Meltdown Likely Under Way At Japan Nuclear Reactor

[jfchandler]

NISA, in live news conference, says they hope to begin using fresh water, instead of seawater, for the reactor cooling activities in Reactors No. 1-3. The agency, as yet, doesn't specify how or where they plan to obtain that volume of fresh water, which is less corrosive than seawater because of the latter's salt content.

[jfchandler]

NISA says radiation in standing water near Reactor No. 3 that injured three workers when they stood in it yesterday was 10,000 times normal levels in nuclear reactor operating water. Japan's nuclear regulatory agency admits there were "problems" with radiation management procedures in TEPCO's efforts to stabilize the stricken reactors.

NISA says the radiation level on the surface of the water was 400 millisievert (mSv). Adds that the workers' radiation monitor alerts were triggered but they continued working nonetheless. Clarifies that the injuries occurred in the turbine building adjacent to Reactor No. 3. The standing water contained 3.9 becquerels of radiation per cubic centimeter, 10,000 times that found in normal reactor water.

Edited March 25, 2011 by jfchandler

[jfchandler]

One of the more reliable sources for live streaming of NHK's broadcasting re the earthquake and tsunami is due to halt at the end of Friday. The web site -- http://live.nicovideo.jp/ -- has a notice on their web site this morning saying their streaming will end as of midnight Friday Japan time / 10 pm Friday Thailand time.

The video stream via NHK's own web site -- http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/ -- has been spotty ever since the earthquake/tsunami, sometimes working, sometimes not... And CNN recently ended their re-broadcasting of the NHK stream.

However, now it appears a reliable video stream of NHK is also available via the Livestation web site and online broadcasting application. The NHK channel on the Livestation web site is available here:

http://www.livestation.com/channels/123-nhk-world-english

Another stream of NHK is also supposedly available on UStream... but that site may be blocked by some ISPs in Thailand.

[jfchandler]

This afternoon will mark the two week anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11.

NHK this morning says the official death toll reported by Japanese police has now passed 10,000.

[atsiii]

One of the Japanese coastal towns years back built a 10 meter high tsunami wall after getting hit in the past... It was supposed to be like the tallest of its kind.... And, the town still got thrashed by the recent tsunami, which went right over the wall... Though I guess they would have been worse off without it.

Yes, I think they might have been worse off without it. But they got trashed nevertheless, and so the point you make is spot on. In fact they have been wiped out 3 times previously (in modern history alone), hence the wall that was twice the assumption of the Fukushima plant.... but still not enough.

And it will happen again in Japan, that is a certainty. Somewhere between now and 2080. The problem is that the collective memory is shorter than the disaster timespan.

Sumatra got hit by a 30m tsunami, causing a much greater loss of life in coastal regions than Japan. But some tribal peoples, isolated from modern society and more in tune with their past, escaped the disaster because their collective memory was retained. They read the warning signs and headed for the hills, and were safe.

Japan can rebuild its towns on the coast. Or it can move them up the hill. This is probably the most important decision for the well-being of the Japanese people on the east coast....

I agree, and the US had the same opportunity for choice with New Orleans... and look what we decided to do; rebuild in the same spot!

35 years ago I had a professor who offered a simple financial based solution: require that all insurance settlements for a natural disaster are paid only once. Think about it... if your house is flooded (and you have insurance), you will be paid flood damages just once. So you can take that money and rebuild up outside the floodplain, or you can rebuild right where you are. But if it happens again--you will not be paid off a second time. Where would you rebuild?

Perhaps the fatal flaw is our belief that our technology can overcome and control mother nature. The examples are everywhere. In the US we attempt to stablize barrier islands so we can built more real estate on them, even though by their nature they must be dynamic and able to move in response to the constantly changing marine forces. We are then surprised when--after we pour all our reinforced concrete to stablize them--they erode away leaving the coastline behind them completely unprotected and the habitate destroyed.

We build higher and higher floodbanks and walls along rivers, even though rivers are dynamic and--based on their fall and volume--know exactly how deep and fast they want to flow. Then we are surprised when the river slows down and precipitates solids until it raises its bed (relative to its new artificial banks) back up to where it wants to be. Since by then we've built more houses within the floodplain right next to the river, we can think of nothing else to do but again raise the artificial banks even higher.

For the wonderful view, we build more and more houses on oceanfront hillsides (i.e. headloading) while at the same time we must widen the roads running along the bottoms of the hills next to the ocean (i.e. toe cutting) to support the increased traffic for the houses. Then we are surprised when the rains come and the landslides start.

