Thanks Matt! You need to explain all this to the Japanese workers there. They keep saying they don’t know what is going on, and that they think at least two reactors are leaking. If only they knew what you know!
Ok, my bad…and apologies to 'luci. You were right and I was wrong. Sorry about that.
-XT
Do you know what that green thing is in this picture at reactor number 4?
It is the crane that moves the spent fuel rods in the pool around, which is above and outside the reactor, and only stored in the building itself.
There is a picture on the same page of the pool and the crane.
You left out the valve sticking problem and the exposed holding tanks. And the secondary structures didn’t just have the roof blown off, they had the outer walls blown off.
Yes, thank you…I already acknowledged I was wrong. I’ve seen reports saying the spent rods we’re in reactor 4 but I must have misread. It happens…hell, me being wrong happens quite frequently…
-XT
Oops, I jumped the gun on my reply, before reading the rests of the posts.
It never happened.
My post was aimed at Matt’s summary which left out a few details.
Something people don’t seem to realize is that these buildings have taken a pounding from both the earthquake and the explosions. Stuff gets twisted so valves stick and God knows what has become of the miles of wiring, switches, gauges, valve motors etc…
Hopefully Monday will answer these questions after electricity is restored.
[QUOTE=elucidator]
It never happened.
[/QUOTE]
I appreciate that, but wouldn’t blame you for rubbing my nose in so spectacular an error. sorry about that and about the snark.
-XT
To me the climate change deniers are in the same camp as flat earthers. But that is also why to me the obsession with nuclear seems so silly. Nuclear plants take time to site, to fund, and to build. Lots of time. And they cannot, must not be rushed. Moreover even the current plants in the queue have swamped the ability of the foundries to keep up. Areva is still struggling to correct construction errors in their plants that were planned to open up well over two years ago. Even China with its huge investment and green light of nuclear has managed to bring only 13 plants online by the end of 2010 and has plans for 34 more in their 12 year plan. That’s a lot for a nuclear industry but no where near the well over a thousand plants needed to make a dent in greenhouse gasses. And those 13 plants produce a mere 1.8% of China’s current electricity. More likely that not the West building nuclear as fast as it reasonably could would just keep up with the number of plants due to be taken off line in the next several decades. (More than half of America’s nuclear plants are over 30 years old.) In America regulators are reviewing applications for 20 reactors that would be built over the next 15 to 20 years. Getting all approved and funded would be all out, (just the one required the government to provide an over $8 billion loan guantee), would make fairly little dent in greenhouse gases, would, given the industry’s track record and foundry constraints, take more than 20 years to accomplish, and would not, under any realistic scenario, replace any sizable number of coal fired plants in America. OTOH we can put up gas fired plants in a virtual instant and for a relative pittance. The increase in North American reserve estimates means that prices are likely to be fairly stable for many years and, again (see past cites) worldwide reserves are currently placed at 60 years. Every time a gas plant replaces a coal one we cut CO2 emissions/kWh by 50-70%. (And the grid consequently is also better able to deal with a higher penetration of intermittent renewable sources as natural gas plants can be dialed up and down to make up for any shortfalls.) Retiring the older coal plants and replacing them with natural gas ones is the fastest and most cost effective means to reduce CO2 emissions in a first phase.
You may find this Science article from 2005 telling:
Nuclear is not up to the job. It’ll be hard enough to build enough new nuclear to not fall behind. We need to do that, but we must not delude ourselves into thinking it is getting us very far.
As for natural gas safety … on the scale of what we are talking about a few dozen deaths in pipeline explosions is a near zero number.
My concerns about natural gas are that it can only bridge us for several decades before supplies start to get tight and prices skyrocket again, and our pipeline and storage infrastructure can only handle so much. It is more cost effective and a quicker impact than nuclear is, but is no silver bullet either.
