Not to defend radioactive fish, but it should be remembered that cesium does get excreted:

http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/Cesium.pdf

I don't know what the biological half-life would be in fish, though.

wotfigo,
Oh, that bugs me when articles leave out important details. I've found many articles stating the 14,400 Bq/kg of Caesium but I didn't find the -137 on end. Are you sure you saw the isotope in article?
Japan bans catching konago fish

The reason I ask is because I've seen water samples showing three isotopes and I wonder if reported Bq is for all three isotopes. These are with half-life Cs-134 (3.25 yr), Cs-136 (13 day) and Cs-137 (30 yr). The activity density of sample was Cs-134 (5.6), Cs-136 (0.56) and Cs-137 (5.7) so this would give an estimate of proportions between isotopes.

I had read another concern is Nori seaweed used to wrap Sushi. Nori absorbs 10,000 times the Iodine concentration in water, 4,000 times the Plutonium concentration and 50 times the Caesium concentration. I hadn't seen any articles discussing the testing of Nori.

EDIT: Changed density ratio to density

Caesium works itself up the food chain. There are no boundaries in the ocean. Larger fish will consume the small ones & move throughout the northern Pacific.

and the fishermen catch the largest fish.

They are not flying blind. just because you cannot see what they are doing. This accident was chosen when they picked the location and failed to design for a tsunami.

http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_new...

"There are several reasons scientists are hesitant to make big claims about the health of the Gulf after the oil disaster."

Yeah, Frank Fred: Money, money, and,,, oh yeah; there's the money:

Keeping Data Secret

There's one other big source of money for studying the health of the Gulf: the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But the scientists who take NOAA money can't openly discuss or publish their conclusions yet. That's because the government is preparing legal action against BP under the Natural Resources Damage Assessment process.

Christopher D'Elia, a Gulf researcher at Louisiana State University, says the NRDA clamps a lid of secrecy on research that many scientists find stifling.

"It may end up in court," he says. "You just can't publish your data, you don't get involved in the normal kind of scientific discourse we had, so it's a more constraining process. I don't think it works. I think it's a nightmare. I think the whole thing, it just grinds everything to a halt."

At what point will a blackout of data and findings be realized at Fukushima? (not implying that they've been forthcoming so far.)

Happy earth day, Frank.

Joules, I do not understand what you mean by the word irreproducible? AFAIK, we are 100 minutes away from the same problem in every other nuke plant in the US? Except the nuke plants have many more reactors and dense-packed overstuffed fuel pools and many times the amount of fuel, including MOX, than what was at TMI?

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7817/794617

TEPCO was part of that project. seems like they have money obligations elsewhere.

IIRC TEPCO was one of the investors in the plant expansion plan LOL.

I don't know that much about the technology used, but it didn't appear overnight:

http://www.irobot.com/gi/research/Technical_Papers/

And see this:

http://mobile.salon.com/news/feature/2011/03/17/japan_fukushima_nuclear_...

Kim Seungho of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute provided a more nuanced answer that skirts around the above two. "Nuclear plan operators don't like to think about serious situations that are beyond human control," Seungho said.

geek7,
iRobot sent two PackBot 510 and two Warrior 710 robots. These robots were mainly designed for bomb disposal applications in warfare areas. One thing I noticed is these robots don't have a tether for power or communications like earlier robots I had read about. They use battery power and communicate with 2.4/4.8 GHz radio.
Videos of PackBot Robots Inside Fukushima

The Idaho National laboratory had some and sent them.

If you shield the chips perhaps regular chips could be used.

Some stuff is just remote controlled. some even wired by tether. In some units have the smarts back with the operator.

Here are some robot pictures from Tepco:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/

These robots have not been exposed to anywhere near the degree that the Chernobyl robots were, normal hardening isn't enough when you drive up to a hot piece of graphite from inside the core. People work so much better... and they can climb ladders, that's going to be tricky for any robot I have ever seen.

It's not just RAD hardening of the electronics that is an issue. Another problem that was discovered at Chernobyl was that conventional vehicle designs cannot cope with rubble: mounds of concrete with protruding and tangled pipes, wires, and rebars. Decades have passed since then and there have been any number of disasters which might have benefited from rubble-hardened robotics, but in the photos shown below, there are belt drives and protruding arms - exactly what became tangled up in the past. The limited capabilities of the current robots seem apparent in the photos they have taken: shots of relatively intact control rooms with clean flat floors. I'm not really expecting that TEPCO will be able to regain control over the reactors from their control rooms. I'm much more interested in what is happening down on the rubble strewn floor of the main containment.

See this:

http://energyfromthorium.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/decay_heat_post_...

60s, yes, almost certainly by slide rule, perhaps with a little deck of fortran punch cards for one or two difficult bits. A slide rule is an excellent engineering calculation tool in the right hands.

I think that the problem was the electric circuits were underwater. But, in any case,
pumps are not rocket science.

Except for something for which the decay product also has a short half-life, you would be detecting the ones that got away (left your body before doing any damage). But periodic urinalyses etc. are performed on individuals who have somehow gotten radioactive particles into their bodies to see how fast it is getting out.

When you work in a nuclear facility and they want to know if you have had an uptake or get a baseline. They have you take a special lunch bucket home and collect all the fecal matter and urine in 24 hours. They then dry this in a microwave( now that's a good job)and measure the isotopes if any. so no a sensor in the sewer would be useless. The water would shield any readings.

