodine. But that’s not what you find out from the BBC.
What of those two workers in hospital? Sounds serious doesn’t it?
Not all of the media are so poorly informed. The Register’s Louis Page has produced some well-researched articles which go a long way to explaining what is really happening:
The situation at the quake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan was brought under control days ago. It remains the case as this is written that there have been no measurable radiological health consequences among workers at the plant or anybody else, and all indications are that this will remain the case. And yet media outlets around the world continue with desperate, increasingly hysterical and unscrupulous attempts to frame the situation as a crisis.
Here’s a roundup of the latest facts, accompanied by highlights of the most egregious misreporting.
First up, three technicians working to restore electrical power in the plant’s No 3 reactor building stood in some water while doing so. Their personal dosimetry equipment later showed that they had sustained radiation doses up to 170 millisievert. Under normal rules when dealing with nuclear powerplant incidents, workers at the site are permitted to sustain up to 250 millisievert before being withdrawn. If necessary, this can be extended to 500 millisievert according to World Health Organisation guidance.
None of this involves significant health hazards: actual radiation sickness is not normally seen until a dose of 1,000 millisievert and is not common until 2,000. Additional cancer risk is tiny: huge numbers of people must be subjected to such doses in order to see any measurable health consequences. In decades to come, future investigators will almost certainly be unable to attribute any cases of cancer to service at Fukushima.
Nonetheless, in the hyper-cautious nuclear industry, any dose over 100 millisievert is likely to cause bosses to pull people out at least temporarily. Furthermore, the three workers had sustained slight burns to their legs as a result of standing in the radioactive water – much as one will burn one’s skin by exposing it to the rays of the sun (a tremendously powerful nuclear furnace). They didn’t even notice these burns until after completing their work. Just to be sure, however, the three were sent for medical checks.
So – basically nothing happened. Three people sustained injuries equivalent to a mild case of sunburn. But this was reported around the globe as front-page news under headlines such as “Japanese Workers Hospitalized for Excessive Radiation Exposure”. Just to reiterate: it was not excessive.
The entire article is well worth reading
But panic sells (as readers of WUWT are well aware), and sober analysis of scientific fact is nowhere near as exciting or is likely to spread like wildfire across the Internet.
No-one will die from radiation from Fukushima. No-one will mutate or develop super-powers. Godzilla will not rise from the sea and destroy Tokyo, except in cinemas.
It’s my view that the world deserves better than this. The real plight of the Japanese survivors of the earthquake and tsunami is being forgotten in the service of a bizarre fear about radiation that is more science fiction than science fact.
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Another large aftershock at 6.5 magnitude has hit off Japan’s northeast coast. Timing was 07:23:56 a.m. local Japan time on Monday, March 28, roughly one hour ago as I write this.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002cqa.php
Now the difficult time begins, as the already weakened reactor structures are jolted by yet another fairly large earthquake. I can only hope that the breached containment structures hold, and don’t release yet more radioactive materials.
The small hammers I wrote about above have just swung a fairly large hammer.
Not even the most idiotic of estimates suggest Chernobyl caused or will cause 1 million deaths. Try between 4000 and about 250000. The 4000 comes from the WHO the 250000 comes from environmental NGOs. Wiki has a good article on the health effects of Chernobyl and why the disagreements exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Roger,
How desperate are you? If you do know as much as you claim to know about nuclear then you know that the chance of further fuel damage is nearly non existent and the chance of additional breaches, if any exist now, in primary containment are also nearly non existent.
WOW,
I thought climate science was full of fear and misinformation.
Radiation level, guesses, have taken it to a new extreme.
The more I read, the less I know.
@ur momisugly Doug Badgero on March 27, 2011 at 4:59 pm
Desperate? Not at all. I’m a sober realist, based on decades of sobering experience in some of the most hazardous chemical and process plants on the planet. I fully recognize that not everyone has had the experiences I’ve had.