The Japanese try to build tsunami walls thinking they can control mother nature. But regardless of how high you build them, since the walls cannot be endless in length, a large tsunami will either overtop them or simply go around them to destroy what's behind. They make for great capital construction projects and politics, and they do help protect against rouge waves. But all of us saw the videos of this tsunami, and there's no wall that can be built by man that would have protected a town (or nuclear plant!) behind it. It might make more sense to construct giant nets instead of walls, that would snag all the debris and bodies as the tsunami withdraws to facilitate salvage and recovery.

[jfchandler]

NHK carries broadcast of a Japan defense official saying their government is considering the use of U.S. military ships and pumping systems to provide fresh water cooling supplies to the stricken Fukushima reactors... Says it's an urgent issue because they want to prevent further corrosion to the reactors and their systems from the salt in the seawater now being used for emergency cooling of the reactors. Says the proposal stems from an offer made by the U.S. government.

Also, the two most seriously injured workers in yesterday's radiation exposure incident near Reactor No. 3 are being transferred to the Radiological Sciences Institute hospital in Chiba Prefecture.

The two workers underwent a radiation decontamination procedure at their original hospital, but still had readings of 150 microsievert after completing that decontamination.

Edited March 25, 2011 by jfchandler

[atsiii]

Some questions for the lay-experts here...

1. Tepco has been pumping seawater and boric acid into the reactors for emergency cooling. How have they done this? Did they break into pipes to get seawater circulating? And if so, would this not constitute a breach of the containment vessel?

2. Tepco has been flooding cooling pools with pumped seawater and boric acid to keep the rods submerged and cool. But where is all the spilled water runoff going? Do these plants have sub drains that capture radioactive runoff? Or is the runoff leaving the site and entering the environment?

3. For over a week Tepco has said various containment vessels "may have been breached," but has anyone seen photos, data and/or the reasoning for these statements? A couple of times pressure has increased in one of the reactor vessels (#3, I think), and Tepco has said it may need to vent some radioactive vapor in order to reduce pressure. Then suddenly the pressure went down on its own and negated the need to vent. How can that happen without the core temperature just as suddenly cooling? Doesn't this indicate that the pressure couldn't wait and found a way to vent itself? And is that why they are saying some of the vessels "may have been breached?"

Thank you in advance!

[jfchandler]

See my comments in ITALIC below...

Some questions for the lay-experts here...

1. Tepco has been pumping seawater and boric acid into the reactors for emergency cooling. How have they done this? Did they break into pipes to get seawater circulating? And if so, would this not constitute a breach of the containment vessel?

They're using Fire Department trucks and pumps to inject the water into the reactors. I haven't seen any mention of what access point they're using to get that water into the reactors' containment vessels.

2. Tepco has been flooding cooling pools with pumped seawater and boric acid to keep the rods submerged and cool. But where is all the spilled water runoff going? Do these plants have sub drains that capture radioactive runoff? Or is the runoff leaving the site and entering the environment?

They've poured vast amounts of seawater into the cooling pools of several of the reactors... A lot of that water apparently is boiled off as steam because the pools have been overheating and have been so hot. Not clear but likely that some of it ends up spilling out. No mention in public of any containment measures associated with that.

3. For over a week Tepco has said various containment vessels "may have been breached," but has anyone seen photos, data and/or the reasoning for these statements? A couple of times pressure has increased in one of the reactor vessels (#3, I think), and Tepco has said it may need to vent some radioactive vapor in order to reduce pressure. Then suddenly the pressure went down on its own and negated the need to vent. How can that happen without the core temperature just as suddenly cooling? Doesn't this indicate that the pressure couldn't wait and found a way to vent itself? And is that why they are saying some of the vessels "may have been breached?"

I believe they have actually been venting several of the reactors at various points in time, mostly earlier in the crisis, to reduce pressure inside the reactors. When they've done that, presumably that steam includes radioactive elements.

There has been a lot of official comment about the vessel in Reactor 2 may have been breached... But lately, with the radiation exposure of workers yesterday near Reactor 3, there's now a lot of talk of that being possible in Reactor 3 as well. I don't believe they've been able to do any direct inspection of the reactors due to radiation levels there. However, there's been pretty conclusive evidence that the reactor fuel rods inside Reactors 1, 2 and 3 have sustained some varying levels of damage due to being uncovered from coolant at earlier points in the crisis.

Thank you in advance!

