Japan abandons stricken nuke plant over radiation

Source: AP

FUKUSHIMA, Japan – Japan suspended operations to prevent a stricken nuclear plant from melting down Wednesday after a surge in radiation made it too dangerous for workers to remain at the facility.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said work on dousing reactors with water was disrupted by the need to withdraw.

Earlier officials said 70 percent of fuel rods at one of the six reactors at the plant were significantly damaged in the aftermath of Friday's calamitous earthquake and tsunami.

News reports said 33 percent of fuel rods were also damaged at another reactor. Officials said they would use helicopters and fire trucks to spray water in a desperate effort to prevent further radiation leaks and to cool down the reactors.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake

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I have a feeling that we are looking at this raised to a Level 7 crisis by tomorrow. Level 7 = Chernobyl.

This is now a crime against humanity!
They are talking about pouring boron on the reactors to stop the reactions?????
SONGS San Onofre Gen Station is setup that in case of emergency they flood the vessel with Boron to neutralize the fuel! Why did they not do that at Fukushima?

It also means that they'll have to fall back to Plan B. Which probably would be to somehow bury and cover over the the reactors after they've melted into the ground, and people might actually have to volunteer to sacrifice their lives.

I'm hoping that there's a different Plan B than that, if they wait until these things melt down, like Chernobyl, it will be, by definition, at least four times as bad.

explosions will impact the reactors which have previously been in a down state?

I'm thinking probably not. The containment buildings should hold against that type of explosion. The biggest threat might be to the cooling systems, but those reactors have been shut down since Friday. By Thursday they shouldn't need any cooling anymore, or not that much.

All I can say is, it's not a problem yet.

...which is causing most of the problems here.

Right now a bunch of short lived byproducts (most of them with half lives measured in hours or a few days) of the main nuclear chain reaction are breaking down and releasing a lot of heat. As these short lived isotopes disappear the amount of heat produced will fall considerably and the task of secure containment will become exponentially easier with every passing day.

The primary and to a lesser degree secondary containment systems did their last ditch tasks. Held things together long enough for the first few critical days while the hottest nuclear byproducts decayed. We are by no means out of the woods yet, but now with every second that things don't come apart completely, the probability of things coming apart falls.

You remind me of the Japanese government.

I think they'll now try to bury it somehow...

You use boron only to stop a fission reaction that's gone out of control, and there may be certain plant designs where that would be necessary. With Fukushima, they stopped fission in the first minutes after the quake, I'm assuming. What caused all the problems since is the residual heat that takes six days to stop. That's what caused melting, fire and explosions. Putting boron in the reactor then will just impede heat dissipation and make things far worse. They would have melted down last Saturday instead of now.

"Neutralize" is something chemical reactions do. This is a nuclear reaction. It's not acid or alkali, there's no such thing as neutralizing it.

Now, they might use boron once the fuel rods melt and obtain critical mass again, unfortunately, by that time all plumbing used to pump it in there would be melted, and the radiation would be too bad to get close enough to throw it on or whatever. Plus, they'd have to get it into the middle of the fuel. Already they can't fly a helicopter over the site to drop water.

Immediately: they're not going to explode like a nuclear bomb, but they'll explode like "dirty bombs" several times and melt down. Immediately you'll have four damaged, melted down reactors that are burning and spewing radioactive fallout with fissile isotopes into the atmosphere, things like iodine, cesium, strontium and maybe even uranium. These things are very dangerous because people can inhale the fallout, and any amount of those radioactive elements in your body that rings on a Geiger counter is guaranteed to be harmful or fatal. A radioactive substance in your body is many times more dangerous than outside of it. You can be in a room with fallout below a certain level of radiation, but have it in your body and it will ruin you.

Later: the radioactive isotopes in that fallout will make a large section of Japan virtually uninhabitable for a few generations or longer. I can't give an accurate estimate as to how much or how long.

Meanwhile, the fallout released into the atmosphere will insidiously cause physical misery and shorten lives to people exposed to it. How many people? Anything from ten thousand to ten million.

Not quite a Nagasaki or Hiroshima yet, but not Mardi Gras in New Orleans either.

Edit: Oops. I just learned, one of those reactors is a MOX, meaning that plutonium has a good chance of being released as well. For fallout, that is much nastier than any of the other isotopes I mentioned.

