In the mid-afternoon on Friday, March 11 2011 the seismic sensors at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan registered the earliest indications of the largest earthquake in modern Japanese history. They executed a preprogrammed response and began to drive all of the long control rods into the three reactors that were currently operating at the site. The control rods caused each generation of fission to produce fewer neutrons and fewer fission reactions. In three minutes the reactors were making 10% of their rated power from fission; in six minutes they were making 1%, and within by ten minutes nuclear fission as a source of heat had ended in the first three units at Fukushima Daiichi. It would never begin again.
However, at Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, a major accident sequence commenced.
Tokyo Electric Power Company, Incorporated (東京電力株式会社, Tōkyō Denryoku Kabushiki-gaisha, TYO: 9501), also known as Toden (東電, Tōden) or TEPCO
The three reactors were shut down by the earthquake and the emergency diesel generators started as expected, but then they shut down an hour later when submerged by the tsunami, about 15 metres high at that point.
The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Taiheiyou-Oki earthquake at 2.46 pm on 11 March did considerable damage, and the tsunami it created, with run-up height of 40 metres, caused even more. It appears to have been a double quake giving a severe duration of about 3 minutes, and was centred 130 km offshore of the city of Sendai in Miyagi prefecture on the eastern cost of Honshu Island. It moved Honshu 4 metres east and apparently subsided the nearby coastline by half a metre. Eleven reactors at four nuclear power plants in the region were operating at the time and all shut down automatically when the quake hit. Power was available to run the cooling pumps at most of the units, and they achieved cold shutdown in a few days. However, at Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, a major accident sequence commenced. The three reactors were shut down by the earthquake and the emergency diesel generators started as expected, but then they shut down an hour later when submerged by the tsunami, about 15 metres high at that point. Other systems proved inadequate and led the authorities to order, and subsequently extend, an evacuation while engineers worked to restore power and cooling.
The operating units which shut down were Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi 1, 2, 3, Fukushima Daini 1, 2, 3, 4, Tohoku’s Onagawa 1, 2, 3, and Japco’s Tokai. Onogawa 1 briefly suffered a fire in the non-nuclear turbine building, but the main problem centred on Fukushima Daiichi units 1-3. First, pressure inside the containment structures increased steadily and led to this being vented to the atmosphere on an ongoing basis. Vented gases and vapour included hydrogen, produced by the exothermic interaction of the fuel’s very hot zirconium cladding with water. Later on 12th, there was a hydrogen explosion in the building above unit 1 reactor containment, and another one two days later in unit 3, from the venting as hydrogen mixed with air. Then on 15th, unit 2 apparently ruptured its pressure suppression chamber under the actual reactor, releasing significant radioactivity. Inside, water levels had dropped, exposing fuel, and this was addressed by pumping seawater into the reactor pressure vessels.
Then a separate set of problems arose as the spent fuel ponds in the upper part of the reactor structures were found to be depleted in water. Unit 4 was undergoing maintenance, and all its 548 fuel assemblies were in that pond, along with other used fuel, total 1535 assemblies, giving it a heat load of about 3 MW thermal, according to France’s ISRN. Unit 3’s pool contained 566 fuel assemblies.
Japan’s Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency initially declared the Fukushima accident as Level 5 on INES scale – an accident with wider consequences, the same level as Three Mile Island in 1979 – but after new estimates of radioactive releases in the first few days of the accident NISA reclassified it as level 7, while claiming that radioactive releases were about one-tenth of Chernobyl’s. The design basis acceleration for both Fukushima plants had been upgraded in 2008, and is now quoted at horizontal 441-489 Gal for Daiichi and 415-434 Gal for Daini. The interim recorded data for both plants shows that 550 Gal was the maximum for Daiichi, in the foundation of unit 2 (other figures 281-548 Gal), and 254 Gal was maximum for Daini. Units 2, 3 and 5 exceeded their maximum response acceleration design basis in E-W direction by about 20%. Recording was over 130-150 seconds. (Ground acceleration was around 2000 Gal a few kilometres north, on sediments.)
The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission found the nuclear disaster was “manmade” and that its direct causes were all foreseeable. The report also found that the plant was incapable of withstanding the earthquake and tsunami. TEPCO, regulators Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and NSC and the government body promoting the nuclear power industry (METI), all failed to meet the most basic safety requirements, such as assessing the probability of damage, preparing for containing collateral damage from such a disaster, and developing evacuation plans. A separate study found that older Japanese nuclear plants and those operated by the largest utility companies were particularly unprotected against potential tsunamis.
