Fear the Media Meltdown, Not the Nuclear One (UPDATED)
The March 11 earthquake off the coast of Japan has been an unprecedented disaster. Now estimated to have been a magnitude 9 earthquake — one of the top five earthquakes measured since reporting started in 1900 — it was the result of a “megathrust” in which an area of sea floor bigger than the state of Connecticut broke free and moved under the force of colliding tectonic plates. It was so strong that it literally moved the entire island of Honshu eight feet to the east. The earthquake was then followed by a tsunami comparable to the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — but since the epicenter of the quake was only a few miles off the coast of Japan, the tsunami struck the heavily populated coast of Honshu with almost no warning, basically washing many coastal villages off the face of the earth.
The earthquake and tsunami seriously damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi (“number one”) and Daini (“number two”) in Okuma, in Fukushima Prefecture, and also damaged the Onagawa plant in Miyagi Prefecture. In total, of the 55 nuclear power generation plants in Japan, 11 have been forced to shut down, cutting power generation capacity in Japan dramatically and forcing the country to adopt a series of rolling blackouts. It would seem impossible to overstate the severity of the crisis.
The media, however, has risen to the challenge, with a combination of poor information, ignorance, and alarmism, along with antinuclear activists passing themselves off as unbiased experts.
Let’s try to make some sense of it all.
Basics of How Reactors Work
The Fukushima plants have several reactors built on the same basic design, either by GE or by Japanese companies licensed by GE. These are all “boiling water” reactors, which means just what it sounds like: the heat of the nuclear reaction boils water; the steam generated is used to drive turbines and thereby generate power. The water in direct contact with the reactor core known as “coolant” is nothing particularly special, just demineralized; water itself isn’t very susceptible to becoming radioactive, but minerals and contaminants in the water can be. If the water is purified, there’s less radioactive waste to deal with.
The cooling water is pumped past the reactor core in normal operation to get the energy with which power is generated, and of course to cool the core. If there’s an accident, the reactor is shut down by inserting the “control rods,” made of some material that absorbs neutrons and so slows the nuclear fission from which the reactor gets its power. Even a shut down reactor continues to need cooling, however; there’s an immense amount of residual heat still left in the reactor core. This means continuing to run the pumps, and of course with the reactor shut down they can’t be run from the reactor’s power, so there are diesel generators as a backup, and batteries as a further backup to the generator.
If all the cooling fails for some reason, the accumulated heat can’t escape; the water boils away, and once it’s gone, the materials that make up the reactor core break down. This is a Bad Thing, because the controls on the reactor fuel also break down; it starts to heat up again. This is what’s called a meltdown. When this happened at Chernobyl, the reactor core quickly became hot enough to vaporize the reactor’s fuel and a good part of the other material around it, leading to an explosion that destroyed the building that housed the reactor.
To prevent that from happening in commercial reactors in the capitalist bloc, the reactor is inside three concentric safety vessels: first, the “boiler” itself; second, a massive steel bottle; and third, an even larger and more massive reinforced steel, concrete, and graphite outer containment vessel. In case of a meltdown, the whole reactor should be contained within the steel secondary containment vessel, but if it’s not, the molten reactor core drops to the graphite floor of the third vessel, where it spreads out across the floor. This causes the reactor to stop, and it can cool naturally. Eventually the pieces can be cleaned up.
This whole structure is then inside a big conventional steel building that is the outside wall of the reactor complex.
What happened at Fukushima Daiichi
The original earthquake hit. Three of the six reactors were in operation, the other three were shut down for scheduled maintenance. The reactors were designed to sustain an earthquake of magnitude 8.2; at magnitude 9, the Honshu quake was 16 times more powerful. This caused the plant to automatically shut down; this was apparently successful, but …
About an hour later, the tsunami hit. The tsunami did two significant things: it destroyed the backup generators that kept the pumps running, and it apparently so contaminated the reserve coolant that it was not only no longer pure, but was so mucked up with the scourings of the tsunami that it couldn’t be safely pumped. At this point, the reactor was in some trouble.
As the reactor heated up, water began to react with the zirconium fuel-rod containers, liberating hydrogen, which started to build up in the boiler. The operators began to vent gases from the reactor to reduce the pressure, liberating the hydrogen into the outer façade building. These gases are mildly radioactive, mainly with nitrogen-16 and several isotopes of xenon, all products of the fission reaction that powers the reactor; apparently they were vented into the outer building in order to slow their dispersion and give them a chance to lose radioactivity.
Hydrogen in combination with the oxygen in the air can be explosive, and at some time after the venting started in reactor 3, the hydrogen in the outer façade exploded, blowing off the walls of upper half of the building and leaving the steel structure exposed. This explosion put six workers in hospital, with various injuries and one apparent heart attack. This was the first spectacular explosion that raised great clouds of white smoke.
This was reported in the New York Times as “radiation poisoning.” No other source has reported this, including the IAEA. Apparently, according to the Times, radiation poisoning breaks arms.
The second explosion was another hydrogen explosion; as before, apparently what was destroyed was the outer building that surrounds the containment, not the containment itself.
Confusion
This is the point at which the media confusion starts. Many stories concentrating on the reactor accidents were illustrated with blazing pictures of a natural gas plant explosion and a burning oil refinery, much more visually impressive than a building with the façade stripped off, but giving the false impression of a blazing inferno at the reactors.
Several headlines said “nuclear explosion,” which is something very different from “an explosion in a nuclear power plant.”
Anti-nuclear politicians like Congressman Ed Markey and anti-nuclear activists from groups like the Institute for Policy Studies warned ominously of “another Chernobyl” — which this isn’t and never will be; the reactors are wildly, radically, different in design. (More on this below.)
Television talking heads talked about the “containment building.” Which is strictly true, since the building in which the containment is housed would be the “containment building” — but misleading and confusing, because the containment for all three reactors remained intact.
So there’s the first bottom-line point: at least so far, the inner, steel, containment vessel on all three Fukushima reactors remains intact.
Radiation
When the gases started to be released from the containment vessels, that meant there was some release of radiation. With their usual nuance, the media reported only that there was radiation released; since there was detectable radioactivity on the clothes and bodies of the men injured in the explosion, this apparently turned into “radiation poisoning,” even for the poor guy who had the heart attack.
But how much radiation was really released? There are several ways to measure radiation, but what we’re usually concerned with is the dose received — that is, how much radiation has hit the body of someone who gets exposed. It can be thought of like sunburn — if you’re out in strong sunlight for fifteen minutes, you are getting a “small dose” of sun; four hours, and you get a “big dose” and may get a sunburn.
In the U.S., this is usually measured as Roentgen, named for the discoverer of X-rays. (Strictly, it’s measured as “Roentgen absorbed dose” or rad, and the dose in humans is “Roentgen equivalent in man” or rem, but for our purposes it’s close enough to say 1 Roentgen = 1 rad, = 1 rem.) In the rest of the world, dose is measured in Sievert, with 100 Roentgen to 1 Sievert. A whole-body dose of 6 Sievert or 600 Roentgen is called the “LD 50/30 dose,” meaning that 50 percent of the people who get that dose will die within 30 days.
The highest dose rate — that is, the dose received in a period of time — that was observed around the Fukushima reactors was about 1015 microSeiverts per hour, but rapidly dropped to about 70 microSeiverts per hour. In other words, 0.001015 Sieverts per hour, or about 0.1 Roentgen per hour. The highest total body dose reported so far has been 106 milliSieverts, 0.106 Sieverts, or about 10 Roentgen.
What does this mean? Well, in the U.S., the average background radiation is around 7 milliSieverts (700 milli-Roentgen) a year; we here in Colorado nearly double that (more in some places, like Leadville) and some places have a background radiation of 50 times that or more.
So 1015 microSieverts is pretty significantly above normal background radiation, but that’s not the whole story either. By comparison, a CT scan exposes you to about 5 milliSieverts, 0.5 Roentgen; the total dose of the highest exposure reported has been about 20 CT scans. High altitude commercial flights have more radiation than normal background; 10 Roentgen is about twice what a intercontinental flight attendant gets in a year.
Effects of radiation
There’s no question that the effects of big doses of radiation are pretty awful; various systems break down, you can’t absorb food — in fact, vomiting and diarrhea are some of the first symptoms, along with hair loss — and eventually, your immune system fails and you die as a result of massive infections, or hemorrhaging, or dehydration. These effects are known as acute radiation syndrome, ARS.
Low levels of radiation are another thing. Obviously, we all are exposed to some radiation because of the normal background. The usual model, based on the people affected in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later Chernobyl, is called a “linear dose response model,” and assumes that if a dose of 100 rem causes there to be 10 percent more deaths in a population, then a dose of 10 rem will mean 1 percent more, 1 rem about 1/10th of one percent more, and so on.
This is a conservative model, but it has a problem — it predicts that places with high background radiation, like Colorado, will have higher cancer rates than places with low background radiation.
What really happens is exactly the opposite — we in Colorado have a lower cancer rate than people at sea level.
Why this would happen is currently unknown, and in any case the rates of cancer are small enough it’s hard to be sure how much of it is due to normal radiation exposure anyway, but there’s certainly some reason to think that the linear dose-response model is too conservative, that some amount of radiation has no particular harmful effect.
What happens, though, is that the model affects how we think about radiation. Very small amounts of radiation are detectable — it’s literally “shining a light” at us, begging to be detected. Following the linear dose response model, there are assumed to be health effects of very small radiation exposures, and that means the regulations require even very very small releases to be reported.
Unfortunately, they tend to be reported as “a very small release of RADIATION.”
Another Chernobyl?
Still, what some people are saying is this is “another Chernobyl.” So let’s talk about Chernobyl for a minute. The accident at Chernobyl was the biggest reactor accident that’s well-known, although probably not the worst reactor accident of any kind. In the Chernobyl accident, a reactor of a radically different design, with a containment building but no containment vessel, overheated and exploded; most sources say the graphite that made up the bulk of the reactor core caught fire, although some sources say the graphite didn’t actually catch fire, combust, it just was very hot. According to the UN report, about 50 people died as a result of the accident, some of them dying from acute radiation syndrome. The highest exposure reported was about 16 Gray — which is another damn unit. There are more physicists than there are things to measure, I guess they have to pack them in somehow. But a Gray is a Sievert, approximately.
That 16 Gray dose is about 1600 Roentgen, 1600-1700 rem, or nearly three times the “lethal” dose. That’s 160 times as great as the worst dose reported from Fukushima.
What’s more, the Chernobyl fire distributed large amounts of radioactive material around — including about 10 tons of the actual reactor core. Unlike the Fukushima reactors, Chernobyl had no containment vessel, so once it was burning it was open to the outside, and diffused easily through the atmosphere, eventually spreading across much of northern Europe and a good bit of western Asia.
At the time of the accident, there were many terrifying predictions of the long-term health effects of the radiation.
The UN investigated these effects, and reported on them, in 2005, 2008, and 2011. The report concludes that there may be as many as 4000 additional deaths total that can be attributed to the effects of Chernobyl, but that’s among all the deaths in one of the most densely populated parts of the world. In other words, the linear dose-response model predicts that perhaps one person in a million might die somewhat earlier than they would have otherwise. Statistically. But we can never know if the prediction is correct.
In fact, the 2005 report says that a much, much bigger effect on public health comes from the rumors and uncertainty:
Alongside radiation-induced deaths and diseases, the report labels the mental health impact of Chernobyl as “the largest public health problem created by the accident” and partially attributes this damaging psychological impact to a lack of accurate information. These problems manifest as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state.
The fatalistic feeling of being doomed leads to passivity, as well as other more significant mental health issues; this is entirely due to poor information and uninformed alarmism.
“Experts” in the media
Now, let’s look at some of the media reports.
One of the first ones I saw (pointed out to me by my PJ colleague Richard Pollock) was this story in Channel News Asia:
Several experts, in a conference call with reporters, also predicted that regardless of the outcome at the Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant crisis, the accident will seriously damage the nuclear power renaissance.
And who are these experts?
