Fukushima Update – June 18

June 18, 2011

In Fukushima Daiichi the wreaked reactors and fuel pools still need cooling and will continue to need it for many month. Cooling is currently done with water which leaks after running through the 'hot' areas. The immense amount (110,000 metric tons) of contaminated water is a huge problem. Each hour additional 25 tons of water are added. Some water decontamination equipment was set up over the last weeks but it has yet to work properly:

Operators of Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant have suspended an operation to clean contaminated water hours after it began due to a rapid rise in radiation.
…
The teams at the plant suspect the radiation rise may be linked to sludge flowing into the machinery intended to absorb caesium or the pipes surrounding it.

All three reactors are still too hot to get significant work done inside of them. The plans to somehow stop the leaks and to implement closed cooling cycles will likely be delayed and and then take longer than anticipated.

There is some weird behavior visible in the radiation level measurement in reactor 1. Every three to four days it jumps between some 50 Sievert and 250 Sievert. As the temperature measurements show no change I have no explanation for this weird behavior.

Reactor 3 has also shown some life over the last weeks with the temperature increasing from 100 Centigrade to nearly 200 Centigrade without obvious changes in the cooling situation. The temperature is now slowly coming down again. I have found no explanation for this phenomenon.

Work to implement a closed loop cooling at the no 4 spent fuel pool is delayed as a site survey found the pipes needed to get it installed got ripped off the walls when the no 4 building exploded.

The three reactor and the four spent fuel pools continue to release radioactive substances into the environment. Japan will need a long time to overcome this catastrophe.

People in the U.S. seem concerned about the Missouri flood which threatens the Missouri, at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Station near Blair, Nebraska. The reactor is cooled down but the spent fuel is quite full and a long, three to four days, station blackout event with no electricity available at the site could lead to problems. But unless there is a breach of one of the upper river dams I see no danger of that occurring.

Additional resources:
AllThingsNuclear Union of Concerned Scientists
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Atomic power review blog
Digital Globe Sat Pictures
IAEA Newscenter
NISA Japanese Nuclear Regulator
Japan Atomic Industry Forum (regular updates)
Japanese government press releases in English
Kyodo News Agency
Asahi Shimbun leading Japanese newspaper in English
NHK World TV via Ustream
Status reports for the German Federal Government by the Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit in German language

Posted by b on June 18, 2011 at 14:22 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Data from Japan support reports from TMI — and what should be commonsense really — that a fixed-radius exclusion zone is a wishful fiction based on the idea of the damaged plant as a radio emitter (like a transmitter), radiating energy in “concentric rings” from a central point. As Mencken, I think it was, said, “Neat, simple, and wrong.”
The greater danger comes from the particles and microparticles of hot elements which travel with air currents (and water of course, but right now I’m thinking about wind and other air movement) like smoke. If you’ve ever watched smoke from any large-scale fire you can see it moving apparently at random, buffeted by updraughts, downdraughts, wind sheer off structures and surface topography, etc. It can skip over one area and then get sucked down directly onto another area further away. It can become diffuse and percolate evenly through an entire region, or get concentrated; it can precipitate out with fog or dew or rain at a specific time point in its journey.
The truly lethal legacy of these nuke plant disasters, I’m increasingly convinced, is “dust in the wind.”
Hence I’m not surprised that data are coming back from Japan documenting semi-random “hot spots” at far greater distances from Fukushima than the official exclusion zone. The movements of dust in air currents are effectively unlimited and unpredictable. If some of it gets into the upper atmosphere it can travel for thousands of miles (like baby spiders, tardigrades, pollen, smoke) and make landfall just about anywhere.
There could be bits of Japan that will be (for all practical purposes) untouched by Fukushima dust, while a chunk of China or Europe (or NW N America) might get enough of a dusting to affect biotic health.
I don’t think anyone, not even NOAA or the US military, has the capacity to model with any accuracy the chaotic movement of dust clouds in the real-world atmosphere. The “concentric dosage dartboard” model is — imho — just plain bunkum. Not that it’s not damn dangerous right close to the plant, that’s indisputable; but it’s far from safe even after the “exclusion zone” perimeter. I’m not sure it can be said to be “safe” anywhere in the world; Fukushima has just added to the body burden all the organisms on earth bear from all the industrial toxins ever released. One more bite out of life.
Is anyone following the claim of a spike in infant mortality in the US?
And what the Fukushima is going on at Fort Calhoun? Admittedly the Pakistani media are possibly just a tad interested in stories that critique or even smear the US, but the industry has such a tradition of bribery and coverups that it’s wholly believable they would try to put a lid even on a disaster of serious magnitude.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 18 2011 18:00 utc | 1

