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A Vicious Circle
Japan says plutonium found at Fukushima
Much will be made out of the Plutonium but the levels found, while from the recent incident, are not concerning at all. Disregard the panicking Plutonium headlines. There are bigger problems at hand.
What I am more concerned about is the vicious responsibility circle at the Fukushima plants.
Cooling needs to keep going in the reactor vessels to prevent reheating and possible fission in the partially melted reactor cores. Pumping water from the outside in and letting hot water steam/flow out somewhere (feed and bleed) is currently the only possibility to do the necessary cooling to prevent reheating and further fission of the reactor cores until a real controlled cooling cycle can be established.
Unfortunately a real controlled cooling cycle can only be established with access to the turbine halls lower levels.
Unfortunately cooling by pumping water from the outside into the broken reactor vessels with partialy melted cores is flooding the downhill turbine halls with highly contaminated water which prevents access and the establishment of a controlled cooling cycle. No one has any good idea of where to put or redirect the hundreds of tons of water pumped in and now coming out into the turbine hall with high contamination.
Allowing to dump the contaminated water into the sea is equal to political suicide in a democratic seafood nation. Technically it is the only solution possible within any reasonable time frame.
The conflict between political and technical considerations will lead to a stagnation of decisions in the stabilization operations.
The contaminated water will not care. It will find its way into the sea. Meanwhile reduced cooling, as already established today, will increase core damage and further radiation leaks.
The Chernobyl reactor had to be mostly neutralized before being permanently buried, which meant that 800,000 or so “liquidators” had to run into the plant, perform some menial task in the presence of boiling nuclear waste for a minute or two, and then run out. Most of them are now sick, dying or dead from radiation poisoning.
Perhaps burying Fukushima will be a simpler process, because of robots or other technological developments. Perhaps burying Fukushima will be a more complicated process, because it has a lot more waste lying around and four out-of-control reactors while Chernobyl had just one. I don’t know. Either way, there is a moral problem that needs to be discussed.
Who will be the liquidators?
[…]
If someone has to die an agonizing, terrifying, nauseating, blistering, stinking, metastasizing death, who should be first guy to run into the Fukushima reactors with a bucket of wet cement?
I nominate Jeffrey Immelt.
Immelt is chairman and CEO of General Electric. General Electric designed all six of the faulty Fukushima reactors. General Electric built three of them. General Electric claimed it was safe to build these reactors next to the ocean in an earthquake zone. General Electric built 23 reactors in the United States exactly like the ones melting down right now in Japan. General Electric has made colossal profits promoting nuclear power in Japan and around the world. Jeffrey Immelt made $15.2 million last year.
[…]
GE ran the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, one of the most polluted places on the planet. GE has paved parking lots with nuclear waste. GE has released vast clouds of radiation on innocent, unwarned people in United States just to see what would happen. GE has done radiation experiments on the testes of prisoners without properly warning them. GE dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River, making it poisonous for generations. GE has refused to clean up the PCBs in the Hudson and elsewhere. GE has lied repeatedly about the PCBs. GE is a serial polluter of ground water. GE takes enormous pride in paying no corporate taxes in the United States. GE has been fined many times for defrauding the the Defense Department. GE has been fined many times for design flaws and safety violations at its nuclear plants in the United States. GE has shipped most of its operations overseas so it can pay workers less and get fined less. GE owns a big chunk of NBC and MSNBC, which has been covering Japan less and less as the meltdown gets worse and worse. GE sees to it that all those NBC Dateline true crime documentaries don’t inform anyone about GE crimes. And last, but far from least, GE launched the political career of Ronald Reagan.
—Who Will Be The Liquidators?
Were there really 800.000 liquidators at Chernobyl?
Wikipedia thinks so.
In April 1994, a commemoration text from the Ukrainian embassy in Belgium counted 25,000 dead among the liquidators since 1986.
