Visit the YouTube Japan earthquake video upload page here. One of the most viewed videos was taken in first-person “shooter view” in what seems to be a Japanese residence. The person manages to capture the video, evacuate the house and get everybody outside with only a slight trace of nervousness.
Although the trend began with backpacker-contributed footage of the tsunami that hit Thailand, uploads to the Japanese earthquake video YouTube site suggests that from now on, most of the archival video footage of public events in the world will be taken by amateurs. Cameras are ubiquitous and people know it. Three people in California were swept away as they stood near the beach waiting to take pictures of the tsunami. One is still missing, according to the Wall Street Journal, which writes:
Three people taking pictures of the surf near the mouth of the Klamath River, about 20 miles south of Crescent City, Calif., were surprised by large waves and swept into the water, said Cindy Henderson, emergency services officer for Del Norte County. Two of the people struggled out of the surf and a male in his 20s is still missing, and is now the focus of a search and rescue operation, said a Coast Guard spokesman.
People feel the same natural thrill at capturing an extraordinary event and posting it online as photojournalists must have once felt when they found themselves on the scene at some momentous occasion. It may have cost one of those three men in Crescent City his life. And though it is not without its drawbacks, the emergence of literally millions of unique data capturing points, especially in a place as dense with electronics as Japan, means that we have a far richer dataset on which to base history.
The creation of millions of data points is a good thing … but. Credulity increases as more images from more sources appear. The technology that empowers amateurs is a subset of the even more sophisticated tools that permit images and narratives to be manufactured. The al-Dura fraud was a warning of more to come. The professional fact checkers are corrupt and we are in a wilderness of mirrors.
This is probably the best-documented tsunami in history. It was shown in real time.
http://www.vgtv.no/#id=38263
Semi-on topic. The mirror in the post office wanted signs.
Some one said (on a previous thread) that child abuse is not well correlated with social pathologies. And that is true. If you think as I do that PTSD is what you should be looking for then there is a genetic component. Until the genetics are worked out the beatings ought to stop. Once we know who can take it, the beatings can resume.
We will learn so much from this big disaster on building standards, nuclear reactor standards, perhaps improved infrastructure standards. They’re smart people and they will learn a lot about improving emergency services and search and rescue techniques. That will only be cramped by their huge debt burden and lack of young people.
Perhaps, given Japan’s demographic death spiral, exacerbated by its xenophobia which has stifled immigration, that country can move its residential towns back from the coast and use the space for agricultural purposes to reduce the impact of future tsunamis.
It’s like the Japanese got into taking pictures of every possible moment, hoping that one day it would pay off, and it has!
As a nuclear engineer, I’ll be studying this event for years. I’ve worked on this type of reactors for many years now. In my prior job I helped developed the US rules on how to handle a total loss of power at a plant like what happened in Japan. My guess is that water flooded the outside emergency diesel fuel oil tanks but that’s only speculation on my part.
Watching the TEPCO website, it seems the worst has passed but some venting of relatively minor amounts of filtered radioactive gases remains. Best to wait until the wind blows out to the ocean for that.
Japan has two had near-misses for their nukes now from events that exceeded their assumptions. We understand nuclear engineering better than we understand geology still.
Reuters:
FLASH: #Japan nuclear authorities say high possibility of meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 reactor – Jiji
@Martyn Williams
RT @dicklp: Nuclear expert tells The Times: meltdown has technically begun at Fukushima.
2 minutes ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet Reply
Retweeted by @W7VOA
More bad news. We need nuclear power and you know how this will be used by the advocates of purity through deindustrialization and poverty. Next will come dark theories of BP techs showing up to throw the wrong switch when the earth moved.
Speaking of which, we need something inapt and in bad taste under the circumstances, Carole King,
“I Feel The Earth Move Under My Feet.”
Ubiquitous videography doesn’t seem to stop unions goons in Wisconsin.
w @ 6: from what I heard (with half an ear on the news) these are 40 year old reactors and like most they don’t fail safe, is there really anything else to say? You can pile backup systems a mile high but what you want is inherent safety, pebble-beds and reverse pressure and the like.
Yeah overall conventional reactors have a good safety record, but.
Multiple cameras from multiple perspectives? Are multiple “truths” the result? Are you embracing post modernism?
Josh, I agree with the idea of inherently safe reactors – but how likely do you think it is that is going to be possible to get that message past all the “NUKES ARE EEEVIL!!!” BS from the watermelons? Especially as some enormous percentage of the population in the UK (certainly) and the USA (probably) have not the vaguest understanding of science or maths? (The latter problem, IMHO, being quite deliberate on the part of our lords and masters.)
Whitehall @ 6,
Given how frequently the Japanese have bad earthquakes, I’m a bit surprised that the Japanese nuclear reactors were not more earthquake safe. I know there are some levels of earthquake that can not be designed against. For example, the Golden Gate bridge is fairly close to the San Andreas fault. Supposedly the Golden Gate bridge was engineered to withstand a Richter 9 earthquake. A Richter 9 would level the city of San Francisco and kill most of the people living there so the destruction of the bridge would be almost irrelevant. It’s conceivable that someone did the same sort of analysis with the Japanese reactors.