@DeA The movements of dust in air currents are effectively unlimited and unpredictable.
No, they are not. Relevant is the mass of dust and that moves under limiting physical laws and thereby is predictable. Where single atoms end up, and we can now measure down to single radioactive atoms, is stochastic and therefore indeed one of the 10^whatever atoms released from Fukushima may end up in Europe and get measured. But where the relevant mass ends up is predictable. The danger of radioactive particles (and many other things) is not deterministic, not a yes-no question or answer, but can only be evaluated in probabilities. (Many people do not like this as it requires some thinking.)
The Japanese did predict the way the radioactive cloud would move but the relevant bureaucracy did not tell the upper government because “it was not asked” (that really was there excuse, verbally). That was the reason for the circular evacuation zone which since has been extended to the relevant areas that were contaminated as predicted.
while a chunk of China or Europe (or NW N America) might get enough of a dusting to affect biotic health.
I strongly doubt that. There is a lot of air and water between these. There is also the general wind from west to east in the northern atmosphere that will make sure the U.S. will sniff anything from Japan before it reaches Europe or can be sniffed northward in China.
I don’t think anyone, not even NOAA or the US military, has the capacity to model with any accuracy the chaotic movement of dust clouds in the real-world atmosphere.
We can not predict each atom but the movement of “clouds”, i.e. a big mass of atoms from one place to another is utterly predictable with very high probabilities.
Fukushima is going on at Fort Calhoun
Nonsense even when an upriver dam breaks – no signs so far- and even then unlikely and even when that happens it likely would be much less in scale. Fukushima is about the biggest fuckup one can think about.
While it is of course necessary to be skeptical and to doubt the official announcements we should at least stick to physics and rational thought.

Posted by: b | Jun 18 2011 19:22 utc | 2

OT, but I tried to post a comment below, longish with several (lots) of links — and msg came back that the site could not accept the post.
Is there a limit to the number of links one can use in a post?
Thnx.

Posted by: jawbone | Jun 18 2011 21:33 utc | 3

@jawbone
Is there a limit to the number of links one can use in a post?
Yes, the limit is three links, though often you can get by it with four. Bernhard has had a hell of a time with spam and trolls, hence the limit….

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 18 2011 22:44 utc | 4

Related to this thread and of special interest to residents of New England and the NE U.S.:
This is no big surprise to individuals who frequent this watering hole but the obfuscation and behind the door dealings of US federal bureaucrats in behalf of vested corporate interests is no where more apparent than in the testimony on the floor of the US Senate by Senator Sanders of Vermont in his questioning of the officials of the NRC commission.
The NRC voted 3 to 2 to ask the Justice Dept. to get involved in the court litigation between Entergy (the owner of Vermont Yankee [VY] Nuclear Power station) and the State Of VT who’s legislature voted last year to shut down VY at the end of it’s design life span of forty years in 2012. Entergy wants to extend the licencing of the aged and decrepit plant for another twenty years and is suing the state to keep the plant open against the wishes of the people of VT and the vote of it’s legislature. (Incidentally, the VY reactor is the same GE Mark I design as the Fuckushma reactors only an older model and has experienced numerous major problems in recent years.)
Senator Sanders asked several members of the commission, and it’s chairman Gregory Jaczko, in essence a very simple question, “do you believe that the NRC should be involved by asking the Justice Dept. to get involved in the lawsuit between Entergy and the State of VT”? The weaseling and evading responses were embarrassing for me to even watch and listen to. In my mind it exemplifies the total corruption and abuses of power so prevalent in today’s US government and politics and shatters my faith in our species ability to be ethical, moral and righteous. But then again I guess I tend to be a naive optimist.
The whole 8:31 minute testimony of Senator Sanders is interesting and pertinent but the weaseling responses beginning at 5:37 is a classic study in pathos.

Posted by: juannie | Jun 18 2011 23:22 utc | 5

Cleanup of radioactive water halted at Japan nuke plant
Radiation level rises faster than expected in Fukushima absorption machine

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 18 2011 23:54 utc | 6

Somewhat related to Juannie’s post (#5 above): HIDDEN AGENDA: Moves to oust Kan may be linked to politicians in TEPCO’s pocket.
The internal dynamics of the whole brouhaha between government, opposition parties (and inside the ruling DPJ) are of course way more complicated than that. MiChael Cucke has posted some enlightening analysis on his Shisaku site – browse through the post for May and June.