Sure, if everything goes just right there are no problems. If the systems were engineered to the proper standards, built to those standards and verified by independent inspectors, and maintained properly over all the years, things can go pretty well. But even the best in the business have their moments when disaster occurs. These reactors and this company are far from the best in the business — they had a bad design, were not designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake nor a 30 foot tsunami. They had numerous near-misses over the past few years — see my earlier comments about the Wall Street Journal article on mishaps at Fukushima Daiichi.
I hope you are absolutely correct, that there will be no additional breaches in any of the containment systems.
However, the engineer in me knows better. I suspect that things are about to get much, much worse. Small breezes in the forest can knock down damaged limbs. Smaller earthquakes do the same thing to damaged nuclear reactors that are already leaking radioactive substances. Or to dams, and bridges, or buildings. It is not simply nuclear power plant containment buildings that have this particular problem.
Watch for TEPCO to again pull out all the workers and announce that radiation levels are far too high for work to continue.
You seem to think that perfection is required to design and operate these plants. It is not, anymore than it was in any of those myriad of chemical plants you worked in.
The fuel damage was NOT caused by the earthquake and neither was any damage to the primary containment. Both were caused by heat produced exceeding heat removal capability. You know, or should know based on your claimed expertise, that decay heat is now orders of magnitude less than it was on the day of the quake. You should also know that any hydrogen explosions were caused by high temperature zirc-water reactions. Temperatures that would be difficult to achieve now, even if all cooling were lost, given the current levels of decay heat.
It is not workmanship that argues against you, it is the laws of physics.
Roger Sowell says:
March 27, 2011 at 5:40 pm
“However, the engineer in me knows better. I suspect that things are about to get much, much worse.”
============
Sounds like they need some engineers.
Problem solvers.
Dedicated professionals.
Armchair quarterbacks, not so much.
After climate science, one of the most corrupt and politicised sciences is epidemiology. This science can be described as the “CAKE OF DEATH”. Why? Everyone dies. The probability of death of any of us therefore = 1. However, epidemiologists are scientists with active hotlines to journalists and politicians, who haggle and fight with eachother for a slice of the cake of death. The aim is to increase the percentage of deaths attributable to theirr pet toxin or hazard or even lifestyle choice. Smoking gets a generous slice, part of which is claimed by passive smoking. Vitamin deficiencies, saturated fats, air pollution, radiation, etc. etc., all claim their slice. But there are only 360 degrees of the cake of death to go round, so this is a zero sum game, a gain by one epidemiologist is a loss to another. The percentage slice of cake that you have obviously affects ones political profile and funding, and therefore epidemiology is a viscious cake-fight.
Just like global warming has made a fine art of taking natural climate oscillation and trousering it as evidence of catastrophic man-made global warming, so epidemiologists will gladly trouser deaths from any source and corral them into the pen of their particular threat to mankind.
For example, in the case of the Chernobyl accident, a sharp decrease in life expectancy followed after the Chernobyl accident which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Two things – the sharp economic decline in Ukraine following the Soviet Union breakup shortly after Chernobyl, with declining living standards for many, and an increase in surveillance for cancers and other supposed health effects of radiation, both caused a big rise in recorded incidence in many diseases and deaths, from cancer or otherwise.
In addition, nearly all the many tens-hundreds of thousands of deaths claimed for Chernobyl, rest on a single highly dubious model assumption, the LNT (linear no threshold) model of radiation carcinogenesis. This assumes a risk of cancer down to zero dose. It is very much in the same category as AGW, since it flies in the face of much contradictory real world data; it is most likely not correct.
Looking beyond cancers, which are stochastic delayed radiation effects, to the claims of a wide range of diseases to be radiation induced from Chernobyl, there is no possibility, scientifically, for these claims to be true. Where is the scientific evidence for them? Where is the detailed dosimetry, internal and external? Where are the unirradiated controls matched for socio-economic status? No-where.
