*update 10:00pm* It is very difficult to find hard accurate news of what is occurring at this reactor. Therefore consider this disclaimer – I would highly advise anyone to research the conflicting stories yourself. Having visited numerous sites with technical professionals discussing the events and what facts they know, it is safe to say the vast majority of professionals are calling “BullS**t” on the official statements. Including numerous retired IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) officials in various industrial trade chat rooms. The verbage from the Japanese officials is frustratingly “guarded”, while it is understandable they do not want to worsen the fears and overwhelm the citizenry with panic, the lack of clarity is not providing room for any optimism. First a hard print article:
Tokyo (CNN) — A meltdown may have occurred at at least one nuclear power reactor in Japan, the country’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said Sunday, adding that authorities are concerned about the possibility of another meltdown at a second reactor.
“We do believe that there is a possibility that meltdown has occurred. It is inside the reactor. We can’t see. However, we are assuming that a meltdown has occurred,” he said about the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility. “And with reactor No. 3, we are also assuming that the possibility of a meltdown as we carry out measures,” Edano said.
Edano’s comments confirm an earlier report from an official with Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, who said, “we see the possibility of a meltdown.” “There is a possibility, we see the possibility of a meltdown,” said Toshihiro Bannai, director of the Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency international affairs office, in a telephone interview from the agency’s headquarters in Tokyo. “At this point, we have still not confirmed that there is an actual meltdown, but there is a possibility.”
A meltdown is a catastrophic failure of the reactor core, with a potential for widespread radiation release. Though Bannai said engineers have been unable to get close enough to the core to know what’s going on, he based his conclusion on the fact that they measured radioactive isotopes in the air Saturday night.
“What we have seen is only the slight indication from a monitoring post of cesium and iodine,” he said. Since then, he said, plant officials have injected sea water and boron into the plant in an effort to cool its nuclear fuel and stop any reactions. “We have some confidence, to some extent, to make the situation to be stable status,” he said. “We actually have very good confidence that we will resolve this.”
A state of emergency has been declared for the plant and two other reactors at the same complex, which holds a total of six reactors, he said. Three are in a safe, shut-down state, he said. “The other two still have some cooling systems, but not enough capacity.”
But Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s ambassador to the United States, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in Washington that he did not know of any evidence of a meltdown. “We are working on it,” he said. “We are getting information every hour on this issue.” And Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, raised another possible issue. “Some of the readings in the measurement equipment were not accurate,” he said without elaboration.
He noted that since the inside of the pressure vessel has been filled with sea water, radiation levels in the area have not risen, implying that the problem was not worsening. The detection of a cesium isotope indicates that the nuclear fuel cladding has failed, said Ken Bergeron, a physicist and former scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. “Now we have to hope that the containment building will succeed in preventing major amounts of radioactivity” from escaping, he said.
As of Sunday morning, winds in northeast Japan were blowing out to sea at 5-15 mph, said CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward. But they were expected to reverse direction by Monday night, he said. The Daiichi plant is located about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo. “We’re in uncharted territory,” Bergeron said. “We’re in the land where probability says we shouldn’t be and we’re hoping that all the barriers to release radioactivity will not fail.” “The bottom line is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen in the next couple of days and, frankly, neither do the people who run the system,” said Dr. Ira Helfand, a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
What we do know, he added, is that Japan’s nuclear facilities are “way out of whack.” Cesium 137 can remain dangerous for 600 years and is associated with a number of cancers, he said. The use of sea water and boron was described as a “Hail Mary pass” by Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies focused on energy policies and a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy.
“My understanding is that the situation has become desperate enough that they apparently don’t have the capability to deliver fresh water or plain water to cool the reactor and stabilize it and now, in an act of desperation, are having to resort to diverting and using sea water,” he said.
