2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami - News and Analysis

[chaanakya]

Govt. says quake damage may go up to $308 bil.

Japan's government says the cost of damage from the devastating quake and tsunami on March 11th may exceed 300 billion dollars.

Economic and Fiscal Policy Minister Kaoru Yosano released the estimate at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

The cost of damage from destroyed buildings and infrastructure systems in the 7 prefectures of northern Honshu and Hokkaido is estimated at between 200 and 308 billion dollars.

The figure far exceeds the roughly 123 billion dollars from the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, which devastated the port city of Kobe in western Japan.

The government says that if the cost of the latest disaster amounted to 308 billion dollars, Japan's Gross Domestic Product in fiscal 2011, which starts in April, would shrink half a percent, or 34 billion dollars.

However, the government says the disaster's impact on Japan's economy may be greater, as the calculation does not include the effects of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 17:3

[Bade]

^^^ The design/safety criteria for NPP for Tsunami was 6 meters..(per some reports)

Do you think it was appropriate to design for 6 mts when record was at least for 38 mts?

A general comment, that record height measured was for another location, isn't it ? Tsunami height will vary from location to location, depending on local bathymetry and coastal features. Besides, all this can be done only with good model runs for various types of water column dislocations due to an earthquake. It is a relatively new applied science and very likely such numbers have got better and with good predictability only in recent years.

[chaanakya]

Follow up

Chubu plant generator moved to high ground
SHIZUOKA (Kyodo) Chubu Electric Power Co. said Tuesday it will place an emergency diesel generator on high ground at its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, in case of power loss due to tsunami.

The announcement was made in the wake of the nuclear crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where emergency power sources that are needed to cool nuclear fuel were crippled by tsunami.

The Nagoya-based utility also said it will have a training session to use a newly introduced emergency generator vehicle at the Hamaoka plant's No. 3 reactor

[chaanakya]

Y40 mil stolen from tsunami-cracked bank vault in Miyagi

SENDAI —
The earthquake and tsunami that pulverized coastal Japan crippled a bank’s security mechanisms and left a vault wide open. That allowed someone to walk off with 40 million yen, police said Tuesday.

The March 11 tsunami washed over the Shinkin Bank, like much else in Kesennuma, and police said between the wave’s power and the ensuing power outages, the vault came open.

“The bank was flooded, and things were thrown all over. It was a total mess. Somebody stole the money in the midst of the chaos,” said a police official in Miyagi prefecture, where Kesennuma is located.

The bank notified police on Tuesday, 11 days after the disaster, said the official.

[chaanakya]

Defect concealed in Fukushima No. 4 reactor: engineer

The No. 4 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have been relying on flawed steel to hold the radiation in its core, according to an engineer who helped build its containment vessel four decades ago.

Coping with the unthinkable: A resident explains his fears during a town hall meeting Tuesday in Kawamata, Fukushima Prefecture, on radiation exposure from the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

Mitsuhiko Tanaka says he helped conceal a manufacturing defect in the ¥20 billion steel vessel installed at the reactor while working for a unit of Hitachi in 1974. The reactor, which Tanaka has called a "time bomb," was shut for maintenance when the March 11 earthquake triggered a tsunami that disabled cooling systems at the plant, leading to explosions and radiation leaks.

"Who knows what would have happened if that reactor had been running?" Tanaka, who turned his back on the nuclear industry after the Chernobyl disaster, said in an interview last week. "I have no idea if it could withstand an earthquake like this. It's got a faulty reactor inside."

Tanaka's allegations, which he says he brought to the attention of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 1988, when it was the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and chronicled in a book two years later called "Why Nuclear Power is Dangerous," have resurfaced after the nation's worst nuclear accident on record. The No. 4 reactor was hit by explosions and a fire that spread from adjacent units as the crisis deepened.

Hitachi spokesman Yuichi Izumisawa said the company met with Tanaka in 1988 to discuss the work he did to fix a dent in the vessel and concluded there was no safety problem. "We have not revised our view since then," Izumisawa said.

Kenta Takahashi, an official at METI's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said he couldn't confirm whether the agency's predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, had conducted an investigation into Tanaka's claims. Naoki Tsunoda, a spokesman at Tokyo Electric Power Co., said he couldn't immediately comment.

Tanaka says the reactor pressure vessel inside the No. 4 reactor was damaged at a Babcock-Hitachi foundry in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, during the last step of a manufacturing process that took 2 1/2 years and cost billions of yen. If the mistake had been discovered, the company might have been bankrupted, he said.

Inside a blast furnace the size of a small airplane hanger, the reactor pressure vessel was being treated one last time to remove welding stress. The cylinder, 20 meters tall and 5.8 meters in diameter, was heated to more than 600 degrees, a temperature that softens metal.

Braces that were to have been placed inside during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over when the cylinder was wheeled into the furnace. After the vessel cooled, its walls were warped, Tanaka said.

[Amber G.]

Do you think it was appropriate to design for 6 mts when record was at least for 38 mts?

A general comment, that record height measured was for another location, isn't it ? Tsunami height will vary from location to location, depending on local bathymetry and coastal features. Besides, all this can be done only with good model runs for various types of water column dislocations due to an earthquake. It is a relatively new applied science and very likely such numbers have got better and with good predictability only in recent years.