There are two types of radiation health effect (leaving aside for now genetic effects and mutagenesis) – stochastic and deterministic. Low doses cause a statistical risk of cancer in the future, but no immediate noticeable effects – these are stochastic effects. There is long delay or induction period between irradiation and subsequent appearence of the cancer from a minimum of 5 years for leukemias to up to 25 years for solid cancers.
Deterministic effects are clinically evident effects appearing within days or weeks of the irradiation – these include the three classic radiation “syndromes”, haemopoietic, gastrointestinal and central nervous system (CNS). One Gray of irradiation (absorbed joule per kg of ionising energy) will give you haemopoietic, 10 Gy and you get gastrointestinal, 100 Gy and you die quickly (and mercifully) from the CNS synrdome – your brain is fried. The scientific literature on deterministic effects is very consistent in showing thresholds of several Grays for the appearence of these syndromes which result from sufficient radiation damage to affect the functioning of tissues. It is dividing cell populations that are most radio-sensitive, thus the first syndrome is haemo where the dividing marrow cells are affected, then the proliferating gut lining cells being killed causes the gastro sysndrome and so on.
A handful of Chernobyl workers and firemen died of the CNS syndrome. A few dozen died from haemopoietic and gastrointestinal syndomes. Including also the most highly exposed workers remediating the site such as the heroic minute-men “liquidators” who ran onto the reactor roof for one minute, eyeballing the exposed reactor face-to-face and each to throwing down a few fragments of contaminated reactor core graphite – perhaps 100- or so died of acute radiation effects. These were people whe received more than a Gray or so of radiation.
Looking out to the wider population in regions contaminated by fallout, the radiation doses fell very sharply. Even in heavily contaminated areas, maximum doses were at worst generally in the tens of milliGrays. The vast majority were in the single digit milliGray or the health-irrelevant micro-Gray level. One exception was children exposed to radioactive iodine and contracting thyroid cancer. There were several hundred cases in the 3-4 years following the accident in the affected regions, up from a baseline level of a handful per year – these cancers were uniquivocally induced by Chernobyl radiation. One of the volatile radionuclides from a breached reactor is iodine in two isotopes, I-131 (8 day halflife) and I-133 (20 hour halflife). These isotopes of iodine exposed populations to doses up to a Gy to the thyroid, since iodine is concentrated in the thyroid (a gland in your neck) where it is used to synthesise the growth regulating hormone thyroxine. Thus the distribution of iodine tablets to “dilute” intake of radio-iodine with stable iodine and keep it out of the thyroid competitively.
However, disappointingly for the catastrophists, very few of these children died. With the great upsurge in medical surveillance and care of people in the region following Chernobyl, and great inputs from clinicians in the USA and elsewhere, the thyroid cancers, which are a highly treateable cancer when caught in time, were successfully treated in the majority of these children – I think only a small handful died. It should be made clear that these cancers were not low dose stochastic cancers – they apeared too quickly for that. They were caused by high – Gy level – doses and resultant actual tissue damage and irritation.
These child thyroid cancers are the ONLY cancer population that can unequivocally be linked to Chernobyl.
There was NO excess statistically of leukemias following Chernobyl in the contaminated regions (and therefore none anywhere). None. Nada. Zilch. A very particular type and spatial distribution of ionising radiation tracks across haemopoietic marrow cavities is required for leukemia induction (Sr-90 is ideal for leukemogenesis, but not I or Cs or even Pu, Am and other actinides although Am241 has some efficacy due to its secondary 60 kV de-excitation x-ray). This is interesting -leukemia is the type of cancer people usually associate with and expect from radiation exposures; there were none from Chernobyl. (But the Japan bomb survivors got them – they got the right type of radiation.)