The Japanese nuclear reactor hit by the tsunami went into ‘meltdown’ afterwards, as officials admitted that fuel rods appear to be melting inside three damaged reactors.
There is a risk that molten nuclear fuel can melt through the reactor’s safety barriers and cause a serious radiation leak.
There have already been explosions inside two over-heating reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, and the fuel rods inside a third were partially exposed as engineers desperately fight to keep them cool after the tsunami knocked out systems.
‘Meltdown': The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant moments after it was rocked by a second explosion today. Officials later admitted that fuel rods are ‘highly likely’ to be melting in three damaged reactors
Fireball: A build-up of hydrogen in Unit Three of Fukushima ignites in a ball of fire that can be seen for miles
Smoke: An enormous cloud rises from the site, dwarfing the plant and raising fears of radiation problems
Extensive damage: Experts are now debating whether a radiation cloud could reach the West Coast
WHAT HAPPENS IN A NUCLEAR MELTDOWN ?
The Japanese reactors work by harnessing the energy of thousands of nuclear fuel rods, that are normally kept submerged in water to keep them cool.
But if the cooling system fails, the heat generated by the nuclear reaction increases uncontrollably.
If that continues for long enough, the nuclear fuel can melt, forming molten pools on the floor of the reactor at thousands of degrees celcius.
This is a meltdown.
These pools of molten fuel can melt through the reactor safety barriers – there is an inner and outer shield.
The worst case scenario is that the protective shield around the reactors is melted away, resulting in a serious leak of radioactive material.
Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said it was ‘highly likely’ that the fuel rods inside all three stricken reactors are melting.
Some experts class that a partial meltdown of the reactor, but others would only use that term for when molten nuclear fuel melts through a reactor’s inner chamber – but not through the outer containment shell.
As fuel rods melt, they form an extremely hot molten pool at the bottom of the reactor that can melt through even the toughest of containment barriers.
Japan is fighting to avoid a nuclear catastrophe after the tsunami. There was a hydrogen explosion at the reactor in Unit Three of the power station earlier today, in which eleven workers were hurt by the blast that was felt 25 miles away.
The reactor at Unit One of Fukushima exploded on Saturday, blowing several walls away but engineers said the core was still contained. The fuel rods in the reactor in Unit Two of the plant were partially exposed from their coolant today – which also increases the risk of meltdown.
Engineers have been fighting to keep the reactors under control after the tsunami knocked out emergency coolant systems on Friday.
Earlier engineers were frantically trying to cool radioactive materials at all the reactors with seawater but had halted the process, which resulted in a rise in radiation levels and pressure.
Plant managers knew an explosion was a possibility as they struggled to reduce pressure inside the reactor containment vessel in Unit Three, but apparently felt they had no choice if they wanted to avoid a complete meltdown.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365781/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-All-3-Fukushima-nuclear-plant-reactors-meltdown.html#ixzz3a9iAhZOD
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Pump and pray: Tepco might have to pour water on Fukushima wreckage forever
Christopher Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation and Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.
Published time: August 07, 2013 20:30
TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)
Fukushima is a nightmare disaster area, and no one has the slightest idea what to do. The game is to prevent the crippled nuclear plant from turning into an “open-air super reactor spectacular” which would result in a hazardous, melted catastrophe.
On April 25, 2011 – one month after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant and the anniversary of Chernobyl – I was interviewed by RT and asked to compare Chernobyl and Fukushima. The clip, which you can find on YouTube, was entitled, “Can’t seal Fukushima like Chernobyl – it all goes into the sea.” Since then, huge amounts of radioactivity have flowed from the wrecked reactors directly into the Pacific Ocean. Attempts to stop the flow of contaminated water from Fukushima into the sea were always unlikely to succeed. It is like trying to push water uphill. Now they all seem to have woken up to the issue and have begun to panic.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin – his control
Stops with the shore; — upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor does remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own
George Gordon Byron, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II
The problem is this: the fission process in a reactor creates huge amounts of heat. Of course, that is the whole point of the machine – the heat makes steam which runs turbines. Water is pumped through channels between the fuel rods and this cools them and heats the water. If there is no water, or the channels are blocked, the heat actually melts the fuel into a big blob which falls to the bottom of the steel vessel in which all this occurs – the pressure vessel – and then melts its way through the steel, into the ground, and down in the direction of China. Well, not China in this case, but actually Buenos Aires, Argentina (I figured out).