According to Georgy Lepnin, a Belarusian physician who worked on reactor #4, “approximately 100,000 liquidators are now dead”, of a total number of one million workers.
According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, “25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled”, which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600 000, liquidators) and 165,000 disabled.[2]
And yet the pro-nuke cheerleaders keep telling us that Chernobyl wasn’t so bad.. This web page is worth a read if you enjoy watching your BS-o-meter peg. The official story is that Chernobyl was ” the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power where radiation-related fatalities occurred” — yeah, tell that to the various teams investigating the long term consequences of TMI — and goes out of its way to assure us that it was all because of “a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture.”
So nothing like it could possibly happen in a modern, non-Communist, high-tech culture with highly educated operators, a proper Western-designed reactor, and a strong culture of obedience and rule-observance… like, for example, Japan?
Their tally of Chernobyl-related deaths peters out at a couple of hundred. But then, this is a nuclear cheerleader site.
Other estimates vary wildly from about 4,000 to 500,000 to just short of a million. There appears to be no strong consensus. The Soviet medical apparatus was falling apart along with the rest of the state; some European countries took monitoring and sampling seriously and some did not; health effects from radiation exposure sometimes take years to manifest…. and so on.
This is perhaps the most disturbing thing about Fukushima, and the nuke industry in general: that the epidemiology required to make accurate assessments of the damage done to human (let alone other species’) health is beyond our present resources and/or political will. Therefore it will not be done, or be done in a slipshod optimistic way. We will never know exactly how much premature mortality was/will be inflicted by the radiation release. Its the perfect crime — deniable mass murder — diffuse, slow, and untraceable. GMO drift can at least be documented with adequate technology, but the hot particles from a core melt are not conveniently stamped “Property of Tepco”, nor do they leave a fingerprint on the cells whose DNA they may be disrupting for decades to come.
Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 31 2011 6:06 utc | 45
Dave, that link was a bit out there, but it was sprinkled with some salient points that have merit…..specifically, the Shunning. I practice this fervently in my life everyday, and I am guiding my children in the use of it, as well. Respect should always be reciprocal. When first encountering an individual, whomever it may be and regardless of their perceived status, extend the common courtesy of consideration and respect giving them the benefit of the doubt until an assessment can be reached after a threshold of interaction has been reached with them. If, once that threshold of interaction has been reached, the individual has proven themselves to not be interested in reciprocal, mutual respect, but instead dismisses you and marginalizes you, and attempts to use their perceived status to dominate you, then you should engage the Shunning.
It’s very similar to what Jesus preached. I’m not being religious here…in fact, I’m a strong Agnostic, but this is about tactics when confronting powerful forces. Jesus said:
Matthew 5:38-42
You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
To turn a left cheek to someone of status in that era, was a grave insult, similar to shooting them the bird, or sneering at them. It was an intentional act of irreverence and disrespect. It told the aggressor that “you can taunt me, insult me, beat me, or kill me, but you will never have me nor my respect…I will not bow down to you and respect you.”
Also, Jews of the era wore only two garments. Therefore, if you had been sued for one of them and gave also the second, what would you be wearing? In other words, Jesus was saying to strip naked, an insult more to the one causing the nakedness than the person being naked.
Romans were allowed to force civilians to carry their gear when on the march, but only for one mile. Forcing the same civilian to carry the gear any further would result in disciplinary action. So how do you think the Roman would feel when at the end of one mile he goes to retrieve his pack and this Jew pleasantly offers to get him in trouble by carrying it another mile. That would be completely not what he was expecting, and it breaks the oppressor-victim paradigm.