“The situation has become desperate enough that they apparently don’t have the capability to deliver fresh water or plain water to cool the reactor and stabilize it, and now, in an act of desperation, are having to resort to diverting and using sea water,” said Robert Alvarez, who works on nuclear disarmament at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Hmm. Robert Alvarez. At the Institute for Policy Studies. Which, according to its web site:
IPS became involved in environmental issues through the anti-nuclear movement, a natural extension of its long history of work on the “national security state.” In 1979, IPS Fellow Saul Landau won an Emmy for his documentary “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,” which tells the story of the cover-up by the U.S. nuclear program and of the hazards of radiation to American citizens. In 1985, Fellow William Arkin published Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race, which helped galvanize anti-nuclear activism through its revelations of the impact of nuclear infrastructure on communities across America.
Anti-nuclear movement? Next?
“It is considered to be extremely unlikely but the station blackout has been one of the great concerns for decades,” said Ken Bergeron, a physicist who has worked on nuclear reactor accident simulation.
Kenneth Bergeron, author of Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power.
I wonder, who else was on this call?
“Joseph Cirincione, the head of the Ploughshares Fund.” This would be the same Ploughshares Fund that:
… supports a global network of experts and advocates who are now poised to realize the vision of a nuclear weapon-free world. We leverage the impact of those funds with our own advocacy, with our ability to raise the profile and visibility of key issues, and by convening and engaging with organizations and leaders in the field.
“Paul Gunter is [sic] the U.S. organization Beyond Nuclear,” which:
… aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic. The Beyond Nuclear team works with diverse partners and allies to provide the public, government officials, and the media with the critical information necessary to move humanity toward a world beyond nuclear.
Gunter also, according to ecologia.org:
… is a co-founder of the Clamshell Alliance. A resident of Warner, New Hampshire, he has been arrested at Seabrook for nonviolent civil disobedience on several occasions.
I begin to see a pattern. Google those several names; you’ll find that over and over again, these same four names are being quoted as “nuclear power experts.” All of them closely associated with anti-nuclear organizations.
I wonder if they might have an agenda?
What to make of all this
No one can tell you that there will absolutely not be a catastrophic failure — really catastrophic, like Chernobyl or worse — at one or more of the Fukushima reactors. At the absolutely worst case, some combination of accidents and failures could break through all three major containments and release a large amount of radiation through the “China Syndrome” or something like it.
It’s very likely that there has been at least a partial meltdown in one or more of the reactors — but “meltdown” doesn’t mean “catastrophic release.” The reactor would not just have to melt down, but also penetrate both the still containment vessel and the concrete outer layer, and both were designed explicitly to keep that from happening.
What we can say is that it’s not very likely to be a catastrophic accident, and gets less likely with every minute. The Japanese are cooling the reactors down, and adding boron, which “poisons” the nuclear reaction by absorbing neutrons, the “sparks” that make the reaction go.
The amount of radiation that has been released is, so far, actually very minor. Instead of being “another Chernobyl,” which the IAEA put at INES level 7, this is INES level 4 — and Three Mile Island was level 5. So far, Fukushima is not just not another Chernobyl, it’s not even another Three Mile Island.
And finally, when you hear someone in the media giving one of these catastrophic predictions, check who it is. So far, the catastrophic predictions are consistently coming from people who have been professionally and personally committed to shutting down nuclear weapons and nuclear power for decades.
(UPDATE: Fuel rod fire?)
few points:
1. the radiation measured at the site is 0.4 sieverts per hour, which is what, 1000 more than the author of the article admits?
2. the spent fuel storage pond is on fire, which means that a lot of radioactive material is released into air, potentially as much as in chernobyl.
3. better idea about health effects of chernbyl can be found here:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs303/en/index.html
4. timely panic during chernobyl could have saved about 5000 children from thyroid cancer if they took iodine. it’s the cheerleaders of the soviet empire that sent unprotected children on may day parade instead.
this above is probably the worst article i’ve seen on PM so far. shame, really.
In fairness to the writer the spent fuel rod issue is a relatively new development. But you’re right this is VERY significant issue and undercuts a lot of the protections put in place.
it is new development in this incident, but not a new issue – it’s been discussed widely after 9/11, and resulted in well known 2006 study i linked below.
Too bad you didn’t read to the second age, where I link the WHO report.
you link to the media release, actual report has more data. for example, it mentions 5000 cases of thyroid cancer among children.
what about the rest of my points, let alone the new developments?
i understand you wrote this article on sunday and everything, but you were working with same limited information as everybody else. but you came with polyannish, minimizing article, which proven to be wrong shortly after. you can placate yourself with the thought that it was a right approach at a time, but reality disagrees.
the people who actually know their way around nuclear reactor, not from wikipedia articles, knew about dangers of spent fuel pool fire, about danger of breaching the contamination vessel, fuel rods melting into the ground and around the contamination vessel, fuel rods catching on fire and releasing radiation through breaches in the contamination vessel, cooling water escaping through cracks and failing to cool the fuel rods, etc. etc., and didn’t jump in with rosy-cheek cheerleading of the “there are no tanks in baghdad” sort.
maybe you should learn a lesson and write only about things you actually know. just a friendly thought.
Spent fuel rods becoming exposed and catching fire? What the heck is that about? Zirconium alloy burns? Spent fuel (MO, yes?) spontaneously catches fire? The decay heat is that immense?
no, i was talking about active rods.
but they are now fighting a chance that the spent fuel becomes critical again:
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78393.html
critical => chain reaction => fizzling nuclear bomb.
seriously things there are much worse than reported, not better.
found a source to answer the question:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11263&page=44
The analysis suggested that large earthquakes and drops of fuel casks from an overhead crane during transfer operations were the two event initiators that could lead to a loss-of-pool-coolant accident. For cases where active cooling (but not the coolant) has been lost, the thermal-hydraulic analyses suggested that operators would have about 100 hours (more than four days) to act before the fuel was uncovered sufficiently through boiling of cooling water in the pool to allow the fuel rods to ignite. This time was characterized as an “underestimate” given the simplifications assumed for the loss-of-pool-coolant scenario.
The overall conclusion of the study was that the risk of a spent fuel pool accident leading to a zirconium cladding fire was low despite the large consequences because the predicted frequency of such accidents was very low. The study also concluded, however, that the consequences of a zirconium cladding fire in a spent fuel pool could be serious and, that once the fuel was uncovered, it might take only a few hours for the most recently discharged spent fuel rods to ignite.
and now, the crew is ordered to evacuate the premises:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262237/skeleton-crew-evacuated-fukushima-containment-vessel-breach-possible-daniel-foster
probability of another chernobyl is now about 50%.
still feel like relaxing?
Yes. Let’s see:
(1) criticality doesn’t mean “nuclear bomb” — getting a bomb to go off requires very specialized configurations of the fissionables, they tend to melt first. Criticality means “making more neutrons than are being absorbed.”
(2) the workers were evacuated for, apparently, about an hour; they’d reached their badge limits and, being Japanese, evacuated until they got an okay to work over badge limit. See the Jerry Pournelle piece up at Tatler, or the IAEA facebook page.
1. surely you must know that “making more neutrons than are being absorbed” means nuclear explosion, right? the nuclear power station operates at equilibrium, i.e making exactly the same amount of neutrons than are being absorbed. if there are more, chain reaction occurs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
it will not amount to specially designed nuclear bomb, true, but it will be equivalent to a “fizzled” nuclear bomb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizzle_(nuclear_test)
(i usually don’t use wikipedia as reference, but this seems to be up to the level of this debate).
2. workers were evacuated again after brief entrance. right now, nobody can approach reactors 3 and 4, where the spend fuel pools are boiling and burning. they cannot even poor water through the roof from helicopters, because holes in the roof are not aligned with the pools. the latest approach is to try high power fire engine water cannon to hit the pools from distance.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78622.html
isn’t it a high time to take the foot out of your mouth?
Sure, Poul, and turning up the heat means a steam explosion. Come on, do the damn math,
not everything can be calculated on a napkin after reading wikipedia article, charlie.
the math is fuzzy. if the heat from criticality is high enough to cause a fast burning zirconium to trigger a “conventional” explosion, we have a dirty bomb, where tons of radioactive material are spread through the air. that’s if we’re lucky. if the rods will melt together fast enough, though, they can form a single mass bigger than critical, in which case a true nuclear explosion – albeit much smaller than the smallest nuclear bomb – will occur.
if you think it’s wrong, show us your math as to how the second scenario is impossible.
Given Poul’s repeated assertions that criticality “means nuclear explosion, right?”, and his insistence in the face of explanations that criticality didn’t necessarily imply an explosion, linking to pieces on nuclear weapons and “weapon fizzles”, I thought another source might be useful. Here’s the MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering Department blog:
Poul was clumsily trying to get to another point, which is that it would be undesirable for the power rods in the spent fuel pool to become supercritical again, because that would lead to a “nuclear explosion.” As I noted, this isn’t possible: a nuclear explosive requires very pure materials and a specialized configuration. He persisted, so it’s interesting to note this in the same posting:
In other words, not only does criticality not imply a “nuclear explosion”, instead being the normal operating condition for any reactor, but re-criticality as a nightmare scenario is also unlikely.
Since Poul took this further to a personal attack, I offered him the chance to honorably correct himself, but he declined.
With poul and his ilk dominating the discussion, I only wish the Intrade market had an item for betting on the number of provable radiation deaths resulting from the Japanese reactor disasters. Even with an over/under of 1, I’d love to put some action on the “under”. With an over/under of 5, I’d put down a *lot* of action.
Me, too. But you can go and invest on the stock market right now. It’s the same thing. What I want to know is- are the financial types panicking because everyone else is, or are they just panicking all on their own because they don’t know any better?
The stock market has its own issues thanks to Ben Bernanke’s QE2 and Congress’s pitiful inability to reduce government spending by even $61B. In response to the disaster, Japan is trying their own version of QE2, proving that Keynesian irrationality knows no national boundaries.
Uranium miners might be a good contrarian play. But, as the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and government intervention (e.g., a nuclear moratorium) can magnify the irrationality. The beauty of the Intrade markets is that whether you win or lose is based purely on objective facts.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Intrade is based on facts, myself. Intrade is closer to a objective factual assessment of the data, than, say, the stock market. But not everyone who bets on Intrade is expert in the field and all people are subject to psychological biases of one kind or another. Even statistical analyses are based on the presumptions of the people who write the programs.
My point about Intrade being fact-based is that if you put money down on a proposition such as “Steve Jobs to depart as CEO of Apple before midnight ET 31 Dec 2011″ and the proposition ends up being true, you get paid off — no matter how rational or irrational the other market participants may be. It’s very black and white, as well as being time-bound.
which “my ilk”? people who inconvenience others with facts?
No, by your ilk I believe he is refering to people that have absolutely zero idea what they are talking about and havent actually spent a decade working in the industry like some of us. I have news for you, as somebody that doesn’t care one lick about wikipedia, but got my information from obtaining a Nuclear NEC from Naval Nuclear Power College in Orlando FL (Now moved to Charleston SC) and nearly a decade of experience actualy working on and around reactors, it is blatently obvious that you have zero idea what you are talking about and are obviously getting all of your information from alarmists and people that have either an agenda or have no clue what they are talking about.
if this is so obvious to you, try to debunk what i am saying with facts. if you are who you say you are, it should be easy, no?
cannot wait.
I agree with Ken. I spent about ten years in the nuclear industry, and I have long recognized that the industry practices a rigorous discipline that folks like Poul are not capable of understanding. Further, Pouls gross misstatements help illustrate that those with pre-conceived notions are simply not poised to learn… especially when they feel qualified to lecture from having read a few newspaper articles written by undisciplined journalsists who most likely drank their way through college.
Since most US power plants are not within easy reach of a tsunami (if a tsunami ever reached most plants, they would be the least of our worries), so worrying about these effects is pointless.
2. the spent fuel storage pond is on fire, which means that a lot of radioactive material is released into air, potentially as much as in chernobyl.
This is the biggest warming or (I hate the term) “Wakeup Call” for the US.