Yep! The (measured) height at the plants were (per what I heard/read) was 10-12 m.

[chaanakya]

A general comment, that record height measured was for another location, isn't it ? Tsunami height will vary from location to location, depending on local bathymetry and coastal features. Besides, all this can be done only with good model runs for various types of water column dislocations due to an earthquake. It is a relatively new applied science and very likely such numbers have got better and with good predictability only in recent years.

Yes . Japan has a very good system of measuring Tsunami wave heights. NPP was hit by 10 mts 14 m wave.

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-ne ... -fukushima
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaki ... 6025945156
other site are also corroborating it.

NHK Tv wad showing wave heights of Tsunami at different locations as Tsunami was progressing. Videos are on YT , some links in this thread. But not to anticiapte tsunami of 10 mts when records are of 38 mts is not a good sign.

People rely on experts who make compromises , technologically or commercially, and put lives in harms way , without even telling them or worst still, fudging figures or hiding facts. TEPCO has been accused of all that and more.

[Amber G.]

Actually the enterpising members can design and market personal dosimeters in a choice of colors as designer ware and make a killing.

Can call it iDosi!

Instead of

... Actually in USA many outlets which sell radiation meters/dosimeters are sold out.. (many are not even taking orders).

I do remember back in my student days ... when someone made one using throwaway electronic parts..(it used a bucket with a stick in the middle..or at least it looked like that. )... could measure up to 25 R/hr

[chaanakya]

Guideline eyed on tsunami-wrecked cars

The government will shortly issue instructions to municipal governments to collect vehicles destroyed by the tsunami that followed the Tohoku earthquake and scrap them after a certain undefined period of time, according to government sources.

A government official revealed this plan

at a meeting of the Miyagi prefectural government's disaster response and relief headquarters on Monday.

As owners of wrecked cars are eligible to claim refunds based on the automobile weight tax when they scrap their vehicles in certain cases and also collect insurance if their cars are covered, it will be difficult for local governments to act on their own initiative to scrap the cars, according to the Cabinet Secretariat and the Environment Ministry.

Under the plan, municipal governments first will have to secure vacant lots to keep the cars. They then will publicize the cars' registration numbers and vehicle identification numbers for a certain period of time.

If the owners claim the cars, the vehicles would be handed over so they can scrap them. If they do not appear before the as-yet-unspecified deadline, the local governments will scrap the cars.

The Miyagi prefectural government has sought permission from the central government to shoulder the duties of municipal governments located in the Sanriku coastal region, as many local governments there have ceased to function.

However, the plan to secure sites for wrecked cars would impose an additional burden on municipalities in Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, as they are already having difficulty finding places to keep the bodies of victims and provide temporary accommodation for those who have lost their homes.

The central government also will exempt electrical appliances left behind in the disaster-stricken areas from the Home Appliance Recycling Law, which obliges owners to recycle the appliances, according to the sources.

This will enable municipal governments to scrap those appliances as disaster waste.

On Monday, the government set up in the Cabinet Office building an office for the headquarters tasked with supporting survivors of the earthquake and tsunami.

Tatsuo Hirano, senior vice minister of the Cabinet Office who has been appointed head of the new office, said the headquarters will prepare guidelines on how to remove and dispose of rubble. The guidelines will also determine who will bear the cost of such work, he said.

[Amber G.]

He doesn't endorse 1,000,000 deaths by radiation claim from Greenpeace and 985,000 from a book Chernobyl... conclusions are moderate ...

/SIGH/!!! It is not a question of what a journalist “endorses” of if his conclusions are “moderate”.. my point was that he does not even MENTION the IAEA numbers of 57.
(while he throws numbers like 100,000, .. 875,000,… 4000.. 1000..)

(He could have easily gotten the number(57) .. by looking at the Times article, for example..)

(A journalist should, above all, report as accurately as possible, the facts he collect.. quote the sources as accurately as possible etc...)

In any case, as I said, I do not have interest or even time to go through that article line by line. As I have already said… it is just me who finds that kind of work pretty sloppy. Any way thanks because I heard about this author for the first time from your post. I know now how much credibility to give him in the future. But that’s JMHO.

Let me ask you (generic you ... anyone can answer) something, answer me if you choose to.

What is , in YOUR BEST ESTMATE (after reading all data): of the total number of fatalities which can directly be (this includes radiation/cancer deaths far way too) related to Chernoybl? To TMI?

Added later. For above: to understand the phrase "directly related" to use your best understanding as you would for other disasters (Like Gujarat quake - lot of people do die even if they survived the initial impact due to long time exposure..etc.. so use a consistent criteria.. just so that we can get some perspective)

[chaanakya]

Actually the enterpising members can design and market personal dosimeters in a choice of colors as designer ware and make a killing.

Can call it iDosi!

Instead of

Just to help

http://www.galacticelectronics.com/GeigerCounter.HTML
http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemad ... r-Counter/
http://www.edcheung.com/automa/radon.htm

It could be called bananaDosi.

[chaanakya]

Family bands together to keep Sendai man on respirator alive through long blackout

SENDAI -- The prolonged losses of power in Japan's northeast following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami have hit many people hard, though perhaps none more so than those literally dependent on electricity for life.