Boron, a chemical element, was being added to the water “to sort of stymie other potential nuclear reactions,” he said. Boron has the ability to absorb neutrons, the sub-atomic particles that occur in the nucleus of all atoms. In a nuclear reactor, it is essential that just the right number of neutrons are present. Too many neutrons can cause a fission reaction to get out of control. Too few neutrons and a fission reaction stops.
But, he acknowledged Sunday to reporters in a conference call, “There’s a lot that we don’t know about what’s happening with these reactors. It’s trying to piece together a picture where you’re dealing with just a few pieces of the puzzle.” Another expert said enough was known to conclude that the nuclear events in Japan rank high on the list of similar incidents. “If this accident stops right now, it will already be one of the three worst accidents we have ever had at a nuclear power plant in the history of nuclear power,” said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear materials and president of the U.S.-based Ploughshares Fund, a firm involved in security and peace funding.
He said only the 1979 partial meltdown of a reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union were worse. If the effort to cool the nuclear fuel inside the reactor fails completely — a scenario experts who have spoken to CNN say is unlikely — the resulting release of radiation could cause enormous damage to the plant or release radiation into the atmosphere or water. That could lead to widespread cancer and other health problems, experts say.
The problems reported at two other reactors in the complex stemmed from a similar cause: an insufficient amount of water being pumped into the cores in an attempt to keep them cool. To ease the pressure inside reactor No. 3, air containing “some minimal radioactive material” was being vented from its containment vessel, Edano said, expressing confidence in the outcome. “We believe that we can stabilize the situation of the reactor,” he said. An evacuation order affected more than 200,000 people living within 20 kilometers of the plants, officials said.
Some experts said the flow of information from the agency has not been fast enough. But IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano defended the Japanese response. “I know the Japanese authorities are working their hardest to gather the necessary details and ensure safety under difficult and constantly evolving circumstances,” he said in a statement. Japanese authorities have classified the event at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 as a level 4 “accident with local consequences” on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale intended to communicate to the public the significance of radiation-linked events. The scale runs from 0 to 7, with the latter being classified as a major accident.
On Saturday night, three patients at a hospital tested positive for radiation exposure, according to the Japanese public broadcasting station NHK, citing a statement from Fukushima Prefecture. The three had been randomly selected from a group of 90 hospital workers and patients who were outside the hospital — about three kilometers from the Daiichi plant — awaiting evacuation at the time of the explosion. The patients had already been hospitalized at the medical facility prior to Friday’s quake. While the three showed signed of exposure, “no abnormal health conditions have been observed,” NHK quoted the prefecture as saying.
Meanwhile, two experts from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission with expertise in boiling-water nuclear reactors like those affected by the disaster have been sent to Japan as part of a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) team. The NRC’s Maryland-based headquarters operations center has been operating round the clock since the beginning of the emergency. The Japanese government was preparing to distribute iodine tablets to residents, the IAEA said. Iodine is commonly recommended to block the uptake by the thyroid gland of radioactive iodine.
The problems at the Daiichi plant began Friday when the 8.9-magnitude quake struck off the eastern shore of Miyagi Prefecture. The quake forced the automatic shutdown of the plant’s nuclear reactors and knocked out the main cooling system, according to the country’s nuclear agency. A tsunami resulting from the quake then washed over the site, knocking out backup generators that pumped water into the reactor containment unit to keep the nuclear fuel cool, according to the agency.
As pressure and temperatures rose inside the reactors at the Daiichi and Daini plants, authorities ordered the release of valves at the plants — a move that experts said was likely done to release growing pressure inside as high temperatures caused water to boil and produce excess steam. As crews were working to pump additional water into the reactor containment unit to lower the temperature, the pumping system failed, Edano said, causing the explosion that injured four workers and bringing down the walls of the building containing the reactor. The International Atomic Energy Agency, citing Japanese authorities, said the explosion occurred outside the plant’s primary containment vessel and that the vessel remained intact. The explosion injured four workers, it said.