Posted by: Morocco Bama | Mar 31 2011 13:41 utc | 54
I am getting the uncomfortable but all too credible feeling that the headline I objected to –“Japanese May Have Lost Fight to Save Nuclear Reactor” — was all too accurate. I begin to suspect that TEPCO has, in fact, been trying to save their reactors rather than to save the people living nearby and downwind — they’ve been trying to do non-destructive things to cool the piles and waste rod storage, hoping against hope to re-occupy and rehabilitate the wrecked plants. Maybe they should have started sarcophagising the plants immediately, following a mass evacuation? I get the sense that — as one might expect from human nature — they could not bear to write off such a huge investment, or to accept such a humiliating loss and defeat. Did they tell themselves they could get control of the situation and salvage the installation, rather than face 30 years and $12B in cleanup costs?
In a Wednesday briefing in Vienna the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that one of its two teams measuring radiation levels in Japan had been testing soil samples from 18 March to 26 March taken at distances of 25 to 58 kilometers from the Dai-1 plant. The nuclear watchdog said that measurements of iodine-131 and cesium-137 indicated “that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded in Iitate village. We advised the (Japan) counterpart to carefully assess the situation.” Iitate village is about 40 km from the plant and so lies well outside the 20 km evacuation zone. footnote
It’s not a good sign, the “exclusion zone” (a new euphemism for our time) being steadily enlarged.
Giving Up:
Japan said Wednesday it is to decommission reactors at its disaster-hit Fukushima nuclear plant and overhaul nuclear safety procedures after admitting serious failings in its battle to contain dangerous levels of radiation.
Power plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) — whose president Masataka Shimizu has been hospitalized with high blood pressure and dizziness — said the shutdown of four damaged reactors was inevitable.
Japan’s Trade Ministry, responsible for the safety of the country’s expanding nuclear energy program, said in a statement that tougher new regulations would be drafted to in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the world’s worst atomic crisis since the 1986 Chernobyl explosion.
Oh goody, let’s draft some tough new regulations that will somehow make the inherent fragility, opacity, authoritarianism and lethality of the technology just go away.
TEPCO President replaced — Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata is to replace President Masataka Shimizu who is stepping down “for health reasons.” For some reason — perhaps too literary an upbringing, perhaps trying to turn this horror into a story whose dramatic conventions I can understand — I am imagining Shimizu as a kind of nuclear Captain Queeg, monomaniacally insisting that the plant must be saved, shouting down anyone who tried to press for more preventive evacuations and immediate sarcophagisation. My literary mind imagines Shimizu finally breaking down as he realises how many lives his obstinacy has cost, and a worn, frantic and guilt-ridden first officer stepping up quickly to save as many lives as he can. It would make a great Kurosawa movie. We’ll never know what was said at the executive meetings. Was Shimizu forcibly removed, sedated, and hospitalised for the greater good? or did he just fold under the shock and horror (and guilt) of it all?
Humans were never wired to deal with culpability and guilt of this magnitude…
BTW, I also find myself wondering how long was Fukushima nuclear installation active, what did it cost to build and how many gigawatt/hrs did it generate in its operational lifetime? When we add build cost to $12B of cleanup costs (without even factoring in liability for possibly tens of thousands of premature deaths, the social cost of genetic damage to one or more generations, etc), did it generate “enough” energy to justify the price tag? How many $$ per KWH? How many lives per GWH?
The Gift That Keeps On Giving:
Water is still being poured into the damaged reactors to cool melting fuel rods.
But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed. […]
Both experts agree capping the damaged reactors with concrete is not an option.
Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal says it has obtained disaster-readiness plans which show the facility only had one satellite phone and a single stretcher in case of an accident.
The blueprints also provided no detail about the possibility of using firefighters from Tokyo or national troops – both of which have been part of the response to the Fukushima crisis – to deal with any disaster.
Levels of radioactive iodine-131 in the Pacific off the plant have been recorded at a new high of 4,385 times the legal limit.
In 2002, the plant’s operator TEPCO admitted to falsifying safety reports, leading to all of its 17 boiling water reactors being shut down for inspection.
TEPCO has already vowed to dismantle the four reactors at the centre of the world’s worst atomic accident in 25 years, but now Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan says the Fukushima plant must be scrapped.