When the power went out here the day of the earthquake, it was 53-year-old Masashi Tsuchiya's wife Kayoko, 50, and others in his family who kept him alive through the dark night. Tsuchiya has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known by its acronym ALS, and he depends on an artificial respirator to breathe. When his home lost power, so did the respirator. His wife and family did the job instead, pumping air into his lungs with a special rubber bag.

With help from friends and his doctor, power was restored to the Tsuchiya home the following day, but the stress of being so close to the edge for so many hours took its toll.

"If it had just been us, we wouldn't have made it," said Kayoko.

[chaanakya]

U.S. spent-fuel storage sites are packed

Found interesting. Deals with problems of Nuclear waste or spen fuels. Astonishingly ( being a nuk noobie) it says

The U.S. has 104 operating nuclear reactors, situated on 65 sites in 31 states. There are another 15 permanently shut reactors that also house spent fuel.

I didn't want to snip. If quoting in whole is found inappropriate , mods please delete it, leaving the link .

The nuclear crisis in Japan has laid bare an ever-growing problem for the United States -- the enormous amounts of still-hot radioactive waste accumulating at commercial nuclear reactors in more than 30 states.

The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could have handled.

Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release from a nuclear reactor.

Spent fuel at Dai-ichi overheated, possibly melting fuel-rod casings and spewing radiation into the air, after Japan's tsunami knocked out power to cooling systems at the plant.

The rest of the spent fuel from commercial U.S. reactors has been put into dry cask storage, but regulators only envision those as a solution for about a century and the waste would eventually have to be deposited into a Yucca-like facility.


This April 14, 1998 file photo shows the defunct Maine Yankee nuclear power plant in Wiscasset, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
The U.S. nuclear industry says the waste is being stored safely at power-plant sites, though it has long pushed for a long-term storage facility. Meanwhile, the industry's collective pile of waste is growing by about 2,200 tons a year; experts say some of the pools in the United States contain four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed to handle.

The AP analyzed a state-by-state summary of spent fuel data based on information that nuclear power plants voluntarily report every year to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry and lobbying group. The NEI would not make available the amount of spent fuel at individual power plants.

While the U.S. Department of Energy previously reported figures on overall spent fuel storage, it no longer has updated information available. A spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear power plant safety, said the capacities of fuel pools are public record, but exact inventories of spent fuel are tracked in a government database kept confidential for security reasons.

The U.S. has 104 operating nuclear reactors, situated on 65 sites in 31 states. There are another 15 permanently shut reactors that also house spent fuel.

Four states have spent fuel even though they don't have operating commercial plants. Reactors in Colorado, Oregon and Maine are permanently shut; spent fuel from all three is stored in dry casks. Idaho never had a commercial reactor, but waste from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania is being stored at a federal facility there.

Illinois has 9,301 tons of spent nuclear fuel at its power plants, the most of any state in the country, according to industry figures. It is followed by Pennsylvania with 6,446 tons; 4,290 in South Carolina and roughly 3,780 tons each for New York and North Carolina.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life -- some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.

How dangerous these elements are depends on how easily can find their way into the body. Plutonium and uranium are heavy, and don't spread through the air well, but there is a concern that plutonium could leach into water supplies over thousands of years.

Cesium-137 is easily transported by air. It is cesium-137 that can still be detected in a New Jersey-sized patch of land around the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in the Ukraine in 1986.

Typically, waste must sit in pools at least five years before being moved to a cask or permanent storage, but much of the material in the pools of U.S. plants has been stored there far longer than that.

Safety advocates have long urged the NRC to force utility operators to reduce the amount of spent fuel in their pools. The more tightly packed they are, the more quickly they can overheat and spew radiation into the environment in case of an accident, a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

Industry leaders say new technology has made fuel pools safer, and regulators have taken some steps since the 9/11 terror attacks to reduce fuel pool risks. Kevin Crowley, who directs the nuclear and radiation studies board at the National Academy of Sciences, says lessons will be learned from the crisis in Japan. And NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko says his agency will review how spent fuel is stored in the U.S.

A 2004 report by the academy suggested that fresh spent fuel, which is radioactively hotter, be spread among older, cooler assemblies in the spent fuel pool. "You're buying yourself time, basically," says Crowley. "The cooler ones can act as a thermal buffer."

First Energy, which runs two nuclear power stations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, was able to reconfigure the spent fuel rods in its pools to make more room. Still, the company is now running out of space, says spokesman Todd Schneider. Ohio has 1,136 tons of spent fuel in pools and 37 tons in dry casks.

The casks in the U.S. are kept outdoors, generally on concrete pads, but industry officials insist they are safe. Unlike the pools, the casks don't need electricity; they are cooled by air circulation.

One cask model, selling for $1.5 million, places spent fuel inside a stainless steel canister, which is placed inside an "overpack" -- an outside shell composed of a layer of carbon steel, 68.58 centimeters of concrete and another layer of carbon steel. When in place, the system stands 6 meters and weighs 68,040 kilograms, said Joy Russell, a spokeswoman for manufacturer Holtec International of Florida.

Russell said engineers have designed the system to withstand a crash from an F-16 fighter jet and survive the resulting jet fuel fire.

Plant operators in some states have moved aggressively to dry cask storage. Virginia has 1,533 tons of nuclear waste in dry storage and 1,105 tons in spent fuel pools. Maryland has 844 tons in dry storage and 588 tons in spent fuel pools.

