Fukushima Update – April 21

April 21, 2011

I am not sure yet if the following item was correctly translated as I do not find it anywhere else yet. But if it was, we seem to have a new additional meltdown which will likely lead to further high radiation releases:

Tokyo Electric admits fuel could be melting at Fukushima nuke plant

TOKYO, April 21, Kyodo

An official at Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, admitted Wednesday that fuel of the plant's No. 1 reactor could be melting.

Given its prior communication one can be sure that when Tepco says "could" they know it is actually happening. But let's wait for some confirmation.

The Japanese government has now declared the evacuation zone as off limits. As support for that decision it only now released data that shows how bad the radiation situation was or rather it does not really show anything:

Radiation levels of over 100 microsieverts per hour were measured at four locations 2 to 3 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant from late last month, the science ministry said Thursday as it released such data for the first time.

Unfortunately this data released is misleading, "over 100 microsievert" does not say how much over. It is likely that the radiation near the plant was in the higher millisievert levels, several thousand times higher than 100 microsievert. Even over 30 kilometers away from the plant in the town of Iitate levels of 40 to 50 microsieverts per hour were reached (pdf). That data points to much higher levels near the plant.

The workers who were in such high radiation for days will likely have future health problems. There are also new reports of very bad working condition the workers have now to endure. But Tepco is doing its very best to motivate them:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is considering cutting annual salaries of its employees by around 20 percent as part of its restructuring effort to make compensation payments over the emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, company sources said Thursday.

Oh – and there just was a 6.4 quake in Tokyo.

Additional resources:
All Things Nuclear – blog by the Union of Concerned Scientists
Atomic power review – blog
Arms Control Wonk – blog
Brave New Climate – pro nuclear blog
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Digital Globe Sat Pictures
IAEA
NISA Japan's Nuclear Regulator
Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (regular updates)
Japanese government press releases in English
Tepco press releases in English
Kyodo News Agency
Asahi Shimbun leading Japanese newspaper in English
NHK World TV – Live stream
Status reports in German for the German Federal Government by the GfR

Posted by b on April 21, 2011 at 15:56 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Yesterday Stoneleigh had a nice resume:
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

Posted by: auskalo | Apr 21 2011 16:38 utc | 1

ongoing discussion at Oil Drum
I check in every so often. Some very informed people there, some of them with background in nuke plant operations and design, some physicists, chemists, etc.
Most interesting comment today I think is
consequences of extending exclusion zone:

If the evacuation zone be enlarged to 80 km as recommended by the IAEA, it is estimated that they need to evacuate another 1.8 million people or making the total of 2 million residents out from the danger zone. Where are they going to put those 2 million refugees?
Another reason for the reluctance to widen the evacuation zone is due to logistics. The Tohoku expressway is a national expressway in Japan and links Tohoku region in the northernmost region in the Honshu Island with the Kanto region and Greater Tokyo.
So if the government decided to entomb the Fukushima reactors, it will need to cordoned off an area with a radius of 50km from Fukushima. Hence the cost of not able to move people and goods from Tokyo to Northern Honshu will be staggering . Moreover it will also prohibit traveling using train services as the main train track passes through the region in Sendai-Fukushima-Iwate and runs parallel to the coast.

OP is quoting another source but link is included.
a common human dilemma: if they admit the true scale of the disaster by enlarging the exclusion zone, then the true cost will escalate hugely (in dollars). if they deny the true scale then the true cost will escalate uncontrollably anyway — but deniably, in diffuse and delayed loss of life and quality of life). any bets?
btw, siting a dirty bomb (aka nuke plant) right on a main transport corridor on an island chain, in hindsight… not so bright?

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 21 2011 16:44 utc | 2

oops — just realised the quote at TOD came from Stoneleigh… sorry for duplication.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 21 2011 19:39 utc | 3

The Oil Drum puzzles me. I’m still trying to form an opinion of it. There is some great insight to be found there , but mostly from a handful of commentators who are not shills of some sort.
Take this article, for example:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6488
Aside from a couple of conscientious comments, this article treats fracking as though it’s perfectly legitimate and the discussion is about process and ROI.
Interestingly enough, considering fracking, China now has the greatest shale gas reserves in the world and plans on exploiting it. As if China didn’t have enough environmental problems, this will add untold quantities of poison to the toxic soup it already produces. Yeah, we can try to prevent fracking in the U.S., but now that China is doing it, fighting this battle is like Wack-A-Mole. You punch down one, and another pops its head up.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Special-Report-China-set-to-rb-3921586447.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=1&asset=&ccode=

