Rantings about stupid nuclear reporting, and I want to bitchslap somebody, also other crap

[kidchameleon]

@BusDriver

No, I find it to be interesting. i don’t see any other recent threads on the subject.

If you are interested in it, you could…start one…that might stick to the facts.

[FXMastermind]

Not a bitch, just more dreary reality about how and why it happened so very very badly.

Newly disclosed manuals for workers at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant highlight the utility’s lack of preparedness for an emergency, a major factor leading to the meltdowns after the March 11 quake-tsunami, a review by The Japan Times showed Tuesday.

   The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency  disclosed the 170-page manuals for operators at the No. 1 reactor unit  of the Fukushima plant, the first of the three reactors to melt down.

    Instructions in the manuals were all based on  the assumption that two backup direct current batteries at reactor 1  would keep working throughout any emergency. In fact, the batteries were  knocked out by water when the monster tsunami struck and crippled the  Fukushima plant.

 The manuals also failed to instruct workers to  open by hand critical valves normally powered by electricity to vent  steam and thus reduce pressure in the containment vessel. The DC  batteries were supposed to supply power to operate those valves.

    The containment vessel is the last line of  defense to prevent radioactive materials from escaping the reactors.  Tepco tried to open the valves to keep the vessel from breaking apart on  March 12. 

Pressure also needed to be reduced to allow coolant water to be injected to prevent a meltdown of the reactor core.

Search results - The Japan Times

As I mentioned during the first week of the super disaster, it seemed as if there were simply no plans in place for what to do, when things went horribly wrong. Turns out, nobody had envisioned loss of power. Much less told the poor suckers working there what to do when it happened.

In retrospect, certainly opening the vents and letting the cores vent into the atmosphere would have been a much better option than what happened. The damage from radioactive water/steam venting for days until they could get pumper trucks there and hooked up, that looks like a good trade off, compared to the nightmare that it turned into.

But there wasn’t even a plan for what to do when ALL the power was gone. It’s not farfetched to say this was a serious lack of planning.

Combined with the lack of equipment on hand to deal with things, the almost complete lack of detection equipment, cameras, protective gear, not even a single protected vehicle for the workers, the entire thing simply reeks of really bad planning. The kind that leads to shit going downhill fast. When the shit hits the fan.

For the uninformed, the explosion of reactor one, the first to meltdown, (no doubt due to leaks in the pipes from the earthquake), led to the inability to prevent the other reactors from being saved. Then it was an epic shitstorm.

Once three blew, four blew, two blew, and even the two reactors up on the hill ended up being totaled, (and they weren’t even on at the time). It was a cascade disaster, a total clusterfuck by any definition.

[FXMastermind]

The peer reviewed hard science is coming to light, and of course it shows clearly that the Fukushima disaster was so much worse than anyone was reporting.

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/28319/2011/acpd-11-28319-2011.html

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/251011/full/478435a.html

By that I mean the lapdog media reported. Certainly nuclear experts and independent scientists and researchers were saying all along it was extremely bad, but no western media outlet stuck with that story.

[FXMastermind]

I forgot, the nuclear cheerleader won’t read a link. Here area few important parts.

The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/251011/full/478435a.html

There is strong evidence that the first strong 133Xe release started very early, possibly immediately after the earthquake and the emergency shutdown on 11 March at 06:00 UTC. The entire noble gas inventory of reactor units 1–3 was set free into the atmosphere between 11 and 15 March 2011. For 137Cs, the inversion results give a total emission of 35.8 (23.3–50.1) PBq, or about 42% of the estimated Chernobyl emission. Our results indicate that 137Cs emissions peaked on 14–15 March but were generally high from 12 until 19 March, when they suddenly dropped by orders of magnitude exactly when spraying of water on the spent-fuel pool of unit 4 started. This indicates that emissions were not only coming from the damaged reactor cores, but also from the spent-fuel pool of unit 4 and confirms that the spraying was an effective countermeasure.

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/28319/2011/acpd-11-28319-2011.html

Just what the experts (who dared to tell it) were saying at the time. There was massive release of radioactive material, and some of it was from fuel rods, some from meltdown of the cores.

Looking back at the start of this topic, I was bitchslapping reporters for reporting bullshit at the time. Stupid ignorant shit like “dear is the real problem, not radioactivity”, the kind of ignorant pussbag nonsense that needs a slapping.