Utilities in Texas, though, have not. There are 2,178 tons kept in spent fuel pools at reactor sites there, and zero in dry casks. In New York, 3,345 tons are in spent fuel pools while only 454 tons are in dry storage.

No cask is totally invulnerable, but the academy report found that radioactive releases from casks would be relatively low.

"If you attacked a fuel cask and managed to put a hole in it, anything that came out, the consequences would be very local," Crowley said.

Casks can be licensed for 20 years, with renewals, said Carrie Phillips, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which has a dozen such casks at its two-reactor Joseph M. Farley plant in Alabama. She said officials have "every expectation" the casks could last "in excess of 100 years by design."

But not the needed tens of thousands of years. For long-term storage, the government had looked to Yucca Mountain. It was designed to hold 77,160 tons -- 69,444 tons designated for commercial waste and 7,716 for military waste. That means the current inventory already exceeds Yucca's original planned capacity.

A 1982 law gave the federal government responsibility for the long-term storage of nuclear waste and promised to start accepting waste in 1998. After 20 years of study, Congress passed a law in 2002 to build a nuclear waste repository deep in Yucca Mountain.

The federal government spent $9 billion developing the project, but the Obama administration has cut funding and recalled the license application to build it. Nevadans have fiercely opposed Yucca Mountain, though a collection of state governments and others are taking legal action to reverse the decision.

Despite his Yucca Mountain decision, President Barack Obama wants to expand nuclear power. He created a commission last year to come up with a long-term nuclear waste plan. Initial findings are expected this summer, with a final plan expected in January.

"They are 13 years late," says Terry Pickens, Director of Nuclear Policy at Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that operates three reactors in Minnesota. Xcel is building steel-and-concrete cask containers to hold old waste on site, and suing the government periodically to pay for them. "We would like them to get done with what they said they would get done."

Some countries -- such as France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom -- reprocess their spent fuel into new nuclear fuel to help reduce the amount of waste.

The remaining waste is solidified into a glass. It needs to be stored in a long-term waste repository, but reprocessing reduces the volume of waste by three-quarters.

Because reprocessing isolates plutonium, which can be used to make a nuclear weapon, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter put a stop to it in the U.S. The ban was later overturned, but the country still does not reprocess.

France produces 1,300 tons of nuclear waste per year, and reprocesses 940 tons. Still, fuel is only reprocessed once and then it, too, needs to be stored. France is expecting that engineers will eventually succeed in building a new type of nuclear reactor called a fast reactor that will use the waste it can't reprocess as fuel.

"They've kicked the can down the road," says Frank von Hippel, a director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.

Other countries, such as Germany, store spent fuel in casks. Finland is building a repository it says will store waste safely for 100,000 years.

Even though there is no long-term storage in the U.S., utility customers and taxpayers have been paying for it -- twice.

Customers have paid $24 billion into a fund Congress established in 1982 to pay for such storage. The charge -- a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours -- would typically add up to about $11 a year for a household that received all its electricity from nuclear plants.

Users pay as taxpayers, too -- for dry storage. Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget.

[chaanakya]

Neutron beam observed 13 times
Kyodo News

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday it has observed a neutron beam, a kind of radioactive ray, 13 times on the premises of its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

Tepco said the neutron beam measured about 1.5 km southwest of the plant's Nos. 1 and 2 reactors over three days from March 13 and is equivalent to 0.01 to 0.02 microsieverts per hour. This is not a dangerous level of radiation, it added.

The utility said it will also measure uranium and plutonium, which could emit a neutron beam.

In the 1999 criticality accident at a nuclear fuel processing plant run by JCO Co. in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, uranium broke apart continually in nuclear fission, causing a massive amount of neutron beams.

In the latest case at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, a criticality accident has yet to happen.

But the measured neutron beam may be evidence that uranium and plutonium leaked from the plant's nuclear reactors and spent nuclear fuel have discharged a small amount of neutron beams via fission.

[chaanakya]

Preparation for nuke crisis woeful;Drills for natural disasters top form, but not man-made variety

FUKUSHIMA — When the massive earthquake and tsunami rocked the northeast March 11, residents who had been prepared by years of drills knew exactly what to do: They scrambled for cover until the shaking stopped, then ran for higher ground to avoid the giant waves.

But when word came that the disasters had left the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant leaking radiation, residents were baffled. Should they run? Stay indoors? Drink the water? Eat the food?

Japan, famous for drilling its citizens on how to prepare for all manner of natural disasters, has done far less to prepare those who live near its many nuclear reactors for emergencies. This has left neighbors of the crippled power station confused, misinformed and angry amid the country's worst nuclear accident.

"The only time I ever learned anything in school about nuclear stuff was when we studied about Chernobyl in history class," said Chiyo Maeda, a bank clerk who lived only 25 km from the plant before her home was lost in the tsunami. "If we had known more before this happened, maybe we could have reacted more calmly."

In an evaluation report written after the drill, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said there was a need for better public education. But none of that appears to have trickled down to the people now affected by the disaster.

"Nobody here knows what a microsievert is," said 59-year-old Tomio Hirota, referring to the unit used to measure a dose of radiation. "I had never heard of that until all this happened. We don't understand what's going on, so we worry."