Thanks to years of procrastination by government officials and politicians, spent fuel rods are currently left on site of virtually all commercial nuclear power plants. The nuclear industry has “paid” billions to finance a permanent repository for these spent fuel rods, but they are left holding them due to lack of leadership in Congress, most specifically Harry Reid, to complete the required steps to open it.
yeah.
even better solution would be to build a breeder reactor next to each BWR, and process new fuel out of waste. but our “green” activists get apoplectic at very sound of words “new reactor”. so very very stupid…
Poul, you’re an idiot. Stop trying to comment on things you have no clue about.
another internet nuclear scientist…
got any facts?
i didn’t think so either…
Onsite storage of spent fuel is just one of the stop gap measures that needed to be taken since the Department of Energy has been collecting money from every nuclear generator with the promise to build a depository. With the decision to not proceed with the Yucca Mountain facility, DOE should stop collecting money (they already spent most of the $20 BILLION trust fund)and maybe AREVA, the french consortium would be interested in buying our spent fuel so that they can reprocess it and sell it back to us. Or perhaps we should consider lifting the moratorium on fuel reprocessing in this country and create some good jobs…and recycle it ourselves.
Amen Neo!!!! Finally, someone who understands just how corrupt and brain dead Harry Reid truly is!!!
I love this article. The mental anguish will indeed be far more damaging than the minute amounts of radiation that are being talked about. But, the left has been promoting and encouraging mental anguish for its entire existence. That is how they have gotten their power.
The problem is not the reactor itself, it is 20-30 years of spent fuel rods held in storage within the reactor itself.
These are older reactors ( up to 40 Years old) and store spent rods in a pool of liquid at the tops of the building, a terrible design to begin with.
These spent rods are highly radioactive and must be kept in special baths to maintain their temperature below an ignition point, where they literally ignite. Due to the quake and Tsunami, the cooling of these spent rods has been disrupted and is the single greatest threat to japan, and whatever life gets in the way.
These reactors are very old designs, and have nothing to do with newer reactor designs, or the fact that Nuclear Reactors should be using Thorium Fuel instead of MOX or uranium. Thorium was the original fuel but political influence shifted to Uranium and MOX, and humanity has paid the price ever since…Thorium is superior in every way, and does not result in runaway reactions, or superheating and fuel rod issues.
This article is well written and informative, but does not address the key issue; 20-30 years of ill stored spent fuel rods are the problem, not the reactor itself.
Alex, the spent fuel thing happened since I submitted this and went to bed. I agree that’s ugly — but so far:
So call it 12 mSv/hr, or 0.12 rem/hr., at the highest. Not a summer resort, but still thousands of times lower than a Chernobyl.
TO: Charlie Martin
RE: You See?
It’s not exactly as you would like it to be. There is indeed, more to this situation than you’re being allowed to know….until someone ‘leaks’ it.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[What they are telling you can be important. What they are NOT telling you can be VITAL. -- CBPelto]
charlie, they measured 400 millisieverts – i.e 0.4 sieverts – and cannot tell now if it’s going up or down.
You can’t start with thorium; thorium isn’t fissile. You have to start with uranium, and then you can switch over to thorium after you have built up enough plutonium to get the reaction started.
you can build particle accelerator next to the reactor to irradiate thorium:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200604/s1616391.htm
the advantage of having an immediate shutdown switch should be more than obvious.
This is not true the Japanese recycle their fuel and there is very little spent fuel in their fuel pools…
Actually, they need to let it cool for a significant time before they can move it for any reprocessing. in this case, the Reactor 4 pool had the rods they’d removed 3 months ago at the start of refueling.
Great piece Charlie,one correction, Markey is a congressman not a senator,it is bad enough he is in congress.
C.S. Lewis once said,” When people stop believing in God they will believe in just about anything”. Just look at the global warming scam.Once upon a time people used to have some skepticism of alarmist propaganda.
This is a review of the engineering behind the issue, from a professor at MIT (almost as good as if it had come from Virginia Tech, but you take what you can get). Based on my ten years of experience as an operator (not going to say where, since I don’t have the authority to speak for my employer, they’ll make a statement if they wish), it’s spot on.
http://mitnse.com/
“So far, Fukushima is not just not another Chernobyl, it’s not even another Three Mile Island.”
Hmmm, so it’s not so bad. Tell me, would you buy any real estate right next to the power plant today? There certainly won’t be anyone around to sell it, though. They’ve all be evacuated by the Japanese governemnt. Something is up.
You know, this is really the thing that most frustrates me. Well, along with people who read page one of three and then complain I didn’t cover something that’s linked in the remaining pages. It was much the same at Three Mile Island — the did a massive evacuation out of caution, and there’s always someone to then say “they much be lying about what’s happening, they did this big evacuation.”
It’s like some people cannot comprehend precaution.
Precaution is the correct word. It IS That-simple… as simple as common sense. ie, if the rising river leaves its banks then any normal person would move to higher ground and any reasonable leaders would suggest such prudent action to all residents.
The writer of this factual offering is attempting to encourage the reader to apply the facts as opposed to forced media input by-way-of alleged experts with prodigious agendas which lack reason and individual reckoning.
To quote Charlie Martin:
‘The frustrating part about writing on this stuff is that people don’t seem to have any middle setting between “everything is fine” and “run in circles scream and shout”. So saying “no, it’s not Chernobyl” is interpreted as “it’s nothing.”
‘So let’s go ahead and make this clear: no, it’s still not Chernobyl. But no, it’s not nothing.’
Jeez, people. Get a grip. There is this superstitious, ignorant fear that seems to kick in any time the word “radiation” is mentioned. It seems to cause the brains of otherwise rational people to leak out their ears.
“Tell me, would you buy any real estate right next to the power plant today? ”
For the right price, sure, so would most people. How much discounting do you do for land sales in the middle of a disaster zone? That’s an interesting economic question. People made a killing buying S. American bonds in the 1980s at a few pennies on the dollar. A few years later they’d quintupled their money.
Essentially a land purchase now would be a bet that no further disasters (like an 8.5 aftershock) are in the pipeline. That’s a gamble but possibly a smart one.
Cheaper real estate? Without any eco-fundies or hysterical safety-Nazi living in my neighborhood?
Dude, I’d buy a mansion and a 100-acre farm in next to that power plant.
This article is a welcome addition to the current media overload. However, the problem is not just a lack of accurate information. That’s only the output side of the equation. The real problem is on the input side, where the average American has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator by decades of progressive “education”. Even if you gave them accurate information, they would still not have an already-learned knowledge baseline with which to categorize the new information, nor would they have the training/discipline in logical thought processes to correctly analyze and draw subsequent conclusions. And meanwhile (as described in the article), professional scare-mongers with their Gaia agenda would be whipping the populace into a frenzy of fear and loathing.
Progressivism is a man-caused disaster… Behold its Triumph!!!
Charles Stevens is correct to point out cultural aversion to science and technology as causing needless panic (if I understand him). In this blog, look for J. M. Broughton, an avowed antagonist of all things nuclear, http://clarespark.com/2009/09/20/jungians-on-the-loose-part-one/. Part two is here: http://clarespark.com/2009/09/20/jungians-on-the-loose-part-two/. This is the tip of the iceberg, and I cannot pin the blame on anyone besides the Progressives, who may be found all over the political spectrum and especially among the hipper youth, fans of such as Rage Against the Machine. It is embedded in twentieth century culture as a response to the first world war, but also “mass society.”
Regardless of what is happening with this nuke thing, there is still the cold, hard reality that we are destroying our Earth’s biosphere all the time, every day, day in and day out.
Not respecting limits is the fundamental problem. We have caused more damage through that then Chernobyl and every other “shocking” disaster combined. It’s called mass extinction and resource depletion.
Good explanation. Thank you.
The media thrives on disaster and this situation is so politically perfect.
All those “nuclear expert” geezers whose shining moments were the China Syndrome and Silkwood get to spout off.
The nuclear industry will learn a lot, which is more than I can say for most of the media.
Exactly right — Robert Alvarez in fact is one of the guys who pushed the Silkwood thing.
Is Robert Alvarez any relation to Luis Alvarez, or his son Walter?
Not so far as I know.
In Japan, they don’t have a “China Syndrome” … they have a “Falklands Syndrome” … check your world globe.
Right On! “China Syndrome” is even a foolish term for anywhere in the US, as most of China is only about 1/4 of the way around the globe from most of the US. The actual anitpod (opposite point on the globe) for any point in the contiguous US is actually in the South Indian Ocean. There are only a few points of land in this area: the Kerguelen islands – whose antipod is in northern Montana. And the tiny Amsterdam and St Paul islands – whose antipod is near Ft Collins, Colorado. From any other place in the US, if you keep digging straight down – you’ll eventually hit the water of the southern Indian Ocean.
Actually, you’ll hit the molten core first and it would all be moot where the exact opposite side of the globe is.
Thanks Charlie, gives me some hope about my many Japanese relatives.
Thank you! The various news readers on TV are in a complete hissy over this and it is impossible to get any useful information from them.
JAPAN REBOUNDED FROM WORSE CATASTROPHES
Don’t worry too much about Japan and the devastation it has suffered, terrible and heartbreaking as it is. The Japanese are an amazingly resilient people. They have recovered brilliantly from far, far worse disasters to become one of history’s economic and political wonders. Remember World War II and the US strategic bombing of Japan? Between 1942 and 1945 we bombed 69 Japanese cities-including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-killing over 500,000 civilians and causing 5,000,000 homeless-and the cost in treasure by today’s reckoning was probably in the trillions. Indeed, as Japan’s Prime Minister recently said: this earthquake/tsunami catastrophe is “Japan’s toughest challenge since World War II.” But it’s not nearly as tough especially for the remarkable, gifted, resilient Japanese.
Apollo Speaks Truth….
They have indeed endured worse, and face this with stoic confidence and calm persistance.
If there was ever one place on earth I would issue a complete “free pass” to have an irrational, purely emotional aversion to Nuclear power, it would be Japan. They could outlaw the mere conversation about it, and I would say nothing.
But since the ONE AND ONLY people on this earth that actually experienced the full horror of a real nuclear attack understand Nuclear power is NOT inherently evil, and have openly embraced its value to their society, then the rest of the hysterical complainers in the world need to SHUT THE F#@k UP!
In case you dont know this, and it might be a little off topic, but there is one fairly famous survivor of Hiroshima alive today. He is Dr Theodore(Ted) Fujita , professor emeritus of meteorology of the Univ Of Chicago. Better known as “Tornado Ted”, the rating system for intensity of tornadoes is named after Dr Fujita. Hes also a survivor of the Atomic blast in Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945. His family was shielded from the balst by the fact there house was on the backside of a mountain where the blast took place. And oddly enough, the fairly apolitical Dr Fujitas only comment on Hiroshima was that if he were Truman, hed have done the same thing.
Not to continue the off-topic discussion, but a tidbit of trivia: Dr. Fujita died in 1998, well over a decade ago.
Excellent article. Clear, informative and calm, precisely the qualities missing from the MSM hysteria-based reporting.
I particularly appreciate the valuable context, comparisons and examples you provided. At a weekend family event, worried folks were repeating the rumors, untruths and misconceptions being reported. Of course, when I pointed out the Colorado situation and the fact most of us experience background radiation every day, the universal response was “I never knew that.”
Thank you, I am forwarding this link to family, friends and colleagues in an effort to dispel their real concerns fueled by an irresponsible media.
This is the exactly the same experience I’ve had in my field, (finance) with derivatives, hedge funds, mortgages, etc. The depth of ignorance is indescribable and profound. Thank you for taking time to explain this. I know that the hype in my field is highly likely to be found in the other fields requiring expertise. You have exposed the biases with great clarity. Thank you.
You should have mentioned that the ISP is funded by George Soros and that the Ploughshares Fund is also one of his organizations(apparently it opposes missile development too.
This is an excellent article. Thank you, Charlie.
Thank you for this article that sheds some light on what is going on in Japan.
TO: Charlie Martin
RE: Soooo…..
….you’ve decided to take this matter main-line.
So be it.
RE: Some Additional Information
The distaff used to hobnob with metallurgists. Something of a society she belonged to as part of her work speccing construction materials. The group included the folks from Rocky Flats—makers of nuclear weapons components. Some of the programs she heard with them related to construction of nuclear facilities.