[Crushdepth]

they want to prevent further corrosion to the reactors and their systems from the salt in the seawater now being used for emergency cooling of the reactors.

That might be a real headache in the medium-long term.

[atsiii]

Thank you, JF!

Obviously the containment vessel is designed to be a closed system, or it would offer little in terms of containment. If they are using external fire trucks to pump seawater into the core in order to avoid catastrophic overheating and meltdown, doesn't that mean they have somehow opened up the containment vessel to the outside world? How else could you get seawater in?

My question about Tepco's claim that the pressure suddenly went down on its own and thus did not need to be vented, is one of basic thermodynamics of a closed system. From my (decades old & no doubt flawed!) engineering school recollection of thermodynamics, pressure in a closed system cannot "suddenly go down" without a corresponding sudden reduction in temperature--which in this case would be unlikely. Similarly, venting the containment vessel would reduce pressure and, correspondingly, would also temporarily reduce temperature. Perhaps Tepco simply claimed that the pressure suddenly fell on its own accord to cover up the fact that they had in fact vented more radioactive vapor to the environment and didn't want to say?

The following is an interesting read from this morning (sorry, I thought I grabbed the URL but I can't find it.):

"But Masaru Tamamoto, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Cambridge in Britain, said the handling of the crisis by Japanese government and corporate authorities is consistent with a culture that carefully guards information from the public and leaves decisions in the hands of anonymous bureaucrats.

Japan, Tamamoto said, lacks a nonprofit sector of government watchdog organizations that work closely with the news media to investigate and publicize government coverups. It leaves the public comfortably reliant on official pronouncements, he said.

"The public lives this way every day, and that's the way things are," Tamamoto said. "Even if you demanded the information, nobody has the information. Even the prime minister blurted out at one point that he didn't have information."

Welcome to Japan!

Edited March 25, 2011 by atsiii

[midas]

Thank you, JF!

Obviously the containment vessel is designed to be a closed system, or it would offer little in terms of containment. If they are using external fire trucks to pump seawater into the core in order to avoid catastrophic overheating and meltdown, doesn't that mean they have somehow opened up the containment vessel to the outside world? How else could you get seawater in?

My question about Tepco's claim that the pressure suddenly went down on its own and thus did not need to be vented, is one of basic thermodynamics of a closed system. From my (decades old & no doubt flawed!) engineering school recollection of thermodynamics, pressure in a closed system cannot "suddenly go down" without a corresponding sudden reduction in temperature--which in this case would be unlikely. Similarly, venting the containment vessel would reduce pressure and, correspondingly, would also temporarily reduce temperature. Perhaps Tepco simply claimed that the pressure suddenly fell on its own accord to cover up the fact that they had in fact vented more radioactive vapor to the environment and didn't want to say?

The following is an interesting read from this morning (sorry, I thought I grabbed the URL but I can't find it.):

"But Masaru Tamamoto, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Cambridge in Britain, said the handling of the crisis by Japanese government and corporate authorities is consistent with a culture that carefully guards information from the public and leaves decisions in the hands of anonymous bureaucrats.

Japan, Tamamoto said, lacks a nonprofit sector of government watchdog organizations that work closely with the news media to investigate and publicize government coverups. It leaves the public comfortably reliant on official pronouncements, he said.

"The public lives this way every day, and that's the way things are," Tamamoto said. "Even if you demanded the information, nobody has the information. Even the prime minister blurted out at one point that he didn't have information."

Welcome to Japan!

Ok......so all these governments around the world that are now demanding

" all food, both fresh and processed, shipped after March 11 should be accompanied "with radiation free and radioactive substance contamination certification from Japanese authorities."

shouldn't even bother?

" When we issued that certificate we didn't have the right erm..... " information "

Edited March 25, 2011 by midas

[atsiii]

Ok......so all these governments around the world that are now demanding

" all food, both fresh and processed, shipped after March 11 should be accompanied "with radiation free and radioactive substance contamination certification from Japanese authorities."

shouldn't even bother?

" When we issued that certificate we didn't have the right erm..... " information "

5555... yea.

Actually, time and again the Japanese are shown to be the most honest people on earth. We westerners grow up singing, "finders keepers, loosers weapers." But if you lose your wallet filled with cash in Tokyo, you will probably have it returned untouched.