Amend the part where I said uninhabitable for a few generations to 5,000 years, and the part where I said ten thousand to ten million to fifty thousand to a hundred million people suffering or dead due to this accident.

And make it worse, that will probably be a major continuing cause of misery or death for generations.

Now it's probably worse Nagasaki or Hiroshima, if not as immediately lethal.

The cancer spike due to the plutonium will be noticeable in just the first two years.

Can you expand on the geographical scope of the disaster?

:scared:

shall we watch Andromeda Strain??

Good news is that most of the heavier, more dangerous isotopes will likely fall out of it before it does. The really nasty stuff like plutonium, uranium, and cesium. You'll get the air-cleansed version of it, the lightest smallest particles. Radiation will be dispersed and at low level, no where near what Japan will suffer. Alaska and the Philippines might have more of a problem. Expect a very slight increase in cancer deaths and just hope that you or someone you know doesn't draw the unlucky number on that. It's a bit like being forced to buy a cancer lottery ticket.

There might be more danger from eating seafood from the Pacific, but how it will pass through the ecosystem is unknown.

I hate to put it like this, but if you were going to chose a country to have a nuclear accident in without effecting other countries, Japan would probably be among the best, simply because the winds blow out to the widest ocean on earth.

and every creature in the northern hemisphere waters may die

There's not enough nuclear material there to do all that. It might cut the lifespan of creatures in the pacific, but it's not going to sterilize the whole ocean or the whole hemisphere.

Not that it was a good idea, but we've got a pretty good history of uncontrolled nuclear reactions in the pacific.

The awful thing is that the Japanese are the only ones with direct experience with that sort of thing on their mainland.

Problem with this is that there are a lot more fissile materials in it than you find in a bomb. It's a "dirty bomb," or rather, 4-6 very big dirty bombs.

There's not too much threat to the US west coast from the look of it, but I'd say the US better be prepared to take in Japanese refugees because a rather large part of their country will be uninhabitable after this.

So, given plenty of nukes out the wazoo which have been tested in the Pacific and have most certainly put radionuclides into the high and upper atmosphere, I can't see how these plants are going to put a significantly higher or comparable amount of material into that wide a circulation.

And I agree that the premium on real estate in Japan makes a large no-go area there much worse than elsewhere.

I'm just saying that I wouldn't suggest that people on the West Coast of the US need to buy up 100 years of water and dried food and move into the bunkers just yet.

...that would opt to go to the US.

It's not like we're talking about the Philippines or Thailand here.

Even with a 50 or so mile radius no-go zone, it's still Japan, which is where most Japanese prefer to be.

It's loaded to the brim. Already you had to spend the equivalent of about $10,000 USD a year for what was for all practical purposes, a closet to store yourself in. The crowding was barely tolerable as it is, so bad that it stopped the Japanese fertility rate. (Last part is not a scientific statement, just my opinion on the cause.)

Not only that, but there's the added terror of another earthquake. This is the kind of disaster that really changes a culture.

This is also going to knock down the Japanese economy and put people into squalor. You might say that the Japanese will rebuild, that they are very productive, but that was in the past. Physical reconstruction requires a much younger population than they have that can do physical labor. Unless they've automated construction in ways I don't know about. I want to see them do that if they can.

So, they either have to bring in immigrants to do that work, or they can't do it. With a some part of Japan uninhabitable, and with their population already crowded, where are they going to house those immigrants?

The lives of refugees in Japan, and for the Japanese in general, are bound to be really terrible on that island now.

We spent decades blasting the Pacific with full-on hydrogen bombs and the ocean is fine. Dial it down a notch.

Yes - any release of radionuclides is not good.

While you can end up with a large unsafe area around whatever it is these plants end up being entombed as, you are not going to get much of that material into the atmosphere and to the west coast of the US, which was the point of this subthread.

We dosed ourselves plenty good with the Nevada and the Pacific tests, from which we got more material than we in the US are ever going to get from these plants in Japan.

Like a total wasteland, for hundreds of thousands of years

http://travel.3yen.com/category/kyushu/nagasaki/

Or Hanford. There's big difference. You don't have that much fissile material fallout with a nuclear bomb. With a plant, you have tons. A bomb's more dangerous in the short term, a plant is far more dangerous in the long term.