Something she mentioned this morning, which I’ll have to research further, is that nuclear radiation causes steel to become brittle. [Note: She knows a bit more about steel than most others, as her father was a supervisor at the CF&I Steel Mill in Pueblo.]
So if we have a total meltdown of the cores in these ‘steel containment vessels’, what is the impact of the temperature, pressure and degradation of steel by radiation on the ‘vessels’?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out. Hopefully not in the form of a 'rupture'....]
My father was in middle-management, including supervisory work, at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, for his entire adult life. I worked at U.S. Steel in a clerical position for one whole summer. I know nothing about the properties of steel; osmosis doesn’t work for transmittal of scientific information.
Did your wife work with her father? Did he tutor her at home? If so, what a great dad! If not, then osmosis?
Well, and a “supervisor” at CF&I could mean he ran janatorial. The whole Hungarian side of my family in Pueblo worked at CF&I, so I guess I know something about steel too.
Chuck,
Yes, certain forms of radiation will make steel brittle. Specifically, ejected neutrons will degrade the crystalline structure of the metal. From what I understand, this is a concern for long lived reactors – I seem to remember that it was an impediment to building net gain fusion reactors back in the 80′s and 90′s. However, I don’t know much about how this applies to the particular reactor design. My *guess* (warning!) is that the moderators soak up most of the neutrons, with the implication that relatively few are available to degrade the containment vessel.
In addition to the other comments made on this post, it needs to be pointed out that “steel” is not just one thing. There are hundreds of types of steel, each designed for specific uses. Some do, in face, become embrittled by some types of radiation, or by the hydrogen that can be generated under these circumstances (for example, high strength steels like 4340 and 17-4PH are much more susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement than 316 stainless or A286 and are thus not used in hydrogen-service applications). Others do not, or have much reduced effects. I do not know what kinds are used in these containment vessels, but the metallurgical engineers are well aware of these problems, and select accordingly.
Mr. Martin:
“The amount of radiation that has been released is, so far, actually very minor. Instead of being “another Chernobyl,” which the IAEA put at INES level 7, this is INES level 4 — and Three Mile Island was level 5. So far, Fukushima is not just not another Chernobyl, it’s not even another Three Mile Island.”
I think you maybe jumped the gun a bit here. According to Fox News, Fukushima has been upgraded from an INES 4 to an INES 6.
Worse than Three Mile Island but not as bad as Chernobyl.
Let’s hold off on the post-mortems until after the body is actually dead, okay?
Apparently there’s a lot more that can get worse at Fukushima than there are things that can get better.
That all said, I wouldn’t overly worried about the anti-nuke “experts” on the Tee-Vee “Talking Shop” shows.
The Alleged Hawaiian in the White house is manifestly General Electric’s “bitch”, and his Chief of Staff was GE’s CEO…and GE JUST HAPPENS to manufacture nuclear reactors, so unlike with Oil or Coal, I don’t think the Odministration is too keen to slap Moratoria, Permitoria, or “Cap and Trade” on the Atomic Boys.
I also caught the Deputy Energy Secretary babbling about nukes being “carbon-free” energy yesterday…how heartwarming to know that when your hair falls out and you can use your scrotum for a night-light that you will not be contributing to Global Warming/Climate Change/Shrinking Polar Ice Caps ‘n all…
The Japanese were lucky, THEIR tsunami only consisted of seawater, not of ripened bullshit like the one we are trying to stay afloat in.
TO: Bilgeman
RE: The ‘Leak’
Indeed. The Prime Minister of Japan has told people to stay indoors or be exposed to dangerous radiation.
Closer to the stricken nuclear complex, the streets in the coastal city of Soma were empty as the few residents who remained there heeded the government’s warning to stay indoors.
Kan and other officials warned there is danger of more leaks and told people living within 19 miles of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex to stay indoors to avoid exposure that could make people sick. — Article at Fox news
This is beginning to look like a ‘train wreck’ in slow motion.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Radiator repair shop: Best place to take a leak.]
“I think you maybe jumped the gun a bit here. According to Fox News, Fukushima has been upgraded from an INES 4 to an INES 6.”
It’s so hard to predict what will happen on Tuesday when you write an article on Sunday night.
Then why do you ridicule people, when they say it could get ugly?
And why do you make predictions? The name of the article says we shouldn’t fear a meltdown.
Apparently it is not a Chernobyl, but from what I can see and predict at the moment, it may be worse than Three Mile Island.
Well – most recent reports indicate that actually there IS a serious problem – earlier posters pointing out the flawed cooling-pond design are probably close to the mark.
But whether it’s a 3 or a 4, is or is not like TMI or Chernobyl is to miss the point.
it is the PERCEPTION that will be key – what this event will do for energy policy will be profound.
Given that Three Mile Island was a fart in a tea cup “worse than TMI” covers a lot of ground…
Patrick
Everyone who knows anything about nuclear power (and doesn’t have an anti-nuke agenda) is saying the same things you posted above. The news media is sensationalizing this issue so they can sell laundry soap, and the anti-nukes are jumping on the bandwagon so they can advance their agenda. I’ve seen articles from Alvarez and Cirincione and even some guy from the Union of Concerned Scientists put forward as evidence from nuclear experts. Fox News is starting to see the light and they are talking to some people who actually know what’s going on instead of pandering to the folks who shout the loudest. The host asked one of the recent experts “What went wrong?” He responded that this was the worst earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and that the plant wasn’t designed for events of that magnitude, and that asking that question would be like saying “An asteroid hit Brazil. What went wrong?” Here’s a post from a blog I write for – you can see that it’s very similar to what’s being said here: http://constitutionclub.org/2011/03/14/what-about-nuclear-energy/
This article isn’t much more accurate than some of the media reports it criticizes, and considerably less accurate than most. I’m just a high school puke, and I can spot the scientific goofs easily.
Glass houses, stones, etc.
If you can spot them, why not enlighten the rest of us who have only engineering degrees and doctorates to relay on. Come on. Show us your stuff !
Good article Charlie.
Once again, it brings up Michael Crichton’s “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.”
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Mike, that’s a lovely anecdote, which I’d forgotten. Thanks.
Heh. I laughed reading this because I have a degree in Theology, and the local garbage wrap published a feature that had a number of errors about the Qumran community and the early Christian church. I wrote the editor, pointed them out (providing proper references), and got correction printed!
A great article. Thanks.
Those of us who are real, ethical journalists, (not really an oxymoron it just seems like it some days,) actually WELCOME guys like you Geezer. We want to know when we got it wrong, and go out of our way to make it right.
Unfortunately, that’s mostly just us guys in the trenches at the community papers and at the blogs like here.
Patrick
I suspect the real truth is somewhere in between. This will not be a Chernobyl, but it will not be a repeat of Three Mile Island either. To the best of my knowledge, there was little residual harm at Three Mile.
But the timing could not have been worse, because short of additional hydrocarbon E&P, there is no feasible alternative of cheap and efficient to producing vast amounts of energy other than nuclear power. Alternative energies are currently a pipe dream that would not even be pursued as alternative without government subsidies. Hydroelectric appears to be tapped and biofuels are proving to be liability and not cost effective, driving the price of staples higher, leading to higher food costs.
And that will be the lasting harm – a lack of energy alternatives for heating and fuel, which this event will provide further propaganda for the nuclear alarmist fools for another 40 years.
I’m afraid the industrialized world’s future is starting to look very bleak from my perspective.
Yeah, the fuel rod fire added some excitement, see the link.
I don’t know enough about the subject to know if this article and its contents are correct or not but I do know one thing for sure, don’t trust for a minute one thing the media and its experts have to say. Those agenda driven parrots of one cause or another will be letting you know exactly what they want you to know and nothing more.
very good technical discussion, thanks.
i was informed by others that modern reactor designs have redundant backup cooling systems using gravity feed in case the pumped cooling systems that come on first are rendered inoperative.
> jack
The author gets a B, maybe a B+. Some of the comments get an F.
I engineered nine Boiling Water Reactors in the US, this plant may not be identical so maybe I am a tough/wrong grader. I have worked on a score of US nukes. Our fundamental problem is that we are getting a Niagara of bum information; I can not make sense of anything. The same thing happened at Three Mile Island (I am a personal friend of the engineer who saved that plant) and at Chernobyl (I was debriefed by technical experts who photographed the melted guts of that plant.) A few thoughts may help.
Eisenhower, a killer, formed a policy as President, Atoms for Peace. He stated a conundrum; either man uses this technology for peace or it will destroy us. The US never solved the riddle; we spend every few months, the entire first cost value of the nuclear industry, on our military. When the first designs were discussed, people like me told him that if every critical component was put in a steel pot, a containment, safety would be increased. He ordered: spend the money. These Japanese nukes have a fancy pot, called the light bulb and the donut, the drywell and the wetwell, or steam suppression pool. They are Mark I designs: I have engineered Mark II, and developed the Mark III. These are better than this early design.
There are several ways to design a nuke. One is better if you want bomb fuel, the graphite reactors like Chenobyl. Stalin wanted bombs; electricity was a by product. But in certain operational modes, it was thought, in the 1950s, that a graphite reactor might run away, explode, so there were a zillion pain-in-the-elbow systems to prevent this, designed by people like me, engineers. The plant manager jury rigged the plant to remove all the safety systems while it was running, and did an illegal test to prove engineers deserve our reputation. They took seven days, round the clock, to get ready. We learned the results, a few milliseconds into the test. Chenobyl had a containment; if the yanks had one, the commissars wanted one, but on the cheap. The Japanese containment is ~ 15 stories high, the Chenobyl containment is a closet with little inside, except pipes. Chenobyl’s core is laying in the parking lot, covered with dirt. TMI recovery people got the last pepper grain out of the pot. About 200 people were killed at Chenobyl fighting fires; all were volunteers and knew the score. Nobody died from nuclear energy at TMI; there were heart attacks.
The Japanese disaster will be worse than TMI, but not as bad as Chenobyl. All reactors were shut down for maintenance or immediately “shut down” with the earthquake detection. They are now fighting the residual heat, an ocean of heat, but perhaps 5 % of a roaring reactor. The heat lessens with every passing hour, in about a week, it will be “nuclearly cooled”. But even this situation requires cooling water, and pumps, for years.
If a core melts, the monster may awaken; no one has had the courage to test this “beyond design basis event”. My answer: daily Mass.
There are many “facts” which I can not understand. I read some from some PhD in Brussels, pure nonsense. Our problem is that the real experts are working round the clock in the plant, and have no time for anyone. Their handlers are technical dummies and misstate facts, and there are divisions of experts with a political bias. We are the victims of ignorance and lies. And I do not know everything.
Have courage, and pray for a grievously suffering people.
What is your take on the potential problems associated with spent fuel rods becoming exposed and catching fire? Apparently this happened in Reactor 4, but I agree that the information being reported is contradictory and confusing.
R.L.-
From what you wrote you must know a lot, enough to understand the limits of what you know. Only an ignoramus will tell you that they know everything about anything. Thanks for the insights.
Now THAT was a helpful comment, and the closest to truth that I’ve heard since this catastrophe happened. Thank you Mr. Hall!
It makes a little more sense if you understand a couple things about the Japanese:
1. Their language is very imprecise, so once the reports have been handed to the political and media people, the message can be extremely garbled, and
2. They’re not good improvisers, and are too slow to ask for help. What makes for good quality control in a normally operating plant makes for inability to throw the book away and reason your way through a situation like Americans would do faced with the same situation. I’m getting the strong impression that when this is all over, the response is going to go down as a huge disappointment, with many lost opportunities. But not as bad as Chernobyl.
The mother’s milk of the left is chaos, and crises create chaos, so the left loves any kind of a crisis.
They can’t sell their ideology without fear and envy. That’s their life’s passion.
Somehow, they have to paper over the indisputable fact that the living standard of the world has advanced by orders of magnitude since capitalism took hold. That is why you see all points attacks on every element of free market systems. Nuclear power is one of them. They know full well that if nuclear power were fully implemented that the wealth of the world would increase dramatically because of the cheap power. Ergo, they sieze every opportunity to attack it. Facts don’t matter to them. Facts are subservient to their lust for power.
There is zero chance that the Make Believe Media will publish the truth about the events in Japan. The truth won’t be known for years, if ever.
