A typhoon that swept through Japan has caused more radioactive leaks at the troubled Fukushima plant.

Workers there say they have detected high levels of radiation in a ditch leading to the Pacific Ocean and suspect heavy rains lifted contaminated soil.

At least 18 people have died after Typhoon Wipha destroyed homes and triggered mudslides. Dozens are still missing.

The worst hit area was was Izu Oshima island, about 120 kilometres south of Tokyo.

More: http://www.euronews.com/2013/10/17/japan-typhoon-wipha-causes-more-nuclear-contamination-at-fukishima/

Has been since the earthquake and tsunami. An unprecedented disaster, at that. Nobody knows exactly how to deal with it, either. The fact is that Fukushima is a disaster with no end in sight.

The upcoming attempts to remove fuel rod assemblies is dangerous, without question. It is also essential to get them moved to a safer location, since another major earthquake could occur at any time and turn the entire mess into something even more impossible to deal with in a good way.

I'm hopeful that they will be able to remove the assemblies. A test of their process was successful in removing two of them. Additional planning has taken place, and they'll start trying to remove the rest. Could things go wrong? Certainly. Will things go wrong? There's a good probability that they will. Will removing the fuel rod assemblies be successful? We'd better hope so, because the alternative isn't a possibility I like to think about.

This operation needs to take place, and it needs to take place before the next major earthquake. I hope it's successful, but many other issues will remain. It's all evidence of my standard statement:

Nuclear power generation is not safe. It cannot be made to be safe.

We need to take heed of that simple statement, but we also need to do whatever is possible to mitigate Fukushima and reduce the risk of further complications, and we need to do that as soon as possible.

I wasn't aware they did a test removal.
Do you have any additional info on that or an article detailing the process? Thanks!

There's some information in the body of this article:

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/3987

The test removal was done in 2012, as part of the planning process for the current planned operation.

I remember Gundersen saying extracting the fuel rods was like trying to pull a single cigarette up and out of a crushed, damaged and bent cigarette pack without damaging it or the rest in the pack. Computers used to do it but everything was damaged in the #4 SFP. Now it has to be done manually with exacting precision and tolerances.
Holy crap, this is scary beyond words...

That would eliminate any chance of removing the fuel. And that could happen at any time. That is why they need to try to remove the fuel rod assemblies, as dangerous as that seems. The more that are removed, the less the risk if there is another major earthquake, and there will be, at some point.

Gundersen is very good at pointing out the problems, but not so good at finding actual solutions. That's my opinion, and he's not directly involved in this process, but is commenting from a perspective that is not first hand involvement with the process.

Last edited Mon Oct 21, 2013, 01:00 AM - Edit history (3)

was a suicide mission for those who worked directly on the fire or flew overhead and poured concrete over it.

It's still a no man's land there. Did it work adequately in the long term?

IDK. But it was suggested for Fukushima as an immediate solution and ignored, AFAIK.

Fire containment

...Twenty years after the disaster, he said the firefighters from the Fire Station No. 2 were aware of the risks.

Of course we knew! If we'd followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation – our duty. We were like kamikaze...[49]

The fire was extinguished by a combined effort of helicopters dropping over 5,000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and neutron-absorbing boron onto the burning reactor and injection of liquid nitrogen. The Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko captured film footage of an Mi-8 helicopter as its main rotor collided with a nearby construction crane cable, causing the helicopter to fall near the damaged reactor building and killing its four-man crew.[50] It is now known that virtually none of the neutron absorbers reached the core.[51]

From eyewitness accounts of the firefighters involved before they died (as reported on the CBC television series Witness), one described his experience of the radiation as "tasting like metal", and feeling a sensation similar to that of pins and needles all over his face. (This is similar to the description given by Louis Slotin, a Manhattan Project physicist who died days after a fatal radiation overdose from a criticality accident.)[52]

The explosion and fire threw hot particles of the nuclear fuel and also far more dangerous fission products, radioactive isotopes such as caesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90 and other radionuclides, into the air: the residents of the surrounding area observed the radioactive cloud on the night of the explosion.