[gonzomax]

The Japanese government is going to test over 300,000 kids for radiation. Not because it is dangerous, but it must be a new Japanese sport.

[FXMastermind]

Haha

“fear” not “dear”

Man, how did I turn into such a bitch?

[FXMastermind]

@gonzomax

The Japanese government is going to test over 300,000 kids for radiation. Not because it is dangerous, but it must be a new Japanese sport.

They are going to monitor them for the rest of their life, not just check them once.

It looks like when it’s your kids that may suffer from nuclear meltdowns/melthroughs, people get all serious about this shit.

Can’t say I blame them.

Meanwhile, the other reactors damaged by the quake (there were a lot), are still having problems.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-26/japan-atomic-says-water-leaked-at-tokai-dai-ni-nuclear-plant.html

It wasn’t just Fukushima One that was damaged, despite what the western media tries to feed you.

[johnpost]

TEPCO is still working on a cold shutdown of Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. radioactive xenon has been found in one of the reactors, it could be a fission product.

estimates are 30 years to decommission.

[gonzomax]

@FXMastermind

Hell, just show us the guide to converting all the different measurements. Like, how you get the figure for naturally occurring potassium in food to the yearly dose. Or how the figures for yearly cosmic ray exposure translates to exposure from airborne Cesium, or what level of radioactive iodine in drinking water compares to the natural radiation from eating bananas.

That kind of fact based science. People are interested.

Japan’s Radiation Exposure: How Serious Is It? | TIME.com There will be lots of cancers in japan in the future. If it happened here, you would be smart to evacuate as far away as possible. That would not be because it is no big deal. it sure as hell is.

[FXMastermind]

@gonzomax

Japan’s Radiation Exposure: How Serious Is It? | TIME.com

OK forgive me for focusing on the first huge error I found, but it’s so terribly bad I have to comment.

Most worrisome of all is plutonium-239 — for a number of reasons. First of all, the vast majority of a fuel rod is made of plutonium, which means there’s just more of it in play.

No, you complete idiot, “the vast majority of a fuel rod is made of plutonium” is not even close to reality. Even a MOX fuel rod is only a tiny bit plutonium, and regular old fuel rods, AFTER they have been used for a year or so are only a little bit plutonium. Most of any fuel rod is uranium, and even after it’s been radioactivated the core of a reactor is NOT mostly plutonium (except a naval reactor or perhaps a space born plutonium reactor, but them is completly different animals), but no commercial reactor uses fuel rods that are anywhere close to being made mostly of plutonium.

In fact if you had mostly plutonium in a fuel rod you would have a serious fucking problem. Plutonium doesn’t fucking need nuetron moderation to start spewing out neutrons. And when you get about 70 pounds of it close together it just goes fucking crazy and melts down just like that. Or is that 70 kilos? It isn’t much.

A reactor core is about 150 tons of fuel, and after a year it’s about one and a half percent plutonium, so you have about 2 tons of plutonium, which is nowhere near a majority.

Oh sure it’s plenty of trouble, enough for a shit load of bombs, but it sure the fuck isn’t the majority of a fuel rod.

That is all.

[FXMastermind]

I know most people can’t be bothered to translate Japanese, but this report is saying there seems to be criticality going on (at least two different locations), and they have started injecting boron into the water to try and stop it.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20111102/t10013667531000.html

This page has a graphic about it.
http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1102/TKY201111020003.html

Interesting shit going on. Not that you would know it from watching the western media.

[FXMastermind]

Video from Tepco of robot working inside reactor building (or what is left of it) in deadly radiation levels.

- YouTube

Finally, fucking robots to the rescue. Haha

[FXMastermind]

Latest report documenting what may have happened.

Resources-Archive

Includes some interesting new ideas about what might have happened to reactors 2 and 4, as well as saying reactor three actually failed before it blew up.

[Novelty_Bobble]

Is this still going? This has been done to death now. The radiation release was and still is a sideshow to the tens of thousands killed by the earthquake and tsunami.

Radiation release is no picnic and I’m sure that some people will have long-term effects from this but even then it will be dwarfed by the immediate deaths (and also by any equivalent power generation via fossil fuels) I’m sure lessons will be learnt and future plants will be even safer.

Remember, this was a >9 earthquake and a massive sustained tsunami.

[FXMastermind]

Yes, the disaster from the nuclear plant is still going.

[FXMastermind]

Woefully unprepared for the wave that swept over its breakwater, the plant just 140 miles (225 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo was doomed almost from the start.