I'm not a sociologist, but I do have Japanese family and many friends in Japan. I see the problem arise more after-the-fact with the need to save face. If, for example, you rerack the rods in the cooling pool to over-design density, just like you have for years, but this time an earthquake and tsunami come along and trips you up--now you have a dilemna. If you are open and honest you lose face; which in an honorific culture based on the strict codes of zen and bushido, the ramifications are very grave. If you are not open and honest, you may lose even more.

So in my experience, if the Japanese give you a certificate stating something is radioation-free, you can trust that it is. But if it turns out later that the certification reading was faulty because the inspection equipment was faulty because someone covered up not performing regularly scheduled maintenance and someone else didn't catch it, etc.; you will likely never get to the bottom of it.

It's for this reasons--and because I have family and friends in Japan--that I've been holding my breath waiting for the third shoe to drop. I worry more about what we may not be being told by Tepco and the government, than by what we are hearing. Sad but true.

Edited March 25, 2011 by atsiii

[lopburi3]

Noticed a shelf full of nice looking Japanese strawberries in local Lotus today. Gave it a walk-by.

[midas]

Ok......so all these governments around the world that are now demanding

" all food, both fresh and processed, shipped after March 11 should be accompanied "with radiation free and radioactive substance contamination certification from Japanese authorities."

shouldn't even bother?

" When we issued that certificate we didn't have the right erm..... " information "

5555... yea.

Actually, time and again the Japanese are shown to be the most honest people on earth. We westerners grow up singing, "finders keepers, loosers weapers." But if you lose your wallet filled with cash in Tokyo, you will probably have it returned untouched.

I'm not a sociologist, but I do have Japanese family and many friends in Japan. I see the problem arise more after-the-fact with the need to save face. If, for example, you rerack the rods in the cooling pool to over-design density, just like you have for years, but this time an earthquake and tsunami come along and trips you up--now you have a dilemna. If you are open and honest you lose face; which in an honorific culture based on the strict codes of zen and bushido, the ramifications are very grave. If you are not open and honest, you may lose even more.

So in my experience, if the Japanese give you a certificate stating something is radioation-free, you can trust that it is. But if it turns out later that the certification reading was faulty because the inspection equipment was faulty because someone covered up not performing regularly scheduled maintenance and someone else didn't catch it, etc.; you will likely never get to the bottom of it.

It's for this reasons--and because I have family and friends in Japan--that I've been holding my breath waiting for the third shoe to drop. I worry more about what we may not be being told by Tepco and the government, than by what we are hearing. Sad but true.

but now i am totally confused.....is this new news or old news ...?? Right now it is a News Alert on " Fox news" and yet it was on Yahoo News several days ago ?

Japan nuke plant reactor core may be breached

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/24/death-toll-japan-quake-tsunami-tops-10000/

Edited March 25, 2011 by midas

[JetsetBkk]

Again, can we keep the activism down a bit, or at least move it to a nice thread of your own?

Good idea! How about a "jfchandler / elcent 'End-of-the-World' News Report" thread?

Hey! Here's another idea... how about jfchandler posting links (L-I-N-K-S) to the news stories that he is Googling from the web rather than the whole text?

Then there might be room for other people to get a word in edgeways.

Or shall I join in and keep posting stuff from the Register?:

Radioactive Tokyo tapwater HARMS BABIES

The Japanese government has announced that radioactive iodine from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant has been found in tapwater, and that infants should not drink it.

Run for the hills!

Oh, but wait...

the BBC does add that "officials have stressed that children would have to drink a lot of it before it harmed them"...

...the health safety limits in question are based on a year's consumption: in other words, a baby could drink milk containing 100 Bq/l of radio-iodine for a year without ill effects.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/23/tokyo_tapwater_fukushima/

[atsiii]

but now i am totally confused.....is this new news or old news ...?? Right now it is a News Alert on " Fox news" and yet it was on Yahoo News several days ago ?

Japan nuke plant reactor core may be breached

http://www.foxnews.c...ami-tops-10000/

It seems to be both... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/world/asia/26japan.html

The Japanese are saying that the water which injured three workers yesterday and previously reported was some 10,000 times more active than core reactor water, and one explanation for that could be that #3 containment (containing the MOX fuel) has been breached. They are essentially saying, "how else could the water be that radioactive?"

[midas]

[/font]I'm not a sociologist, but I do have Japanese family and many friends in Japan. I see the problem arise more after-the-fact with the need to save face. If, for example, you rerack the rods in the cooling pool to over-design density, just like you have for years, but this time an earthquake and tsunami come along and trips you up--now you have a dilemna. If you are open and honest you lose face; which in an honorific culture based on the strict codes of zen and bushido, the ramifications are very grave. If you are not open and honest, you may lose even more.

