It's only been 4 years. Finally they can maybe see inside that hell-hole.

Our problem is some of what they are looking for has made it clear across the Pacific, indeed, around the world. What a mess.

Fucking EVERYWHERE!

Look at this shit!

Here in LA, we spend a good portion of every morning checking the radiation levels before we take off our containment suits.

Radiation from Fukushima reactor detected off Vancouver Island [View all]
Source: The Canadian Press

Dirk Meissner, The Canadian Press
Published Monday, April 6, 2015 7:32PM EDT

VICTORIA -- Radiation from the leaking Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor has been detected on the shores of Vancouver Island, four years after a deadly earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed 16,000 people.

University of Victoria chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen said Monday that it's the first time radiation has been found on the shorelines of North America since the quake and tsunami ravaged the Japanese north coast and disabled the nuclear reactor.

Low levels of the radioactive isotope Cesium-134, which scientists say can only come from Fukushima, were found in waters collected on Feb. 19 off a dock at Ucluelet, B.C., about 315 kilometres west of Victoria, said Cullen.

Last November, the first sample containing detectable radioactivity from Fukushima was discovered 150 kilometres off the coast of northern California.

Over the past 15 months, scientists and citizen volunteers have been collecting water samples at more than 60 sites along the Canadian and U.S. west coasts and in Hawaii as they've looked for traces of radioactive isotopes from Japan.

"This is the first sample that's been collected in North America with this contaminated plume of sea water, which we've seen offshore, but it's the first time we've actually seen it at the shoreline," Cullen said.

Read more: http://www.cp24.com/news/radiation-from-fukushima-reactor-detected-off-vancouver-island-1.2314613

DU link here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1060409

Per your own link:

One would think that someone as smart as Cullen would not utter such a gawd damn stupid statement, eh?

I mean, everyone knows one does not ingest or even swim in cesium when getting a dental x-ray.

What kind of a scientist is this Cullen fellow and why would anyone repeat such a dumb ass statement as if it had any bearing?

An x-ray dose passes through a body. It has no residency. An ingested cesium atom resides in a body for up to 70 days.

What Cullen is suggesting is crap science. I wonder who signs his paycheck?

Gee... I could have sworn that we saw video of the inside of this same PCV back in October of 2012 (and I think in January of 2012 for unit 2)

Our problem is some of what they are looking for has made it clear across the Pacific, indeed, around the world. What a mess.

Some? What's your best guess for how much of it is missing? Feel free to take the highest release estimate from any source at all.

Too much. Way too much.

First we saw the explosion of #1. Wow.

We know that water has been running through what's left and that water is going into the Pacific, carrying corium into the ocean.

In another 20 years, if even then, when they can get to the corium and extract it, they can weigh what they extracted and compare it with what was in there before the explosion and then we will know how much snooper and zappaman have been scraping up.

Do them a favor and tell them, like I have, to not eat it, ok? They may listen to you?

How much? Tons? Grams? There are lots of estimates for how much was released... pick one.

We know that water has been running through what's left and that water is going into the Pacific, carrying corium into the ocean.

Corium is not particularly water soluble. Try again.

From what I have read, a hydrogen explosion is caused by water being overheated and the water molecule gassing into hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

The excess heat came from the fuel rods overheating, because the rods were not being kept cool. So what I think is that the fuel rods got very hot.

Those fuel rods contain quite an assortment of fission materials. Now overheated, many of the fuel rod materials, like the water, gassed. The explosion was an open air explosion and allowed the gasses to escape to the atmosphere.

So.... yes.

You've been corrected on that in the past... and the only place that I've read it appeared to come from your imagination.



Please... let's not pretend again that anything you have to say has anything to do with "the science" if you're going to miss things as straightforward as "water molecule gassing into hydrogen and oxygen atoms" when it "overheats".

When water boils... it's still water. It doesn't break into hydrogen and oxygen. You can get it to shed electrons and shift to a plasma state at about 12,000 degrees Kelvin... but no reactor can come close to that (the uranium and plutonium would have been gases long before that point).

But goodness... wouldn't it be awesome if that were true? The hydrogen economy would have been here a century ago.

You actually sit there and tell me I do not know science and then go on to disclaim elemental thermodynamics?

I figured your post dismissing electrolysis would have been deleted by now, in shame, after these many hours, but no, it is still there.

Incredible, meaning: you have no credibility.

That's hilarious. You never fail to entertain.

Yes... I sit here and tell you that my kids knew more science by 4th grade. I swear... every time I start to think that you might actually be anti-nuclear, you go and make the "pro-nuclear sock puppet just here to make anti-nukes look ignorant" theory... very hard to refute.