Nine residents near the site of the explosion got radioactive material on their clothing and were being decontaminated, Bergeron said. “Now, we’re trying to make sure they have not been internally exposed to radioactive material.” He described their exposure as “not hazardous to health.” The team then reverted to the plan to flood the reactor with sea water, which Edano said would lower the temperature to acceptable levels. That work began Saturday night and was expected to take two days, Edano said.
Japan is heavily dependent on nuclear power, with 54 plants and another eight slated for construction, said Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action, an environmental group. All are located in “very seismic” areas, she said. (full article with interactive visuals)
What is being discussed in various professional chat rooms is the basic premise that a sub-surface meltdown (meltdown where the core continues to errode below the surface of the earth) is being avoided by maintaining the meltdown in the facility itself. Essentially they are flooding the containment area continuously with sea water to create an above the surface similarity to what would occur if the core reached the sub surface water table. The big question is where’s the water vapor (steam)?; and where are they directing the contaminated sea water? Again, there is 99% speculation and only 1% scientifically verifiable evidence of what is actually happening. Still no scenario looks good…… /SD
Things could not be more confusing if they tried. Reports from Japan, and familar technical experts claim a slow meltdown is underway. The Japanese foreign minister says everything is ok….. Something just don’t sniff right… 6:00 pm – Tokyo (CNN) — Crews at a nuclear plant struck by an earthquake, then a tsunami and then an explosion in the span of 36 hours resorted Saturday to flooding a feverish nuclear reactor with sea water in hopes of preventing a meltdown of its core. An explosion that sent white smoke rising above the Fukushima Daiichi plant Saturday afternoon buckled the walls of a concrete building that surrounded one of the plant’s nuclear reactors, but did not damage the reactor itself, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters.
The explosion was caused, he said, by a failure in a pumping system as workers tried to prevent the reactor’s temperature from racing out of control. The International Atomic Energy Agency, citing Japanese authorities, said the explosion occurred outside the plant’s primary containment vessel and that the vessel remained intact. The explosion injured four workers, it said.
To limit damage to the reactor core, Tokyo Electric Power Company began injecting sea water mixed with boron into the primary containment vessel in an operation that got under way Saturday night, IAEA said. The use of sea water and boron was described as a “Hail Mary pass” by Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies focused on energy policies and a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy.
“My understanding is that the situation has become desperate enough that they apparently don’t have the capability to deliver fresh water or plain water to cool the reactor and stabilize it and now, in an act of desperation, are having to resort to diverting and using sea water,” he said.
Boron, a chemical element, was being added to the water “to sort of stymie other potential nuclear reactions,” he said. But, he acknowledged to reporters in a conference call, “There’s a lot that we don’t know about what’s happening with these reactors. It’s trying to piece together a picture where you’re dealing with just a few pieces of the puzzle.” (much more)
- Update 5:00pm EST* Good signs
- Reports now that meltdown avoided
- Seawater coolant lowering core fuel temp.
- Contamination under control with lowering radiation levels.
- *Update 2:00pm EST*
- 190 people report to hospital with radiation sickness.
- Iodine pills being given to population.
- Evacuations expanded.
- Red Alerts issued with other reactors core issues. Sea Water now used as coolant.
- Food Scarce in Northern Japan.
- Lines for water stretch for miles.
5:00am Overnight things went from Bad to worse in Japan. A CHINA SYNDROME type event began – Explosions have been seen at Fukushima Nuclear power plant. The roof and walls of the Number One reactor have collapsed in the exposion. Number One reactor failing. Evacuations ongoing in advance of China Syndrome Type Meltdown. Reports in the news reflect there were injuries and fatalities in the explosion. Evacuation distances have been expanded. Rapid increasing of ambient radioactivity levels now being measured. Exterior radiation reported to be massively increasing by several factors. Fuel rods compromised. Total #1 reactor core meltdown now possible. This may be unprecedented in the history of Nuclear Energy.