A large area of Japan will probably become uninhabitable. But, I'll agree, the Pacific and the US west coast will not.

poison onto the planet

Now we have a coutry ripped apart and the release of massive radioactive particles.

What next?

fuck us all.

Fukushima, translates to "good-fortune island"

Is that going to be an oxymoron?

They Mayans might not have been that far off. Damn them.

This is terrifying.

Fires, smoke, explosions ... now too hot for the workers to stay.

Scary, scary sh*t.

I mean ... HOLY *BEEP*

Now reads: Japan suspends work at stricken nuclear plant

Fuck'n plutonium. fuck me.

Exposing the workers while it apparently wasn't helping just wastes the time that the workers can do something effective-- that is in terms of the exposure they can take before dying.

The question is, will the radiation levels ever drop enough to allow them to return?

in perspective

(I KNOW it's not ALL crap -- but a whole of a lot is...)

I'm trying to follow but not doing a great job of it.

The live feed seemed to be saying that they came back an hour later.

I am not doom and gloom or sensationalistic.

We has some major adjustments to our maps of reality to consider, though. I think that is wise advice. Change is the constant and things, as a whole, are changing in ways that certainly challenge our expectations and bizarre tendency to cling to what is referred to as normalcy.

The only antidote I can suggest is to let yourself be more flexible and able to consider more options than usual. There is a time to dig in and argue and debate facts and there is a time to be very aware and face them as they unfold. Denial has no real capacity to shield you from anything that is truly dangerous. None at all.

n/t

n/t

You know the rest

I'll be raiding Trader Joe's in Albuquerque tomorrow for frozen fish. Anything caught in the ocean after today, I won't trust (not that I had much faith to begin with).

They're going back. They have to. After all, they haven't even begun to pump water on the containment pool for the spent fuel rods on #4. Of course that's because radiation levels are too high for anyone to get near #4.

But if the radiation spike that caused the evacuation is due to damage in the container of #3 reactor and the subsequent release of radioactive steam, as they're speculating. I don't know if they can come back. If they do how long can they stay there?

Link regarding the damage to #3's container:

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78456.html

"Here we go kids!"

Yellowstone, 1988. We will now witness a burn. Blessed Buddha.

there was life threatening levels if they had to leave for 45 minutes. This from the lady who has been broadcasting from Tokyo and a man she talks to. He came in to correct her so who knows what is correct. They both agreed that if the left the building that something bad must have happened.

Personally I believe that they left because they know it's over, checkmate, and they wanted to be with their loved ones before the end. I would suspect that authorities stepped in and said "Oh no you don't... If you leave we have widespread panic. You stay there and push buttons and stick it out while we stock up on rice and beans and fly the f*ck out of here."

fashion.

0236: Mr Edano, Japan's chief government spokesman, says workers trying to douse the reactors with water were forced to retreat when radiation levels surged there.

0221: Japanese Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says the authorities are still looking for the cause of white smoke billowing from reactor 3 at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. He says the radiation reading at the plant is fluctuating by the hour.

'It was just temporary evacuation following a surge in radiation'
Per MSNBC...

I really think they're "sending them back in" is an effort to prevent panic.

From the little info we have so far this could go either way. I don't actually think this will be as bad as Chernobyl because even in the worst case scenario these plants are a lot better designed than that one was. Also that plants was at full operation during the disaster. Still the lack of any real information is what is really frustrating here!

That the people on site are working mostly blind to what's happening themselves. That's why everything is so sketchy. Plus, if any of those busy workers has time to report what they know, I'm certain it's in technical jargon that doesn't translate well from nukespeak to flackspeak, and then doesn't translate well from Japanese to English.

If temperatures were high enough for those zirconium rods to catch fire, then it melted their instruments. I don't know exactly how they found out how that happened. They must have sent in a robot to find out what happened, since a worker taking a look would have probably come out extra crispy.

The Obama administration on Tuesday insisted that nuclear power plants in the United States are safe even as they kept an eye on the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan.

I'd have to contradict President Minitrue though. There's an inherent design flaw to something you can't really turn off and that you have to douse with water constantly or face catastrophe. There's a flaw in the very conception of that design, as very well illustrated in Japan.

