patrick.net

terriDeaner,
Are there certain steps you plan on taking based on what you learn here? This is a very interesting theoretical discussion, although I think it seems selfish to worry about the US over Japan at this point, but even if the ultimate conclusion was some radiation or whatever could come to the US, what are you going to do? All I can figure is avoiding fish from Japan. What else is there to do?

@zzyzzx

Thanks for the link.

Btw, here is probably the best explanation, although some are saying this might be debunked elsewhere. MIT has a bunch of explanations for each of the events that took place.

http://mitnse.com/2011/03/15/explanation-of-hydrogen-explosions-at-units-1-and-3/

pkennedy says

@terriDeaner
Actually you’ve give nothing. Everyone else has provided clear examples and explanations.
You used fusion instead of fission, showing you clearly don’t have an in depth understanding of this information, because anyone with anything beyond Fox or CNN news as their sole source of information wouldn’t make that mistake. It’s akin to all of us talking about flying and you start talking about lift in water, and us needing to correct you that water and air are not the same thing. It’s not a small slip up in this industry, it’s as embarrassing as getting confused between air and water while discussing planes.

Sorry pal, everyone makes mistakes, even me. And I don't think typo's are that big of a deal, particularly when they are corrected quickly.

You seem to be implying that my mistake was conceptual. I assure you, it was not. Please note that "fission" and "fusion" look and are spelled very similarly, and when you're typing quickly one may be mistakenly substituted for the other.

I'm sure you'll understand, given your eloquent writing sample above. With such amazing flow, it exhibits an exceptional level of grammar usage, and impeccable spelling througout!

ch_tah says

terriDeaner,

Are there certain steps you plan on taking based on what you learn here? This is a very interesting theoretical discussion, although I think it seems selfish to worry about the US over Japan at this point, but even if the ultimate conclusion was some radiation or whatever could come to the US, what are you going to do? All I can figure is avoiding fish from Japan. What else is there to do?

I'm not sure - avoid the beaches in the spring and summer until some testing has been done, probably. Not eat fish from the western Pacific, or migratory ones that swim through there. Keep the earthquake emergency kit up to date. Keep looking for results from local monitoring stations (haven't found any web-based results yet).

Another precaution is stocking up on potassium iodine. I picked up this link from another thread in this forum:

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Surgeon-General-Buying-Iodine-Appropriate-118031559.html

For now there is nothing much else to do but wait for more news. Even if there was a worst case, serious particulate discharge high into the atmosphere (AN UNLIKELY SCENARIO) it would probably take a while (days-weeks) for any of it to get here anyhow.

pkennedy says

here is probably the best explanation, although some are saying this might be debunked elsewhere

That guy was talking out of his ass which should be clear by now, maximizing and fabricating the good things and trying to minimize the bad things. But as Feynman said, Mother Nature cannot be fooled.

The guy was so clueless he was talking about refurbishing the plant and returning it to operation.

I found his original remarks that people exposed to the venting should quit smoking to compensate to be pretty fucking offensive, though the MIT students have removed that particular idiocy from the original.

Whether the nuclear engineering students have anything intelligent to add to this discussion remain to be seen.

They have yet to explore the implications of having the secondary pressure vessel in unit 2 breached. This is bad news if they have to vent more steam from unit 2 -- its core is partially melted down so any steam coming from the reactor pressure vessel is going to be highly radioactive.

Troy says

That guy was talking out of his ass which should be clear by now, maximizing and fabricating the good things and trying to minimize the bad things. But as Feynman said, Mother Nature cannot be fooled.

This is why it is always best to read critically (previously typed sarcasm removed...).

And now bad news:

New fire hits Japan nuclear plant

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12754883

#4 reactor is on fire again.

The situation with #4 is not clear now. Smoke was noted at 5:45AM but NHK said it was gone later.

Still no clear info on this.

terriDeaner says

Do you understand that if you ingest trace amounts of radioactive cesium or strontium it will accumulate over time in your body, replacing normal elements like potassium and calcium? Imagine the blood cancer risk resultant from having a radioactive skeleton. And the problem is compounded by bioaccumulation through the food chain. This means that low levels of radioactive dust over grass gets concentrated by cows eating the grass, and further concentrated in humans eating the cows.

Trace amounts of cs will not accumulate in your body. It passes out through the urine and feces. You ingest and pass out non radioactive cs all the time. It's naturally occurring and is all around us. Radioactive cs does exactly the same thing. Much larger amounts than trace are needed to accumulate. It's just not possible for those levels of concentrations of cs to drift 6000 miles short of a nuclear war.