Hint. Water electrolysis uses an electrical current with specific electrodes... not heat. That has nothing to do with reactor meltdowns.

And you think the water molecule lasts forever even with a nuclear power plant meltdown. Bwahahahaha

Well, at least you finally admit the cores had a meltdown.

And we know that #1 had a hydrogen explosion. So were did all that hydrogen come from?

Heated sufficiently zirconium burns like magnesium with sufficient energy to extract oxygen atoms from water to form an oxide or hydroxide, leaving excess hydrogen.

Typical fuel rods are pelleted U in a zirconium sheath.

Key: "...extract oxygen atoms from water..." leaving hydrogen atoms.

I am sure baggins will be back in a few to plead his ign....??

Your statement was "water being overheated and the water molecule gassing into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. "

That's simply nonsense.

And you think the water molecule lasts forever even with a nuclear power plant meltdown. Bwahahahaha

No... I think that it remains water when it "overheats" and "gases". BTW... both scientists and 4th graders call that "boiling".

And we know that #1 had a hydrogen explosion. So were did all that hydrogen come from?

We know that there were multiple hydrogen explosions (including the ones that you claimed were nuclear). Oxidation of the zircaloy was where it came from. Just like you've been told for years now while trying to pretend that it wasn't hydrogen explosions... but nuclear explosions (including in the unit 4 fuel pool).

You doubling down like that. I've come to expect it from you, tho.

#1 reactor was a hydrogen explosion caused by the meltdown producing sufficient heat to break the h2o molecule into its component parts. It is called decomposing. We could tell it was hydrogen because the cloud from the explosion was clear; very little smoke.

#3 had a mushroom type cloud with lots of smoke showing burning solids. The solids were from core material. Indeed, much core material was found around Japan and even some in Europe. The explosion there came directly from the nuclear core.

#4, it remains to be seen just what happened there. Have not seen a video of that destruction and there are a few different reports as to what did occur. One report was the walls just melted away.

An explosion of any sort in a nuclear reactor is always a bad thing. The fact that it was not a nuclear detonation very slightly improves it. Chernobyl was not a nuclear detonation per se, but it was a very bad thing.

There is a thing about radiation and in particular cesium you need to get. It has probably been explained before, but I will give it a whack.

E=MC^2. (Energy = Mass * Speed of light (squared))

What this means to a cesium atom (or any other atom, regardless of source):

Radiation is energy.

For a cesium atom to release energy (read radiation), it must lose mass. Typically in nuclear chemistry this happens when fission occurs. Typically fission breaks an atom into two pieces, sometimes one piece is smaller than an atom, but often two different atoms result. Neither of the two new atoms are cesium, and when you add all the split parts up, there is slightly less mass than there was before fission. This is where the energy in the radiation photon of say a gamma ray comes from. If you can determine the missing mass, you can then calculate the energy of the photon produced using the above formula and determine the wavelength of the radiation produced.

This is called nuclear decay. For any single atom of any species, decay happens once. An atom of a radioactive isotope does not sit there glowing and spewing radiation, it decays, once. Emitting radiation requires a loss of mass and this happens only during decay. After decay, it is no longer cesium. Where the danger of cesium 137 comes in is the short half life, the short half life means that cesium 137, in even very small quantity, say a million atoms or so, will produce a lot of individual nuclear decays in a short time.

It is important to remember how small atoms are. A million cesium 137 atoms will have a mass of 1.37 * 10^-15 grams, a tiny fraction of a picogram. (about a millionth).

Being exposed to ionizing radiation is not a good thing. It does however happen all the time and every day. Our bodies have developed repair mechanisms to deal with it. If they hadn't our lifespans would be far shorter.

That is the kind of info that everyone can use.

Here's one way I've been thinking about it:

With a 30 year half-life of cesium 137

And with 60 non-decayed cesium137 atoms in your body

In 30 years 30 atoms would have decayed... and, IIRC, turn into barium?

In another 30 years, another 15 atoms would decay, leaving 15 un-decayed.


The question which comes to mind is that energy is constant and so the energy from the decay remains in your body until it escapes. Also the mass that escaped in the decay of the atom is still in the body until eliminated. In fact, especially with an alpha mass the damage can be considerable.

Plus, cesium is a bit toxic while residing in a body.

All together, the demands on an immune system from cesium137 can be significant. EPA even says so.

So it is out of your body the very instant it is produced. The interesting bit is whether it strikes something on the way out.

Energy is not a constant. As explained previously, an atom functions on the level of chemistry all the time, but releases radiation once, in an instant during decay. So but for all except an single instant in say 30 years, the individual atom is radiologically inert.