In summary: the relation between radiation doses received (from human and animal studies where those doses are well known) is abundantly sufficient for it to be clear that these claims of the type of tissue level diseases requiring several Grays of radiation, to be suffered by many tens of thousands in the wider Ukrainian population due to Chernobyl, are utterly impossible. The radiation doses are nowhere near enough. Also – many of the diseases spuriously attributed to Chernobyl radiation have no experimental or evidential basis for being radiation induced. Some diseases claimed for Chernobyl radiation by the Ukrainian ministry of Chernobyl in a report include:
“diseases of the endocrine system” – only the few hundred children with thyroid cancer qualify fot this – they mostly survived
“diseases of the nervous system” – no, CNS syndrome requiring tens to hundreds of Gy afffected a small handful of Chernobyl workers only
“..of the circulation system” – requires doses above 1 Gy, received by a few dozen liquidators and firemen
“.. of the digestive organs” – gastrointestinal syndrome was suffered by a dozen or so workers and firemen
“..of the cutaineous and subcutaneous tissue” – what does this mean?? literally it means the whole body? Skin is partly dead and very radiation insensitive except for burns with a few Gy. Fat has very low radiosensitivity.
“.. of the muscolo-skeletal system” – not very radiosensitive except bone marrow – that is the haemopoietic syndrome;
“psychological dysfunctions” – not connected with radiation exposure. CNS syndrome kills you (fries your brain) and does not otherwise change your behaviour.
Rigorous scientific investigation of radiation carcinogenesis and pathology, reveals it to be on no firmer ground than CAGW. Radiation biology needs its Steve McKintyre.
@ur momisugly doug
the cumulative death toll to date since the disaster is around 1 million finds a new study. this can be cited from a few different places, i like prisonplanet, so here you are:|
http://www.prisonplanet.com/harmless-chernobyl-radiation-killed-nearly-one-million-people.html
mike g says:
March 27, 2011 at 8:44 am
And, Francisco, any idea what the size of the big one everyone is worried about in CA is? Well, this one was 50 times bigger than that. If a 9.0 quake were to happen within 100 miles of Diablo Canyon, that plant would be the least of everybody’s problems.
==============
There was a monster 9.0 earthquake in Oregon 311 years ago. If/when it happens again, a nuclear plant ccould be “the least of everybody’s problems”but only if nothing goes wrong with the plant. If it does, it will be one more huge problem to deal with on top of all the other huge problems.
This piece of news on the Oregon big one appeared two years ago:
http://www.kval.com/news/38389664.html
Summary
At 9 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700 AD, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit a fault running from Northern California to Southern British Columbia, causing untold damage and destruction to the Pacific Northwest coast and Native American tribal communities.
The only apocalypse is that our world is now inhabited primarily by a bunch of cowardly, uneducated, man hating, fear driven babies who don’t have even the slightest idea what poses a real danger.
A far greater danger is losing our political will to act rationally and to provide for our energy needs in the most reasonable and cost effective way. That should include nuclear. I’m disgusted that we no longer live in the world of heroes and engineers that built the underpinnings of everything we have today.
Phil,
Ahem, I refer you to the excellent post above by “phlogiston”. In particular, you might want to look up what is meant by the “linear no threshold” reference and how wrong that is for radiation exposure. The problem is these “scientists” don’t tell you that there is no statistical integrity to their arguments. We know much more than we did 50 years ago but we ignore most of it because it does not fit into our view of the world. For some inexplicable reason we want to believe low level radiation exposure is more dangerous than it is.
Comparisons between anthropogenic global warming alarmism and worries about nuclear plant safety are rather outlandish. We know that once you lose control of the cooling of a nuclear reactor, it is hard to get it back. We know that the effects of sustained high levels of radiation have very undesirable effects on living things. We know that big earthquakes and tsunamis happen. We had a major mess in 1986 that resulted in the evacuation of a fairly large area that will remain uninhabitable for a long time. And on the other hand we have no clue, really, about the global temperature effects of a slight increase in CO2 atmospheric concentrations, and we have good reasons to believe it is small.