Posted by: philippe | Jun 19 2011 2:11 utc | 7

And now we’re ready to start up all nuclear plants again, according to this article in Japan Times. Except Hamaoka, I think (hope!).
(and typo in my previous comment: Michael Cucek is the name. Sorry MTC 🙁 )

Posted by: philippe | Jun 19 2011 2:15 utc | 8

Well I find your debunking oddly comforting, b 🙂 This is one instance in which I’d rather be wrong.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 19 2011 5:12 utc | 9

What I wrote above about “randomness” that isn’t really random can be applied to this piece:Japan finds random nuclear hot spots

As officials bolster efforts to map the nuclear fallout with daily and sometimes hourly readings, they have found that radioactive particles concentrate in random hot spots — curling with the wind, collecting along mountainsides and raising fresh problems for residents who thought they were a safe distance from danger.
Japan’s evacuation map now resembles not a circle but a paw print, with a growing number of finger-like projections. On Thursday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano recommended the evacuation of several emerging hot spots beyond the government-ordered 12.5-mile evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant. These hot spots — some as far as 35 miles from the facility — could receive more than 20,000 microsieverts of radiation in a year, surpassing the internationally recognized limit for adult exposure, Edano said.

It is not really random. The “paw print” is exactly the predicted and simulated path the wind took after the big releases from the plant and the spots where it rained during that time.

Posted by: b | Jun 19 2011 6:48 utc | 10

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html
“Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think
Scientific experts believe Japan’s nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public.”

Posted by: somebody | Jun 19 2011 10:02 utc | 11

Strikes me that the nuke industry is a very dangerous player right now… not only is it closely tied to the secret apparatus of state and the military, not only are trillions of dollars at stake, not only is it an introverted guild with a strong “insider” culture… but now it has a new banner of “necessity and humanitarianism” to justify dirty tricks, as it positions itself to be the saviour on the white horse who will rescue us from Peak Oil and Climate Vandalism.
An ostensible holy mission has to be one of the most dangerous things any mafia or power group can have. Everything they’re doing, you see, is only for our own good; they’re saving the world; you have to sacrifice a few eggs; the end justifies the means; and so on. Times of crisis breed saviour/rescuer ideologies which justify tremendous crimes… I mean even more tremendous crimes than usual…

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 19 2011 14:31 utc | 12

I suppose since we no longer read reports about US milk supply and such being tainted by Fukushima… it’s no longer happening.

Posted by: Eureka Springs | Jun 19 2011 16:30 utc | 13

Dangerous Minds:

According to a well-known Japanese documentary maker, TEPCO paid for the creation of a blacklist of actors and musicians who are against the nuclear industry.
When one actor, Taro Yamamoto, joined an anti-nuclear protest, he lost his part in a popular soap opera. Yamamoto’s ‘crime’ was to say that schoolchildren in Fukushima should not be subjected to the same annual radiation dose (20 microsieverts per year) as nuclear power workers in Europe.

Perhaps we should start an Oprah Winfrey Fund — why not give it a catchy popular charismatic name — which would offer some compensation and legal support to media professionals — artists, actors, singers, dancers, entertainers of all stripes — who are threatened and harassed (or fired) for making comments critical of the new aristocracy (the corporadoes). Lese-majeste is not a crime I would like to see restored to our law books.
There was some film maker — Kieslowsli maybe — I can’t find the interview with a quick google — who said something like “You people in the West think we have problems with government censorship. You can get around government censorship, one way or another. It is much harder to get around the censorship of money.”

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 19 2011 17:59 utc | 14

E.Springs @13
I suppose since we no longer read reports about US milk supply and such being tainted by Fukushima… it’s no longer happening.
I recently heard (no cite, it was on Pacifica Radio) that consumer behavior studies show that consumers pretty much return to old patterns of behavior within four months of a given incident, if they’re convinced that “everything is all right”. Those who would manipulate us know this.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 19 2011 19:06 utc | 15

I find this report to be odd, very odd. perhaps it is just silliness, perhaps there is some truth to it.
http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/18-Jun-2011/US-orders-news-blackout-over-crippled-Nebraska-Nuclear-Plant-report