Anybody have the Intrade over/under on whether the windmill-huggers will let this crisis go to waste?
Bravo Charlie Martin! The truth now has its boots on, and is chasing the lies around the world.
A shame that the circulation of PJM is a bit lower than the MSM. But when Three Mile Island and Chernobyl went off, there was no PJM at all and it took far longer for accurate reports to put perspective on the biased MSM hysteria.
The Japanese nuclear events are a real tragedy. I’ve worked in the US nuclear industry for 25 years. My novel “Rad Decision” culminates in an event very similar to the Japanese tragedy. (Same reactor type, same initial problem – a station blackout with scram.) The book is an excellent source of perspective for the lay person — as I’ve been hearing from readers. It is available free online at the moment at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com . (No adverts, nobody makes money off this site.) Reader reviews are in the homepage comments.
Ah, James Aach. Rad Decisions. I read this book several years ago. I’ve been thinking about it the last few days, “Wow, this is like that book I read.”
A fan here. I recommend this book. You will learn a lot about what’s happening now in Japan and be entertained at the same time.
Pretty good post, Charlie. However, I must disagree with you regarding one thing. This accident is going to be exactly like Three Mile Island and that’s a good thing!
First a micro-resume
* Retired nuclear engineer specializing in high radiation instrumentation
* Trained by TVA to operate a Mk I BWR
* Spent 2 years at Browns Ferry NP (Mk I BWR) after the ’75 fire reworking the incore instrumentation system and the reactor building basement instrumentation (HPSI and LPSI pump instruments, torus instruments, etc)
* Spent three years at Three Mile Island working on the recovery. I was there when we lowered the camera into the reactor and saw the rubble pile where the core used to be.
OK, that out of the way, let’s do a short recount of what happened at TMI.
A very poor design of the turbine bypass valve caused loss of condenser vacuum after a routine trip. This caused atmospheric venting of the secondary (non-radioactive system) system. This in turn caused the pressurizer PORV (power operated relief valve) to open to relieve excess pressure in the reactor system. All normal to that point. The PORV stuck open and through a bit of horrible bad luck (one pressurizer water level channel out of service for maintenance and the other indicator’s needle stuck) the operators turned off the safety injection pumps that were designed to make up coolant for the leak.
The reactor core was uncovered and because of a combination of circumstances, remained uncovered for about 24 hours. During that time the fuel got hot enough to a) partially melt and b) cause the zircalloy cladding to burn in the steam atmosphere, liberating hydrogen. Hydrogen build up in the containment and exploded (we euphemistically called it a “burn” but it was an explosion). The containment pressure recorder with a time constant of 1.5 seconds recorded a containment pressure of twice the design value (60 psi if my fuzzy memory holds). But because the whole reactor building in a PWR is the containment, the explosion was contained and nothing was harmed.
Cooling water flow was eventually restored and the remnants of the core were cooled normally.
The highlights of the Japanese accident are the same. Loss of coolant after loss of off- and on-site power. Zircalloy burning, generating massive amounts of hydrogen. Hydrogen explosion in the area above the refueling deck. That part of the reactor building is nothing more than metal siding as used in industrial metal buildings.
The seawater injection seems like a radical step but it really isn’t. When the hydrogen production started, the staff knew that the zircalloy cladding was burning and that the reactor was toast. Since the plant was blacked out, it was probably impossible to align the valving necessary to pump from the demineralized water tanks and no power to run the pumps. From what I’ve been able to gather from the horrible mass media reporting, they’re using diesel-powered pumps to supply water from outside the plant. Since they knew the plant was toast, the effects of sea water just didn’t matter and so they took the easy route and plopped the pump suctions into the sea.
RE: spent fuel pit fire. I’m having to speculate here but I suspect that what was burning was equipment and accessories stored on the refueling floor used to handle the fuel during refueling. The spent fuel pit itself is designed to contain enough water to keep the spent fuel cool for a long period of time (memory’s fuzzy on this one but I believe 2 weeks) without replenishment.
In any event the fuel doesn’t burn in air. If the spent fuel somehow became uncovered and if par chance there was some fresh spent fuel that still contained enough decay energy to get hot enough, pouring water on it would cause the same zirc/water reaction as has taken place in the reactor building. Firefighters certainly would not have “put it out” as the media reports.
So let’s summarize what happened at TMI as far as the public is concerned.
*) No off-site radiation exposure above ordinary regulatory limits
*) No off-site contamination
*) No injury to anyone off-site or on.
*) No long term effects to anyone other than utility stockholders.
*) The ill-advised evacuation actually caused a traffic accident death.
So if this accident unfolds to be like TMI, that could be the best outcome imaginable.
John
My GUESS is that John is close to the truth. The Unit 4 fire is reported out, but radiation levels are high, ~ 100 – 400 millisieverts/ hr. (10-40 Rems, for us old guys, several CAT scans/ hour) in the buildings. The workers are getting zoomies, the public, not so much.
My fear is that the pool(s) are cracked, leaking, so make up water may be needed, bleed and feed.
I am certain that John knows more about this than all of the media. He knows systems. If he had good looking legs, he could be a real benefit to national news. I can not understand why station power was not restored ASAP. Ditto clean water, condensate. I can not understand why we get accurate weather reports, on bank signs, but not radiation levels, real time, on the web, everywhere. Let people know!
And it blows my mind that experts, like John, are ignored, while ignoramuses bray. (I do not know John, but we probably parked in the same lot.)
“I can not understand why station power was not restored ASAP.”
What part of “earthquake followed by tsunami” eludes you? The whole region was devastated.
“I can not understand why we get accurate weather reports, on bank signs, but not radiation levels, real time, on the web, everywhere. Let people know!”
Because people know what temperature and %chance of rain mean. They have no grasp on what radiation levels mean, and thanks to the press and popular entertainment, believe ANY radiation will turn them into half-melted super-powered mutants.
Hey I bet John the nuclear engineer has very nice legs!
Thank you for your input and expertise.
That’s good, pertinent info. Thanks.
John
Spot on analysis. I to had over 15 yrs experience, however, mine was at a PWR. As I looked at the GE design documents that the IAEA put out to show how the plant was constructed, I had a couple of questions. Seeing how you worked BWR’s you might be able to enlighten me.
First, do the Control Rods move up into the core from the bottom? It seemed to me that the drawing that was presented, the hydrolics that operated the rods were coming up from underneath. Kinda strange to me since in PWR’s the Rods are extracted from the top and gravity drop on scram.
Second, it looked like the emergency core cooling (ECCS) fed in from the bottom of the vessel. If that is true, and reports of 30-70% fuel failure in the 2 plants would show that the inlet areas of the vessel would be blocked by the debris of the failed assemblies.
BTW.. While in recert, I sat through the video that you explained early on in your post. I can still remember looking and saying ” Where are the fuel bundles??? “
@Charlie: thank you for a great article that I as a non-expert even I can follow.
Question: Isn’t the real issue that will need to be keep in perspective as the whole nuclear/non-nuke discussion continues is the age of these and most of the plants in the US?? If we’re looking at no new plants finished in some 30+ years, of course their design and safety will be some what less than what we could have today. I loved my 1978 Ford, but the 2008 model I have has a ton more safety features that have been added since then. I would expect that the same would be true for plant construction — and we will learn even more from this terrible event that can be used in new plant construction.
I hope the opportunity grabbing politicians don’t use this as a way to stop development of this most efficient power source….
NBC Nightly News is doing it’s part to scare us about a reactor meltdown here in America.
http://www.bluecollarphilosophy.com/2011/03/nbc-nightly-news-says-america-will-have-a-nuclear-reactor-meltdown-video-shocker.html
Maybe the Liberal media is providing cover for Obama and Democrats to decide not to build any more nuclear plants.
Fox is making this as scary as any of them – they are owned by Saudi’s after all.
Wait…Rupert Murdoch is a Saudi??
Oh, you must mean the Fox/News Corp Shareholders…right?
Oh are you just completely full of bunk?
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s the latter.
How did you find out Saudi Arabia owns FOX?
Dear Charlie: Many thanks for this fine article, especially the links. One small glitch: while he doubtless wishes he was, Edward Markey is a federal Representative, not a Senator. Regardless, he’s a menace.
Keep up this good work.
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
Edwin Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists is getting a lot of air time on NBC as a nuclear “expert” but seems to be fanning the media hysteria. Robert Bazel, on the other hand, seems to be more balanced with the facts. It will be interesting to see how NBC handles this since it’s parent, GE, makes money from nuclear and also designed some of the reactors in question. This may contrast with their hatchet-job coverage of climate change skepticism in order to protect their green energy interests.
There are two glaring problems with the Fukushima nuclear plant complex – one that could never have been corrected since it seems all of Japan sits on a giant bunch of fault lines – but the other could have been more well thought out. Japan has been plagued by tsunamis since before recorded history. Tsunamis are well known to Japanese everywhere – and the risk is especially well known to those living close to the coastline.
Building a nuclear power plant in a tsunami prone zone (all of Japan’s coastline) seems to have been a foolhardy endeavor. The push to get away from the expense and volatility of imported oil may have cost them more than they bargained for.
Will the Japanese now spawn their own eco-nazis to rise up and put a damper on future nuclear plant development? I’m betting the seeds of such a movement has been planted in this double whammy disaster.
Lets hope it isn’t as chilling there as its been in the USA.
I’m quite sure the eco-nazis in the USA would have pointed these weaknesses out in locating a plant in a coastal area in the US – along with the striped ass cross-eyed gnat being threatened with extinction – etc etc.
“I’m quite sure the eco-nazis in the USA would have pointed these weaknesses out in locating a plant in a coastal area in the US – along with the striped ass cross-eyed gnat being threatened with extinction – etc etc.”
Right, K.T. I live on an ocean golf course in California. This land was bought by Westinghouse for a nuclear plant and then sold for development (1) after Westinghouse realized power of the “what ifs” being formulated and (2) before the California Coastal Commission was established to prevent coastal developments like where I live.
Diablo Canyon and San Onofre are nuclear power plants along the California coast. http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/state/state_energy_profiles.cfm?sid=CA
For some reason, I have a lot of faith in the Japanese authorities and people. This may be a false impression, but I think the Japanese are better at pulling together and recovering from things like this than Americans would be.
In the States, we’d already be screaming about who’s to blame (for an earthquake and a tsunami?) and howling for each other’s blood. There’d be half a dozen Congressional committees sharpening their blades and tightening their nooses by now.
Because this happened in Japan, I don’t think there’ll be a “nuclear disaster.” Anywhere else – who knows?
I agree with you. I am incredibly grateful to those who there on site trying to keep those reactors and cooling ponds in control. Brave people all! Bless them and keep them save.
Thanks, this appears to be a very fact-based exposition, unlike the crud that I used to watch and read in the Make Believe Media.
I just wonder if the MBM calls upon these fear-mongering “experts” in their stories because it suits their hidden agenda or because more panic makes for more viewers/readers? Maybe it’s a bit of both.
Just because no major radiation occurs, it doesn’t mean everything is honky dory. It is clear to everyone that this is NOT by any standard under control.
There cannot be a source of energy where a dangerous radioactive contamination is even remotely possible. And just because we get lucky and nothing terrible happens this time by no means make it OK.
Nuclear facilities better increase safety way beyond the current level, or they will lose all credibility forever.
The problem with backup cooling should be solved by having a system that can be transported by truck or boat and be plugged in.
The experts better come up with a REAL solution and fast.
JL,
Did you bother to read the article and comments? A number of nuclear engineers or equivalent added additional information to what Mr Martin wrote initially.
If the containment vessel ruptures there could be an additional complication to this accident, however, if I understand correctly, because of the cooling that is occuring over time, and the addition of boron and sea water, as time passes the risk of that occuring diminishes.
Additionally, the newer reactors have enhanced saftey features including gravity fed water cooling systems and further redundancy.
If you look at history, alot more people have been killed by failed hydroelectric dams than nuclear accidents, even including the Russian disaster of 25 years ago. In the 1970′s there was a dam failure in China that killed 150,000 people.
There cannot be a source of energy where a dangerous radioactive contamination is even remotely possible. And just because we get lucky and nothing terrible happens this time by no means make it OK.