Special Report: China set to unearth shale power
China has spent tens of billions of dollars buying into energy resources from Africa to Latin America to slake the unquenched thirst for fuel from its growing industry and burgeoning cities.
But China may have more energy riches under its own soil than policy makers in the world’s second-largest economy ever dared imagine.
Just over a year ago, Beijing awakened to a technology revolution that has unlocked massive reserves of gas trapped within shale rock formations in the United States.
Once deemed too costly to extract, shale gas has turned around U.S. dependence on foreign gas imports. Just a few years ago, the United States was building scores of expensive facilities to import liquefied natural gas (LNG), looking at booming long-term demand forecasts and wondering which countries would supply the huge volume of imports it needed…..
China’s confidence has been bolstered by a new report of its estimated reserves of shale gas, which shows them to be, by far, the largest in the world.

I hate to say this, but we’re so freakin doomed. The hole just keeps getting dug deeper and deeper.

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Apr 21 2011 21:27 utc | 4

citizen here
I cannot tell you how relieved I am to find the bar again!
I have a teacher who is living on the inside edge of the new 80 expanded danger zone which the government is resisting declaring, and have been scrounging for the latest information to keep up with what invisible dangers he and his family are facing. He, like many others, has sent his children out of town for the duration, and likewise his wife is in Tokyo. But he has stayed to be of use in his own town, which is also struggling to recover from tsunami damage.

Posted by: citizen | Apr 21 2011 22:27 utc | 5

I believe this is just a mistake of tense. Could have as opposed to could be. There was a hoopla over the melting of fuel, mostly by reporters who have not been paying attention. There is no question that there was a melt resulting in fuel taking on dimentions consistent with high concentration of substances spread in water. The argument centered around whether to call it a melt down. But the term melt down does not sound quite the same in Japanese (yuyo or yuuyo 溶融). The press seems to avoid this term (possibly coached) but Edano the cabinet secretary used it very early a few days after the event. Some of the press got stuck into the Tepco spokesman as if suddenly out of slumber.
A bigger worry now is that the government (and under what authority?) has decided to consolidate press conferences so that Tepco the useless Safety entity (Nishiyama) will face the press in a coordinated joint sessions. So what information control that was lacking or was not so competently handled to date is going to be even clumsier and uninformative in the future.

Posted by: YY | Apr 22 2011 0:11 utc | 6

I don’t know what got into me it should be “yoyu”.
How a 70% damage to fuel is interpreted by some as the coating just coming off and creating/releasing hydrogen, otherwise the rods are perfectly intact, is strange. Where the crumbled or melted bits are stuck is the question that Tepco is answering in the most optimistic way of somehow stuck in the stacks as opposed to piled on the bottom.
This is interpretation of temperature readings. But instruments, when they are not foggy are sometimes wrong.
It does appear that it hasn’t gone critical.

Posted by: YY | Apr 22 2011 5:05 utc | 7

Criticality seems to be an ongoing debate. I am not savvy enough in nuclear reactor innards to know whose arguments are strongest.
Gerson Lehrman Group (some think tank?) report:

During full-power operation, numerous “fission products” are in approximate steady-state equilibrium, meaning roughly equal becquerel of I-131 and Cs-134, with a slow buildup of Cs-137. But they all cease to be created when the reactors are scrammed. Japanese regulators NISA and MEXT seem oblivious of the mysterious fact that I-131 Bq “reactor density” is still often reported double the Cs-134/137 Bq. The TEPCO data suggest that fission is ongoing despite the reactor shutdowns. This is bad news.
[…]
Everyone with just a very basic understanding of reactor safety should know that once a reactor is scrammed, U-235 is no longer fissioning, and I-131 has no parent which can be decaying to create it in an ongoing process. SNF pools contain the million-year halflife I-129 which is difficult to measure, but the water circulating in intact SNF pools should have absolutely no detectable I-131 in them.
Units 1-131 all scrammed 3/11/2011, so it has been almost five full 8-day halflives for their I-131 to decay to stable xenon. At t=0, as we say, the Bq of I-131 and Cs-134 and Cs-137 would all be approximately equal, but, after five I-131 halflives, the “reactor density” radioactivity of I-131 should be only 1/2**5=~3% of what it was originally. Go look at all the data of relative radioactivity that TEPCO is reporting with dates of April 19, 2011 and you’ll see that instead of I-131 being below the levels of the two cesiums, I-131 is often twice as high as the two cesiums always reported.