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 19 2011 20:01 utc | 16

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 19 2011 20:52 utc | 17

Re @16, the no-fly order, the fire, evacuation and 90+ minute loss of coolant flow to the spent fuel pool are aspects that are easily independently verifiable. Whether it was a “level 4 emergency” and if there’s a news blackout is not.
A local television station claimed they weren’t allowed to film on land and they resorted to filming the flood level around the facility by boat.
What concerns me is that the levees that are keeping the water level where it is were designed to keep the water back for a few weeks of sustained use, however the forecast is for this water level to rise a few more feet and stay that way for possibly months. This of course precludes any other unforeseen large rainfalls in the interim. If the levees begin to fail, will this cause some sort of cascade flooding of the dams and overwhelming of the sandbags and other defenses set up by the nuclear plant?
I’m not anywhere close to knowledgable enough to answer these questions. I do know that the spent fuel pools are in a building at ground level… built on a flood plane… in an aera experiencing what some are already calling a 500-year flood… in a facility that the NRC cited in 2010 for not having adequate flood protection (which was supposedly addressed earlier this year).
I’d appreciate if someone more knowledgable would chime in and tell me not to worry. But I don’t think that’s gonna’ happen. I’d like to turn to some sort of news source that will tell me just what the fuck is going on, but I don’t think that’s gonna’ happen either.

Posted by: Pyrrho | Jun 20 2011 2:43 utc | 18

While there may be a whole lot of intelligent and knowledgeable people working their asses off to deal with the problem, I’m puzzled, as someone who is paying reasonable amount of attention, that they would choose to try to cleanup the water that they would recirculate back into the reactor. It’s one thing to filter out the larger debris to keep the plumbing from getting clogged up, it is another to extract radioactive particles which then require further storage, and which presumably would continue to desolve into the coolant as the source is never going to stop yielding this stuff.
If the two short term objectives are to cool and to contain, the only stuff they should want to extract would be the heat and not the hot particles. It would be much easier to run a heat exchange system that used radioactive water but was reasonably shielded than to take out the radioactivity only to have it contaminated again as it circulates.

Posted by: YY | Jun 20 2011 5:12 utc | 19

Let’s face it, this is “Old News” that’s not coming back. Nobody cares anymore, and most didn’t really care when it was marginally covered, at best. It’s on to the next catastrophe. They’re happening now with such rapidity, we can’t afford to linger on one for any length of time. There are other fish to fry….until we realize we are the fish, and we’re frying. There’s a woman on trial for murdering her child and you want to malinger on something you can’t see or smell? Get real! Get with the ticket. Hot Evil is so much more glamorous than Cold Evil. Cold Evil’s boring….it’s for Wimps. Step right up and get yer Hot Evil right here, folks. You won’t be disappointed. It’s sure to thrill. Don’t pay any attention to that carpet that’s just been pulled from beneath your feet.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/casey-anthonys-father-breaks-daughter-murder-trial/story?id=13840879
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_zo0FiNheI

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Jun 20 2011 19:56 utc | 20

Actually, Morocco Bama, you can’t buy a thrill…
Seems to me, the Casey-Anthony case sounds like a microcosm of the larger macrocosm, but I guess that’s for Ivory Tower Sociologists, to decide. You know, those who hide their work behind peer reviewed pay-walls. Validating the ‘military think’ of the Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic view and it’s symptoms of compartmentalization, as well as the straight-jacket of Aristotelian black / white thinking.
The whole thing reeks of an “episodic” plot all the way down to the imfamous, ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy bullshit coming from motherfuckers, who should know better. /rant
Note: no reflection on you, MB. Just needed to vent…
That’s what happen’s when I listen to KRS-One followed by Jesu.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 20 2011 20:57 utc | 21

Core through the floor?

In a TV Asahi program on June 16, [Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute] made the following comment:
“As far as I can tell from the announcements made by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the nuclear fuel that has melted down inside reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant has gone through the bottom of the containers, which are like pressure cookers, and is lying on the concrete foundations, sinking into the ground below. We have to install a barrier deep in the soil and build a subterranean dam as soon as possible to prevent groundwater contaminated with radioactive materials from leaking into the ocean.”
His comment captured public interest and when I asked a high-ranking government official about it, the official said that construction of an underground dam was indeed being prepared. But when I probed further, I found that the project was in limbo due to opposition from TEPCO.
Sumio Mabuchi, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan who is dealing with nuclear power plant issues, holds the same concerns as those expressed by Koide and has sought an announcement on construction of an underground dam, but TEPCO has resisted such a move. […]

footnote
Meanwhile
TEPCO involved in project to oust PM Kan?