JL, are you aware that coal fired plants release significant radiation?
The NYT is apparently infested with old burnt-out anti-establishment hippies, any hyperbole that advances their anti-capitalist dogma is deemed fact and therefore front-page news.
That yellow rag can’t go bankrupt fast enough.
Charlie,
I learned much from your excellent piece. Can you expand on a couple of things?
How does the steel containment structure survive the meltdown of the core? I have heard the temperatures can get up to 7000 degrees and that is hot enough to melt steel.
As time passes and boron is added how long will it take for the reactor to cool? How is the boron introduced? Is it a powder of is it in some other form?
I have heard of a newer technology, pebble bed reactors that are even safer than previous models, what is the commercial status of use of that type of reactor?
Thanks again for your information and keep up the scholarly approach.
I believe I know one of the answers to your questions.
MOX fuel is at least partly driven by temperature. Increasing temperature causes increased power generated by the fuel. That is what creates the run-away situation.
In a pebble bed reactor, the balls have a physical structure (using graphite I believe) which causes their power output to fall with increasing temperature. At some high, but not catastrophic temperature, the power output of the reactor falls to the point where the reactor doesn’t get any hotter.
MOX requires coolant in order to insure that run-away doesn’t occur. The fuel in a pebble bed reactor does not.
Sorry it took so long to reply, this has been a couple of busy days.
(1) the thing with the steel containment is that it’s cooled too. The example I’m about to steal (because I can’t remember when I first heard it) is a cast-iron frying pan. If you put a torch to it, it will eventually melt. however, if it’s sitting in water, the water will boil, but the pan won’t melt.
(2) the boron is put in as boric acid, so it’ll dissolve easily.
(3) there are really good Wikipedia articles on both pebble-bed and traveling-wave thorium reactors. Both have the advantage that they false towards shutdown instead of toward high temperatures.
I wonder if Bill Gates’ net-worth went down a few million. He’s invested in Terrapower and its traveling wave nuclear technology. I don’t know if reactors based on this technology can melt-down with the loss of cooling. I would think that overheating would be a definite problem since the reaction is “set and forget” and can not be shut off in the event of cooling failure.
I am surprised that nuclear plants do not have a provision to drive their charge pumps with their own steam. This would reduce the external energy needed to cool them down after a shutdown dramatically.
They do. In the case of an BWR, the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System and the Emergency Core Cooling System both have steam driven turbine pumps. But you need control power to operate them. I don’t know why the Japs have not been able to bring in IC turbines of other generators. Must have something to do with that 9.1 earthquake and resulting tsunamis.
They do, US plants must have turbine drivened pumps. A brutally rugged turbine, sometimes called a Terry turbine, can shove cooling water into the reactor, if anything is making steam.
Apparently the Japanese do not have power, water, and MAY BE running out of living workers. By now, a fleet of generators, tankers, and battalions of nuke operators and support personnel should be anchored off shore.
I can not comprehend how Japan let this situation degenerate into disaster. By now, this is not Mother Nature’s fault.
But IMHO, and study, TMI, Chenobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger accident, the New Orleans levees, the Big Dig roof collapse, the I 35 W bridge collapse, the BP well blow out, the Catholic pedophile fiasco, and our financial banking collapse all share a common characteristic: incompetent bosses, and incompetent/lazy over viewers. Some may include Congress. It is the great weakness of any centralized hierarchical organization: who can fire a lousy boss?
If you have doubts about your big manager, you maybe right. But I have no solution, other than yet another engineered line of defense.
“I can not comprehend how Japan let this situation degenerate into disaster. By now, this is not Mother Nature’s fault.”
I was starting to get that feeling yesterday. A report of a pump generator running out of gas, another of someone turning a valve the wrong way, etc. I wonder if the Japanese culture of saving face has caused a great deal of trouble here. They waited an awfully long time to call for help from the NRC. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, so to speak, even if those measures mean help from the US or Europe. They immediately requested help in terms of humanitarian relief- why not for the reactors?
R. L. Hails Sr. P. E.,
The problem is not lack of water. The problem was caused by too much water. It’s called the Pacific Ocean.
Distributing the water to the right places is an issue. The need is for emergency cooling capability, not operations. Seawater is adequate for the spent fuel cooling ponds. It is the reactor vessels which might need potable water and, even for those, it is the ones which might be returned to operations which have priority. I’d only give credence to a true nuclear power plant engineer as to whether seawater might be too unsafe to use as coolant for reactors which are shut down, and have only waste heat to dissipate.
As for your comment, “… MAY BE running out of living workers”, please consider that orders of magnitude make a difference.
But the amount of power needed to control steam driven turbine pumps should be so small – DC power for a few sensors and one or two control valves.
I think I’ll take this opportunity to point out the incredible irony of an organization called “Plowshares” objecting to nuclear power. After all, the only real way to get rid of nuclear weapons is by burning them up in nuclear reactors.
Interestingly, “Plowshare” was a DOD/DOE program in the early 1960s to investigate peacetime uses of nuclear explosions.
It’s because they both draw their name from Isaiah 2:4, “…They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and study war no more.”
Buy time in the nuclear energy business?
Why is it that our MSM are acting like the world is going to end…. and the people that are living in Japan have done a great job of dealing with intense pressure? Kind of like our media is doing everything possible to make nuclear nrg look like something satan would have invented.
It is the meltdown of the US Dollar that worries me.
More people will die from starvation caused by a collapsing dollar and rising food prices than would die if all the reactors turned in bombs (not possible) and blew up.
Note that in Matthew 24, the time line of the end times, verse 7 ties together famine and earthquakes. Fox News just reported that there was a lot of agricultural damage in Japan.
I forget the exact terminology, but in the Air Force they taught us the concept of “false redundency” – a back-up system that relies in any way upon the system it is supposedly backing-up. This seems to be one of the design flaws here. Why rely on back-up generators to supply electricity to pumps to keep the cooling water flowing when such relies on electricity or existing water or systems. Why were there not any “passive” protections. One thing they knew they’d have in an accident was heat. Then why not a steam-engine powered water cooling system using available water or outside tanks? In fact, why rely on any mechanical/electrical system at for emergency cooling? Why not a syphon standby system, again using available water or outside tanks? Just askin’
I was told by technicians at PP&Ls Susquehanna plant yesterday that not only were the generators flooded by the Tsunami but their fuel tanks were washed away. The generators might have been saved but they could not get the safety doors that protect them closed in time.
FWIW my tech friends were also of the opinion that the net result of all this will be a very expensive clean up but no danger to the rest of us. They also said that the gasses released tell you what may be melting, for instance, fuel cladding versus the actual fuel core. I didn’t take notes so I don’t remember the details, such as what temp different parts melt at.
it is a freaking mess but not the end of the world
………….and they don’t build them like this anymore.
I am for nuclear power and hope this doesn’t stop more development of them.
still safer and cleaner then coal.
Mark Levin is reading excerpts from this post right now on his radio show.
My conclusions:
The situation is bad but is under control by very capable engineers and technicians;
That there will be very little suffering attributable to radiation.
That the plants affected were “old” in terms of nuclear power plant design and more recently-built ones are more efficient and better protected
continuing,,,,
That this experience will prove valuable in improving designs even further.
That one can depend more on those who sign their names – Charles Martin, R.L. Hails, Sr.,- than those who sign themselves “Poul” (as in chicken”?
I live in the Massachusetts Seventh District. Please do not elevate our congressman, Edward Markey, to the level of Senator. His aspiration would be our undoing.
Charlie…what’s your take on this?
http://www.counterpunch.com/whitney03152011.html
I sent your piece to my anti-nuke brother, and he simply responded (several times), “B.S.!!!” And sent me the link above. Would appreciate your feedback on my brother’s counter-argument.
RB
The plant is on fire. There are explosions. When something explodes it leaves big holes. All the radiation could escape. You don’t have to be a scientist to figure that out.
http://politiken.tv/nyheder/udland/ECE1223228/optagelser-viser-atomkraftvaerk-der-eksploderer/
Apparently you don’t even have to read the article.
The hydrogen explosions have mostly damaged the outer buildings, the “shed” that is what you normally see of the reactor. There are some reports that there may have been damage to the primary containment on reactor 2, but not the secondary containment around it.
Thanks for patiently answering peoples comments, no matter how emotional they are. I think that shows real class.
Can you show me test results from a test where a plant has been through an earthquake, a tsunami, several explosions, continued uncontrollable fires, complete failure of all backup cooling systems and had tons of saltwater poured over it?
well, as a counter-argument, “B.S.!!” is a little hard to argue with. Usually, the answer is “B.S.!!!”.
The linked article though is mostly mistaken. On the other hand, a spent fuel rod fire would be “worse than a meltdown” because it’s unconfined. What we hear now, though, is that it’s a regular old building fire, not a fuel rod fire, and the high radiation counts may well be simply because the fuel rods lots a good part of the shielding water, but not all. I did the calculation over in a comment on Tatler, but basically the high count can be explained if part but not all the water were lost — and we know that happened.
Charlie. My anti-nuke brother sent this to me:
http://www.counterpunch.com/whitney03152011.html
What’s your take on it? (He refuses to read your piece…he’s convinced we’re all gonna die.)
To: Chuck Pelto
Re: The Sky
It’s falling
Regards,
Nathan
Charles, good article. Only question I have is how you came up with a 17x difference in energy between an 8.2 and 9.0 quake. Unless I’m totally out in left field the energy difference is 10^(9-8.2) or 10^.8 which works out to be a difference of 6.3 not 17.
The Richter Scale has to do with the magnitude, or amplitude, recorded on seismographs. The power of the quake is the energy released. The amplitude difference between two earthquakes has an exponential factor of about 1.5 to convert it to the magnitude of the difference in energy released between the two.
In your example, you used 10^(.8) and came up with 6.3, Correct for the amplitude difference recorded on seismographs. The difference in energy released between an 8.2 and 9.0 Richter Scale quakes would be 6.3^(1.5) (10^(.8))^(1.5) or about 15.8.
Good rule of thumb that falls out of the math and is and easily applied without the use of a calculator is that every .2 increase in magnitude reported on the Richter Scale is equivalent to ABOUT (not exactly, it’s a tad less)) a doubling of the energy. So the difference between 8.2 and 9.0 is 2x2x2x2 or about 16. The difference between 8.0 and 9.0 being about 32.
That one is confusing a lot of people. The modern magnitude scale is called the “moment magnitude”. There’s a good article on it at Wikipedia; basically, they came up with a new scale, but then made the magnitudes sort-of match the old Richter “local magnitude” scale.
The expression for difference in energy in moment magnitude is 10^((3/2)× difference in magnitude); thus 10^((3/2)×(9.0-8.2))=15.85 or roughly 16.
From Wikipedia…
The Richter scale has been superseded by the moment magnitude scale, which is calibrated to give generally similar values for medium-sized earthquakes (magnitudes between 3 and 7). Unlike the Richter scale, the moment magnitude scale reports a fundamental property of the earthquake derived from instrument data, rather than reporting instrument data which is not always comparable across earthquakes, and does not saturate in the high-magnitude range. Since the Moment Magnitude scale generally yields very similar results to the Richter scale, magnitudes of earthquakes reported in the mass media are usually reported without indicating which scale is being used.
The energy release of an earthquake, which closely correlates to its destructive power, scales with the 3⁄2 power of the shaking amplitude. Thus, a difference in magnitude of 1.0 is equivalent to a factor of 31.6 ( = (101.0)(3 / 2)) in the energy released; a difference in magnitude of 2.0 is equivalent to a factor of 1000 ( = (102.0)(3 / 2) ) in the energy released.[2]
Great work, Charlie. I like the way you stick with the thread and post new info. That link from Ken Miller leads to excellent updated technical stuff as well. These badass reactors have been subjected to conditions that far exceeded their design, and the radiation release seems minimal while cooling continues. I’m optimistic: no major radiation releases, no death.
Hint for RB: I only needed to glance at the link and see “counterpunch” to know that it’s drivel, not worthy of a Regular American’s click. Sorry, but your bro’s lost. As The Great One would say…”he’s a drone”, there’s nothing you can do or say; he must overcome his frightened little inner child and learn to think clearly, or forever remain askance from reality.