Any energy generator, any machine, really has to 1) have a real off switch so you could shut it down and forget it immediately in an emergency and not wait a week before it dies, and 2) Doesn't become enraged if you don't water or feed it, even when you're not using it.

I would be very concerned.

Air currents and ocean currents bring a lot of pollution to Alaska. Unfortunately the state doesn't see the need to monitor like other states. They've also denied money to Alaskan Native Villages to carry out air quality monitoring. I feel for my relatives up North, those who still live off the land, those whose food supply just took a major blow in longterm health.

the jetstream (see top-right quadrant above) pulls cold air from Greenland and Iceland down to directly over N.W. Africa and the Canary Islands here, where sea-level temperatures of below 12ºC (54ºF) at night and below 19ºC (66ºF) by day and copious rainfall are unusual, although this is the third time we have seen this weather pattern during this long winter.

Does the Pacific/North American jetstream not also normally reside at higher latitudes at this time of the year?

A permament southerly shift in 'normal' jetstream patterns would certainly be easy to associate with climate change and the observed warming in the Arctic.

point I'm more worried about the building panic then anything else. Look at this http://www.geigercounters.com/
It all depends how many blow and how long before they are buried. There are all kinds of things to worry about. Where will the Japanese people go? Will they be welcomed, all radioactive, with their children and parents and stuff. If the Democrats were still in charge, things would be better. With Republican pulling the levers, they may well refuse the Japanese entrance. Are you going to JIB Japan and seeing what's going on? http://jibtv.com/program/fullscreen.aspx?page=0

:toast:

No need to worry about radiation. We get way more pollution from the ships in the port and the damn refinery in Wilmington.

hey neighbor, and welcome to DU!

:hi:

:wow:

Try paying attention if you're going to get all freaked out!

I've spiffed the earthquake kit. It's not going to be that bad over here. We'll shelter in, if need be. I'm concerned, not panicked. I'm heartbroken for the Japanese people.

And if Soledad O'Brien says it, I believe it. But that's a personal bias not coming from my cerebral cortex.

the right wingnuts like Palin, Bachmann et al spout their bullshit about how government regulation is bad for business.

As we all are painfully aware, the lack of government regulation is bad for PEOPLE!

But then I think they know that and don't give a shit! Where are these geniuses now? Why aren't they spouting their crap about too much regulation NOW!

I demand they repeat their rhetoric and stand accountable, NOW! :grr:

1st - Windscale, UK in 1950s
2nd - Chenobyl over UK in 1980s
3rd - Japan ?????

no doubt organisms like archebacteria will survive.

radioactive dust that fell out particularly heavily in rains over the US East Coast and over Western Europe during the period.

Born Yorkshire 1954; migrated Wessex 1960s; Ireland, London 1970s; France/Spain 1980s...

but they didn't say to which reactor.

I did notice earlier a report that said they had been pulled from one, and another report that said they were back in another one.

But even the locals are wondering about the veracity of what they are hearing, based on their interviews.

and they were only out for about an hour.

by the time the "abandonment" was out to the public, the workers were already returning.

better to follow the japanese english language media than anything else because everything else is usually behind.


All those remaining were pulled out for almost an hour because radiation levels were too high, but later allowed to return, officials said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/16/us-japan-quake-idUSTRE72A0SS20110316


amazed by this thread. people take little bits of information, forgetting it's already been filtered through language barriers, not to mention that the people concerned are under stress and not communicating very well, through time barriers --then they filter it through their own preconceptions again & speculate --

and what emerges is basically a bunch of useless bs.

thought about how everything I am getting on this is.

So I washed some more dishes. But I have thought that emptying and filling all my water containers, just as a check, might not be a bad idea later, what with (I hope were well-trained) workers having to leave a plant 'cause the radiation is so out of control they had to leave for a while. From a place where, theoretically, they should have been in control of that level.

Or, perhaps they just went for a long lunch and a little vodka. Get away from the bustle, you know? Boss had to tell somebody something.

I am in a crowd of smart people trying to stay ahead of the game. Like the stock market. Works about as well sometimes.

I really think they said that just to calm people. To me, there's no way they sent workers back into there, at least for not any amount of time.

Such a fluid situation. :hi:

This is really bad.

Thanks for the thread, onehandle.

What does that mean? Chipped? Cracked? Spoiled? Bent? Twisted? Broken?

How about... MELTED?