Equipment assembled included remote-controlled bulldozers and robot-carts that could detect radioactivity and carry hot debris. Valery Legasov (first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow) said, in 1987, "But we learned that robots are not the great remedy for everything. Where there was very high radiation, the robot ceased to be a robot—the electronics quit working."[53]

Evacuation developments

The nearby city of Pripyat was not immediately evacuated after the incident. The townspeople went about their usual business, completely oblivious to what had just happened. However, within a few hours of the explosion, dozens of people fell ill. Later, they reported severe headaches and metallic tastes in their mouths, along with uncontrollable fits of coughing and vomiting...[56]

Flora and Fauna



After the disaster, four square kilometers of pine forest directly downwind of the reactor turned reddish-brown and died, earning the name of the "Red Forest".[120]

And the reports for fauna are predictably horrible. I have not heard about anything like this in Japan. There were some stories of older men volunteering to work in the disaster area. They know they will die, but they, too, like the Russian firefighters, see it as their moral obligation to future generations. I've read that every human being who was breathing at that time in the world, is carrying those isotopes and radionuclides inside their bodies now.

I'm wondering if it's too late, since it's gotten into the groundwater; and I don't like their idea of dumping any of it in the ocean, IMO they have no right to do so. Here is what happened less than thirty years ago in Russia, not all the areas exposed:

Radiation Area



Groundwater was not badly affected by the Chernobyl accident since radionuclides with short half-lives decayed away long before they could affect groundwater supplies, and longer-lived radionuclides such as radiocaesium and radiostrontium were adsorbed to surface soils before they could transfer to groundwater.[119] However, significant transfers of radionuclides to groundwater have occurred from waste disposal sites in the 30 km (19 mi) exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Although there is a potential for transfer of radionuclides from these disposal sites off-site (i.e. out of the 30 km (19 mi) exclusion zone), the IAEA Chernobyl Report[119] argues that this is not significant in comparison to current levels of washout of surface-deposited radioactivity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl

There are probably difference to the technological correct crowd in these two disasters. I don't care. This is and was stupidity, one of the worst ideas from the Cold War era.

Just my humble opinion.

Supposedly, they have shored it up..yeah right.
It is made much worse now by the liquefaction of the ground the reactors are sitting on. The latest typhoon only added to the mess with the ground water saturating and destabilizing everything.
Question for anyone: Why is the spent fuel pool suspended 3 stories up off the ground?

ground at all. That was a design element, and a bad one. But, that's the situation at hand.

It's easy to look at what should not have been done. If we look at that, we'd say that these plants should not have been built where they were built at all. And yet, they were built where they are.

At this point, this is purely a mitigation effort for a disaster of enormous proportions. At every stage, it will be highly dangerous and prone to failure.

We're looking back and bemoaning what was done. That's not useful in mitigating what is happening now. It's also easy to do. What's not easy to do is fixing things after the disaster. Not easy at all.

if this removal goes wrong, the entire site may have to be evacuated forever..as in FOREVER? (does not bode well for the entire country of Japan or the world for that matter)
Also, haven't the "off the scale",mind-blowing radiation levels taken its toll on everything, including compromising the integrity of any metal objects? Cranes, dozers, construction equipment, beams and the reactor buildings themselves have turned brittle.

are saying. I know that if the Reactor 4 building collapses with the fuel rod assemblies still in place, such an outcome is certainly likely.

I'm sure they will have difficulties in extracting some of the assemblies. Things are all out of plumb and there has been some damage, too, from what I understand. They may not actually be able to remove all of the assemblies with this current effort. I would think that they will proceed by removing those that will be relatively easy to extract first. Once those are removed, they'll probably turn to the job of removing the others, hopefully in order of difficulty, removing the easiest ones first.

Think of the children's game of Pick up Sticks. That's a little like what they're facing. If they remove assemblies in the correct order, they may have great success. If they try to remove the most difficult ones first, they could be in trouble. I have no doubt that they see that as clearly as I do, and expect that to be their plan.