But how will anyone ever know if it is the " strict codes of zen and bushido " that determined what

is being revealed now versus what is not ? It could simply be protecting corporate interests

that is the most important goal ? To me this is like a re- run of the BP oil disaster

several months ago in the Gulf.

[geriatrickid]

Noticed a shelf full of nice looking Japanese strawberries in local Lotus today. Gave it a walk-by.

No need. Those berries would have been grown before the fallout became an issue. The berries are picked and cooled to about 1C, wrapped and the package is pumped with CO2. It probably would have taken a week or so to get to your retailer. Strawberries are grown in Kanto and Kyashu. Kanto is in the Tokyo Yokohamo area and Kyashu is at the very bottom of Japan. At the time of their growth, it is highly unlikely the strawberries would have been exposed to harmful radiation.

Edited March 25, 2011 by geriatrickid

[atsiii]

IMO, I think JF has done a great job with his posts. Part of the activism you decry is people rejecting out-of-hand opinions that differ from their own. I don't see him doing that. I have not seen any post of JF's that attempted to belittle the post of another simply because it differed from his own view. And I certainly have not seen any of JF's posts attempt to dismiss the arguments of others as no more than, "the sky is falling, the sky is falling."

I too have missed a couple of URL's for sources... but it's more because I'm old and stupid and consumed with the disaster that is and continues to develop; not because I'm trying to promote my point of view over that of others.

Science thrives because we ask questions and then try to answer them; not because we hold opinions and try to defend them.

[atsiii]

[/font]I'm not a sociologist, but I do have Japanese family and many friends in Japan. I see the problem arise more after-the-fact with the need to save face. If, for example, you rerack the rods in the cooling pool to over-design density, just like you have for years, but this time an earthquake and tsunami come along and trips you up--now you have a dilemna. If you are open and honest you lose face; which in an honorific culture based on the strict codes of zen and bushido, the ramifications are very grave. If you are not open and honest, you may lose even more.

But how will anyone ever know if it is the " strict codes of zen and bushido " that determined what

is being revealed now versus what is not ? It could simply be protecting corporate interests

that is the most important goal ? To me this is like a re- run of the BP oil disaster

several months ago in the Gulf.

I don't disagree...

[atsiii]

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-25/reactor-core-may-be-breached-at-damaged-fukushima-power-plant.html

The above article states that the highly radioactive water that burned workers when they stepped in it yesterday could be coming from a breached containment vessel at #3, or perhaps from the overhead cooling pool which I assume also contains MOX rods.

[lopburi3]

Noticed a shelf full of nice looking Japanese strawberries in local Lotus today. Gave it a walk-by.

No need. Those berries would have been grown before the fallout became an issue. The berries are picked and cooled to about 1C, wrapped and the package is pumped with CO2. It probably would have taken a week or so to get to your retailer. Strawberries are grown in Kanto and Kyashu. Kanto is in the Tokyo Yokohamo area and Kyashu is at the very bottom of Japan. At the time of their growth, it is highly unlikely the strawberries would have been exposed to harmful radiation.

Unlikely is not good enough for the Thai wife.

[atsiii]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704425804576221732000955352.html

"Japanese regulators acknowledged the severity of the crisis might be greater than they initially expected."

ATS-- Duh!!

"U.S. military is taking a more direct role in efforts to cool the overheated reactors, shipping more than 500,000 gallons of fresh water from a military base south of Tokyo for use in cooling the reactors."

ATS-- But I remember at the start of this crisis that the U.S. offered to airlift copius amounts of coolant to the site and the Japanese refused... stating it was an over-reaction and not needed.

[midas]

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-25/reactor-core-may-be-breached-at-damaged-fukushima-power-plant.html

The above article states that the highly radioactive water that burned workers when they stepped in it yesterday could be coming from a breached containment vessel at #3, or perhaps from the overhead cooling pool which I assume also contains MOX rods.

The trouble is now with all this censorship of information, I don't know now which " sources " are to be regarded as scaremongering or otherwise ......

I mean distinguished nuclear expert Helen Caldicott

says it could be much worse than ” 30 multiples of Chernobyl. “ I haven't heard that one before ?

" Based on our chat with experts in the US ( who wanted to remain anonymous given the hysteria surrounding Japan nuclear disaster) that Fukushima disaster is worse than Chernobyl due to the sheer amount of fuel in the reactor. We had also predicted that TEPCO was lying from day one concerning whether the reactors had melted or not.