Naoto Kan may leave a lot to be desired as a prime minister, but one thing’s certain–he’s never taken a dime from Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Kan’s complete independence from TEPCO money–and pressure–may be the real reason so many lawmakers are trying to push him out the door. His calls to shift Japan away from nuclear energy and to break TEPCO into separate companies that handle power generation and power transmission threaten some very powerful special interests.
There are many lawmakers in both the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and the opposition Liberal Democratic Party who have taken TEPCO money for years and feel obligated to protect the company’s interests.

Wow. It’s like the wars and conspiracies of the Tokugawa period, but less decorative and with far higher stakes… Can a power utility really topple a PM and replace him with a more compliant apparatchik? I mean, more or less openly?

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 21 2011 5:51 utc | 22

DeAnander @comment 22
It is of course a wee little bit more complicated than that, which I noted when I originally posted that link about the relations between TEPCO and (top-) politicians in comment 7 above. There are various battles going on, various factions with different visions for a future of Japan. The Fukushima incident is just a convenient excuse.

It’s like the wars and conspiracies of the Tokugawa period

Hmm, viewing it like that has an orientalistic smell. Those behind the scenes and not-so-behind-the-scenes fights are typical of most ‘post-modern democracies’.
also

Core through the floor?

Old news. That has been mentioned before on this site. Here, and in a previous Fukushima thread.

Posted by: philippe | Jun 21 2011 9:17 utc | 23

More “Cold Evil” that will barely be noticed here on the home front (US of A):
Safety standards often lowered (by the NRC) to accommodate aging Nuclear Plants …

Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.
Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews. The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety — and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the United States.

Yesterday I linked to another item where these abominable weasels in the NRC were exposed by Senator Sanders of VT for the despicable corporate shill vermin they are.
According to Terence McKenna as novelty (complexity) concrescences and approaches the eschaton, everything speeds up asymptotically and becomes so weird that no one can keep up or understand what is happening. We’re obviously experiencing this phenomena. I have my doubts that we’ll even make it to Dec. 2012.

Posted by: juannie | Jun 21 2011 12:25 utc | 24

Sorry Philippe (et al) — life excessively busy and stressful at present and I’m obviously not reading as carefully as I should before posting. I wasn’t intending an Orientalist slur btw — apologies to any person of Asian descent who felt it so — just reaching for a culture/history-appropriate analogy — if we had been talking about the German nuke industry I might have referred back to the Hapsburgs, or to the Borgias if it were an Italian power company and govt… Power politics is power politics, was what I was trying to say, never seems to change regardless of fancy dress, song remains the same. But right now, the accumulating elite is running out of planetary resources to loot so the “game of thrones” is getting (as Juannie mentions above) crazier and crazier.
Shutting up now.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 21 2011 16:11 utc | 25

I haven’t heard this mentioned yet, but has anyone considered a meltdown at Fort Calhoun and the implications for one of the largest aquifers in the U.S.? The Ogallala is predominantly under Nebraska. Here’s a map of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
Here’s where Fort Calhoun is located.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fort+calhoun,+nebraska&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x8793bfcafb913357:0x3b002bac2f958c6d,Fort+Calhoun,+NE&gl=us&ei=Go8ETr3UHeHW0QHQtcG9Cw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CCAQ8gEwAA
Imagine of that aquifer gets poisoned with radiocativity from Fort Calhoun? You want to talk about crisis…..Holy Shit, Batman!!

Posted by: Morocco Bama | Jun 24 2011 13:26 utc | 26

Flood berm collapsed at Nebraska nuclear plant
Published 12:55 p.m., Sunday, June 26, 2011
FORT CALHOUN, Neb. (AP) — A berm holding back floodwater at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station has collapsed.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it’s monitoring the Missouri River flooding at the plant, which has been shut down since early April for refueling.
The 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Sunday, allowing the swollen river to surround two buildings at the plant. The NRC says those buildings are designed to handle flooding up to 1014 feet above sea level. The river is at 1006.3 feet and isn’t forecast to exceed 1008 feet.
The NRC says its inspectors were at the plant when the berm failed and have confirmed that the flooding has had no impact on the reactor shutdown cooling or the spent fuel pool cooling.
NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko will visit the plant Monday.
Updated pictures from Ft. Calhoun
The New York Times, June, 24