I have been keeping an eye on developments, and it is quite clear that the reactors are no longer containing the molten fuel – some proportion of which is now in the ground underneath them. Both this material and the remaining material in what was the containment are very hot and are fissioning. Tepco is quite aware – and so is everyone else in the know – that the only hope of preventing what could become an open-air super reactor spectacular is to cool the fuel, the lumps of fuel distributed throughout the system, mainly in the holed pressure vessels, and also in the spent fuel tanks and in the ground under the reactors.
TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)
That all this is fissioning away merrily (though at a low level) is clear from the occasional reports of short half life nuclides like the radioXenons. The game is to prevent it all turning into the open air super reactor located somewhere under the ground. To do this, they have to pump vast amounts of water into the reactors, the fuel pond and generally all over the area where they think the stuff is or might be. This means seawater since luckily they are near the sea. But they are also unluckily near the sea – since you cannot pump the sea onto the land without it wanting to flow back into the sea.
Now a good proportion of the radioactive elements, the radionuclides, are soluble in water. The Caesiums 137 and 134, Strontiums 89 and 90, Barium 140, Radium 226, Lead 210, Rutheniums and Rhodiums, Silvers and Mercuries, Carbons and Tritiums, Iodines and noble gases Kryptons and Xenons merrily dissolve in the hot seawater. There is also a likelihood that the normally insoluble Uraniums, Plutoniums and Neptuniums will dissolve in seawater to some extent, because of the chloride ions. And if they don’t, the micron and nano-particles of these materials will disperse in the water as colloidal suspensions. So a lot of this stuff gets into the sea. Of course, most of the fuss is being made by the Americans who are on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. How unfair that the USA should suffer from the Japanese affair, they think. And also feel a level of fear, underneath all this. As perhaps they should since it is their crappy reactors that blew up.
We hear that 400 tons of highly radioactive water is now escaping the barriers that Tepco erected and is reaching the sea. Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said on August 7 that “stabilizing Fukushima is our challenge.” Tepco said, “This is extremely serious — we are unable to control radioactive water seeping out of the Fukushima plant.” CNN quoted “industry experts” saying that “Tepco has failed to address the problem…[the experts] question Tepco’s ability to safely decommission the plant.”
TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)
There are some things I want to say about all this. First is the inevitable discourse manipulation – something that we have seen in the media ever since this disaster occurred. “Decommission the plant” suggests some calm and ordered scientific process akin to shutting down and defueling an old reactor which has reached the end of its design life. It sparks images of a wise nuclear engineer in a lab coat consulting a document, discussing some issue with a worker in brilliant white overalls with a Tepco logo, wearing a white hard-hat. The reality is that this is a nightmare disaster area where no one has the slightest idea what to do and which has always been out of control. All that they can do is continue to pump in the seawater to hope that the various lumps of molten fuel will not increase their rate of fissioning. And pray. The water will then pick up the radionuclides and flow downhill back to the sea. Of course, they can put up a barrier; surround the plant with a wall. But eventually the water will fill up the pond and flow over the wall. All that water will create a soggy marsh and destabilize the foundations of the reactor buildings which will then collapse and prevent further cooling. Then the Spectacular. All this is predictable enough.
Let us look at some numbers. Four hundred tons of seawater a day are flowing into the sea. That is 400 cubic meters. In one year, that is 146,000 cubic meters. That is a pond 10 meters deep and 120 meters square. This will have to go on forever, a new pond every year, unless they can get the radioactive material out. But here is the other problem. They can’t get close enough because the radiation levels are too high. The water itself is lethally radioactive. Gamma radiation levels tens of meters from the water are enormously high. No one can approach without being fried.