In an analysis, Stephen Lendman, lays bare the talk that Fukushima is a small disaster that has been controlled. On the contrary, he believes the world is facing a situation like never before as radiation has entered food chain and water supply and will spread at super fast speed.

"

http://dawnwires.com/politics/dire-warning-radioactivity-to-spread-around-the-world/

Edited March 25, 2011 by midas

[atsiii]

http://www.businessw...ower-plant.html

The above article states that the highly radioactive water that burned workers when they stepped in it yesterday could be coming from a breached containment vessel at #3, or perhaps from the overhead cooling pool which I assume also contains MOX rods.

The trouble is now with all this censorship of information, I don't know now which " sources " are to be regarded as scaremongering or otherwise ......

I mean distinguished nuclear expert Helen Caldicott

says it could be much worse than ” 30 multiples of Chernobyl. “ I haven't heard that one before ?

" Based on our chat with experts in the US ( who wanted to remain anonymous given the hysteria surrounding Japan nuclear disaster) that Fukushima disaster is worse than Chernobyl due to the sheer amount of fuel in the reactor. We had also predicted that TEPCO was lying from day one concerning whether the reactors had melted or not.

In an analysis, Stephen Lendman, lays bare the talk that Fukushima is a small disaster that has been controlled. On the contrary, he believes the world is facing a situation like never before as radiation has entered food chain and water supply and will spread at super fast speed.

"

http://dawnwires.com...ound-the-world/

Yes, it's difficult to know. And I think that's why you must try to manage a crisis (from a PR perspective) proactively. If you disseminate accurate verifyable information at least daily, you subvert a lot of the fear mongering. But for whatever reasons... they are not. Otherwise... what's true... what's new?

Scary... and (IMO) getting worse.

[atsiii]

Interesting... this article now says that Japan is urging people living within 18 miles (30km) to evacuate. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-japan-nuclear-plant-20110326,0,5763742.story

Are things getting worse? Is it possible that Chicken Little was more right than wrong?

[Chopperboy]

Dogs and Demons – Alex Kerr

http://www.alex-kerr.com/html/nuclear_reactors_japan.html

There are some pretty scary skeletons hidden in Japan’s bureaucratic closets. At a sinister agency called Donen, the hiding of information becomes downright terrifying. Donen, a Japanese acronym for the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, manages Japan’s nuclear-power program.

At Monju, the fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Tsuruga, which suffered a major leak of liquid sodium from its cooling system in 1995, Donen officials first stated that the leakage was “minimal.” It later turned out to be more than three tons, the largest accident of its type in the world. But they could easily remedy the trouble by hiding the evidence: Donen staff edited film taken at the scene, releasing only an innocuous five minutes’ worth and cutting out fifteen minutes that showed serious damage, including the thermometer on the leaking pipes and icicle-like extrusions of sodium.

Donen’s attitude to the public at the time of the Monju scandal says much about officials who take for granted that they can always hide behind a wall of denial.

Still, there was widespread public anger and concern over Monju (which remained shut down for the rest of the decade), yet the same scenario repeated itself in March 1997, this time when drums filled with nuclear waste caught fire and exploded at a plant at Tokai City north of Tokyo, releasing high levels of radioactivity into the environment. In May 1994, newspapers had revealed that seventy kilograms of plutonium dust and waste had gathered in the pipes and conveyors of the Tokai plant; Donen had known of the missing plutonium (enough to build as many as twenty nuclear bombs) but did nothing about it until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded an accounting. To this day, Donen claims to have no idea where the plutonium is clustered or how to remove it. “We know that the plutonium is there,” an official said. “It’s just held up in the system.”

Given that several nuclear bombs’ worth of plutonium dust were lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen’s initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, “Radioactive material was released,” and in others, “No radioactive material was released”; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire—ad nobody ever informed them of the accident.

Several weeks later, Donen revealed that it waited thirty hours before reporting a leak of radioactive tritium at an advanced thermal reactor, Fugen. This was an improvement, though, because in eleven cases of tritium leaks during the previous two and a half years, Donen had made no reports at all. Reform, however, was on the way: Donen was “disbanded” and renamed Genden in May 1998, supposedly to appease an angry public. Today, under this new name, the nuclear agency continues to operate with the same staff, offices, and philosophy as before.