The tone of the report is oddly informal and snarky. I don’t know how seriously to take it.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 22 2011 5:10 utc | 8

I don’t know which is worse the occasional criticality or the apparent doubling (at least) every eight days of the stuff that is leaching/leaking out of the core. When the increase in leakage matches the loss to half life, that is serious demage.
Criticality apparently can be achieved simply. All it takes is three guys, a stainless steel bucket, and tank stirred with a wooden handled ladle. This was the last big accident before Fukushima. One of three I think is dead. Maybe no boron in the solution that went flash.

Posted by: YY | Apr 22 2011 5:32 utc | 9

Welcome back citizen… pull up a stool, whatcha having, I’ll get this round.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 22 2011 6:26 utc | 10

Interesting at least in the novelty of it, how to Check for Radiation…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 22 2011 6:43 utc | 11

Is it not possible for them to send Robots to solve this problem easily if more technicians and professionals work in this situation if they work very hard then this may be solved within a few weeks after ending of this problem Japanese should not build Nuclear Power Plants for power generation because earthquakes and tsunami’s regularly hits Japan’s territory so they have to search for other alternatives to generate power.

Posted by: Prasad | Apr 22 2011 11:19 utc | 12

Hello citizen have a drink on me.

Posted by: Noirette | Apr 22 2011 12:02 utc | 13

The Japanese have long been involved in cleaning up Chernobyl.
To what extent (money, staff, etc.) as compared to other countries I can’t judge.
It may be minor, small experiments in the right terrain, I have no clue.
They have a project going there since decades which involves growing rape to leach out the radioactive elements from the soil.
The rape is then turned into bio-fuel and bio-gas. (Green energy, anyone?)
Having only skimmed some MSM articles about it I can’t judge the Science.
Right now, Japanese ministers and scientists are traveling to Chernobyl, Russia, Ukraine, to learn about long-term decontamination.
One brief news article – the top on google, it mentions soil decontamination and rape which surprised me a bit, as it confirmed my memory of the Japanese initiatives.
http://tinyurl.com/3v3sne4

Posted by: Noirette | Apr 22 2011 12:27 utc | 14

the link in comment 14 mentions an international conference in Kiev on the Tchernobyl subject. El Pais carries an article: Los alrededores de Chernóbil nunca serán aptos para el ser humano (the environment of Tchernobyl will never be fit for human beings) that points out that a cool 2000 square km will remain forever dangerous due to radiation.

Posted by: philippe | Apr 22 2011 12:56 utc | 15

Japan one month later

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Apr 22 2011 17:30 utc | 16

thank you c.p. for making it real with these photos.

Posted by: d.l.finn | Apr 23 2011 3:55 utc | 17

a small cup of warm saki for all

Posted by: d.l.finn | Apr 23 2011 3:56 utc | 18

Fukushima No. 1 has gone critical after shutdown definitely more than once and perhaps as many as 30 times. The irrefutable evidence is:
(A)Accounts of neutron bursts measured at a distance from the plant–30 of these have been reported.
(B)The appearance of blue flash–which has since been disputed. This evidence is secondary and can be discarded with no effect on our conclusions.
(C)Elevated and repeatedly spiking temperatures in No. 1 as compared to No. 2 and No. 3.
(D)The appearance of radioactive chlorine. The significance of this is that chlorine is not a daughter particle of the fission of uranium left over from before the shut-down but is created when the chlorine from the salt in sea water (which was pumped into the reactor for emergency cooling after the shut-down) is bombarded with neutrons. The neutrons can only come from renewed nuclear fission reaction after the seawater was pumped in.
This has several implications:
If boron has been pumped in to suppress fission–I have encountered only one report of this, and if they are trying to stifle renewed fission they are certainly keeping it a secret–it came too late or did not suppress fission events in No. 1.
Containment has been breached–all the way. How badly is not clear, but the reactor vessel in No. 1 is no longer completely contained nor isolated from the outside environment.
The state of the core in No. 1–while unknown–is certainly anything but intact. At best the zircalloy cladding has been destroyed by heat and chemical reaction with steam. This has permitted the uranium fuel pellets to scatter as they will inside the reactor vessel, and most likely the suppression pools. Whether the fuel pellets themselves are intact or have in turn decomposed into slag is just iffy. We will have to hunt for clues: They certainly will not ever tell us. The nuclear fuel that has been scattered around the plant site may have come from the fuel pools rather than the reactor vessels–and some certainly did!–so this is going to be very difficult to tease out.
All official communiques are disinformation. They try not to lie–so information blackouts are hints of things that cannot be couched in any positive way.
Which is to say, if they tell you the zircalloy cladding was damaged but the rods are still in tact–well that is not possible. The fuel pellets have no structure of their own. When the cladding (which is what actually holds the rod together) goes the pellets just fall out in a heap. It is not an all or nothing thing, but still, that is what happens.