‘Anyone living within 1km of the coast near Fukushima should get out’
But I want to make two other points. The first is that the Pacific Ocean is big enough for this level of release not to represent the global catastrophe that some are predicting. Let’s get some scoping perspective on this. The volume of the North Pacific is 300 million cubic kilometers. The total inventory of the four Fukushima Daiichi reactors, including their spent fuel pools, is 732 tons of Uranium and Plutonium fuel which is largely insoluble in sea water. The inventory in terms of the medium half-life nuclides of radiological significance Cs-137, Cs-134 and Strontium-90, is 3 x 1018 becquerels (Bq) each. Adding these up gives about 1019 Bq. If we dissolve that entire amount into the Pacific, we get a mean concentration of 33 Bq per cubic meter – not great, but not lethal. Of course this is ridiculous since the catastrophe released less than 1017 Bq of these combined nuclides and even if all of this ends up in the sea (which it may do), the overall dilution will result in a concentration of 1 Bq per cubic meter. So the people in California can relax. In fact, the contamination of California and indeed the rest of the planet from the global weapons test fallout of 1959-1962 was far worse, and resulted in the cancer epidemic which began in 1980. The atmospheric megaton explosions drove the radioactivity into the stratosphere and the rain brought it back to earth to get into the milk, the food, the air, and our children’s bones. Kennedy and Kruschev called a halt in 1963, saving millions.
TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)
What we have here in Fukushima is more local, but still very deadly and certainly worse than Chernobyl since the populations are so large. And this brings me to my second point, and a warning to the Japanese people. The contamination of the sea results in adsorption of the radionuclides by the sand and silt on the coast and river estuaries. The east coast of Japan, the sediment and sand on the shores, will now be horribly radioactive. This material is re-suspended into the air through a process called sea-to-land transfer. The coastal air they inhale is laden with radioactive particles. I know about this since I was asked in 1998 by the Irish State to carry out a two-year study of the cancer effects of releases into the Irish Sea by the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield. We looked at small area data leaked to us by the Welsh Cancer Registry covering the period of 1974-1989, when Sellafield was releasing significant amounts of radio-Caesium, radio-Strontium, and Plutonium. Results showed a remarkable and sharp 30 per cent increase in cancer rates in those living within 1km of the coast. The effect was very local and dropped away sharply at 2km. In trying to discover the cause, we came across measurements made by the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Using special cloth filters, they had measured Plutonium in the air by distance from the contaminated coast. The trend was the same as the cancer trend, increasing sharply in the 1km strip near the coast. We later examined cancer rates in a higher resolution questionnaire study in Carlingford, Ireland. This clearly showed the effect increasing inside the 1km radius in the same way. The results were never published in scientific literature but were presented to the UK CERRIE committee and eventually made it into a book which I wrote in 2007 entitled, “Wolves of Water.” Make no mistake, this is a deadly effect. By 2003, we had found 20-fold excess risk of leukemia and brain tumours in the population of children on the north Wales coast. The children were denied of course by the Welsh Cancer Intelligence Unit that supplanted the old Welsh Cancer Registry – which had been shut down immediately after the data was released to us. We did publish this in scientific literature.
Nevertheless, the sea-to-land effect is real. And anyone living within 1km of the coast to at least 200km north or south of Fukushima should get out. They should evacuate inland. It is not eating the fish and shellfish that gets you – it’s breathing.
And what about the future? The future is bleak. I see no way of resolving the catastrophe. They will either have to pour water on the wreckage forever, and thus continue to contaminate the local sea, or find some more drastic immediate solution. I was told that US experts had the idea at the beginning of bombing the reactors into the harbour. Not so stupid in my opinion. That at least may enable them to get sufficiently close to the pieces to pick them up, and should also solve the cooling problem. Apparently (my contact said) the French argued them out of it because of the negative effect on nuclear energy (and Uranium shares).
The Fall out..the sea water was pumped into the Pacific Ocean !!
Fresh leak of highly radioactive water detected at Fukushima nuclear power plant
Updated
22 Feb 2015, 12:18pmSun 22 Feb 2015, 12:18pm
Photo: International Atomic Energy Agency team members during an inspection of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. (AFP/IAEA)
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Map: Japan
Sensors at the Fukushima nuclear plant have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water into the sea.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the sensors, which were rigged to a gutter that pours rain and ground water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a nearby bay, detected contamination levels up to 70 times greater than the already-high radioactive status seen at the plant campus.
TEPCO said its emergency inspections of tanks storing nuclear waste water did not find any additional abnormalities, but the firm said it shut the gutter to prevent radioactive water from going into the Pacific Ocean.