Likewise, comparisons between the media treatment of these two topics are off. The media is clearly, and often rabidly anti-skeptic in climate matters. But I don’t see that the media has a clear leaning for or against nuclear power. I mean, come on, they don’t run dozens of stories every day of the year speculating about how nuclear power is the cause of every problem on Earth. They are covering this story NOW because something rather worrisome is happening in that nuclear plant. To listen to many people here, the only acceptable coverage would be no coverage at all, or just something along the lines of “this is nothing to worry about”. Go tell that to the people in the area.
Likewise, comparisons between a nuclear accident and natural catastrophes are way off, as they systematically leave out the time component. An earthquake or a tsunami hits, and the next day you can start cleaning up and rebuilding. An area gets badly contaminated with radiation, and your only option is to abandon the area for a very very long time. For all purposes, it’s as if the catastrophe was unrepairable. There IS a difference.
The debate rages on over the settled science of nuclear power.
;o)
Patt said on March 27, 2011 at 6:09 pm:
It’s not a study, it’s a book, has its own brand-new Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment
It started off as a 2007 book that was a collection of assorted papers, then translated from Russian in 2009. It’s put out by the New York Academy of Sciences, cough up some serious dough to own a copy.
Good info about the book and its merits here:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/04/is-chernobyl-consequences-of.html
Valuable Info from the book mentioned at Wikipedia:
One Hundred Seventy Thousand People dead from Chernobyl in North America Alone!!!
Gee, I must have missed the press release…
Francisco,
“We know that once you lose control of the cooling of a nuclear reactor, it is hard to get it back.” There is no basis in fact for this statement. Why do you believe we know this?
“We know that the effects of sustained high levels of radiation have very undesirable effects on living things.” We likewise no this about arsenic, mercury, and a long list of other toxins. Radiation is energy, when that energy is deposited in living tissue it can do damage up to and including death. Why is this treated differently than any other industrial hazard? Toxins deposited on the ground can cause long term damage be they long lived radioactive isotopes or stable chemical toxins. Why is it we think we can’t manage radioactive material just as we manage other industrial hazards? Each has its own unique hazards and those hazards can be and are managed.
The problem I have with the media is there ignorance about low level radiation exposure and what could credibly occur. As others have pointed out, it is unlikely anyone will die due to radiation exposure due to this event. This includes workers at the plant.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 27, 2011 at 7:21 pm
“Patt said on March 27, 2011 at 6:09 pm:
@ur momisugly doug
the cumulative death toll to date since the disaster is around 1 million finds a new study. this can be cited from a few different places, i like prisonplanet, so here you are:|
[stuff deleted]
Valuable Info from the book mentioned at Wikipedia:
It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America.
One Hundred Seventy Thousand People dead from Chernobyl in North America Alone!!!”
Wow, with references from both prisonplanet and wikipedia saying it’s true, then surely it must be.
Doug Badgero says:
March 27, 2011 at 6:37 pm
“For some inexplicable reason we want to believe low level radiation exposure is more dangerous than it is.”
Put a hard number on this “level” and length of exposure, Doug.
@ur momisugly Doug Badgero on March 27, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Presuming that comment was directed at me, I hope you are right that no more radiation will leak. Physics does indeed indicate that — IF EVERYTHING WENT ACCORDING TO PLAN — that the heat generation is less now than it was several days ago. But, can you or anyone else guarantee that no meltdown occurred? Is all the fuel where it belongs, inside the fuel rods? Is there no radioactive water pooled in the bottom of the system, where it can leak out? The answer is, of course, no one knows. There SHOULD be not much residual heat produced 17 days after the shutdown. Time will tell.
What sober engineers do is plan for the worst, then operate to the best point possible, and make long and detailed contingency plans in case things don’t go as expected. We also schedule and run practice drills — but safely, not where something is actually blown apart or blown up. There’s a good article in today’s Washington Post on the conditions in the damaged nuclear plants. “Hellish” is the word they used.