Posted by: Gaianne | Apr 24 2011 0:30 utc | 19

A poster on TOD reflected that: we have, still, no plan or strategy for disposing of “spent” (or “live” for that matter) fuel rods, just increasingly vulnerable and overcrowded storage pools; and since we have diminishing, not increasing, resources (i.e. increasing costs) for dealing with that situation; ergo, it seems unlikely that we will deal with it effectively prior to a general unravelling of energy-intensive, highly complex social structures (i.e. Peak Oil aftermath). After such an unravelling we will no longer have the resources or tools for that job.
If this is the case then we can write off about a 20 to 30 mile radius around every nuke plant (the original poster did not specify radius but that is my guesstimate) as uninhabitable. Many of these plants are situated in just the places where human habitation is desirable and historically favoured, i.e. rivers, river forks, and coastlines; and due to the political power of urban dwellers relative to country people, many of them are situated on prime farmland (as in Fukushima for example). Hence the land lost to these no-go zones is land essential to human survival: favourably located for transport, food, and water (in order of increasing importance).
So in a sense (here is my riff on the OP’s thoughts) we are dispossessing humans of habitation in favour of technomass, in an incredibly permanent no-kidding kind of a way. Useless technomass at that — the lethal ruins and relicts of nuke plants that oh-so-briefly generated electricity — will occupy land that we could have used to keep human society going.
We are doing this with the excuse or rationalisation that somehow we will pull a new techno-rabbit out of our hat and solve all these problems just in time. Ukraine is still waiting.
What I’m saying is, we don’t have to have a world-shaking mega-storm event or a 9.0 earthquake or a terrorist in a small plane to create a disaster. The disaster is already there. All we have to do is not deal with it. All we have to do is not keep the life support systems running. We have a warped version of the old “dead man’s switch” (in which, if the operator of a dangerous piece of equipment dropped dead and failed to hold the switch closed, the equipment would stop). If we all dropped dead or became unable to maintain the life-support pumps for the spent fuel pools, if our hands come off the switch, instead of shutting down they become lethal… and usurp thousands of square miles of inhabitable territory for multi-civilisational periods to come.
What part of “stupid” are we unable to spell here?

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 24 2011 18:16 utc | 20

Tepco just corrected its interpretation of core damage.
#1 70% now 55%
#2 30% now 35%
#3 25% now 30%
Problem is that it appears to be matter of “discovery” of data transfer and calculation mistakes. Sad part is that it does not appear to be an exercise in making the situation appear better. They are still pretty much flying blind.

Posted by: YY | Apr 27 2011 3:33 utc | 21

Leakspinner has now started a blog about the Fukushima disaster.
http://leakspinner.wordpress.com/
Although he is not a MSM professional “expert”, his YouTube videos have been very good over the last two months and now his blog has links to pertinent news and experts such as Arnie Gundersen and Prof. Christopher Busby as well as leakspinner’s own previous videos. My only criticism is sometimes leakspinner talks slowly and repeats himself during his videos to make a point. In some ways though, this is a good thing, as he makes things very clear and easy to understand.
I post this not to detract from b’s invaluable updates, but as an additional source for information. However, the widespread long-term problems from this nuclear disaster may be more serious than b and others anticipate. But without a doubt, the problem in Japan is being downplayed at the moment by all the major news media. I have mentioned to my wife that we may need to be charitable and host in some way a family from Japan to relocate if there is a wider evacuation zone that Japan is not capable of caring for. I am no longer ambivalent about nuclear power – there is simply too much damage – no amount of risk is acceptable in such a situation. Again, this damage to risk factor is related and a somewhat similar situation with deep water drilling.
Here is another good link on low-level radiation health risks:
http://www.llrc.org/index.html