Posted by: juannie | Jun 27 2011 0:30 utc | 27

juannie, my six yr old son is living in Neb, with his, “Jesus will save them”, mother and I am powerless to do anything to help him… I am in much emotional pain over this. Thank-you for the info, and links, please continue to share if you run across more.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 28 2011 9:54 utc | 28

b,
this item is important to enough of us that you might consider a separate thread for Ft. Calhoun?
Uncle,
that is such a hard one. I kind of wouldn’t give a shit what happens to humanity because of it’s collective stupidity
and see extinction as a blessing for the planet, IF it wasn’t for the kids. They’re innocent but not me and most of we adults.
I’ve lived a more luxurious and consumptive a life than perhaps 99.9% of all humans who have ever lived and when I was
younger and much more foolish certainly participated and benefitted from our exploitive ways. I now feel I owe something
to your son and my daughter and most all of the less than thirty year olds who have been born into this mess.
I hope I’m wrong in this case but the history of government and industry’s denials have conditioned me to hear NRC Chairman Jaczko’s
reassurance of “everything is just OK and under control” after his visit to Ft. Calhoun as totally hollow and a coverup. I know that the PTB
do indeed tell the truth when it is coincident with their agenda. Lets hope this is the case this time.
Some links here that unfortunately belie that hope:
Re: The Flood of July 1993 and the Cooper Nuclear Station located between Nemaha and Brownville, Nebraska,
adjacent to the Missouri River.

licensee declared a Notice Of Unusual Event when the water level in the
Missouri River reached 274.0 meters [899 feet]. The river level continued to
rise and subsequently peaked at 274.6 meters [900.8 feet]. The elevated river
level caused the closure of several area roads including a portion of
Interstate 29 and Route 136 in the State of Missouri which isolated one of the
planned emergency evacuation routes.
Subsequent to the reactor shutdown, the licensee noted increased inleakage.
The vital area rooms outside of the radiologically controlled areas were
relatively dry with only a minor amount of water leaking in through the
concrete walls below ground elevation. However, some of the below-grade rooms
inside radiologically controlled areas in the turbine building and the reactor
building, had extensive inleakage. In some cases, the inleakage significantly
challenged the capacity of the floor drains. Examples of this problem were:
(1) a lower hallway in the turbine building where standing water was found and
water was leaking in around safety-related cable trays and (2) the
turbine-driven feedwater pump rooms where water was dripping on control boxes,
and the floor drain system had backed up so that standing water from within
areas known to be radiologically contaminated had migrated out into designated
clean areas. The NRC inspectors observed that plant personnel had not taken
actions to identify the areas where inleakage was occurring and had not
established measures to divert the water away from important components. The
turbine building inleakage was eventually stopped when the licensee pumped out
the underground cable tunnels that encircled the plant. The heavy rains had
flooded the cable tunnels and water was covering the manways and storm drains
at grade level.
Similar problems were observed in the reactor building quadrant rooms and
torus room. Water leaking into the reactor core isolation cooling (RCIC) pump
room was impinging on RCIC electrical components. Subsequently, an
annunciator lit up indicating a ground in the RCIC 250-V dc circuitry. This
ground was apparently caused by water that had entered into some of the RCIC
circuitry. The water leaking into the torus room was impinging on junction
boxes and other electrical components. The inleakage in these areas was not
appreciably reduced when the licensee pumped out the cable tunnels and storm
drains. However, the inleakage did decrease as the river level dropped.

Posted by: juannie | Jun 29 2011 14:11 utc | 29

my take from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/tepco-chubu-rally-around-nuclear-future.html

Shareholders of Tepco, as Japan’s biggest utility is known, voted to continue with nuclear power yesterday at the company’s first annual meeting since the crisis at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant wiped about $36 billion off its market value. Kansai Electric Power Co. today reinforced the status quo, with shareholders rejecting a motion to halt reactors.
The utilities are “trying as desperately as possible to circle the wagons, marginalize public opinion and proceed with business as usual,”
“Each asset needs to be sold at the best time and in the best way,” said Nishizawa, 60, adding that the utility will rely on government funding for compensation payments to victims.
The Nikkei newspaper reported this week that 69 percent of respondents to a telephone poll oppose the restart of nuclear reactors currently shut for maintenance.

public be damned, nukes rule!

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 29 2011 20:52 utc | 30

Privatise the profits, socialise the costs…

Posted by: DeAnander | Jun 30 2011 5:47 utc | 31

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