You keep comparing Chernobyl with the Japanese plants. Chernobyl didn't have a containment building. The explosan simply tossed the roof of the reactor. Over 200 tons of material thrown high into the air. Most of it landed on the nearby scandenavian countries where is was absorbed by the environment and passed up the food chain to some degree. There is a world of difference between several hundred miles and over 6000 miles.

None of this matters since you keep coming back to the same tired argument that all radiation is the same and any trace amount is harmful. Pure hokum.

bob2356 says

Chernobyl didn’t have a containment building.

Maybe you haven't been keeping up with current events, but neither do 2 out of the 3 Fukushima 1 scrammed reactors.

One other problem is that there are thousands of nuclear rods sitting in cooling pools at the upper levels of all 6 power plants.

One reactor is currently emitting steam or white smoke at this time. If this is reactor 2 this is steam directly from the core, which has been 30% damaged due to loosing all coolant for several hours.

Turns out the "smoking" reactor is Unit 3.

The one fueled with 5% plutonium.

Not good.

Live update from TEPCO now.

Workers have suspended operations in the facility, waiting for the somewhat elevated radiation levels to abate (~6 millisieverts at the main gate, probably much higher at the control facility).

TEPCO says maybe no water in #4 spent fuel pool.

Cores could have melted in the empty cooling pool.

Could be a likely scenario.

TEPCO wants to inject water as quickly as possible.

No shield in #4 fuel left. Workers cannot approach.

From bbc asia-pacific:

0320: Staff have now been evacuated from Fukushima because of a spike in radiation levels, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference.

What is going on?

Things are going out of control. Now being interrupted by emergency earthquake warning for Ibaraki.

I'm not really up on this sort of thing, but Japan being the land of robots and all.... don't they have views of what's going on inside? I mean I would think they could deploy widgets with cameras on them all over the place. Radiation/heat issues?

I am also curious why more automated devices were not deployed.

Status update 6 out.

http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_1300245068P.pdf

Main page here to follow it yourself:

http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/

No info on fuel rod integrity in the cooling pools for #1-3...

Here's a wind speed/direction map for Japan via zerohedge... can anyone read Japanese? AiJ?

http://www.weather-report.jp/com/home/kishomap/fusoku/japan_l.html

Better news from bbc:

0623: Workers at the Fukushima plant have returned after being evacuated, CNN is quoting Tokyo Electric Power Company as saying.

From 10:20AM JST millisievert levels were registered at the main gate, briefly peaking at 10.8mSv at 12:30.

Could be much higher at the reactors.

Picture of Unit 4 is quite shocking:

#3 is on the left and was the one with the big explosion on Monday.

This has been contained just about as well as subprime was in 2008.

Further evidence that this is an ongoing crisis. Nothing is certain.

And the rest of the pictures from that nytimes series were fucking depressing. How awful.

LOL. TEPCO press conference is a riot right now. The reporters there are assholes.

TEPCO had a live press conference and 10 minutes in the reporters could see on NHK that CH-47s arrived with water baskets and the reporters started going WTF and the TEPCO big cheeses were kinda laughing a little, or amused that the water operation was starting before TEPCO could tell the reporters.

TEPCO said:

smoke coming out of spent fuel pool temperature water boiled off of #2.

180 workers back removing debris from the exploded plants. (Fun job.)

Dick reporter assaulting the nice TEPCO senior manager about drywell and suppression pool pressure is "downscale" which I think means it has lost pressurization too. This means when #3 core vents excess pressure it will also vent into the plant directly

Frankly I don't see how anybody can be working in this environment, with all these rods being exposed to the air.

Now they're ganging up on TEPCO guys.

1,2,3 reactors are cooling with seawater and venting radioactive steam.

Emperor is now talking to people, saying the usual stuff.

Watching TBS now . . .

They're showing how they moved the fuel rods from inside the #4's reactor to the spent fuel pool.

The reporters are talking about how dangerous this is, now that there's no coolant left in the pool!

So much for "containment".

I read somewhere that with a naked core exposed to air it's basically Chernobyl-level dosage to anyone coming close to Unit 4 . . . which is why they are employing helicopters now to try to get the core under water again.

To out things in perspective:
Chernobyl release way more radiation than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and it didn't affect us, even though it's closer to the US (at least where I am at).