But unless you live in Japan why worry? The atomic tests in the 50's and 60's put more in the air then this accident.

"legally off limits"

That means no one will be going in to feed the animals anymore. I wonder if teams will be sent in to shoot everything, like at Chernobyl?

Livestock left to perish in zone
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110420004883.htm
More than 600,000 domesticated animals have been left behind

Beef brand hailing from area near Fukushima plant could face extinction
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110419p2a00m0na003000c.html
Called "Iitate gyu" (Iitate beef), the brand is marbled beef produced mainly by an Iitate public company.

Japanese farmers ventured Crashing High Levels of Radiation in Zone Ekslus to Save Their Livestock
http://businessarea.org/japanese-farmers-ventured-crashing-high-levels-o...
cattle milk and meat became the pride of Fukushima Prefecture.

http://observers.france24.com/content/20110408-video-drive-through-no-ma...

At the current rate of water injection and assuming AREVA can deliver on its promise of 1200 tons/day water purification by the end of June, the site will be reasonably emptied by December.

Interesting way to look at the current situation, in terms of the capacity to process radioactive water.

For these plans to succeed, it is important that the rate of water leakage out of the Reactor Pressure Vessels remain about what it is now.

The NRC Reactor Safety Team report (leaked to the NY Times) said that in order to fill the drywells of Nos. 1-3, there was no need to pump water directly into them, since there was sufficient water leaking from the RPV. An anonymous industry source claimed, in the NY Times, that No. 2 has a large vertical crack in the RPV, leaking gas and water.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/japan-breach-suspected-nuke-plant/st...

(I can no longer find a reference to this quote in the Times' own archive. Perhaps they have withdrawn their report?)

Richard Lahey, who worked on these systems at GE and who was chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, also believes there has been a breech of molten material in the No. 2 RPV

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/japan-lost-race-save-nuclear...

The Nos. 2 and 3 RPVs and drywells are at atmospheric pressure, again indicating what we might call a significant flow path of water from the RPV to the outside world, at least in Nos. 2 and 3.

A key question is whether the RPVs or their associated plumbing, seals, and fittings are deteriorating from the inside out. We have limited data from inside the vessels. Fuel remains partly uncovered, and even the underwater fuel may be encased in salt, inhibiting cooling. Temperatures remain high at the sensor locations, and could be significantly higher in local areas.

If the leakage rate stays about where it is, there is reason to hope for a slow and frustrating cleanup process that manages to protect most members of the public. However, if the leak rate increases, it could become difficult to maintain water pressure in the RPV and significantly more fuel could escape containment.

Steven Wing has another article looking at political and ethical context surrounding TMI health and epidemiological research, and the court case for damages involving 2,000 local residents: "Objectivity and Ethics in Environmental Health Sciences" (Environmental Health Perspectives, 2003).

When matching projections/assumptions for a larger release of gases and fission products at TMI with cancer incidence observations and records one does find support for "the hypothesis that radiation doses are related to increased cancer incidence around TMI" (as Wing describes in 1997 paper). Without projections for larger releases of radiation from TMI, however, elevated cancer incidence observations and records go largely unexplained (particularly for leukemia and lung cancers). Steven Wing was also recently "on-air" with Arne Gunderson on his blog discussing global radiation exposures.

Nuclear apologists largely rebut the research of Wing by suggesting local reports of larger radiation exposure symptoms (dead pets, hair loss, vomiting, erythema, metal taste) are overblown, and are discounted as false reports from a stressed and psychologically burdened population. It's worth noting that most epidemiological research on cancer incidence after TMI from 10 mile exposure area do show elevated numbers of lymphatic and blood cancers, lung cancers, premature births for downwind groups, they just don't report on a causal linkage with radiation exposure or dose levels (since it is "assumed" by all of these reports that radiation dose levels were not high enough at TMI to generate higher cancer incidence or other health impacts).

UCS adds to these uncertainties and unanswered questions: "David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer-turned-whistleblower who monitors the U.S. nuclear reactor fleet for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says radiation monitors on the vent stacks at Three Mile Island went off scale during the accident. The exact amount of radiation released will never be known, he says, because crucial records from the first two days following the accident somehow never surfaced, and not enough radiation dosimeters were deployed in surrounding communities to give a true reading. What is known is that the partial meltdown damaged at least 70 percent of the reactor core and caused more than one-third of its highly radioactive fuel to melt."

Was this plant an example of GE's only nuclear reactor design at the time? I had read that they were pushing this design as a "bargain priced" nuclear reactor - smaller and cheaper than others. That was in a story where they talked to one of several engineers who resigned in the 70's because they were unhappy with the safety of the design.

Well.. as frustrating as this must be for those of you who feel nuclear deserved a brighter path, I hope it's clearly noted that the conclusions you've described of these business dealings that left us with a few dozen of these inferior plants scattered over the globe were a result of the industry itself, and NOT the environmental movement and their so-called irrational fears of radiation.

The folks trying to dissuade the public of Peak Oil will talk about 'Above Ground Factors' to explain away why output numbers are faltering, as if that serves to defeat the ultimate question of overall Petroleum production declines.

'In a perfect world', fission might have been containable.. but once again, we see how many surprising imperfections show up in life while we're busy making other plans.

Digging back some decades in my old brain it may be that the BWRs have a slight efficiency benefit compared to PWRs because of the lack of the intermediate heat exchanger (steam generator). Anyone have actual numbers on that?