First a visual explanation of what causes a Melt Down. Also, it is termed the China Syndrome because technically the molten uranium (in this case Plutonium) is so incredibly hot it can burn a hole through the earth (hence the reference to China). However, historically when the highly radioactive core hits the water table it stops. But the subsequent explosion with the radioactive steam, vapor cloud and fallout is what can kill.
This is what the initial explosion looked like from a distance. (see below) No one can get, nor would they want to be any closer to this event. It is horrid.
(Mail) A building at a nuclear power station in Japan has exploded after the massive earthquake damaged its cooling system. Several workers have been injured and white smoke was seen pouring from the Fukushima Daiichi plant after the blast. There were fears the reactor at the site could melt down and radiation levels around the plant had already reached 20 times the normal.
Fukushima Prefecture official Masato Abe said the cause of the building collapse was unclear. Footage on Japanese TV showed that the walls of one of the buildings had completely collapsed, leaving only a skeletal metal frame standing. Pressure has been building up in the reactor – more than twice the normal level – and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said it was venting ‘radioactive vapours’ to relieve the pressure.
People living near the reactor were being warned to stay indoors after the explosion.
Government spokesman Yukio Edano said: ‘We are now trying to analyse what is behind the explosion. We ask everyone to take action to secure safety.’ (read more)
(WaikitoTimes) A Japanese nuclear power plant has exploded, a day after a massive earthquake damaged the facility’s cooling system. Residents have been warned to stay indoors. Nuclear authorities had earlier warned that the Fukushima No 1 plant, located about 250km northeast of Tokyo, an urban area of 30 million people, “may be experiencing a nuclear meltdown”.
The plant’s cooling system was damaged in the quake that hit on Friday, leaving the government scrambling to fix the problem and evacuate more than 45,000 residents within a 10km radius. Public broadcaster NHK reported that a blast had been heard at about 3:30pm (local time) and showed delayed footage of smoke billowing from the site, also reporting that the reactor building had been destroyed.
TV channels warned nearby residents to stay indoors, turn off air-conditioners and not to drink tap water. People going outside were also told to avoid exposing their skin and to cover their faces with masks and wet towels.
Japan mobilised 50,000 military and other rescue personnel Saturday, as Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano warned the number of dead would “rise greatly”. The United States, with almost 50,000 troops stationed in Japan, sent aircraft carriers to waters off the disaster zone as the relief effort gathered pace. On the east coast of Japan’s main island, Honshu, where at least 3,600 houses were destroyed, there were some hope as army helicopters airlifted people off the roof of an elementary school in Watari, Miyagi prefecture. Miraculously, naval and coastguard choppers rescued 81 people from a ship that had been dragged out to sea by the tsunami.
NUCLEAR THREAT
Earlier operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s Unit 1 scrambled to take down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9-magnitude quake and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system. Some 3000 people within three kilometres of the plant had already been urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 10 kilometres after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1’s control room.
Most of the 51,000 residents living within that radius have been evacuated, Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan’s nuclear safety commission, said. Earlier he said that even if there was a meltdown, it wouldn’t affect humans within a 10-kilometre radius. Japan declared states of emergency today for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability. The government firstly declared a state of emergency at the Daiichi unit – the first at a nuclear plant in Japan’s history. But hours later, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the six-reactor Daiichi site in northeastern Japan, announced that it had lost cooling ability at a second reactor there and three units at its nearby Fukushima Daini site.
The government quickly declared states of emergency for those units, too. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kept cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by tsunami flooding. A pregnant New Zealander living nearby earlier said she feared one of the plants would explode. Jayne Nakata – Jayne Lark until she married a Japanese man – said one of the plants was about 50km from her home. “If there was a large explosion we would be affected here,” she said today. Radiation levels inside the plant had increased 1000 times above the norm, although authorities said levels outside the facility’s gates were only *eight times above normal, which meant there was “no immediate health hazard”. (*note…. reports just prior to explosion were 20 times greater)
If the reactor does indeed melt down, the results could be similar – if not worse – than that of Chernobyl. When a reactor at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine went out of control in April of 1986 during a low-power test that led to an explosion and subsequent meltdown, it contaminated 58,000 square miles of land between Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine, and prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents.