Now as hard as it is to believe, on the atomic scale, your body is only very slightly different than empty space. The chances of gamma ray hitting something are quite low. Because alpha particles are a bit bigger, the chances they will hit something are larger.

An atom of cesium is toxic to one molecule of something in your body. Odds are +/- 100% that you have at least one of every type of atom in your body somewhere. In that 137 grams (roughly 0.25 pounds) of cesium 137 contains 6.022 * 10^22 atoms and in that most of the atoms composing your body are lighter than cesium, your body probably contains something between 1 * 10^25 to 1*10^26 atoms (bunches and bunches). When you look through that many atoms, pretty much everything is going to be there every time.

While the chances of hitting something are quite low, even lower are the chances of hitting something that matters. Much of your body is water and hitting a water molecule might ionize it, but a considerable portion of the water in your body is ionized all the time (which is why it has a pH). Ionizing an additional molecule would not be detectable.

If it happens instead to hit a bit of DNA or RNA, depending on where, a cancer could arise. Most defects in DNA will kill the cell, but some cause cancer. This is a very low probability event, but given exposure to enough radiation, it will happen.

In this case, getting it right would mean that you wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that the explosion occured within the reactor vessel.

With your earlier theory, the burning zirconium is creating both hydrogen and oxygen... which could create an explosive mix within the reactor vessel.

In reality, ziroconium (or in this case zircalloy) does not burn in water without the prexistence of oxygen. The hydrogen is created by the oxydation of the zircalloy in water. The chemical reaction strips oxygen from the water (but that oxygen is now bound to the new "rust" molecule) and frees the hydrogen. The key difference being that there still isn't any free oxygen in the reactor vessel to form an explosive mix. The hydrogen has to escape the RPV and mix with the oxygen outside of the reactor (in this case... within the reactor building).

Note (as mentioned to RE in the prior post) that if the explosion was from within the reactor, it would have to blow the lid off of the RPV and the concrete cap. The cap is clearly still in place, so we would now know for certain that this didn't happen (if we didn't already agree that BWR cores can't explode).

will turn out to be amazing.

Arguably far too little, far too late, but amazing none the less.

...we are going to need lots more of it.

The symptoms appear to be:

It isn't "dead"... it just isn't moving.
The camera is working
The temperature and radiation sensors are working fine
It's still transmitting
When they tug on the cable, it appears to be stuck.

Let me guess... something in those symptoms still translates to you as "radiation killed it"... right?

They had four years to get it ready, yet the snake choked, FBaggins. Why, we don't know because the radiation fries the circuitry of all the other robots they've sent in.

I don't know where some people got the notion that humans can't enter the buildings and even the robots die (or my favorite, "melt&quot when they go in... but it simply isn't true. There have been plenty of trip into the buildings by humans (including installing sensors into a couple of the primary containments)... and robots have been used extensively. I'm aware of one robot that stopped working early on, but for heaven's sake... you can go to youtube and watch scores of hours of video content sent back from those robots (often multiple robots at a time so that they film each other).

radiation fries the circuitry of all the other robots they've sent in

I "get" why you might ignore inconvenient questions that would require you to admit your prior errors... but why on earth would you keep repeating nonsense like this that's so obviously wrong?

The key mission is the one scheduled for late in the year where a similar (but "amphibious&quot robot is supposed to try to get down to the bottom of the primary containment to view the state/location of the corium (this mission only goes down to a landing above that because that's where the pipes enter the containment). I'm sure they wanted to look around and gather as much data as possible, but the primary mission was to confirm that the robot could get in... and that there was a clear path to follow further down that wasn't blocked or damaged.

They actually had two robot missions scheduled for this month to come in from opposite sides of the reactor, hoping to find at least one clear path to lower the next model to the "basement". They're going to delay the second mission (scheduled for today IIRC) while they check to see if there are any lesson learned that can be avoided from this first mission... but the first robot already found a clear path for the next model to take before it stopped moving. So the primary mission was already accomplished.

The design for these robots limted the amount of electronics, but the ones that are there (digital camera, communication, radiation/temperature sensors, etc) are reportedly still working fine.

There's no way to know for certain, but this appears to be a simple case of a remote-controlled vehicle getting its cable stuck, or driving somewhere that it couldn't back out of. They've been pulling on the cable and it won't budge...which obviously isn't a common radiation impact.

This would be interesting to talk to him about. He was a physicist and worked with nuclear material (as well as an inventor). Unfortunately I never took much interest in the physical sciences, so it was hard to understand.