  "During the first week of the accident, I thought several times that we were all going to die," plant chief Masao Yoshida said.

At the height of the crisis, all but a few dozen workers – dubbed the “Fukushima 50” – were evacuated. Officials boast that number is now up to as many as 3,000 a day, compared with the pre-crisis work force of 6,400.

Evidence of the tremendous man-hours already invested in the cleanup is piling up in the workers’ staging area, on the edge of the 12-mile (20-kilometer) no-go zone around the plant. More than 480,000 sets of used protective gear – which can be worn only once – lie in crates or plastic bags at the complex, which before the tsunami was a training facility for national-level soccer teams.

HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News

Holy crap.

[FXMastermind]

From the complete and utter “what the fuck” department of “news reporting”.

Low Levels of Iodine Detected in Europe

Low Levels of Iodine Detected in Europe | IAEA

“The source of the contamination is not known at the moment,” it said.
“We have not detected any increase in the concentration of other artificial radionuclides, which suggests the cause was not a nuclear power plant accident.”
Dana Drabova, head of the Czech nuclear safety office, told the CTK news agency: “With probability bordering on certainty this is not from a Czech source, and definitely not from our nuclear plants.”
In Poland, which has no nuclear power plants, a spokesman for the atomic energy agency told AFP: "We detected trace levels of radioactive iodine-131 over Poland during measurements taken October 17-24. It was a very low level.
“Readings were 100 times higher in late March in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident,” spokesman Stanislaw Latek said, adding that Ukraine had also detected “trace levels” between October 10-20.
He also said: “Unconfirmed reports suggest there may have been an incident at a nuclear power station in Pakistan but this requires further confirmation.”
An IAEA spokesman said he had no information about any such incident, however.
On October 19, Pakistani authorities reported an emergency at the almost 40-year-old Karachi nuclear plant (KANUPP) when workers were forced to repair a leak.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hpy3bIs158xIF3jQV6Z0EvCXxghg?docId=CNG.af9bf1282db3c9d34412aa1ada59f782.231

“The IAEA believes the current trace levels of iodine-131 that have been measured do not pose a public health risk and are not caused by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan,” the body said in a statement.
It said iodine-131 was a short-lived radioisotope with a radioactive decay half-life of about eight days.
The Czech nuclear security authority said it had been detecting radioactive iodine-131 at a number of monitoring stations since late October and had informed the IAEA to see if it could identify the source, Reuters reports.

Low levels of radioactive particles 'found in Europe'

[FXMastermind]

Additional safety measures required at Japan’s nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster may cost 19.4 billion yen ($252 million) per reactor, the government said.

Emergency measures such as maintaining cooling at a 1,200- megawatt nuclear station are estimated to cost about 11.8 billion yen, a committee under the National Policy Unit said in a report today. Other costs include steps to secure emergency power generators and improve external sources of electricity and 1.3 billion yen to prevent explosions and equip workers with radiation-protection gear in a severe nuclear accident.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-15/japan-s-nuclear-safety-steps-may-cost-252-million-per-reactor.html

Oh good Lard! Now they want nuclear power stations to actually be prepared for a disaster? In advance?
**
Emergency measures such as maintaining cooling at a 1,200- megawatt nuclear station**

Oh please. Now they want to be able to maintain cooling? In an emergency? How will the poor power plant be able to make a profit if they do that?

**secure emergency power generators and improve external sources of electricity **

What the hell? Think of the poor shareholders. This is really going to cut into profits.

**1.3 billion yen to prevent explosions **

Isn’t that asking a bit much? I mean, that’s a lot of money to prevent an explosion. Besides, didn’t we learn that the Fukushima disaster wasn’t really that bad?

equip workers with radiation-protection gear in a severe nuclear accident.

Oh now they are just being ridiculous. You want all workers to have protective gear? Just in case?

This is out of hand.

[FXMastermind]

It’s really looking like a true disaster. Now they want power plants to be prepared for a disaster? Oh cmon. Seriously?

Next thing you know, somebody is going to want the US to do the same thing. This is absurd.

What next? Have some sort of evacuation plan in effect? Back up cooling systems?

Poor nuclear industry. This is really getting ugly.

[gonzomax]

Fukushima fallout fears over Japan farms - BBC News There was no big radiation problem . see the map showing areas that are not allowed to grow crops. You know it is all anti nukers causing this mess. Nothing to see here.