There seems to be a fundamental moral issue in play here: isn't there a specific, emphatic immorality about taking risks whose outcomes are (a) incalculable, too complex or diffuse to measure and (b) beyond our capacity to remediate or manage? When we have neither the telemetry nor the data reduction capacity to understand where the toxins are going (and yada yada that Walt just said), imho it is profoundly wrong to take the risk in the first place. It is by definition an unaccountable risk, one whose perpetrators cannot be held fully responsible nor the victims fully identified.

Rather like playing Russian Roulette with an AK 47 in a crowded theatre... but even that metaphor fails because the shooter can be identified, and forensic analysis done on identifiable dead bodies and bullets.

This is more like "poisoning the well," considered a most serious and despicable crime in the Middle Ages iirc: when you poison a well you kill an unknown number of persons over an unknown amount of time without having to be physically present and risk retribution or arrest. Hence it is a cowardly crime, and one with uncontrollable, random results. Of all the crimes in the antique calendar it was one of the most heinous. Of course these nuclear events are only one face of the steady practise of "poisoning the well" which has been industrial BAU for over a century now. The release of toxic compounds into the shared environment, the release of unmanageable and unpredictable GMOs, mass destruction of biodiversity, climate destabilisation, all these incalculable and uncontainable risks have been imposed on the world at large without any plebiscite.

Hubris is a catch-all word for overoptimist arrogance, but it seems to me there is an important distinction between hubris that leads me to take risks with my own fortune, health, life, etc., and hubris that leads me to take risks with the lives of strangers without their consent. I find the first foolish and often tragic, but the second deeply criminal.

As I write this -- this very week -- the 28-y-o daughter of an acquaintance has been diagnosed with a virulent, fast-moving, inoperable cervical cancer. We will never -- none of us -- know whether this cancer developed due to exposure to some chemical or synergistic combination of chemicals in our industrialised environment; whether it might never have developed in a N America free of fallout from 50 years of nuclear hubris; or maybe she was unlucky in her genetic heritage. Or a synergistic combination of all three. No one will ever know whether it was "caused" or "just happened." We do have data in hand that strongly implicate industrial toxicity in "cancer clusters" and actuarial trends. But -- as the clever villain traditionally sneers at the dogged cop in the B-movies -- "You can't prove anything."

Some say that the present generation in the affluent West (20 years old or so) are the first in our history who can expect to live shorter lives than their parents. Their parents and grandparents are living remarkably long lives (though the final years are sometimes rather unhappy) thanks in part to industrialised medical technology. But it will be one of history's great ironies if the toxic by-products of the technology that extends Grampa's dotage to a ripe old 96 or so, condemn Granddaughter to die before she is 30; if the nuclear plant that once kept the lights on at the hospital, in its failure mode generates a rolling epidemic of immune disorders, cancers and teratogeny that overwhelms the failing resources of the industrial state.

I've been dipping into Post Peak Medicine, an online book intended for health care providers. When I consider the possible impacts of peak oil and energy shortages on our ability to maintain the high-tech medical industry that provides, among other things, anti-cancer drugs (to those who can somehow find a way to afford them), I wonder if we are not being left with the worst of both worlds: a pathogenic environment contaminated with just about everything we can imagine (and some things we can't), and an ever-diminishing capacity to cure or even maintain the people who are suffering from various metabolic insults from ambient and ubiquitous toxicity. The prospect of diminished medical care capacity seems to me to make this kind of gambling -- risk imposition by reckless release of more toxicity -- even more immoral, since we know (or at least are reasonably certain) that the resources required for mitigation are dwindling.

Sheesh, sorry to be so grim. I've been reading about the ongoing public health disaster (though the PTB are not officially calling it that) in the Gulf, post Deepwater spill, and wondering how "society" is going to absorb the ever-mounting butcher's bill from one mega-scale industrial "accident" after another. The IMF answer appears to be to abolish socialised medical care altogether and just let poor people die young. I suppose that's one approach to demand reduction.

"Quantifying the damage"

There will be no damage. Damage implies liability.
Information is failing to escape into public view.
Test and monitoring data will not be fully recorded.
Fatalities other than immediate will be disputed.
No one has died. No one plainly, so far, ever will.

The battle of Chernobyl:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5384001427276447319#

When these systems work normally, the owners can reap sizable profits, and when they fail the costs and consequences can quickly become overwhelming. The loss of a permanently trashed billion dollar plant is only the beginning. Next is the inevitable highly hazardous, expensive, and prolonged effort to try to subdue the situation until the radioactive mess somehow gets stabilized and contained. Then there are the health effects on an indeterminate number of people from ingested radioactive particles, which show up first as genetic damage (deformed babies) and then possibly only years later as cancers whose origins are impossible to positively identify. And finally large areas of permanently unsafe land now condemned as too contaminated to live on, hunt on, or farm on.

Quantifying the damage in any meaningful way becomes impossible due to the sheer complexity of the event and the lack of adequate data collecting capability.

But one thing we do know with absolute certainty, renewables are 'TOO' expensive and we can't possibly live without 24/7, 365 day a year centralized electrical power generation for every Tom, Dick and Harry on earth...as for the Janes they can already make do with less.

The costs that Walt BT describes don't count as a subsidy? How about Grand Larceny from humanity and the commons?
Can we try those who are responsible for manslaughter?

They have been astonishingly lax in sampling, monitoring, establishing exclusion zones and enforcing them.

Perhaps they have a sufficiently docile population that they expect to be able to maintain the "no health risk" story indefinitely.