I’m really tempted to click on that link though…hmmmm…haven’t checked on the nutters for a while….could use a good laugh…damn that link…it sit’s there beckoning, mocking me…OK…you got me! Click!
Charlie, Thank you for this article. Not surprisingly it is hard to get information from journalism majors interviewing other journalism majors, much less the anti-nuke folks. I have two requests:
1) as you point out in one of your comments above, things appear to be changing quickly – can you post an update
2) I may have missed it (I read the article quickly last night), but I don’t remember seeing a discussion of the difference between radiation (or any type, alpha, beta, gamma, neutron, proton, etc.) and radioactive contamination (i.e. the escape of radiation-generating isotopes). The discussions in the press (right or left) are horribly confused in this regard. One short paragraph would do it.
For updates, watch Tatler. I’ll probably have another article, but i’ve got a day job — I can’t write 3000 word articles every night. http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/
For purposes of talking about these doses, gamma’s really the only thing that matters. I’ll try to write something about the differences.
I want to write about contamination; for the moment, google “banana equivalent dose”.
In Canada, one of the talking heads on TV (CTV) was one of the top people in the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, also an anti-nuclear group. He took the occasion to throw out some half-truths and untruths.
IanM
I’ve heard NO ONE talk about .4 Sieverts per hour!
I’ve had a confusion between milli Sieverts and MicroSieverts.
The best information I have now is a peak “on site” radition level, of 4000 MicroSieverts, or 400 milliREM per hour.
Hardly a fatal or non-operative dose.
This is consistent with releases of Cesium, Iodine, and Xenon. The three primary volitiles.
Contamination clothing, full face mask, and regular dosimetry should allow ANY qualified worker to work in this enviroment.
If the cores “melt down” I encourage everyone to look up CORIUM on Wiki, and to read the technical references.
YES, it will be a disaster for the PLANTS. They are “toast”.
NO, it will NOT burn through the containment reinforced concrete floor.
Why not? Look up the CORIUM write up, read the work by the French Labs and Sandia. The molten UO2 will disperse, and stabalize, partially burned into the concrete.
They will have to make the “disposal” of the cores for these plants, the plants themselves.
But that’s where it will stay. And the releases will be what will happen in the next 10 days to a month, and that will be limited.
Max, the 0.4 Sv is from IAEA, but it’s localized. Have a look at my stuff today in Tatler http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/ — it looks like those could have been due to loss of water shieding on the spent fuel storage ponds.
What I’m curious about is, would even the “worst” be as bad as is claimed? I.e. the containment failed and there was a catastrophic full-force steam explosion. As one thing I heard was that Chernobyl had more than just a steam blast to propel radioactives — it had the graphite fire, which allowed material to be released in a form that was much more conducive to covering large areas.
The sky is falling. It’s the End Times! We’re DOOMED! But wait…there’s a tiny glimmer of hope…Algore and the Green Weenies can save us!! We don’ need no stinkin’ nuke power plants! We can run the entire economy on sunlight & wind.
Get rid of your car. Buy a horse.
I bought stock in Japanese companies, nuclear power companies, and uranium mining companies heavily on Monday and Tuesday. The outcome of the containment efforts is uncertain. It could still turn out to be very bad. But I am pretty confident that: 1) the worst of the quake disaster is over, 2) Japan isn’t 25% less valuable than it was last week, 3) nuclear power isn’t going anywhere, and 4) with level of personnel, worldwide expertise and resources devoted to containment efforts increasing by the day, the Japanese are going to figure this out. We’ll see.
This article explains some misleading points but completely skips over the real concern at the plants
Yes there is a containment wall however in order to relieve built up pressure workers are venting steam out into the atmosphere
Right now that steam has acceptable levels of radiation but if a meltdown that steam would quickly contain dangerous harmful levels of radiation
Swami, that’s false. TMI, for example, had a real meltdown and still didn’t have dangerous radiation anywhere outside the plant.
spent rods do not have reinforced containment walls around them only housed in pool of water if those water levels are lost more dangerous radiation will leak out through venting process
At that point it will be damned if you do or damend it you don’t
because if you keep venting then more radiation gets out through vents(this has nothing to do with containment walls)
if you stop venting because of a dangerous radiation leaks then pressure build up and more explosions which open breach for radiation from the spent rods seap into atmosphere again nothing to do with containment walls because spent rods do not have containment walls
I will say it again explosion may not damage containment walls and allow dangerous radiation to seap out but explosion can open breach of spent rods because there are no containment walls
Ok nothing 2 worry about unless u live n a post-industrial & media-driven society(GE NBC-Universal/ Comcast) where u don’t produce much anyway but sex-drive, anxiety, entertainment, more energy, & nonstop political yackeety yack which will confer on the winners more of the same. I am anti-nukes because its really a military spin-off. The manufactured ‘need’ for energy will just mean more wars, more consumption, more drugs for us…and a big fat Pentagon. My thermostat is set @ 67 F in the winter and I consume less than 300 ccf gas(usually less than 300 kWh per month.) Entergy Nuclear is headquartered in my hometown and they r really a just a subsidiary of the military-industrial complex (USA). Which means they lie…recently re: Yankee Plant groundwater levels.
So, you burn what you obviously consider to be an inconsequential amount of energy to heat your home… “Manufactured” need? Indeed! And you’re one of the manufacturers:
Where do you get your food? Do you buy it from a market somewhere? Did you drive there to get it? How much energy was spent growing it? moving it through the distribution system? paying for the lights in the store? What happens to the waste from your consumption? Do you throw out trash and/or recycling? How much energy do the trucks burn hauling it away? I presume that you have a toilet in your home (for that other biproduct of your food consumption) – think that the sewage plant burns any energy?
Do you drink any water from the tap? Take a shower/bath once in a while? How much energy gets used to purify it, pump it, maintain the distribution system? Do you bathe in cold water, or do you have a water heater?
Obviously you have a computer – even if it’s “Energy Star Compliant” it burns a few joules over time. Do you suppose that every link in the internet chain along the way consumes a little power? How much energy was consumed in its manufacture? What will you do with it when it’s obsolete/broken?
Get the idea?
Now, multiply all that consumption times all the rest of the population around you. It doesn’t take long to arrive at a significant amount of energy usage. The “Military Industrial Complex” has very little to do with it. Yes, our society burns a lot of energy. But it’s not because of any vast conspiracy (well, actually I suppose you could say it was – a conspiracy of all of us in the world who consume ANY goods/services). It’s a whole bunch of people just like you (and me, I freely admit!) living in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. And since we are unwilling to forego our comforts and conveniences, I don’t see our consumption dropping in the near future; we will continue to need energy. It doesn’t matter where that energy comes from – Nuclear, fossil fuels, wind, solar, wood, heck, even whale oil – all sources have issues. I personally believe that nuclear energy is one of the most reliable, cleanest, and safest forms of energy. We need more nuke plants, not less. After all, our primary source of energy for the planet is nuclear. It’s that huge, bright nuke plant around which we orbit.
NS (Nuclear Science). Just showing I try 2 conserve. I don’t own a car but use mass transit. Tepco, others, and my own Entergy Nuclear (Grand Gulf) do a public service and take some rads 4 me 2 distribute power 4 which I am very grateful, but I expect them to lie to the regulators from time to time. My nukes company does have some egg on their face due to their lies re: Vermont Yankee in the past year or so. The military aspect of nukes creates a dishonest culture in my view. The conspiracy part has more 2 do with the way we as a society r n denial about the dangers of empire and consumption and the way our media assists. Truth is the first casualty of war as they say. Security 4 nukes is very costly 2. Reality is what we r witnessing n Japan and industrial countries will review & retool our nukes as lessons r learned. I feel sorry 4 the nukes workers on the front.
29. John
is this still just a TMI?
Hard to be sure. Yesterday’s big worry, the “fuel rod fire” now looks to have been false. I think the answer is that this may be another TMI or a little worse, but it’s still way not another Chernobyl.
A small point of emphasis: The Chernobyl reactor was an old-fashioned graphite core reactor rather than the common boiling water type. Graphite core reactors are still used as research devices around the country. There still may be some on college campuses even.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_core#Graphite-moderated_reactors
Great article, thanks.
Good article.
Unfortunately, fear of nuclear energy is a distraction when there may be thousands of people buried in the rubble that the quake and tsunami wrought.
I wish you’d have written this in bold font.
Seriously.
Amen.
Like Al Gore? That behemouth of science “factoids”….sure.
Why waist your time telling uneducated people that they are over reacting and do not understand these matters as well as you? It is to no avail. Let the ignorant anti nuke people stew in their own unfounded fears.
Now is the time for the many smarter and more scientific individuals(posting here and elsewhere) to get their butts over to Japan ASAP and show them how fearless you are.
Basically, because we’re in the stew with them.
Maybe what we need more is universal education to the standard you want, so everyone, regardless of whether or not they can pay themselves, can get it.
Head of NRC now reports that the spent fuel rod pool in Reactor 4 building has no water. Helicopter mission to drop water was aborted due to radioactive steam cloud. This could be it. Another rumor is that radiation levels near the plant are now 1500mSv/hour. Of course, the rumors are always hard to verify and contradictory information is coming from a variety of sources. But, if this is true, it’s really bad. Workers can’t approach to fix anything because of high radioactivity in the area. Probably means melt down in all 3 active cores and spent fuel rod exposure in all 6 reactors. Please someone correct me if I’m wrong, but if they can’t get close enough to work, it’s gonna get really bad.
This would all be easier if people would give me a damn link to what they’re reading. In this case, I think you’ve got the units confusion that we’ve all been running into:
That’s from MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering department, mitnse.com Notice your rumor is 1500 mSv, the real reading is 1500 μSv, 1/1000th as much.
Ah, good point…… but isn’t a microSv 1/10th of a mSV, not 1/1000? I did get the units wrong. Wish they still used rems.
Micro with a u with long tail is 10^(-6) and milli is 10^(-3). At least in the engineering world that math is micro is 1/1000 of a milli.
Charlie,
I am a money manager and I can tell you that the population is generally and willfully ignorant about anyting that forces you to process and think. Details are anathema to most, and all it takes is a little knowlege and you have a room full of experts. I have seen this hundreds of times over in my field. Thank you for your explanation. As you no doubt know, Mark Levin said there was more useful information in this one piece than on all the internet, cable news and network media combined. Hats off to you. We have a country that generally speaking only knows how to react to soundbites. All you have to do is look at the responses to your piece to see real data supporting that notion. Please keep us updated. Thanks again.
I suspect that the “smoke” from the fires may actually be steam, the product of the oxidation of hydrogen, forming H2O, which becomes water vapor under high heat. This rapidly condenses and falls like mist – elephants on cat’s feet?
I think the term “radiation” is being used too loosely. Rather, what is being released is contamination, radioactive particles which, when they decay do so a rate described by their half-lives. The product of their decay is radiation which can be in the form of alpha, beta and gamma rays. When ingested, it is the decay of the contaminated material that is of greatest danger and concern, when, for example, radioactive iodine collects in the thyroid.
Right, on both counts, I think. Generally “white smoke” is steam and that’s what we know they’ve been releasing. And yes, the whole thing of radiation (number of emitted particles per second), dose (amount of absorbed energy per unit volume) and dose rate (absorbed energy per unit volume per second) all get confused. but on the topic of radionuclides released, most of them are probably going to be xenon and nitrogen, which dissipate quickly, have a short half-life, and aren’t easily absorbed by the tissues.
Yes. The media consistently says “radiation” when they mean “fallout”. They don’t understand the difference, and yet they still get paid.
The fatalities at Three Mile Island totaled only ONE less than Chappaquiddick Island,
when Ted Kennedy drove his car off the bridge to Martha’s Vineyard.
Is replenishing water lost in the Reactor and in the spent fuel storage ponds all that is required to get this mess under control? Is the work now being performed inadequate? Will restoring power permit the problem to be resolved?
Thanks
Bill, frankly, I’ve had a long couple of days — 6 hours or something on national radio various places, plus trying to follow this thing and keep up with what’s happening. So I’m mildly fried; I hope I’m intelligible.