Also, from what I've read, one of changes you are going to see from this is they way backup generators at nuclear plants are placed. Power plants are also major consumers of electricity, and in the case of a nuclear plant, having those backup (most likely diesel) generators to keep things like pump running is absolutely necessary. The problem here is that they placed them in the basement which the tsunami flooded! As in:

Didn't the same thing happen with Katrina where the pumps were underwater or something like that?

Troy says

Frankly I don’t see how anybody can be working in this environment, with all these rods being exposed to the air.

Wearing a radiation suit aling with individual radiation monitors and limiting exposure. you use a fair number of people who only work there for limited amounts of time. Also, if possible use robots if you can get them. They might have one of those handy in a place like Japan or a nuclear power plant.

Obligatory radiation suit picture:

Vicente says

I’m not really up on this sort of thing, but Japan being the land of robots and all…. don’t they have views of what’s going on inside? I mean I would think they could deploy widgets with cameras on them all over the place. Radiation/heat issues?

If I had to guess, the robots that they have might not be in the right place and most likely not designed for this particular task. In so far as radiation/heat issues those can be accounted for in the design of the robot. These things have sensors all over the place that work just fine because they are designed to work there.

More importantly, anyone see any obvious short term investment opportunities?

Level 6 now...

Possibly level 7.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale

More learned here from the foreign media than from the Japanese media.

Today wind was blowing east toward the Pacific Ocean.

Saw the news today, apparently people are stocking up on PotassiumIodide (US West Coast).

zzyzzx says

I agree. The stuff I see written by people is so stupid and illogical that it isn’t funny. At least I used to work at a nuclear plant, and don’t expect this situation to amount to much, as long as the can pump in seawater until they get the regular systems working, they’ll be fine.

You don’t see Cherynobyl style nuclear reactors in palce like the US or Japan.

In all seriousness, do you really feel the same way today? Yes, the US and Japan do not use Chernobyl style reactors, so an exact repeat of a "Chernobyl event" is not even possible. However, it seems that the containment vessels for Daiichi #2 and #3 have cracked, allowing ongoing releases of radioactive material. Weren't these reactors DESIGNED to avoid this exact problem???

I for one hope your prediction is at least partially correct and that these containment vessels do not break down any further. I fear that they may not be able to continue pumping seawater for cooling, however.

To top it off, it seems like the situation in Japan could get much WORSE than Chernobyl because of a huge design flaw in the way that spent fuel is stored at these boiling water reactors (same reactor design as the one you used to work at, yes?). Essentially each reactor has an UNREINFORCED reactor core full of spent fuel sitting on top of the containment vessels of #1-#6.

I found this graphic by tracking through a series of links from the website you provided for you former place of employment:
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/generic-bwr.pdf

It is a generic schematic from the US nuclear regulatory commission, and it shows the spent-fuel cooling pool located at the top of the typical boiling water reactor used in the US. Was this how your plant was set up as well?

from bbc asia-pacific:

1759: The embassy says there are "numerous factors in the aftermath of the earthquake and Tsunami, including weather, wind direction and speed, and the nature of the reactor problem that affect the risk of radioactive contamination within this 50 mile (80 km) radius or the possibility of lower-level radioactive materials reaching greater distances."

1757: This is an extract is from the US embassy's advice to its citizens in Japan: "Consistent with the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] guidelines that apply to such a situation in the United States, we are recommending, as a precaution, that American citizens who live within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant evacuate the area or to take shelter indoors if safe evacuation is not practical."

But also consider this opinion

from bbc asia-pacific:

1818: The US Environmental Protection Agency says it is increasing its monitoring of radiation along the western coast and Pacific territories, AP reports. However the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it does not expect harmful levels to reach North America.

and this statement from the EPA:

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/statement.html

And (finally!) how to access online monitoring in near-real time

http://www.epa.gov/narel/radnet/pdf/How_to_Access_RadNet_Data.pdf

Let's hope this works-

from bbc asia-pacific:

1832: The AP news agency is quoting Tepco as saying a new power line is almost ready which could end the crisis. The disruption of power to the pumps which send coolant through the reactors is what led to their overheating.

Finding recent facts on this with any depth from US media is useless. Thanks for pointing me to BBC Asia-Pacific.

Vicente says

Finding recent facts on this with any depth from US media is useless. Thanks for pointing me to BBC Asia-Pacific.

Sure, you're welcome. It seemed like the nytimes was on top of this story over the weekend, but has since lagged behind on their updates.