Nor is it only government agencies such as Donen-Genden that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head at 10:35 a.m. on September 30, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan’s worst nuclear accident ever—the world’s worst since Chernobyl—resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of them critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation, and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai’s nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO’s managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.

Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them—and they were all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found to handle the victims, even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities.

There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements, such as for isotope iodine 131, weren’t made until as many as five days later.

The accident at Tokai came as a shock to other nuclear-energy-producing nations. The director of the China National Nuclear Corporation commented, “Improving management techniques is the key lesson China should learn from the Japan accident, since the leak happened not because of nuclear technology but because of poor management and human error.” And, indeed, poor management, combined with official denial, was at the root of the disaster. “Oh no, a serious accident can’t happen here,” a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.

The level of sheer fiction in Japan’s nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rain-water. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and ¥1 billion later, Donen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built the sheds. Nobody knows where the money went—semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public—but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There is no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, “The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.”

Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that renovation was going smoothly, and asking for ¥71 million to remove the sheds it had never built! It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, “It’s true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.”

When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn’t as dangerous as activists say. “A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), who looks like an extra from ‘The Jetsons,’ gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it’s safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, ‘I feel refreshed!’ ”

There is a lesson to be learned from Donen’s madness, and it is that if you disguise the truth long enough you eventually lose touch with reality yourself. This happened at MOF, which can no longer figure out the true state of bank finances, and it happened to the nuclear industry, which doesn’t know the standard techniques of nuclear-plant management common elsewhere in the world. Why invest in technology when with a stroke of the pen an official can bring fires under control and make leaks dry up?

While it runs against the conventional wisdom that Japan is a technological leader, there is no question that Japan has fallen drastically behind in the technology of nuclear-power management and safety.

Edited March 25, 2011 by Chopperboy

[midas]

Interesting... this article now says that Japan is urging people living within 18 miles (30km) to evacuate. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-japan-nuclear-plant-20110326,0,5763742.story

Are things getting worse? Is it possible that Chicken Little was more right than wrong?

" safe to remain as long as they stay indoors. " <deleted> ?

How many hundreds of years is that ??

Edited March 25, 2011 by midas

[jfchandler]

Stepped out for a while, and while I was away, I noticed a couple issues raised that deserve clarification on my part:

1. It's generally accepted and good practice here that when sometime is posting content from a news report, to include a link to the original source, in addition to whatever portion of the content is copied here. That's a practice I have regularly followed, and most others have as well. (In general, it's permissible if warranted to post the full text of Japanese media reports in English language, but only the top couple pghs of U.S. news reports with a link to the remainder due to copyright issues.)

The one exception to that, in my case lately, has been that I have been monitoring NHK World's live broadcasts, which often have included live news conferences by TEPCO or NISA officials or others related. And in those cases, where the news provided warrants it, I've been posting here direct accounts of what's being said at these live news conferences as they occur. Obviously in those cases, there's no written news report or web address to link to at those points in time, because the reporters involved haven't written them yet.

In those cases, I'm giving TVisa readers here the information and facts at the same time they're being heard by the news reporters covering the story, rather than waiting an hour or two later for that information to show up on one of the various news web sites (though I'll usually post those later as follow-ups as well). I consider that to be a value to those here, and my posts in that regard have been pretty much unfailingly accurate except in the early days for occasionally mixing up milli vs. micro-sieverts (not any more, though). And I think I'm pretty reasonably well qualified to provide those recaps, considering I spent most of my career as a professional, mainstream journalist.

2. In what probably has been more than 200 posts from me here during the past two weeks (though admittedly I've lost count at this point), I'd daresay that no one reading them would have the slightest idea what I think about nuclear power or nuclear power vs. alternative energies, or any related political topics. Nor what I think the outcome of the current mess is going to be... Because, No. 1, I've never posted anything on those subjects; No. 2, I'm not sure what my views on those subjects are, and No. 3, even if I had some clear view on those subjects, I don't consider those to be the purpose or topic of this thread. The topic of this thread ought to be about news and information relating to the Fukushima nuclear crisis and related earthquake/tsunami news.

3. Lastly, anyone paying the slightest attention to my posting here would have no reason to lump me into the "the world is ending" crowd. Although, I will admit I did one clearly sarcastic post, I believe in response to Lopburi 99's posting about a CNN report of some impending crisis, joking that yes indeed the world was ending and Armageddon was here....and commenting that CNN would have "breaking news" on it tomorrow... Sorry if anyone actually took that retort to be serious. Amid the avalanche of varyingly bad news over the past two week, there are times when a bit of attempted humor is called for...