Not everyone commenting on the current situation at Fukushima is qualified to do so. I'm not qualified either, but I know that there are people on the scene who have been planning this operation for months. There's no standard procedure. This is a one-time event and everything has to be planned based on the actual conditions. I'm not paying any attention to anyone who has not been on-site and studied the situation at first hand, nor am I paying any attention to anyone who is not a structural engineer of some kind. Their comments are not useful. I'm relying on expertise that is directly involved in the process. I hope they get it right.

and lying about it for years now?

On one hand, in some sense that area is already evacuated "forever" in that it will not be fully usable for productive purposes again during the lifetime of anyone around today. And that's if nothing more goes wrong.

But the "off the scale" radiation levels aren't remotely large enough to have a measureable effect on the structural integrity of engineering materials like steel and concrete. The precariousness of the structures derives entirely from earthquake and flood damage. Levels of exposure that are bad for the health of humans - which is what most monitoring instruments are concerned with - won't make materials brittle.

The problem is not that ongoing radiation is weakening structures - it flat-out is not. The problem is that structures are already compromised, and further damage might result in further releases.

It should be noted that as bad as it may be that there's a lot of potentially dangerous material stored at those reactors, our failure in the US to deal realistically with existing reactor waste means our own spent fuel pools are packed with far more of the stuff per reactor. A big lesson for us is that, regardless of the future of fission in the US, we need to get serious about doing something more intelligent with our waste. For all the opposition it sparked, we'd be far better off with the waste in Yucca Mountain than distributed at reactor sites across the country. We're currently doing pretty much the stupidest thing imaginable short of, say, dumping it all into the nearest river.

Respectfully though, I did find this article about radiation and metal:

http://2012indyinfo.com/2011/05/09/accelerated-aging-effects-of-radiation-on-materials-at-fukushima-daiichi-lucas-whitefield-hixson/

A Google search of "radiation damage to metal" turns up over 6,000,000 hits.

Yes, there is such a thing as irradiation damage to metals. But I took your question to be mainly about the structural integrity of the buildings housing the spent fuel pools and reactor vessels. The kind of radiation damage your references talk about occur at the radiation fluxes characteristic of operating reactors, which are many, many orders of magnitude greater than what would be experienced by structural elements of the Fukushima reactors. A lot of the links are broken on the page you provided, but if you look at the graphs that are on that page, two things stand out. First, the yield and tensile strength changes are on the order of a few percent even at elevated temperatures. The materials making up the building are all at temperatures well to the left of the beginning of those graphs (which start at 100 C, the boiling point of water). Second, the irradiation condition is a neutron fluence of about 10^18 per square centimeter. Under present conditions, neutron fluence is going to be vastly smaller. A quick search reveals one estimate, based on observations of sulfur-35, of under 10^12 neutrons/m^2 through March 20, 2011, which amounts to 10^8 neutrons/cm^2, or less than one-billionth the level used in the tests whose data your source cites. Since the main source of neutrons would be active fission, the levels they measured represent most of the exposure one would expect outside the reactor vessels.

The numbers do matter a lot! And what they mainly show is that when it comes to structural elements, which will have been designed with safety margins vastly greater than a few percent, the effect of radiation released from the meltdowns should be very small when it comes to bulk mechanical properties. The real structural damage issue is the effect of the earthquake. The bigger worry in my mind is the integrity of "spent" fuel rods during the removal process from the pools. Some radiation damage may have happened to those, but the bigger effects would come from mechanical stresses and overheating.

Thank you.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons plus man's foolish, ill-advised nuclear Frankenstein...all the ingredients to make the catastrophic "Perfect Storm".

This is WHY everyone was scared of meltdowns....

why isnt this one of those moments where we drop everything and protect life?

Japan originally said they can handle it themselves.
That didn't work out so well.
Now it is a FUBAR and an unprecedented crime against the entire planet.

in Friday Harbor, San Juan Island.
I'm concerned they aren't releasing readings for the public anymore and they are NOT testing seafood.
Have to wonder why not? I may call Cantwell and Murray and inquire.
I'm really worried too.