Chiho Watanabe, a teacher in Fukushima, said the school has regular fire and earthquake drills but had done nothing to plan for a nuclear crisis. Nor did it have any monitoring devices for radiation.

"I guess we just trusted the government that the nuclear plants were safe," she said. "What else could we do? The nuclear facilities never instructed us that we needed to be ready for something like this."

[chaanakya]

[Amber G.]

If anyone is curious/interested... IAEA, and other sites are actually having numbers associated with that bad water, radioactive I, Cs and neutrons etc.

For example, in water near the plants: radionuclides showed amounts below regulatory limits for cobalt-58, iodine-132 and cesium-136. and (far) above limits for cesium-137, cesium-134 and iodine-131.. etc..

[Amber G.]

FWIW - There were some posts about "concrete pumping" and speculation aka Chernobyl... Just to clarify that part form a news report:

At 5.17pm today efforts to refill fuel ponds at units 3 and 4 were upgraded significantly by the arrival of a concrete pumping truck of the kind usually used in construction. It will supply water at up to 160 tonnes per hour through a 58 metre flexible boom via remote control.

[Sanku]

Amber et al -- with all due respects, this calculation about "how many liters of milk and how many kgs of spinach" being used currently to suggest that some how the matter is perhaps not serious; is deeply flawed

1) Calculations assume radiation in Milk and spinach. This ignores that Milk and Spinach are not necessarily the only places where harmful stuff collects. There would be a whole list of bio products where they will end up.

2) Calculations are made on how much milk OR how much spinach. Huh!!! I mean why not how much Milk AND spinach AND ..... that calculation will yield fairly different numbers. and that is reality. People dont eat only milk or spinach.

3) Calculations ignore the fact that concentration happens in food chain, i.e. grass will have x parts million/ cows will have 10x/ pigs eating food with cow inputs will have 100x. Humans eating pig will collect 1000x. (Indicative numbers)

4) These are EARLIEST signs of leak, with the plants merrily leaking radiation, morning evening and night, with breaks for pyrotechnic displays. The number will only go up.

This is going to far far worse before it gets better.

[Amber G.]

Preparation for nuke crisis woeful;Drills for natural disasters top form, but not man-made variety

FUKUSHIMA — When the massive earthquake and tsunami rocked the northeast March 11, residents who had been prepared by years of drills knew exactly what to do: They scrambled for cover until the shaking stopped, then ran for higher ground to avoid the giant waves.

<snip>

"

We keep getting these type of articles about how dangerous NPP are (that is much much much more than Tsunami etc..).. and how evil/stupid/unprepared those who made those plants were/are.. that, at least is seems to me, no one among these reporters are stopping to think about their responsibility to be objective and give us some perspective.

This is one of many such items posted here. Of course, the mainstream media is talking about this particular aspect of Japan Disaster ...90% of the time

Just for the perspective guys:

In a disaster where 20,000+ people are killed, these worthies (the reporters) are critical of NPP wrt their "preparation".. and what a evil/poor/bad job they did ..

- NOT a single death , yet reported due to radiation , or any "nuke" related aspect. NO major medical issues either. (Keep in mind, all this while 20000 people lost their life in other ways which this article does not even analyse..)

- The evacuation took place within HOURS! KI tablet distributed before they might be needed. Okay one person didn't know what a Sievert is .. but these worthies, who have time to look it up, still have even less of an idea.

In all, IMO, kudos to Tepco and Japan in general.

[Sanku]

We just do not know how many people died in Nuke related incident, or will die. The Japanese are releasing minimum needed information. There were report of missing workers in earlier days at the plant, no report saying that they have been found has emerged.

What we know is that large scale radiation leaks have long term consequences as seen by Chernobyl accident (where substantial health issues were seen over eastern europe/germany)

The matter is not helped by seriously questionable calculations on nuclear exposure with calculation based on a person only drinking, bathing and swimming in milk all their lives.

I think "fools these mainstream media" type disdain will really not convince anyone anymore.

[Theo_Fidel]

3) Calculations ignore the fact that concentration happens in food chain, i.e. grass will have x parts million/ cows will have 10x/ pigs eating food with cow inputs will have 100x. Humans eating pig will collect 1000x. (Indicative numbers)

This is absolutely right. The Banana dose garbage I see on the news is particularly foolish. K40 is naturally present and our bodies have developed ways to keep amounts of it under strict control. Also K is used in muscle action and is diluted by distribution around the body.

By contrast there is almost no radioactive Iodine, Caesium and Strotium present environmentally. Radioactive Iodine when ingested displaces normal iodine and increases radiation dose dramatically by concentrating in certain areas. Caesium is water soluble and has a tendency to get into ground water. It is not naturally present in the body. When it gets into the body it displaces normal Potassium increasing the radiation exposure. Because Potassium is used by so much life it tends to get concentrated up the food chain. The worst is Strontium. It mimics calcium and about 1/3 of the strontium ingested will end up in your bones almost permanently. Watch for bone cancers to increase dramatically in Northern Japan for the next 500 years or so.

[Sanku]

Watch for bone cancers to increase dramatically in Northern Japan for the next 500 years or so.

I had been trying to avoid making a serious reply on the banana nonsense, hoping people would see that those were not really very meaningful.

But sometimes once hands are forced.