Why not? The process is stochastic. Who can "prove" that Chernobyl killed more than 48 people... ?

*We've had the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Steam/Steel Age. I wonder (if anyone's around to write them) whether the histories of the future will call us the Poison Age?*

THE AGES OF WRATH

The wreck of a twenty-first century freighter
Was found in the silted-up harbor of Boston,
And also an office intact, a computer
Looking as new as when used, in the ruin

Furniture found there — exotic design,
One thinks of the ancients who carried on business
In centuries past, in time out of mind —
Did they have their own names? It’s anyone’s guess

The streets and the alleyways covered with rubble,
Grass and the forest to bury them all,
We see but a section, the slice of a bubble
Blown up by the eons to rise and to fall

Who were these creatures? They called themselves human,
Two legs and two arms, a head with a hat,
We know but the name of the city, it’s Boston
Or Beirut, or Beijing, or something like that

And we in our hives and our nests and our swarms
Our burrows and mounds will wish them good rest —
Though life must go on in its numerous forms
We honor the spirit no matter how dressed

Archaeological science is never
Precise as astronomy, physics, or math,
And yet we assert it’s a worthy endeavor
To honor the old of the ages of wrath

-- Pavel

Expanding the exclusion zone will have critical longterm repercussions, as Stoneleigh noted yesterday:

If the evacuation zone be enlarged to 80 km as recommended by the IAEA, it is estimated that they need to evacuate another 1.8 million people or making the total of 2 million residents out from the danger zone. Where are they going to put those 2 million refugees?

Another reason for the reluctance to widen the evacuation zone is due to logistics. The Tohoku expressway is a national expressway in Japan and links Tohoku region in the northernmost region in the Honshu Island with the Kanto region and Greater Tokyo.

So if the government decided to entomb the Fukushima reactors, it will need to cordoned off an area with a radius of 50km from Fukushima. Hence the cost of not able to move people and goods from Tokyo to Northern Honshu will be staggering . Moreover it will also prohibit traveling using train services as the main train track passes through the region in Sendai-Fukushima-Iwate and runs parallel to the coast.
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/More_tremors

By extending the exclusion zone they will be faced with closing the main north/south transportation corridor for a long time. What's a 'little' radiation when you need to move people and goods?

Keep moving folks. Nothing (much) to worry about here :-/

Yep, it is a fatal flaw. You cannot have it both ways. Either high class multi-level containment is required, or it is not. Which?

Future generations have a much better chance of dealing with a ton of spent fuel (containing about 95% uranium and maybe 2% various isotopes of plutonium) stored in a stainless steel drum that you could drive a tank over, than they have of coping with its fossil fuel equivalent- about two and a half MILLION tons of carbon dioxide spread throughout the biosphere, and a plume of toxic combustion products and metal-contaminated fly ash. For a start, they could use the plutonium and uranium in a fast reactor, leaving about a ton of fission products that will be at background radiation levels in about three hundred years

Instant grook material. How bureaucrats think:

When you can't control the situation,
try to control the information.

I meant comparable in terms of how the situation developed. There were certainly very different initiators (human mistakes vs. earthquake/tsunami), but I'm referring to the dropping of the water level, exposing the fuel rods, corrosion of Zr, significant melting (confirmed at TMI). I'm just honestly curious about why iodine (apparently) stayed more in solution at TMI. Although the reactor was very new, it should not take long for I-131 to build up to its steady state level. All retrospective reports seem to indicate surprise at the lack of I-131 released externally. I don't think that will be the case at Fukushima.

More generally, as the stakes increase for construction and operation of increasingly complicated energy infrastructure (nuclear plants, ultra-deepwater wells), there are things that become difficult to test. Listening to interviews with those involved in the TMI accident and aftermath (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/a_is_for_atom.html) it is clear that mistakes happened and flaws exposed that weren't even on their radar screens. If the response today is only to point fingers at the past and say "tsk tsk" for stupid mistakes, or for operating old reactors, and not stepping back and considering the possibility that a little less confidence in our cleverness might be warranted, then Fukushima becomes even more of a waste.

Don't rush to judge what my agenda is, if anything. The fact that so much energy can be released from a material from just tossing in a few neutrons, I think, is an amazing thing. And I would truly like to believe that there is a possible pathway by which it could be harnessed with much less risk and certainly without leaving a radioactive present for future civilizations to deal with. The problem is trying to find that pathway amidst all of the human failings that have caused the decisions made up until now to be less than ideal. Thomas Edison was able to invent the light bulb by failing a lot. But we can't do that with nuclear reactors, and that was my point.

If you designed it from the outset for remote operation for 100 years, what would you come up with?

At best, I think you might come up with a design that we should require you to run in 2-3 prototypes, far from population centers and aquifers, for 100 years, at your own expense, with full liability exposure, before applying for type acceptance.

I have visions of the buried robot crew rising zombie-like and seeking revenge!

I remember the tritium battery. Tritium is a beta-emitter: it throws off electrons. Just add a plate to collect them and a current source is made. The luminescent idea might be the one linked below. An array of nano-scale engines set to nodding like Japanese Shishi odoshi (鹿威し)could be fabricated with millions to a sheet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optoelectric_nuclear_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_piezoelectric_generator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi_odoshi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQQnrO1mfY

Silly... but point out other ways of thinking.

Written by gswright:
Between the initial construction cost and the cleanup I wonder if this project has made dollar one.

It has been immensely profitable for the executives of TEPCO who are allowed to keep their salaries and avoid a lengthy prison term.