Meanwhile, I hope you'll all take note that we've now passed the Two Week Anniversary of Fukushima Daiichi, et al..

Lots more news to come, I'm sure.... Thanks for everyone's comments and contributions to hopefully making this an informative resource for everyone involved. :jap:

[atsiii]

Dogs and Demons – Alex Kerr

http://www.alex-kerr...tors_japan.html

There are some pretty scary skeletons hidden in Japan’s bureaucratic closets. At a sinister agency called Donen, the hiding of information becomes downright terrifying. Donen, a Japanese acronym for the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, manages Japan’s nuclear-power program.

At Monju, the fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Tsuruga, which suffered a major leak of liquid sodium from its cooling system in 1995, Donen officials first stated that the leakage was “minimal.” It later turned out to be more than three tons, the largest accident of its type in the world. But they could easily remedy the trouble by hiding the evidence: Donen staff edited film taken at the scene, releasing only an innocuous five minutes’ worth and cutting out fifteen minutes that showed serious damage, including the thermometer on the leaking pipes and icicle-like extrusions of sodium.

Donen’s attitude to the public at the time of the Monju scandal says much about officials who take for granted that they can always hide behind a wall of denial.

Still, there was widespread public anger and concern over Monju (which remained shut down for the rest of the decade), yet the same scenario repeated itself in March 1997, this time when drums filled with nuclear waste caught fire and exploded at a plant at Tokai City north of Tokyo, releasing high levels of radioactivity into the environment. In May 1994, newspapers had revealed that seventy kilograms of plutonium dust and waste had gathered in the pipes and conveyors of the Tokai plant; Donen had known of the missing plutonium (enough to build as many as twenty nuclear bombs) but did nothing about it until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded an accounting. To this day, Donen claims to have no idea where the plutonium is clustered or how to remove it. “We know that the plutonium is there,” an official said. “It’s just held up in the system.”

Given that several nuclear bombs’ worth of plutonium dust were lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen’s initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, “Radioactive material was released,” and in others, “No radioactive material was released”; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire—ad nobody ever informed them of the accident.

Several weeks later, Donen revealed that it waited thirty hours before reporting a leak of radioactive tritium at an advanced thermal reactor, Fugen. This was an improvement, though, because in eleven cases of tritium leaks during the previous two and a half years, Donen had made no reports at all. Reform, however, was on the way: Donen was “disbanded” and renamed Genden in May 1998, supposedly to appease an angry public. Today, under this new name, the nuclear agency continues to operate with the same staff, offices, and philosophy as before.

Nor is it only government agencies such as Donen-Genden that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head at 10:35 a.m. on September 30, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan’s worst nuclear accident ever—the world’s worst since Chernobyl—resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of them critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation, and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai’s nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO’s managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.

Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them—and they were all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found to handle the victims, even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities.

There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements, such as for isotope iodine 131, weren’t made until as many as five days later.

The accident at Tokai came as a shock to other nuclear-energy-producing nations. The director of the China National Nuclear Corporation commented, “Improving management techniques is the key lesson China should learn from the Japan accident, since the leak happened not because of nuclear technology but because of poor management and human error.” And, indeed, poor management, combined with official denial, was at the root of the disaster. “Oh no, a serious accident can’t happen here,” a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.

The level of sheer fiction in Japan’s nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rain-water. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and ¥1 billion later, Donen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built the sheds. Nobody knows where the money went—semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public—but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There is no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, “The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.”

Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that renovation was going smoothly, and asking for ¥71 million to remove the sheds it had never built! It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, “It’s true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.”

When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn’t as dangerous as activists say. “A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), who looks like an extra from ‘The Jetsons,’ gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it’s safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, ‘I feel refreshed!’ ”

There is a lesson to be learned from Donen’s madness, and it is that if you disguise the truth long enough you eventually lose touch with reality yourself. This happened at MOF, which can no longer figure out the true state of bank finances, and it happened to the nuclear industry, which doesn’t know the standard techniques of nuclear-plant management common elsewhere in the world. Why invest in technology when with a stroke of the pen an official can bring fires under control and make leaks dry up?

While it runs against the conventional wisdom that Japan is a technological leader, there is no question that Japan has fallen drastically behind in the technology of nuclear-power management and safety.

5555... love it! And Alex's books, too! On another thread I'd love to know if you also enjoyed Japan Lost and Bangkok Found?