The atomic bomb survivor cancer threshold was 100-200 mSv (10-20 Rem) acute exposure. I would somewhat arbitrarily define acute exposure to that received over a 7 day period. I base this on a very unscientific estimate on how long the body takes to repair cellular damage. Obviously, in reality in would depend on the person and the nature of the damage. Certainly I would say it is less than 1 month though.
One thing low level definitely is is the few mSv received by anyone other than those very close to the disaster.
From Daryl M on March 27, 2011 at 7:48 pm:
Yup, you get it.
They’re attributing 170,000 North American deaths to Chernobyl?
For the US (reference):
Strangely enough, “reduced radioactivity from Chernobyl fallout” is not specified as a possible reason for the decline. Ah, what the hell, the “million deaths from Chernobyl” people might as well claim it anyway, it all has about the same basis in scientific fact.
Sigh. I had promised myself not to make any comments today.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8408863/Japan-tsunami-Fukushima-Fifty-the-first-interview.html
From: http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/files/en20110327-2-1.pdf
@roger Sowell says(March 27, 2011 at 8:16 pm ):
Please read: http://www.shimbun.denki.or.jp/en/news/20110324_01.html. That seems to me to be one of the best and most detailed descriptions of what happened at Three Mile Island. If I understand Dr. Ishikawa properly, then I would think that the cores of reactors #1, #2 and #3 melted as he described within 32 to 72 hours after the tsunami. Dr. Ishikawa also explains, in his words:
So, it would seem that the cores melted a long time ago, and have been cooling ever since. As reported in several different places, the water level in the reactors is somewhere between 1.2 and 2.3 meters below where the top of the cores used to be. Accordingly, I would think there is a good chance that what is left of the three cores may now be completely under water, which would be a good thing.
Furthermore, the discovery that radioactive water puddles have formed in the basements of the turbine buildings may also be a GOOD THING. Why? Please refer to the following study, titled Assessment of BWR Main Steam Line Release Consequences by John N. Ridgely and prepared for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2002: http://adamswebsearch2.nrc.gov/idmws/DocContent.dll?library=PU_ADAMS^pbntad01&LogonID=5d44503dea2a82493ae18401c9d75e3d&id=062980113
Paraphrasing it states that steam from the reactor vessel can leak through valves in the steam lines used to isolate the reactor from the turbines, and that such leakage would ultimately come out the turbine seals into the turbine building and then, presumably, outside. This may have been happening since shortly after the tsunami, but, until just a day or so ago, the turbine buildings were apparently dry. I suspect that the water that has been found just recently may be condensate from this steam leakage. If so, this might mean that the temperature of this escaping steam may now have come down enough for condensate to form and that would mean that the cores (or what is left of them) may finally be cooling down. However, that is just a guess on my part.
@Doug Badgero on March 27, 2011 at 6:37 pm:
I assume that you were referring to Patt on March 27, 2011 at 6:09 pm.
Chernobyl – how to find it on google. Look a little north of Kiev and you see a big round area without any towns. There used to be towns, cities, and villages there. In fact the buildings are still there. Try google maps – zoom in north of Kiev. Very green towns appear – overly green, overly grown – and NO cars. No people either. Regardless of the death toll, hundreds of square miles are uninhabited – could people live there – probably; will they – not if there’s a choice.
Now Russia can maybe sustain losing a thousand square miles of prime land. I doubt Japan can. I suspect at a minimum all savings Japan has ever garnered from nuclear power are already wiped out. That plant is now surely a total loss. The real question is will tsunami land even be inhabitable. The loss of life due to the earthquake is tragic – but not being able to rebuild or worse not being able to reinhabit is the mega disaster.
Panic isn’t really in order, but only because radiation is so slow. But it lasts, and it chases people away. Anyone discounting this because it is insufficiently deadly is really missing the point. A relatively similar blow to the US would be if Washington and Oregon became uninhabitable and unusable. We would survive, but we would be diminished.