Is replenishing water lost in the Reactor and in the spent fuel storage ponds all that is required to get this mess under control?
Not all, but it’s a necessary first step.
Is the work now being performed inadequate?
Depends on who you ask, but the people on the ground in Japan feel like it is; also, the longer we go without something dramatically worse happening, the less likely it is that something awful will happen.
Will restoring power permit the problem to be resolved?
It will help a whole lot.
They are stringing a new power line to the coolant generators as we speak.
So the thouands of people evacuated are stand in out of work Hollywood actors.
The scenes of destruction at the nuclear plants are fake sets in Nevada, the measured radiation is totally fictional, the video is composited fake footage and the the general poplulation has been given a free vacation in a tropical paradise.
So they prepped for an 8.2 and got a 9.0
Facts are facts. Opinion is opinion.
I agree with PJ on this. As an ANTI-right winger, perhaps this view of mine might mean he’s on the right track and not just that I liker the conclusion.
One doesn’t really need any facts to evaluate media (both “main stream” and “Blog Swamp” media) for bovine excrement content.
My Latin stinks but approximately its ‘quo bono’, whi benefits?
In American, its ‘where you stand, depends on where you sit’.
Interestingly enough, for the minority who actually pay any attention to apparent facts, there are MANY links to scientificf reports of some credibility here http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100079763/nuclear-power-some-perspective/ and http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100079763/nuclear-power-some-perspective/
This is a classic example of a highly technical/scientific problem being managed by politicians and reported by journalists who haven’t a clue about what they see are seeing and hearing.
Home sick so got to listen to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chief report to a congressional hearing about Japan and also his 2012 budget proposal. He said there is no more water where the rods are and there is a crack in the container where another reactor stores rods so it is probably that water is leaking out. He said it is very serious.
Critical thinking teaches never say never. Your article states it is not and will not be a Chenobyl and insinuates the people behind the media are anti-nuclear. Well who the heck cares when the situation could turn worst at many minute, aftershocks, a second tidal wave, 10,000 unaccounted for and you are writing an article down playing and accusing the media of distoration. I found your article self inflating and missing the point. Given all the expense planned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the permitting process, expense of disposal of spent rods, safety design considerations – government expense of research I wonder just how cost effective is nuclear power these days? When all costs are considered just what is the cost of producing a kWh from nuclear plants?
You all seem to be having so much fun with graphite and microverts etc but..I did see in the Daily Telegraph where they quoted from WikiLeaks that the Japanese Government were warned that this complex was not fit for it’s purpose.It was only reinforced for a level 7 and a level 8.9 hit, the internal safety systems were downgraded to the rest of the Japanese Nuclear Industry which were fudging their results. Did not sound good but who beleives Wiki Leaks?
this news is so dreary. any comments or serious problems can be forwarded to president obama in care of the beach girl from ipanema,rio de janeiro,south america or to your friendly democrat party……over and out…
Thanks so much for writing this article Charlie & to all of those who provided factual information in the comments. Now I at least feel like I have a rudimentary knowledge of what is happening & how nuclear reactors operate. Could quote several people here, but I’d love to put this in bold for you & everyone else…
“UNFORTUNATELY, FEAR OF NUCLEAR ENERGY IS A DISTRACTION WHEN THERE MAY BE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE BURIED IN THE RUBBLE THAT THE QUAKE & TSUNAMI WROUGHT.”
Sadly, everything in the mass media is one big distraction, & to quote another commentator; “It’s a whole bunch of people just like you (and me, I freely admit!) living in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. AND SINCE WE ARE UNWILLING TO FORE-GO OUR COMFORTS AND CONVENIENCES, I don’t see our consumption dropping in the near future; we will continue to need energy.”
It’s way past time we as individuals take responsibility instead of putting the blame on everyone else & pointing the finger at who is worse than thou or worse; predicting the end of the world (which makes the whole thing MUCH worse = no responsibility/effort to change). INTERNAL thought should be a given, but good luck convincing those unwilling to listen, especially the ones who only want to see the negative/differences… My heart goes out to all those families still searching for their children…
And MAHALO to you Charlie for keeping up to date AND holding down a day job… BIG UPS! I’ll be tuning in from now on; DEFINITELY would love a link when you find one with up to date developments (besides Tatler).
Mai Iloko Mai,
Lace
Thanks for quoting my comment.
It’s true – we burn a lot of energy in this country (and in the West in general) per capita. And it is ultimately a personal responsibility of each of us. However, as a capitalist I believe that supply and demand drives the market. If energy was 10 times more expensive, we would see a lot fewer night lights, and more sweaters being worn (in winter… but since I see that you are in Hawaii, I guess you don’t know about that!).
But until I see Al Gore and Susan Sarandon living in a cabin in the woods, burning their own waste for heat, and burning candles made from their own tallow for light, I plan on enjoying the blessings of our great country.
Outstanding reporting. Note that low levels of radiation have been considered a cure for many centuries and many places in Europe one goes for radon exposure.
Scientific experiments show low levels of life (mold) live longer when exposed to low level radiation.
Not only ignorance and selective reporting of the facts, but blatant journalistic fraud with the footage of blazing infernos from other unrelated disasters. Disgraceful.
I understand that they have brought in mobile generators. What will bringing in a power line do that the generators can’t?
Thanks
Provide more power and not need truckloads of deisel that could be used elsewhere.
This article seemed insightful a few days ago but now seems utterly naive if not ridiculous. What sayeth you now Mr. Martin?
(count the “if’s” If this hadn’t happened and that hadn’t happened and if I knew that, well then I would have been right)
That you’re not reading the real data, just the hysterics. See this piece in Christian Science Monitor today: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0317/Fear-of-Japan-s-nuclear-crisis-far-exceeds-actual-risks-say-scientists
This is my first time to write a comment on an internet blog and my main purpose for doing so is to thank all the people who took the time to write all the words I have been reading during the last couple of hours.
I’m not a big fan of the mass media because in the past I have seen multiple cases where the information reported was either misleading, inaccurate, or false. My assessment of the factual accuracy in those instances was based on personal knowledge in my own field. About 25 years ago I read a newspaper article about a DC-9 crash which included an information box with some basic information about a B737 complete with a picture of a B737. At the time I was a B737 pilot, so I doubt anyone could possibly believe me to be incapable of recognizing the difference between a DC-9 and a B737. There were other similar examples, but you get the idea… it was completely obvious to me that there were factual errors in news reporting.
From that point on I have never been able to believe that the information in anything else I saw reported in the news is completely (or even partially) reliable. I think the average news consumer is not interested in good news and I believe the media know that to sell ads (which pay their bills after all) they need to make sure they deliver the bad news their consumers crave, even if it means lacing fact with fiction.
Based on those cases where my own knowledge on the topic enabled me to see that the reporter had probably just grabbed whatever he or she could find to cobble together an inaccurate story to fill up a space with some bad news before the deadline for the press, I have never trusted the news media to provide factual information. Some of what is there may be true, some may be false. But since I am not an expert on anything outside of my own field (by my definition of “expert” I’m not an expert even in my own field), how can I differentiate between fact and fiction?
Although I’ve read numerous Michael Crichton books, I didn’t run across the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” that Mike K referred to, but I think his post did a better job of saying what I am trying to say here.
So why did I try to say it my way? Well, I live in Japan and I just want to thank all you people who shared your words here. The news stories about the nuclear power plant problems which include pictures of huge fires which to me are obviously not at a nuclear power plant are more examples of irresponsible reporting and in this case I think they are actually extremely harmful. Unfortunately lots of news consumers believe everything the media deliver and I think it’s criminal that this kind of irresponsible “reporting” is not only allowed, but is financially rewarded.
Thank you. And thanks, everyone, for your complimentary comments, I haven’t been good about that.
Mr. Martin, thank you for your reply. This is the second post of my life on an internet blog. It was only after submitting the first one that I realized the “Reply” link below each comment would probably have allowed my comment to be presented as a response to Mike K’s much better post which was actually my intention.
Thanks for the great article and sorry for the confusion.
Joe Fisher
I’m curious: how do you expect people to _not_ believe what’s seen on those news stories, when most people are not nuclear experts?
And so, how could they possibly find out its falsity in a truly objective manner?
Anyway, FOSSIL energy (oil, coal, gas) is *BAD* — global warming from FOSSIL emissions, FOSSIL toxic release, FOSSIL all that bad stuff is PROVEN beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt by science as harmful and causing major harm right now. Just look at the smog in China, or the glaciers melting in the Himalayas — you can thank fossil fuels for all that. It’s the baddest source of energy on the planet.
The point I’m trying to make is if I know with absolute certainty that one article in the media is inaccurate because the topic of the article happens to be something I know about, is it reasonable to assume other articles (on topics about which I know little or nothing) are more accurate? Even though you may think so, I don’t. Fool me once… shame on you. Fool me twice… shame on me.
Since I’m unable for the most part to differentiate between accurate information and inaccurate information outside of those areas where I am knowledgeable, I typically err on the side of skepticism. So if it seems like I’m saying I believe very little of what I see in the news (especially TV, which is why I stopped watching TV years ago), you are reading me loud and clear… that’s EXACTLY what I mean.
Mike K said it better than I can [http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/fear-the-media-meltdown-not-the-nuclear-one/#comment-928899]
This is the third post of my life… all of them on the same page.
Joe Fisher
Listen to Charlie Martin interviewed on KOA, 850AM, Denver’s Mike Rosen at:
http://tinyurl.com/4amog8o (Opens to MP3 of the show on http://850koa.com/pages/mikerosen.html; right click and “Save as..”)
Thanks!
Charlie, CONGRATS to having this piece recommended enthusiastically by Mark Levin, linked by him and read in part on his show a couple of nights ago. I wouldn’t have known about it but for listening to the podcast. Sharing with everyone I know.
To the person asking about expertise and the media: only fools believe the media on ANY subject when expertise is required. Smart people go looking and listening for expertise via blogs, articles and radio interviews. There is virtually nothing the faux media covers accurately. Turn it off! Seek out accuracy elsewhere and let the drones remain stupid and ignorant. Don’t join them.
Same here! I found this article through Mark Levin’s recommendation. I also forwarded it to several ill-informed individuals who have been sucked into the vortex of the televised media hysteria. Thanks Charlie for your contribution to logical information!
This is a great piece that is well put together and has eased my fears. Thank you all for your informative responses. The Great One linked to this site and I was very happy to have the information to inform some of the drive by media rubber neckers in my area!!!
LESSONS. Don’t trust the nuke’s company info. Watch the US Navy & the Seventh Fleet for true radiation readings. We can ‘conserve’ when we must. We can conserve energy when the power shuts down the nukes backup pumps and when we don’t have purified water to pour on the hot reactor or the spent fuel pools. Backup power reliability has not be 110%. Conservatives have a 110 % reliable political messaging ops during a nuclear crisis, but as to info accuracy they are depending on that from unreliable sources like the rest of us (Tepso, Entergy, Excelon, Duke). MAIN LESSON- Conservatives are conservative in everything but energy conservation…they hate the mention.
Funny, Nature just confirmed pretty much all of this — if anything, it’s a little better news than I’ve been working out.
I suppose you’re now going to claim Nature is a conservative magazine.
So…what happened to all the media hysteria? Seems we had almost three days of almost no coverage of the impending China Syndrome / blazing nuclear furnace. Perhaps the “story was exhausted” ’cause they couldn’t create more new fear out of cooling and contained reactors…or perhaps they really think Mohmar (sp? whatever spelling of the week you might choose to use…) getting his bootay spanked was really that dominating of a story.
I know this article is now out of date, but in case anyone comes across this, it was recently determined Fukushima had more than a melt-down. In fact it had at least one melt-through, meaning a reactor has melted through its containment vessel and has sunk beneath the foundation. As far as any increase in danger goes, I can’t speak to that, but it does mean they cannot get close enough to stop any leakage or further mishaps. I was also curious what this author thinks about Arnie Gunderson since he reported there is more than one melt-through. He seems to think Fukushima is much worse than Chernobyl.
Tremendous things here. I am very satisfied to peer your article. Thank you so much and I’m taking a look ahead to touch you. Will you kindly drop me a e-mail?