You won't get any real radiation data from the govt not at this point. After all on a practical basis, nothing can be done with whats happened at this point.

Here:
http://www.calibex.com/Geiger-Counter-Sale/zzcalibex1zB1z0--search-html?nxtg=514f0a500507-830CBBEB9058A2E5

playing down the seriousness of all this. Pathetic to say the least.

You're wrong. I'm not downplaying the seriousness at all. In fact, Fukusima scares the crap out of me. I'm pointing out that there are even more serious possibilities down the road if the fuel rod assemblies are not removed, and soon. That's a job that absolutely must be done, to prevent something so awful it's hard to imagine.

Can TEPCO do it? I do not know, but they are poised to start attempting the job. I know of nobody else who is ready or capable of the job. Will they be successful? I sure hope so, but I have no way of knowing. I'm not there. I'm not an engineer. I can't even see what they're attempting from any perspective that would let me come to any sort of conclusion.

I know that they successfully removed a couple of assemblies in a test. I'm hopeful that they'll remove the rest.

I can't name names but its not you I'm talking about.

and the Pacific Ocean is SO big that dilution is the solution...riding in an airliner is the same...natural radiation...nuke ground testing/air blasts didn't hurt us, no one has died yet..blah, blah, blah...
I'm surprised they are not here already chiming in.

Its just a hand full but they're usually here to make a lot of noise in threads like this one. One particular poster is pretty nasty too the way they talk down to us because we aren't all nuclear physicist and how what we say means nothing because of that. I don't have to know everything about splitting atoms to know it is a dangerous process that is fraught with all kinds of ways to trip the process up especially when something happens out of the planned. Sometimes it all gets under my skin but most times I just laugh at them. Knowing full well if they'd be given a chance to go help with the process of containing this they'd likely run the other way faster than you or I would.

Of all the ways to die Radiation Poisoning is not the way I want to go, I do know that for a fact.

TEPCO has shown, if anything, that it is not capable of doing the job.

But TEPCO has lied and covered up the problem for years now, and refuses international help.

TEPCO is doing this. You'd better hope they succeed. That, my friend, is the bottom line. Because, if they don't, the whole thing may collapse on itself, creating a disaster truly worth crying doom and gloom over. Truly.

"They're just venting a little steam."
"These plants are perfectly safe because they have redundant Back Up Systems."

Many of them were screen names that were obviously marketeers for the Atomic Industry,
but many easily influenced DUers were sucked in by their
"because I KNOW Science and YOU are just an ignorant Luddite" conservative bullshit.
I have yet to see a single Mea Culpa from them for propagating that bullshit at DU, or swarm attacking DUers who expressed their valid and genuine concerns.


[font size=4]The Lesson of Fukushima[/font]
[font size=3]As long as we use Nuclear Energy,
Fukushima and WORSE
will happen again,

...and again,

and AGAIN![/font]

Man has never produced a Fail Safe machine.

Hey Japan? Getting desperate now that you have no fucking clue? Help..help..
(read the comments on this article..brutal indeed!)

http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/japan-to-seek-fukushima-decommissioning-ideas-overseas

TEPCO’s own estimates suggest the full decommissioning of the site could take up to four decades and that much of the trickier work is yet to be done—notably the removal of reactor cores that have probably melted beyond recognition.
According to the utility’s own plan, these reactor cores—which are feared to have seeped into the containment vessels and possibly even eaten through thick concrete—will be removed around summer 2020.

Although TEPCO says the reactors are now under control, critics say the plant remains in a precarious state and at the mercy of extreme weather or further earthquakes. They point out that there is still no plan for the thousands of tons of water being stored on site


Let's see..2020..oh yeah, the Olympics!!

I hope they get good advice and successfully carry it out.

The area continues to be shaky, to say the least.

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

Follow the links on the above page to the IEB (Iris Earthquake Browser) for interactive maps.

Ha!

Nowhere do they report actual strontium levels... let alone measure it and claim a "6,500-fold spike".

They only talked about levels of beta emissions. Strontium emits beta radiation... but so does the element that represents ~99% of all of the current activity (cesium).