Yes! This is a site where all kinds of stuff is dragged in and pondered through. Much more alive than the news.

My own thoughts as I read yours? Not mean, just what is stirred?

Parts of the storage-pond fuel-rods were blown up to a mile from the site. Plutonium and uranium and all their decay products are scattered about by this. Other radionuclides are found with strontium-90 reported today. It has been admitted that TEPCO and the IAEA withhold information they share among themselves from daily radionuclide assessment.

The nuclear fuel may well be melting and pooling. Several claims have been made that there is flow. Reactor #2 is not fully being cooled by water since its containment pressure is open to the atmosphere and its temperature is 300 degrees F. The radio-actives are being swept out by the cooling water. The evacuation area should probably be extended either as a radius, or as fingers inclusive of hot-spots.

There are nuclear reactions as well. One is the mystery of chlorine-38. Chlorine-37 is in the sea-water used for initial cooling. It would have to absorb a neutron to become chlorine-38. Neutrons can only come from a neutron-exchange or chain-reaction or criticality among the fuel elements in this case. So its existence implies parts of a core are still intermittently firing-up. Other nuclides support this. Iodine 131 continues to keep pace with cesium
in the #4 spent fuel pool. Its half-life is 8 days. It is made the reactor is running. This implies that parts of the fuel-pool load is firing-up, too.

The water is not being poured on the outside of the containment vessels. It is being run into them. It evaporates and is replaced, "feed-and-bleed", or it runs out. Ocean water was use in the beginning. A huge quantity of salt accumulated on the reactor fuel and control elements. "Pure" water was flowed in to try and dissolve the tons and tons of salt. The pressurized containment vessel of reactor #2 has a hole in the bottom of it. The water pours through, inadequately cools the #2 core, and carries away elements of its damaged fuel load. This is the intensely radioactive water that is stopping work. The water is fed in by fire-hoses attached to what remains of the plumbing plant. The pumper is trying to fill the spent fuel storage pools. The pools are cracked. The floor of #4 needs to be shored-up. Water was running through the containment vessels for a moment on emergency power. The earthquake cut the power to the plant. The tsunami wiped-away the generators, effectively. The tsunami destroyed the access roads leading to the facility. Action was delayed. All of the waters that flow through broken pools and vessels are collecting in the basements and service tunnels. The facility is slowly drowning. Radio-actives are streaming into the ground water.

There was a means to vent hydrogen gas to the outside of the
buildings. It was even, perhaps, hardened*. Some cascade of failures allowed the units to explode one-by-one. One heck of a demo that each of the four unique embodiments of the this particular nuclear fission power generating means was prone to unattractive failure modes.

There are simple, gravity-fed emergency cooling systems that were developed later for other designs. Quite different reactor proposals carry the fuel in the cooling media: it can be shunted into quenching storage.

The lessons will be lost in folly is my sad experience... In the Savanna-river plutonium processing facility there was a HEPA filter installation for plutonium dust that developed too much back-pressure and set off an annoying alarm. Now the official procedure is to replace the element. The unofficial remedy is to punch a broom-handle through it a bunch of times and get back to work.
Simple.

Google's cache:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:qXW0hnmmPeYJ:www.cdc.gov/NCEH/...

CDC's copy (down?)
http://www.cdc.gov/NCEH/radiation/savannah/factsheets/fact7.pdf

*Each unit is unique. I do not know what level of engineering update was in place in each one:
http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-...

I was going to say the same thing.

pouring large amounts of cool water on the outside of the containment vessel is a fairly effective method of cooling a reactor. I never would have guessed this, but, basically, as far as I understand it soaking the outside of the pressure vessels, first with high powered fire hoses, and later with concrete pumper trucks was what prevented massive fires and brought the site to a reasonably stable situation

Water is being injected into reactor pressure vessels with hoses attached to external fire extinguisher connection. None of the primary cooling systems are functional. No repairs have been attempted. Water leaks out as fast as it's being pumped in, because the pressure vessels are cracked. Fair to assume that melted corium spilled into the reactor basements. Spent fuel pools in #2 and #3 are inacessible. Fuel cladding at Fukushima is burning less intensely than Chernobyl but continually for over a month.

What part of this mess is under control?

The actions that had success are robust and dependent on simple technologies.

Pumps are pretty well understood.

You might want to inquire in the Drumbeat thread. Leanan, who posts Drumbeats, moderates there.

Could the thread you refer to be in the April 20 thread rather than the April 22 thread? If you click on the April 22 thread, a link to the most previous thread will appear at the top.

You can also use the search field at upper left.

Best,
Kate

I too was following a 'Drumbeat' a while back and wondered where it all went--only the most current post is on the TOD home page. As soon as a new 'Drumbeat' is posted the previous one goes to join its other older kin. When following open thread I find it easiest just to click the 'Drumbeat' button at the top of the TOD home page. All the recent 'Drumbeat' posts, which includes every currently active one, come right up on a single page. Leanan runs a pretty shipshape operation.

If we predict the performance of other technologies, automobiles, airliners, fossil, wind and solar energy systems, by their state of the art in 1965, we will get nonsensical, useless, inaccurate results.

Well, OTOH, if we were still operating 1965 automobiles, with random patches and fixes applied over the years...

What is the risk (probability times consequences) of Gen III reactor designs proposed for the future; designs with core catchers and passive safety systems that can contain a full meltdown?

Don't know. And neither do you.