[ramana]

Sanku and Theo, No one is advocating complaceny (sitting on our haunches waiting for tsunami). What we are saying is not to lose prespective. Hence the banana, milk, spinach etc.

What we saw in Japan is a triple whammy (eqk, tusnami, wipeout of D-G set fuel tanks) and the inherent design flaw of LWRs using enriched fuel (will have core exposed in case of an accident). Add to that the requirement to store spent fuel at the site. Inspite of all these the rad exposure was minimal.

[Sanku]

Sir, I agree with nearly all of your posts, barring the section below, forgive me for disagreeing and pointing yet again what seems wrong here:

Inspite of all these the rad exposure was minimal.

Sir this is where I humbly and strongly disagree, I claim there is massive rad exposure. They are underplaying it by

1) Partial information available to them of which they release partially.
2) Playing with words to not really focus the issue.

The 20 Km radius area around the plant is probably toast forever. The amount of radioactive poison already pumped in the sea is not even being looked at formally. There is already 2x rad levels 250 km away in Tokyo.

Sorry for going on and on, but I think it is critical to highlight that the rad exposure is not minimal. At least till not proven otherwise by a massive structured test suite on the entire sea-land area with independent inspectors.

We need to know the truth, as much as the Japanese themselves need to, the world is a global village now. Its not a Japanese problem any more.

[ramana]

Sanku,
How can I convince you that BWR accident in Fukushima doesn't have that kind of rad concentration? Had it been a PWR and the main hot leg or cold leg or cross over leg pipe burst leading to core meltdown I agree. But not here.

I do agree its not a Japan problem but could be Indian in future if plan to acquire LWRs goes thru.

[Sanku]

Ramana Saar, I suspect the problem is more due to dispersion of live fuel through steam (water pumping etc) -- this may not be traditional mode in which BWR would spread rad. What is your view on spread of radioactivity through exposure of fuel to water which later get released into env (untreated) as well as direct exposure of enriched U fuel to air?

What kinds of issues are we looking at then?

[ramana]

Hindu reports:

What the hell is going on?

Japanese PM.

Nearly 4,000 spent fuel assemblies were stored at the Fukushima Daiichi unit — more than thrice the amount of fuel in the six cores


Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan had every reason to ask the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), “What the hell is going on?” His outburst was in response to the delay of nearly an hour by TEPCO officials to alert him about the third explosion at the Fukushima nuclear facility.

Can it be dismissed as a slip on the part of TEPCO officials, given the emergency situation at the nuclear facility? Quite unlikely.

This is not an isolated case, and TEPCO has a dubious track record of falsification and concealing crucial data, including safety data, of the nuclear plants.

Ticking time bomb

It has now come to light that the company has been storing 4,000 spent uranium fuel assemblies at its nuclear units at Fukushima Daiichi.

This is equivalent to almost the amount of highly radioactive uranium fuel produced in six years by the units and more than three times the amount of radioactive material present in the cores of all the six units.

For instance, Unit-4 had some 548 still-hot fuel assemblies stored in a pool of water in the upper floor. It was the lack of cooling water in this pool that ultimately led to an explosion of the roof of Unit-4.

More than 60 per cent of the spent fuel from the facility is stored in a separate pool built in 1997.

According to Reuters, constrained by space, TEPCO had initiated steps to increase the storage capacity of spent fuel inside the reactor buildings by “re-racking” the pools. There were other plans for increasing the storage capacity outside the reactor buildings.

But only the reactor buildings offered sufficient open space for any significant increase in storage capacity. “TEPCO had the capacity to more than double the number of fuel assemblies stored in the reactors from 3,998 at the time of the quake to 8,310 assemblies,” according to Reuters.

No safety checks

The Guardian reports that TEPCO had missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the March 11 quake. For instance, the company had failed to carry out safety checks on 33 pieces of equipment inside the plant's cooling system. The company's admission of this omission came weeks after government regulators approved prolonging of the life of one of the six reactors.

This is not the first time that TEPCO had violated safety norms, concealed crucial safety data, or even vital information about geological fault structures.

Turning a blind eye

It was after the 2007 earthquake of 6.8 magnitude, which hit the seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan's west coast that it became clear that the reactor facility was built directly on top of a seismically active fault line.

People were told about this only after the quake.

According to Nature, scientists knew about the presence of an active fault under the nuclear facility but it was “ignored when the plant was enlarged.”

TEPCO had apparently found a seven-km long fault line during the course of its investigation prior to expanding the facility. “But [TEPCO] failed to investigate it fully,” notes Nature.

Hiroaki Nakata, a seismologist at the Hiroshima Institute of Tehnology was quoted as saying in Nature: “There's no reason for TEPCO to have stopped when they [found the fault line]. There are many places where they missed — or intentionally avoided — seeing fault lines.”

The damage to the plant was minor and no one died and the amount of radiation released was reportedly negligible. Yet, this and many other instances dented the public's faith and trust.

According to Nature, it became clear that 1,200 litres of contaminated water released from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility into the ocean was 50 per cent more radioactive than what TEPCO had previously stated.

Other instances

There have been many instances when TEPCO had behaved irresponsibly. In February 2007, the company admitted to 199 cases of falsifying inspection data at three nuclear power plants, including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. TEPCO was found to be slow in reporting two radiation leaks and miscalculating the amount of radiation released.