“Dismantle” is a small word for a very, very long and dangerous project.
Some “readiness plan” eh? Talk about “success-oriented engineering.”
And now we’re back to the $64M question. *Who will be the liquidators?*
Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 1 2011 5:34 utc | 60
it is horrifically clear that the consequences of this extend far beyond japan..it is indeed the chronicle of a death foretold as Uncle $cam and many others in this thread before have posted nothing will be the same again and still no one is listening…if three mile island,chernobyl and more did not put doubt into the peoples minds about nuclear safety what will.
Below cut/paste from ‘wikipedia’
“Nuclear power plant accidents
with multiple fatalities and/or more than US$100 million in property damage, 1952-2011
January 3, 1961 Idaho Falls, Idaho, US Explosion at SL-1, National Reactor Testing Station. An additional 1,100 Curies were released as fission products to the atmosphere, but due to the remoteness, most of it was recovered and buried.
October 5, 1966 Frenchtown Charter Township, Michigan, US Partial core meltdown of the Fermi 1 Reactor at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station. No radiation leakage into the environment.
December 7, 1975 Greifswald, East Germany Electrical error causes fire in the main trough that destroys control lines and five main coolant pumps.
February 22, 1977 Jaslovské Bohunice, Czechoslovakia Severe corrosion of reactor and release of radioactivity into the plant area, necessitating total decommission.
March 28, 1979 Middletown, Pennsylvania, US Loss of coolant and partial core meltdown, see Three Mile Island accident and Three Mile Island accident health effects.
September 15, 1984 Athens, Alabama, US Safety violations, operator error, and design problems force six year outage at Browns Ferry Unit.
March 9, 1985 Athens, Alabama, US Instrumentation systems malfunction during startup, which led to suspension of operations at all three Browns Ferry Units.
April 11, 1986 Plymouth, Massachusetts, US Recurring equipment problems force emergency shutdown of Boston Edison’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant.
April 26, 1986 Pripyat, Ukraine Steam explosion and meltdown necessitating the evacuation of 300,000 people from Kiev and dispersing radioactive material across Europe.
May 4, 1986 Hamm-Uentrop, Germany Experimental THTR-300 reactor releases small amounts of fission products (0.1 GBq Co-60, Cs-137, Pa-233) to surrounding area.
March 31, 1987 Delta, Pennsylvania, US Peach Bottom units 2 and 3 shutdown due to cooling malfunctions and unexplained equipment problems.
December 19, 1987 Lycoming, New York, US Malfunctions force Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation to shut down Nine Mile Point Unit.
March 17, 1989 Lusby, Maryland, US Inspections at Calvert Cliff Units 1 and 2 reveal cracks at pressurized heater sleeves, forcing extended shutdowns.
February 20, 1996 Waterford, Connecticut, US Leaking valve forces shutdown Millstone Nuclear Power Plant Units 1 and 2, multiple equipment failures found.
September 2, 1996 Crystal River, Florida, US Balance-of-plant equipment malfunction forces shutdown and extensive repairs at Crystal River Unit.
September 30, 1999 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan Workers at the Tokaimura uranium processing facility added too many buckets of uranium directly into a precipitation tank, causing it to go critical, killing two, and exposing one more to radiation levels above permissible limits.
February 16, 2002 Oak Harbor, Ohio, US Severe corrosion of control rod forces 24-month outage of Davis-Besse reactor.
August 9, 2004 Fukui Prefecture, Japan Steam explosion at Mihama Nuclear Power Plant kills 5 workers and injures dozens more.
March 11, 2011 Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan Cooling failure in 4 reactors following an earthquake, tsunami and multiple fires and Hydrogen explosions at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.”
no one heeded words spoken decades ago…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f94j9WIWPQQ&feature=related
we are undone..the black waters of the tsunami may have receeded..but they have left behind horrors beyond our generation.
Posted by: noiseannoys | Apr 2 2011 12:44 utc | 86
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