Have the designers/sponsors/wannabe operators run a few full-size prototypes for complete life-cycles, unsubsidized and with full liability exposure, and get back to us with the results.

*How do these risks compare to the continued use of fossil fuel or dependence on intermittent unreliable undispatchable sources of energy?*

End the no legal liability status of nuclear power and I'd be willing to listen.

IMHO - and it really is humble - we have so far as a species not put in place a reliable over time and environmentally secure method of large scale power production.

3. More batteries in event of station blackout – 1988

Do you have a full listing of the battery backup capability for all US reactors in event of an SBO?

The section below comes from a piece titled Nuclear "Station Blackout" by David Lochbaum.

What are the odds of a SBO leading to disaster at a US reactor?

Higher than you might think.

For example, the NRC's report shows that the risk of an SBO at the Brunswick nuclear plant in North Carolina leading to reactor core damage is nearly twice the risk from all other causes combined. Brunswick's batteries are sized to last only 4 hours -- half the capacity of the batteries that failed to preserve safety at Fukushima.

And, as Figure 1 below shows, Brunswick is not so unusual. This plot shows that, for many US reactors, SBO accounts for a large fraction of risk that events would lead to core damage

Figure 1: This plot shows the core-damage frequency (CDF) due to SBO as a fraction of the core-damage frequency due to all causes ("Plant CDF"). The bars show how many of the US reactors had a value of this ratio falling in the range 0-5%, 5-10%, etc.

In light of Fukushima and because so much decay heat is produced in the first 24 hours I feel reguiring robust battery backup that would last a full 24 hours would be a prudent and relatively cheap safety measure to quickly implement.

Much beyond that time frame the heat sink capacity of the emergency cooling system on the older reactors has become saturated so other cooling systems would have to be brought on line. A full day does give a far better window for bringing emergency equipment to a trashed reactor site than the 4 hours emergency cooling battery run time some US reactors currently have.

Bill:
I can not find the article you've linked to:
-->"http://resources.nei.org/documents/japan/FactSheet_US_Nuclear_Plant_Enha" is how the address reads.
Looked on Google and on the nei site. Closest I find is:

http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-...

Do you have the link?

Which of these six are you saying would have made any difference at Fukushima?

Major Modifications and Upgrades to U.S. Boiling Water Reactors with Mark I Containment Systems.

1. Added spare diesel generator and portable water pump – 2002

2. Added containment vent – 1992

3. More batteries in event of station blackout – 1988

4. Strengthened torus – 1980

5. Control room reconfiguration – 1980

6. Back‐up safety systems separated – 1979

Fukushima had 13 diesel generators. Go for 14?
US batteries are expected to last four hours.
But the real question is - Which of those upgrades would help a plant with wiring that runs through utility tunnels filled with ocean water?

Yair...can anyone explain how the turbines on these reactors are serviced if the steam that drives them passes throught the core...that is to say...I had always assumed the turbine steam was heated by a heat exchanger system and would not be radio active.

Is there something I am missing?

Thanks

Time and again this has come up with the situation in Fukushima: people, experts, engineers, hackers and hams are all wondering why didn't they do this or that thing: have plans, procedures, people, equipment, systems - in place or acquired immediately to meet this and that need. As they said in some film "Don't second guess an operation from a f*king armchair"...

Well, I admit being guilty of this as well, having commented here about robots and stuff - being a 'solution-oriented' engineer as well as a ham myself - but I also work for a government bureaucracy and an institution that is very specific about procedure (military aviation). Nothing gets done if you haven't got a procedure for it. Or, wouldn't get done if we didn't have experienced veteran people in place who are able and willing to use their initiative when the need arises (and fortunately we still have a few around).

However with Fukushima there is also two further obstacles in place: the Japanese culture, and corporate culture. Neither of which helps in this situation. The Japanese are amazingly strict about procedure, custom and status in the organization. And corporate culture there just compounds this: in the end its not a question of technology or resources but about how humans function and their attitudes in the organization.

Reminds me of "human factors"-training or modern concepts in leadership which have been the key tools in our organization to enable people to work with complex systems (from operating or maintaining an aircraft to leading a squad or a military command). From what I understand, having visited Japan only a few times: all of these ideas pretty much fly in the face of what Japanese cultural thinking and especially corporate culture are. The Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down" is a very dangerous attitude if you have to work together in complex, new situation, where you have to be creative about possible solutions, assertive in voicing them and criticize current policy and procedure which might not be appropriate at all.

So I wouldn't be all that surprised if 1. they didn't even have a plan, other than periodic outsourced maintenance for the generators, for such an emergency repair. They had multiple redundancy in the units they operated. They did not believe they would loose all of them and the grid at the same time. 2. even if they did have the tools and cranes in place for the maintenance procedure, someone relatively high-up would have to be knowledgeable enough to check the damage, evaluate it, and give the right orders - to people who might not have any procedure to follow, or training to follow any if they did. 3. Most likely though, my belief is, even if they were able to repair any flooding and mechanical damage for the engine itself to turn - the sea water flooding the generator, racks of electronics, switching gear, everything - everything would need to be replaced - most of which wasn't designed or constructed for any kind of emergency repair - they would have to be completely rebuilt. The reactor buildings exploded soon after and I don't think they'll be able to do any major repairs or rebuilding around the site if the contamination gets too high...

- Ransu

Yair...Allen, I know where you are coming from and feel I am qualified to comment on this. I ran a diesel powerhouse for many years and have modified a V8 two stroke Jimmy to run on six cylinders to get a fishing trawler home.