In 2002, a major scandal hit the company. A government investigation revealed that TEPCO had systematically concealed safety breaches for a period stretching to nearly two decades.

A three-year investigation revealed that up to 13 of the protective shells surrounding reactors had cracks. And the company officials knew about this.

TEPCO ordered closure of all its reactors after it admitted to falsifying data in about 30 safety logs and up to 200 incidents. This included the now infamous Fukushima Daiichi Unit-1.

Wow! They had a history of ignoring problems and not reporting the data.

[arnab]

. Watch for bone cancers to increase dramatically in Northern Japan for the next 500 years or so.

Well this is what UNSCEAR has to say after a 20 year study of the Chernobyl incident

http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident.

**

Conclusions
The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was a tragic event for its victims, and those most affected suffered major hardship. Some of the people who dealt with the emergency lost their lives. Although those exposed as children and the emergency and recovery workers are at increased risk of radiation-induced effects, the vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chernobyl accident. For the most part, they were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background, and future exposures continue to slowly diminish as the radionuclides decay. Lives have been seriously disrupted by the Chernobyl accident, but from the radiological point of view, generally positive prospects for the future health of most individuals should prevail.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Theo_Fidel]

Well this is what UNSCEAR has to say after a 20 year study of the Chernobyl incident

Well, in that case I suggest you move to Chernobyl and take possession of a 1000 Sq Km's of land. That has to be the ultimate test, did the report convince you enough to move there.

What, you don't want to. Why not? Didn't all those wonderful explanations for the elevated cancer rate not convince you. While you're at it roundly curse the Russians for maintaining their exclusion zone, where you know, no human is allowed and yet the claim is that there is no long term effect. Maybe the jury should still be out on a radioactive substance that will be here 500 years from now. Talk is cheap.

[arnab]

Well, in that case I suggest you move to Chernobyl and take possession of a 1000 Sq Km's of land. That has to be the ultimate test, did the report convince you enough to move there.

What, you don't want to. Why not? Didn't all those wonderful explanations for the elevated cancer rate not convince you. While you're at it roundly curse the Russians for maintaining their exclusion zone, where you know, no human is allowed and yet the claim is that there is no long term effect. Maybe the jury should still be out on a radioactive substance that will be here 500 years from now. Talk is cheap.

Well your argument is then no longer about the available scientific evidence, is it? It is more about fear of the unknown (if the jury is out perhaps you can show me an alternative study disputing the evidence of UNSCEAR)

Meanwhile, as they say - 'when life serves you a lemon, make lemonade'

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/busin ... ml?_r=1&hp

Nuclear Industry in Russia Sells Safety, Taught by Chernobyl

[somnath]

I had posted somewhere before the opinion of George Monbiot on nuclear power post Fukushima - and he a is a card-carrying green..

Here's an interesting piece by Gwyneth Cravens today on BBG (this time managed to the interent version )..
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-0 ... avens.html

The story is still unfolding, but in the end, pollution of air, water, and soil from fossil fuels pose a greater risk than the relatively low-level radiation from Fukushima
-------
When coal, gas, and oil burn -- providing 73 percent of U.S. electricity -- they release transparent gases that combine with water vapor to form fine particulates. These lodge in our lungs, killing 13,200 Americans annually and sickening thousands of others. In addition, unconfined fossil-fuel residues include soot, mercury, radon, ozone and, in the case of coal, 100 million tons a year of fly ash laced with heavy metals. Health costs: $120 billion a year.
----------
Continuous low-dose radioactive emissions from coal combustion, which concentrates isotopes in the fly ash and flue gases, expose residents within a 50-mile radius of a plant to low-level radioactivity that is 100 to 400 times greater than a nuclear plant would
-----------
What about natural gas? In 2010 alone, its power-related explosions killed 14 Americans. Extraction pollutes the water supply, sometimes with radioactive material -- low-dose, but sometimes far greater than the level allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency.(and nat gas is the "cleanest" fossil fuel - though its supply is very very constrained)

the inherent design flaw of LWRs using enriched fuel (will have core exposed in case of an accident)

Raman-ji, can you elucidate a bit more on this? LWRs will have its core exposed in an accident? What types of accidents? And what is the design deficiency in LWR that the containment vessel will expose itself the moment there is an accident? Barring some random news reports, what we know about Fukushima is that its containment vessels have held on...

[Theo_Fidel]

Well your argument is then no longer about the available scientific evidence, is it? It is more about fear of the unknown (if the jury is out perhaps you can show me an alternative study disputing the evidence of UNSCEAR) ]

Your report is not evidence at all. There are no long term human residents in the exclusion zone, ergo no data. Obviously I wasn't clear enough.

[arnab]

Your report is not evidence at all. There are no long term human residents in the exclusion zone, ergo no data. Obviously I wasn't clear enough.

hmmm, as far as I recall, the mandatory exclusion zone is a 6 mile radius from the Plant. The town of Pripiyat was 1 mile from Chernobyl and mainly housed the nuke powerstation workers (popn 50,000). This town was resettled. So the exclusion area works out to (on the basis of a 6 mile radius) around 125 sq miles. right? You would have had to evcuate many more for say something like the Narmada dam project.