From what I’ve read the sheaths the uranium pellets are in and which form the fuel rods, are melting. The sheath melts at a temperature far lower than the pellets, themselves. So that exposes the pellets to the cooling liquid which is water. That’s not good. That liquid in the reactor is intended to boil and it is up to the water pumps to manage the temperature at a certain pressure. Normally that energy is used to generate electricity but that’s all finished.
The earthquake hit and the reactors scrammed. The damping rods were pushed up into position to block neutrons and quench the nuclear fire. But there is a lot of mass in there that is still quite hot, and the damping rods damp but don’t put out the nuclear fires. It is therefor critical to continue to move heat away from the core. This is normally the steam that turns the wheel as they used to say on steam ships, but once a reactor is scrammed all the heat has to be transferred to the environment because none of the energy is used to produce electricity. That is a total loss heat removal system. Every excess watt has to be put into the ocean, actually. And for that to happen the pumps need to pump. They’re not.
Now we have a problem. There is enough latent heat in the reactor to boil the water enough to create an over-pressure condition. To relieve that they must release the steam from the core. This has two ominous side effects. When water is exposed to fusion it breaks down into its constituent parts – hydrogen and oxygen. When you release the steam there is less water left behind, and what is left behind doesn’t stop boiling which of course requires releasing the steam again. And with it, hydrogen and oxygen. This was released into the outer shell – that is the building that exploded. The hydrogen and oxygen reformed to produce water and blew the building to hell.
And the core is running out of water. The solution is to add more water but hang on, it is under pressure because it is heated by that nuclear furnace that is still burning. There’s not power to create the pressure needed to force cooling water into the reactor core. Now what?
What happens next is the water level drops below the tops of the fuel rods and they start to warm up. And there’s nothing to take away the heat. So the sheaths melt and the pellets fall out onto the rest of the reactor or drop to the floor of the reactor. A little of this is a bad thing! Any steam released now has byproducts of direct exposure to uranium. Hot, scintillating uranium.
So assuming a miracle happens and power becomes available to force cooling water into the reactor to cool it, what happens next? It requires a steam release which causes another hydrogen gas explosion. And bad things happen when you hit hot neutrons with cold water. Google it. Oh – and those pellets that fell out of the sheaths? They’re oxidizing. That creates a trace particle that can be tested for and which is the tell-tale that a core meltdown is under way. That has been detected.
The good news is after a time, with replenished water, the core can cool to a safe level. The bad news is those control rods that were jacked into place in the scram don’t last for ever. Even worse news is the spaces they occupy are perhaps filled with uranium pellets, and retracting a spent damping rod for replacement may result in a situation where a new rod cannot be put back in place. And those rods are the only thing that prevents the China Syndrome – a fictitious but useful description of what happens in a super meltdown. In a super meltdown a large number of sheaths melt and the pellets fall to the bottom of the reactor and sizzle. There is not enough fuel or density to create a runaway nuclear explosion, but the heat generated is unstoppable by anything in the reactor, and the fuel will liquefy and melt through the bottom.
The reactor belly pan is designed to deal with this. As the bottom melts way the fuel will be scattered round a large area, reducing the density, lowering the temperature, and the nuclear fire will go out. Maybe. But if anything unanticipated foils that, such as a wicking action by debris dangling down the meltout hole and drawing gobs of liquid uranium into a new dense pool, the next stop is China – well, that doesn’t work in Japan, so the next stop is Venezuela. Hence the name China Syndrome. The cute notion that the uranium will melt all the way to the other side of the planet. That can’t happen, but in the worst case scenario it can get out of the reactor complex and run down hill to the ocean.
Probably won’t happen.
Lee says:
March 27, 2011 at 10:29 pm
“Now Russia can maybe sustain losing a thousand square miles of prime land.”
It’s called the Ukraine.