While in theory it is possible to "bodgy up" a repair such as you describe I imagine it would be difficult on a modern electronic diesel.

Also, when they "put a leg out of bed" engines can bust the side out of the block and wreck the sump...difficult to maintain lubrication under those circumstances.

Cheers

Amazing, 4 hours with no reply.

C'mon, anti-nuclear folks, if you think a 50 foot wall is ridiculous, explain why it's impossible to know how high to build a seawall.

C'mon, pro-nuclear folks, if you think a a 50 foot wall is ridulouus, explain why it's a waste of money.

Personally, I'm pro-industry and pro-safety so it sounds like a great idea to me.

Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country.

The bottom line is that it’s a gamble: Governments are hoping to dodge a one-time disaster while they accumulate small gains over the long-term

And the argument is not about whether they should have insurance as I explained in above post.

No other industry has the potential to cause so much damage as to bankrupt a whole country. Nor is any other industry capable of excluding precious land area at the heart of our western civilization, making it unavailable for any use, for decades to come.

The hazard is too great for any responsible government to take. And Fukushima has yet again shown that the risk is not insignificant. And, most importantly, there are good off-the-shelf alternatives to nuclear power and the problem of energy is only a problem if we keep on insisting on status-quo on life-style.

This is not a case of devils bargain between nuclear and coal as many would like to frame the issue. And we can save a lot energy especially in the house-hold level (AC etc.) - and micro-generate and micro-store the rest. We can built smart super-grids to deal with the problems of intermittent energy sources. There are no technical reasons why we wouldn't - just strong political lobbies for the business interest - who play on the card of human intellectual laziness, crave for convenience and not having to change anything. A formidable card indeed.

- Ransu

Indeed, it smacks of preparation for crisis management

Could be.

all together now: throw up your hands

The estimated total release from Chernobyl was 5.2 million terabecquerels.

Since we have a near-order of magnitude upward revision of the later release rates from Fukushima Daiichi (when, as the post says, releases had allegedly slowed markedly) Do we also have a revision of the earlier official estimate of up to 10,000 terabecquerels per hour in mid-March?

Gosh. A few thousand terabecquerels per hour here, a few more there, a few hundred a day for months--you could get to a big number.

I'm sure the very professional, carefully-screened and -accredited reporters who are now permitted to attend the consolidated, carefully-scripted press conferences will keep us right up to date on all the details.

"So a teraBq is 27 curies?"

Correct. A curie is the radioactivity of 1 gram of radium. Radium has a half-life of 5300 years. You can use those facts to ratio things quickly.

For instance, Co-60 has a 5.3 year half life, so it only takes 1 mg of that to make a curie, and that amount would be trivial to inhale. Tc-99 has a half life of 211,000 years so 1 curie of that would be 50 grams, and inhaling that would take a really determined effort, and you would probably die of something else in the attempt.

Another useful rule is the curie-meter-rem rule. One curie generates 1 rem (or rad, more accurately, but for gamma radiation they are the same thing) at 1 meter. A very handy rule to keep in mind while on the job, when the job involves wearing a "canary suit."

The SI fanatics discarded the handy thumb-rules in the search for mathematical purity.

"Hot debris hampers reactor repairs"
"Radiation map shows hazards lurking around every corner" http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110425a1.html

and not a single coal plant shut down.

Ah, thanks, Rootless. I've had a grumpy day, but that was a nice nightcap.

It will be interesting to see what others think. WRT to your question, I would say that Taleb's (truly rather wonderful) piece suggests the rallying cry: "Stochastic tinkerers of the world, unite (locally)!"

Further, the reasoning he elucidates ought to make it easier for us to locate all of the uber-complex, centralized, error-intolerant approaches to the energy problem in the area of the map labeled, "Here be dragons."

I would prefer a plan of continous water cooling while sorting the debrie on the site and in the reactor buildings while continue to approach and survey the damaged reactor cores. And then as soon as possible implement resurculating cooling that do not mobilise radioactive elements and after that start moving used fuel off site.

Massive efforts could be made with surveying the spread of radioactivity and cleaning up the less active parts of the site and building work and accomondation areas for the next steps in the securing and clean up effort. Such efforts are unlikely to go wrong and makes the hard jobs easier.

Then continue with this untill he last scraps of corium is in a container about a decade later and the effort turns into an ordinary dismantling plus research into corium wastehandling.

No whiz bang violent efforts or odd ideas for cocooning while it slowly is stabilizing, such could make the situation worse.

What about lead as was used at Chernobyl?

Silver would be a good choice as its fumes would not be toxic. Would silver work as well as lead in shielding radiation and quenching the heat?

Hmmm. Well, there are two flavours of post it seems (to me): info-squirrel stuff (adding new facts and urls to the cache to be considered) and op-ed stuff (drawing conclusions and policy recommendations from the fact-cache).

The op-ed part is what I suppose we would call the "debate" in the thread, and I'm assuming that was what MG wished summarised. Obviously there's controversy and some polarisation :-)

If I had to summarise -- and of course I'm doing so from my particular "camp" in the debate so my summary is as biased as anyone else's would be -- there is strong agreement that we (industrial humanity) face a predicament, that our predicament is of historic proportions (not just a passing annoyance), that our predicament has to do with the exhaustion of fossil fuel resources *plus* their environmental impacts, and that the solutions we seek and decisions we make are extremely important. Most people here share, I think, a common belief that large numbers of human lives (and quality of life) are at stake.