So say Fukishima allows for an exclusion zone of 6 mile radius, would you accept that there will not be significant increases in bone cancer over the next 500 years caused by radiation?

Added later: You were of course initially arguing about the 'food chain' effect - cows eat contaminated grass, cows produce contaminated milk, milk consumed by humans etc. Those effects were obviously calculated in the UNSCEAR study and found to have no impact. Now you are saying that all that matters is 'long-term residency' close to the plant. That should be the least of our problems.

[ramana]

Somnath in a LWR the reactor pressure vessel is always on a pedestal so that any pipe break or leak drains the coolant and exposes the core. All safety measures are to dump coolant water to ensure the core is not exposed leading to meltdown.

[shiv]

From the point of view of medical science, cancer needs to be looked at as a jigsaw puzzle which can be completed using 20 pieces, but there is a choice of 5 options for each of those 20 pieces. That means that there are 100 pieces of which only 20 are needed to complete the puzzle and cause the cancer. Different combinations of the 20 may work to cause cancer.

Radiation is only one of those 100 pieces. Nobody knows exactly why radiation may cause cancer. Nobody knows exactly why radiation fails to cause cancer in others. After a point medical science is shooting in the dark. They have found about 15 of the 100 pieces of jigsaw and have no clue about what is going on exactly.

As a boy I agonized over cancer because my mother underwent radiation for a non cancerous condition (It was fashionable in those days to use radiation for all sorts of rubbish). I worried for many years that my mother would die of leukaemia. She died of ripe old age. On the other hand - another person, close to me, underwent the same radiation treatment in his 30s and died 30 years later with an unusual manifestation of a cancer that happened to occur in the path of the radiation that was used. No one can be sure that it was the radiation that did it. He had been a a smoker for 40 years, but I and that man's descendants will die with the suspicion that it was the radiation that did it.

The rakshasa who causes cancer uses bullets of many calibers - ranging from 2.2 to 5.56 to 7.62 to 9 mm to 12.7, 23, 27, 30mm etc. Radiation is one of them. Nobody can predict whether a cancer will occur from just the single 30 mm or whether you need to take several hits from 2.2 or some other combination. Nobody knows if the 30 mm will blow off a leg but the man survives but another man dies after taking several hits from different but smaller calibers on the battle field.

[Theo_Fidel]

The town of Pripiyat was 1 mile from Chernobyl and mainly housed the nuke powerstation workers (popn 50,000). This town was resettled.

Pripyat has been abandoned for 25 years and Your exclusion area is wrong.

[arnab]

The town of Pripiyat was 1 mile from Chernobyl and mainly housed the nuke powerstation workers (popn 50,000). This town was resettled.

Pripyat has been abandoned for 25 years and Your exclusion area is wrong.

Sorry - meant to say Pripiyat has been 'resettled in a different place'. So what is the exclusion area? I read that even guided tours are offered in the 'Zone of alienation' (radius 19 miles). The mandatory 'Zone of exclusion' is a 6 mile radius
But as I said earlier - do you still believe the 'food chain' contamination argument to be correct? since your argument is focusing on 'long-term residency' requirements. The former has obviously been analysed by UNSCEAR.

[Theo_Fidel]

The former has obviously been analysed by UNSCEAR.

No.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Shiv,

I too have agonized over why cancer catches some while others live to be 96 smoking 2 packs a day.

The way I understood it the human body has amazing repair capabilities. Literally thousands of damage events are repaired in cells every single day. Even complete double helix breaks are fixed even though it is very rare. Radioactive particles generate Beta and Gamma rays that are particularly damaging to DNA. In Chernobyl several biological studies have identified ongoing radiation damage caused genetic deformities amongst the Flora & Fauna in the region. Of course this is hotly contested by the Nuclear lobby.

Perhaps this is why some are more susceptible than others. Older folks who have fewer cell divisions are less affected than infants who have numerous growth changes ongoing. Maybe some can live in a high radiation zone without to many problems until they get very sick and the body has to go through massive tissue repair and cell division making them vulnerable.

In any case it is not a good sign that the radioactive material has found its way into a water source so quickly. Undoubtedly there are localized populations near the reactors who are drinking water with much higher levels. It is always the case that there will be hot spots.

[somnath]

Somnath in a LWR the reactor pressure vessel is always on a pedestal so that any pipe break or leak drains the coolant and exposes the core. All safety measures are to dump coolant water to ensure the core is not exposed leading to meltdown.

?? Are you saying that PHWRs will never have a LOCA? Given my "non-background", I did a little bit of Googling, and found this interesting report..

http://www.aerb.gov.in/T/PUBLICATIONS/C ... G-D-05.PDF

Simultaneous independent occurrence of loss of coolant accident
(LOCA) and safe shutdown earthquake (SSE) is considered as of very
low probability. A designer, by using conservative methods, should
demonstrate that LOCA is not caused by SSE. However, simultaneous
occurrence of LOCA and SSE should be considered to demonstrate that
this does not lead to failure of containment, which is the ultimate barrier.
Supports/hangers, whose failure could be a threat to containment
integrity, should be designed for simultaneous occurrence of LOCA and
SSE.

Low probability! But this is precisely what happened in Fukushima, isnt it? Obviously, the "black swan" isnt so "black" anymore..So everyone needs to re-visit these assumptions...