I would humbly suggest that you need to do more reading. Cites have been provided previously in this thread. There is plenty of wind and solar and geothermal resource and others and even without natural gas plants as complementary power generation in a regional mix intermittency is a solvable issue. Most renewable can go up in an instant and while major wind farms and solar plants may take time a few years to plan and site, more distributed generation can go up in a matter of months.
If there was a reasonable monetized price placed on the carbon emitted, be it by a carbon tax or cap and trade, many forms of renewable would be cheaper than natural gas generation even at today’s relatively low natural gas prices, and be far cheaper than unsubsidized nuclear. Get the CO2 monetized and then stop subsidizing nuclear and renewables both, and I can guarantee you that you will not see a rush to build dozens of nuclear power plants, but you will see lots more natural gas and renewable options.
My bottom line is that diversity in our power generation mix makes the most sense. The goal is to have the coal plants retired beginning with oldest and dirtiest and to replace them with less dirty alternatives. If nuclear with carbon monetized is attractive to investors and can be built quickly enough, then it will compete successfully and be part of the mix. Maybe some new designs can. But we the people should not absorb all the financial risk.
Radiation and “radioactive contamination” has been measured at the reactor site, in the evacuation zone, in the surrounding town, in Tokyo and across the Pacific. In Part 1 I explained how the reactors are having to periodically vent steam to keep cool, and that since the fuel rods have very likely overheated and been damaged, that steam will contain radioactive fission by-products. We can identify these elements in incredibly small amounts, which means the press will be reporting “contamination” all around the world for quite some time.
The problems with the reactors seem to be under control for the moment. This is partly because the reactors are generating much less heat now and partly because some power is coming back on line, restoring the ability to circulate cooling water rather than just boil it off and vent the steam. The dreaded “meltdown” Three Mile Island style has been avoided, although with hindsight it probably would have been better in the long run to drain all the water after the first couple of hours (where the decay heat would have dropped about sevenfold) and then let the meltdowns happen.
The spent fuel pools are a seperate matter. These are large deep “swimming pools” full of spent fuel rods still giving off decay heat, and they are each on top of a sort of concrete cube that comprises the Mark I reactor building. The pools were roofed over by a steel-frame-and-cladding structure that has basically been blown to shit on reactors 1, 3 and 4. The pools are essentially sitting in the open.
The fuel rods are normally under a deep layer of water, which is kept circulating to maintain a temperature down at around 30 deg C. However, circulation requires power and there hasn’t been any, so these pools have been slowly getting hotter. Additionally some water may have slopped out during the earthquake, and the hydrogen explosions may have blasted away some more. As the water level in those pools drops through evaporation, the upper ends of the fuel rods become exposed. Depending how long it’s been since they were pulled from a reactor, the exposed rods will get hot, possibly hot enough to rupture their zirconium claddings and so dump the same fission products into the remaining pool water, as described in part 1 for the reactor cooling water. If the fuel pools drain completely, there is a risk that the rods will get up to a white heat and the zirconium cladding will catch fire, sending heavy fission products into the atmosphere. That would be a true, Chernobyl-level contamination disaster, and something of the kind was feared to have happened at reactor building 4 after the fires there.
However, more recent reports tell a slightly different and less alarming story. The fire at building 4 was not at the fuel pool and did not directly involve the fuel rods, but nevertheless it was asociated with a large increase in the measured radiation level. The fire was reported to be an oil fire in a circulation pump. The circulation pumps are deliberately kept above the level of the fuel pools so that if the circulation loop was ruptured by the fire, the pool wouldn’t drain, but nevertheless, any water in that loop and pump, and any accumulation of radioactive material within that pump during its years of service, would have been released by the fire. Additionally, while the fuel pool at building 4 was not empty, it was certainly low and the exposed rod ends would have heated up considerably. Not necessarily enough to melt, since the fuel rods had been cooling for some time, but maybe enough to rupture their claddings and let the more volatile contaminants escape.