Posted by: Rick | Apr 27 2011 5:10 utc | 22

The True Battle of Chernobyl Uncensored (Full)

It’s a documentary which analyzes the Thursday 26th April 1986 that became a momentous date in modern history, when one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in northern Ukraine, exploded. It was the most significant reactor failure in the history of nuclear power, a Maximum Credible Accident (MCA). The plant, just 20 km away from the town center, was made up of four reactor units each generating an output of 1,000 megawatts. The reactor in question exploded due to operational errors and inadequate safety measures and the meltdown was directly linked to routine testing on the reactor unit’s turbine generators.
The test required reactor activity and the thermal reactor output to be run down to a lower level. During the procedure, however, the reactor plummeted to an unexpectedly low and unstable level of activity. At this point, it should have been shut down; as the operators chose to continue with the test, the events subsequently proved to be catastrophic.
More than 200 people died or were seriously injured by radiation exposure immediately after the explosion. 161,000 people had to be evacuated from a 30 kilometer radius of the reactor and 25,000 square km of land were contaminated. As time went on millions of people suffered radiation related health problems such as leukemia and thyroid cancer and around 4,000 people have died as a result of the long-term effects of the accident.
Nobody was prepared for such a crisis. For the next seven months, 500,000 men will wage hand-to-hand combat with an invisible enemy — a ruthless battle that has gone unsung, which claimed thousands of unnamed and now almost forgotten heroes. Yet, it is thanks to these men that the worst was avoided; a second explosion, ten times more powerful than Hiroshima which would have wiped out more than half of Europe. This was kept secret for twenty years by the Soviets and the West alike.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 28 2011 6:06 utc | 23

SNAFU
That’s an awful lot of contaminated water running into the earth and sea, and no end in sight. But not in the news anymore, now that we have the 2012 campaign season revving up.

Posted by: catlady | Apr 28 2011 6:19 utc | 24

Cesium levels not declining as anticipated
IANANE (I am not a nuclear engineer)… does this mean that some kind of recriticality is smouldering still? Or is it just that steam/dust is still emerging from the shattered structures despite the resin spray, water, etc.?
Either way, hot cesium = bad, and more hot cesium released into the prevailing winds = more bad. That much anyone can grasp.
Meanwhile the Japanese government tells its schoolteachers

– However, there will be no impact with such weak radiation levels such as [cumulative] 250mSv (=250,000microSv) over several years. Therefore, it is unimaginable that physical damage from “definitive impact” could occur at the level of radiation seen outside of the evacuation zone.
Page 11
– It is unthinkable under current conditions that residents, even those staying near the nuclear power plants, would be exposed to a cumulative total of 100mSv (=100,000μSv) of radiation. The amount of radiation, however, should be monitored. At below the cumulative level of 100mSv (=100,000μSv), the probability of cancer due to other causes could become higher, and no clear correlation has been seen between radiation and increase in the probability of cancer. MEXT official “how to correctly understand radiation” handout for teachers

I love that phrase “no clear correlation.” Remember how many times it fell from the mouths of Big Tobacco’s lawyers over the years?

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 28 2011 17:07 utc | 25

@DeA – does this mean that some kind of recriticality is smouldering still
Unlike in the reactors – possible but with little chance in the spent fuel pools.
But the are still pumping water into reactors which means that steam and air must be released from them. The steam is contaminated. The release will only stop after a closed loop cooling system can be established in all reactors and spent fuel pools. That point is months away.
That is the reason why I urged a different path. Month and month, probably until next year, of release of radiating gases and particles into the environment will make this a PR desaster.

Posted by: b | Apr 28 2011 18:01 utc | 26

5/4/2011 — Radiation forecast overview — Cesium-137 Buildup , Xenon in the air on West Coast

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 4 2011 12:03 utc | 27

Thanks Uncle,
Just to let you know I appreciate your updates, especially now that OBL has pushed this far more immediately pertinent information (at least for me) out of sight. Humm?

Posted by: juannie | May 4 2011 14:12 utc | 28

Back to Main