The reactor meltdown released a hundred radioactive elements into the atmosphere including dangerous iodine, strontium and caesium, which are the most dangerous, and can still be found in the affected areas today.
In the years since Chernobyl, studies on groups of emergency workers and individuals with the highest exposure rates have linked the radioactive fallout to several health consequences like certain cancers, cardiovascular disease and death.
Radiation is predicated on three factors: total exposure, how close you were to the accident and how much time you were exposed to it. The human body is very resilient and has mechanisms in place to repair damage to cells from radiation and chemical carcinogens. But exposure to high levels of ionizing radiation can lead to radiation sickness, and sometimes, permanent biophysical changes to the cells. The severity of radiation sickness depends on the amount of radiation the person encounters and the amount of time he or she is exposed. Symptoms can arise at any point after exposure. It can be immediate or occur over days, weeks or months.
Early exposure symptoms can include: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache and fever. Signs that may appear in the days following exposure include: dizziness, disorientation, weakness, fatigue, hair loss, bloody vomit and stools, infections, poor wound healing and low blood pressure. But radioactive fallout traveling through the environment can pose long-term health consequences depending on the amount of exposure — and chronic exposure to these high levels of radiation can cause more serious conditions like cancer and premature aging.
From the time a person becomes contaminated to the time when he or she starts developing symptoms is a good indicator of just how significant the radiation exposure is. The earlier the signs show up, the more concentrated the exposure. The most important thing to remember is if someone experiences any of these issues he or she should not remain in the area. They should seek emergency treatment immediately and destroy their contaminated clothing.
Sundance Science 101 : A Nuclear Explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi Plant? – Why is Water So Important to Nuclear Reactors? With the terrible scenes in Japan today and now the nuclear explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant I thought it would be informative to understand what exactly the risk of a nuclear explosion is and why the presence of water within the nuclear power plant is so crucial to ensuring the safety of the nuclear processing system.
A nuclear reactor is actually a supply of powerful heat that is produced from the exothermic fission responses occurring within the core. Consequently a coolant is required so this high temperature is slowly removed and utilized in a suitable way. Water within the reactor will not be immobile. Cool water is consistently coursing to the reactor as well as heated up through exposure to the energy rods. The tremendous level of heat energy contained in the nuclear reactor core is required to be shifted somehow in order that it is turned into electrical power. The water shifts this heat by carrying it away. This heat transfer also keeps the functional temperature with the core itself inside safe confines for the elements employed in the building of the reactor. For this reason coolant performs a crucial role in the different parts of nuclear energy plants and will serve the combined function of taking out the temperature in the reactor in addition to transporting it towards the electrical energy generation outlet both directly or circuitously according to the form of nuclear reactor being employed and for the purpose.
It is worth reminding ourselves that nuclear electrical power plants are probably the safest establishments in today’s times (despite the scenes in the Fukushima Daiichi plant). These were created and designed to resist incredible natural forces including earthquakes and tornados. They’ve got redundant security programs and numerous boundaries in order to safeguard thegeneral public and staff members.
However, several nuclear plants are positioned on coastlines and use the water as a temperature drain that is effectively limitless and uses no freshwater – this of course makes them susceptible to the problems faced during the aftermath of an earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. This however is why nuclear power plants are subject to stringent criteria primarily adjusted to cater for the location of the plant. A nuclear facility such as that sitting across two tectonic plates will require much more significant counter measures to counter anything Mother Nature can throw at it than a facility in a more quiet area of seismic activity.
Our thoughts and wishes today and into the future go to all those affected in Japan