The fuel pools have been topped up by long-range fire hose and helicopter and their temperatures are being monitored at reactor buildings 1, 2 and 3. They have never reached boiling point at those buildings and probably never allowed their rods to become exposed. Reactor building 4 is something of an unknown - the building has been extensively damaged and there were fears that its fuel pool was cracked and empty. It has been reported that in fact the pool’s steel lining is intact and that it still held water at the time that the helicopters were dumping into it, but there’s no temperature data (sensor presumably lost) and no direct observation of the water level.
The majority of the high radiation levels reported on the site are probably due to the reactor building 4 fire, the reactor building 4 low-water event in its fuel pool, and the torus rupture of reactor 2. Radioactive material has been distributed over the site. Measured radiation levels have been dropping quite rapidly suggesting that short-lived isotopes are responsible for the most part.
There’s not really enough data to predict what the health consequences of this will be, especially since it still isn’t even over yet.
Cite? I’m getting my information from the NEI updates and NHK world news. Where are you getting yours?
I am perfectly capable of being gracious. Its just that I die a little, inside…
Just now I watched an interview with an actual employee of the plant, who was there during the earthquake. His identity was hidden because he feared he would lose his job if the bosses knew. 17 years he worked the place, knows it inside and out. He, in that way the Japanese do, as much as said he doesn’t believe what they are saying, doesn’t believe they are telling the truth, and knows they are not revealing what has happened, and doubts what they are saying now.
Meanwhile, one of the issues that just drove me to ranting, the lack of information, especially video at the site, has become clearer. While it certainly seems that the Japanese have no way to view the site, since March 12 they have been getting high def video feeds, round the clock from the US, who has been using a Predator drone to film the site.
Both visible and infrared.
So they have had high resolution imaging since the 12th, day and night.
The kind or resolution where you can identify somebodies face in the video.
The US, for whatever fucked up reason, hasn’t let anyone but the Japanese see it, and the Japanese have not only refused to share any of it, they have acted like they didn’t have it all.
Which confirms what I thought all along, except the level of observation is much less than I imagined, no ultraviolet, no x-ray or gamma ray detection. But they have had high resolution video from the air all along.
So they are indeed the piece of shit liars I suspected. The infrared footage would be real valuable to nuclear experts and anyone trying to help solve the crisis. I don’t know if any nuclear experts outside Japan have seen the footage, and can’t say, but I can smell a liar a mile away, and these pussbags are the worst kind of liars ever.
And that includes the US officials who wouldn’t give anyone the information as well.
According to the live stream update they said the pressure was rising in one of the containment structures (as has happened in the past) and they would be venting it. The problem arises when these vents jam which is what happened at 3MI.
The good news is that they have the backup generator running for 5&6 and the temperature in the cooling tanks are going down.
This imaging explains why the US insisted there was a fire in the #4 pool, and why they knew it was empty of water. Anyone could tell that if they saw the footage.
But what do these complete assholes do? Leave everyone else in the dark, and let people live in the horrific fear of not knowing.
Of course this is far from all the deception going on. But it proves the point.
Spent fuel pools was for part 2, and I left out a lot more than the valve sticking problem. E.g. Reactor 1 has also had its drywell flooded with seawater through the fire supression system. What I wanted to do was try to nail down some technical details to actually discuss rather than the snide content-free back-and-forth that seems to be happening a lot in this thread. If FXMastermind knows something I don’t, he can actually give me a cite and educate me.
See the above posts, with link to source. Welcome to the real world.
It doesn’t seem that the neutron saturated steam corresponds to the radiation that is being detected. At least now they have water canons that can hit the buildings. I left out that they were going to change from (I hope I remembered this right) building 4 to building 3. Whatever the correct number it appears they are still doing triage with open sources of water.
Interview where?
Now you’re projecting your own prejudices and assumptions all over. Reactor building 4 still has something of a roof on top of it. You can’t possibly know what a drone saw even if one was in the air at the time.