After establishing this common ground, opinion starts to diverge widely. I would say that we have disagreements based on

belief vs nonbelief in perpetual economic (and/or population) growth (Cornucopians vs Limitarians);
belief vs nonbelief in GDP as a meaningful measuring tool for life quality;
trust vs mistrust of the nuclear industry as a social actor;
optimism vs pessimism re human capacity to manage increasingly complex systems;
enthusiasm vs skepticism for large centralised energy generation;
optimism vs pessimism wrt the capacity of societies to conserve, reduce waste, and otherwise reduce energy demand while maintaining adequate life quality;
conflicting models of what "adequate" life quality really means, i.e. b/nb that increased energy consumption inevitably equals greater happiness;
satisfaction vs dissatisfaction with the current state of "globalisation";
personal experience vs non-experience of living with lower energy consumption/expectations;
confidence vs lack of confidence in the capacity and competence of ordinary people to manage the provision of energy and other amenities in their own communities (i.e. enthusiasm for credentialled experts and centralised control vs enthusiasm for generalists, devolution, and small-scale autarky);
optimism vs pessimism wrt the longevity of present day industrial civilisation (is it just Peak Oil, or Peak Everything that we are facing?) and continuance of govermental/business/financial norms;
urban vs rural perspectives;
loyalty vs disloyalty to technomanagerial standards, belief-systems, culture;
insider vs outsider perspectives on nuclear technology;
industrial vs biotic priorities, metaphors and models...

... this last perhaps touching on quite a fundamental disagreement over what are the most important amenities or resources on which human life, happiness, and cultural continuity really depend. For some the answer to this question is Energy, mostly in the form of Electricity. Others would say that we can't eat electricity, and all the ways in which we try to generate it in industrial quantity are chipping away at the bases of our biotic existence (things like water, viable topsoil, food, fish, trees).

We are all arguing for the survival of humanity and some kind of cultural continuity (i.e. avoiding a crash, or softening the crash if it is inevitable). We disagree about the proximate and ultimate threats, and the most effective/robust survival tactics. The stakes are high, and resources are limited, which makes debate passionate and urgent.

Here's a link that works (Bloomberg has a terrible habit of creating a new URL every time they update the story, and drop the previous link). This one works for now:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/japan-s-terrifying-day-saw-unpr...

It's a compelling account, spliced together from multiple first person reports, and some commentary thrown in from by various armchair observers. I really wish they would have made the FULL first-person transcripts available from these important accounts. I'm guessing Bloomberg got a press release with multiple edited accounts provided by TEPCO.

I was hoping for some detailed information on the status of the cooling systems in the moment after the reactor SCRAM and before the tsunami hit, but didn't find anything. Especially since one Japanese engineering expert, looking at reactor data, has suggested there may have been earthquake damage to cooling systems before the tsunami hit. Workers were sent out to look for earthquake damage, instrument panels were broken down for 1 and 2 (no explanation given), and it doesn't seem they have any reports from anyone in the control room (perhaps considered too sensitive)? I'm glad someone has decided to collect these stories. We had months of it following the Deepwater Horizon accident. I hope there is much more in the future, and in particular from individuals providing a record of events under oath before their memory becomes fuzzy and mixed with secondary accounts and post-accident reflections and synthesis.

That heat flux is due to natural decay, which is small given the long half life for U-235. That is very different (i.e. much smaller) than the flux possible by concentrating it and slowing down the neutrons such that it fissions at a rather high rate.

Why do we have to mine (in the way you think) new uranium? We can reprocess existing stocks of spent fuel; the chinese have a pilot plant that mines coal ash for uranium; in sitru liquid mining; Gen IV reactors can use thorium (3.5 times more plentiful than uranium) which can breed it's own fuel and/or can, in the chloride version, us U238/DU; IFRs can use U238; and so one. Hard rock mining may become a lot less necessary.

Rickover after that statement clarified his statement.

"I do not have regrets. I believe I helped preserve the peace for this country. Why should I regret that? What I accomplished was approved by Congress — which represents our people. All of you live in safety from domestic enemies because of security from the police. Likewise, you live in safety from foreign enemies because our military keeps them from attacking us. Nuclear technology was already under development in other countries. My assigned responsibility was to develop our nuclear navy. I managed to accomplish this."[32]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover

Apparently … the rebuttal from the pro-nuclear crowd is that Rickover was a disgruntled employee after getting fired "by a vengeful SecNav," and his critical comments only make up a "few sentences" in a 205 page congressional report. The bulk of his testimony is about the "economic necessity" of nuclear ("we will need nuclear power because we are exhausting our non-renewable energy sources"), and his specific critical comments about nuclear are "philosophical" and not policy recommendations. They also suggest Rickover may have been deluded about the inherent risks of radiation ("that radioactivity is more dangerous than 'ordinary' kinds of hazardous materials"). Aren't the contortions of the pro-nuclear evangelical crowd a bit awkward to watch: Rickover "achieved more than almost anyone else who has ever walked on the planet" (a secular Jesus in a peacoat unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and preaching the gospel of how to bring the atom under human control … and later crucified on the cross by Congress). The lessons I take from this testimony: let's look at the economics and find another way to produce our energy (one not so heavily reliant on a non-renewable resource or so focused on uninhibited and carnavalesque growth, boundless productivity, and unattenuated environmental consequences).

"RT" Seriously? These are the folks that take seriously every conspiracy nut under the sun.