The higher-than-normal levels of contamination were detected on Sunday, with sensors showing radiation levels 50 to 70 times greater than usual.
Though contamination levels fell steadily throughout the day, the same sensors were still showing contamination levels about 10 to 20 times more than usual, a company spokesman said.
It was not immediately clear what caused the original spike of the contamination and its gradual fall, he said.
“With emergency surveys of the plant and monitoring of other sensors, we have no reason to believe tanks storing radioactive waste water have leaked,” he said.
“We have shut the gutter [from pouring water to the bay]. We are currently monitoring the sensors at the gutter and seeing the trend.”
The latest incident, one of several that have plagued the plant in recent months, reflects the difficulty in controlling and decommissioning the plant, which went through meltdowns and explosions after being battered by a giant tsunami in March 2011, sparking the world’s worst nuclear disaster in a generation.
TEPCO has not been able to effectively deal with an increasing amount of contaminated water, used to cool the crippled reactors and molten fuels inside them and kept in large storage tanks on the plant’s vast campus.
Adding to TEPCO’s headaches has been the persistent flow of groundwater from nearby mountains travelling under the contaminated plant before washing into the Pacific Ocean.
The International Atomic Energy Agency recently said TEPCO has made “significant progress” in cleaning up the plant, but suggested that Japan should consider ways to discharge treated waste water into the sea as a relatively safer way to deal with the radioactive water crisis.
Sea creatures are now dying
“Sea creatures sick, dying or disappearing at alarming rate all along Pacific coast… Some wonder if it’s fallout from Fukushima” — New York Times: “Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction” —
Study: “We may be on precipice of major extinction event” in marine wildlife
Williams Lake Tribune columnist Diana French, Jan 13, 2015 (emphasis added): Out of sight is out of mind. Those of us living in the Interior might not know or care that sea creatures are sick, dying or disappearing at an alarming rate all along the Pacific coast. There are dying oysters, bleeding herring, melting star fish, hungry Orcas and sick seals. The latest are dead seabirds… Some blame ocean acidification for the devastation, others wonder if it’s radiation fallout from Fukushima. Whatever, it might be helpful to find the cause before all the creatures are gone.
University of California Santa Barbara, Jan 15, 2015: A consortium of scientists, including UC Santa Barbara’s Douglas McCauley, has found that the same patterns that led to the collapse of wildlife populations on land are now occurring in the sea… Their findings are published today in the journal Science… “All signs indicate that we may be initiating a marine industrial revolution,” [McCauley] said. “We are setting ourselves up in the oceans to replay the process of wildlife Armageddon that we engineered on land.”
New York Times, Jan 15, 2015: A team of scientists… has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Science — ‘Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean’, Jan 16, 2014: Loss of species in marine environments… appears to be increasing rapidly. McCauley et al. review the recent patterns of species decline and loss in marine environments… they note many worrying declines… our effects on marine animals are increasing in pace and impact… today’s low rates of marine extinction may be the prelude to a major extinction pulse… habitat destruction is likely to become an increasingly dominant threat to ocean wildlife [and] is likely to intensify as a major driver of marine wildlife loss. Proactive intervention can avert a marine defaunation disaster of the magnitude observed on land.
These Whales died in a remote bay in Chile.
Santiago (AFP) – More than 20 whales were found dead and rotting along a rocky coast of southern Chile, maritime officials said Friday, as they tried to determine what killed them and when.
The whales, discovered beached north of the Gulf of Penas, measured about 10 meters (33 feet) long, according to officials with Chile’s national fisheries service.
Officials identified them as sei whales, which are internationally protected after being hunted nearly to extinction during the middle of the 20th century.
Images showed the decaying mammals grouped together and laid out along a grass-and-rock shoreline.
They were discovered by a group of foreign scientists who were conducting research in the area.
“The number of dead whales exceeded 20, but we have not tallied the total,” a fisheries service source told AFP, declining to be identified.
Bad weather was hampering attempts to determine exactly how many whales had died and when.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-more-than-20-dead-whales-found-beached-in-chile-2015-5#ixzz3a9zqruC7
These Dolphins died in Japan.
Seals died in California and British Columbia.
A select group of humans have destroyed the ecology and natural habitat of God’s sea creatures