The timing is unfortunate with the Japanese reactors because the American people need to be sold on the concept of nuclear energy.
From what I heard on the news (still a jumble), the reactors were designed to withstand a six-point-something earthquake: this was an 8.9, a once in a millennium-type event. Wasn’t the famous San Francisco earthquake a 6.7 or so? pretty huge, but they go up logarithmically, not arithmetically, in strength. A commenter said, for comparison, that the Japan earthquake was 1,000 times as strong as the Haiti quake.
They had failsafes, but the double-whammy of catastrophic earthquake followed by a huge tsunami was just too much.
Michio Kaku, a sloppy reporter (physicist of some sort who lectures at the Open Center in Soho) was on ABC, saying excitedly that if the reactors failed, we’d have a situation “like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl!” Which was an idiotic thing to say — the failsafes worked in Three Mile Island, and NO one was hurt. Chernobyl, on the other hand, really did melt down and render its region uninhabitable. Free nation wins again!
Let’s hope the same happens in Japan. Because if there is a meltdown, we’ll Never get safe nuclear power online. The reporters were already swarming the possibility like flies at Obot’s press con.
Holy Crap–there’s just been an explosion at the reactor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4uogOEUrU
Nuclear power plant just exploded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4uogOEUrU
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12720219
Of course the media is going to milk the ‘meltdown’ trope for every drop of juice. As they try to generate hysteria over every disaster.
People are so conditioned by hollywood, with its unreal need for constant drama. If nuclear was as dicey as the hysterical braying mobs imagine, then so would everything else be, like buildings, and airplanes, and surgery. You should not set foot outside your door if you are scared of the word ‘nuclear’.
I work on a bus which drives people with cancer to their chemotherapy appointments. If they happen to lose bladder control and pee on the bus, as some do, guess what? It’s a nuclear spill! Hazard protocols. I used to carry a geiger counter while disposing of medical waste, there’s radiation everywhere! But medical authorities know how much is safe. You didn’t know this? Wonder why? Because enviro-nut demagogues dominate public discussion. Time they were retired to asylums. Bring back to the spotlight the technicians, engineers, hydrologists etc who have made us secure and safer.
I’m starting to get a real bad feeling about things. 11 US ships have been designated for disaster work including the Washington and the Regan.
I’m wonder how much of the power grid is up in that area. I thought I read somewhere the Japanese were trying to get aux electrical generators to the nuke plants that needed it. Right now the problem seems to be trying to figure out the scope of the damage. They are doing photo recon and survey teams are in. I’m real uneasy about having to task those carriers for relief work. It looks necessary but I really really wish we had more carriers to keep on station. Kan has flown over the area but from what I’ve read the Japanese pretty much consider him to be a wiener. I can see a race to replace power sources before next winter hits that area. On top of that there may be more quakes hitting in the near future.
Yes, the risk of after-shocks of significant size is one of the big worries.
That’s very bad news about the reactor. I was so hoping they’d be able to contain it.
But I wanted to post this link to the fantastic (and inspiring) “Professional Mariner” article about the heroic response of New York City’s maritime fleet to the World Trade Center attacks. It’s a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit, and is a good example to think on right now.
http://www.fireboat.org/press/prof_mariner_jan02_1.asp
For those who don’t know the remarkable story of how the fleet of NY tugboats and ferryboats spontaneously coordinated and organized a massive evacuation of 1 million New Yorkers from downtown and midtown (per the Coast Guard estimates) and then ran all the supplies, medical relief, and firefighting/rescue forces and supplies into the city, you really should read this article. It’s amazing what those men did. And the government didn’t take over until Day Four.
You see, the tunnels and bridges were all shut down, for the first time in our city’s history. All we had was our boats, and boy, did they come through for us. I know that similar heroics are going on in Japan right now.
You’re correct. However I have also noticed that the video captured thuggery in Wisconsin has not made it to the MSM channels. Rather it has been ignored. Also there has been talk of civility over there but yet no mention of the multiple death threats, captured video racism by these same socialist thugs.However there was weeks of so called teabagger racism after the Obamacare bill was rammed down our throats, even though the entire proceeding was on video from various angles without any evidence. Hope and Change.
Even if the the Japanese reactors fail, given the intensity of the crisis that may be upon us, it may means risks still have to be run. There is no safety in hoping to rely either completely on oil, and still less in hoping that “Green Energy” can come to the rescue. People may prefer not to consider nuclear power an option, but do they have a choice?
There are eventual engineering solutions to problems, but first you must survive. And for the system, that’s not a given. At the rate things are developing in 2011, Japan will be forgotten inside two weeks because another problem will be upon us. Tunisia is now foggy; Yemen barely registers; Saudi Arabia is blocked out down into subconsciousness; Egypt is just a distant memory. Libya is fading from the headlines. But they’re still there. The Euro is still failing; the bond markets are still demanding their pound of flesh; Iran is still smoldering.
None of it has stopped; they are momentarily ignored, like a heart condition forgotten because of a diagnosis of cancer. One thing drives out the other from the mind, but they’re all happening as background processes.
They’re all churning along and whichever process has the foreground seems the most important, for an instant, but in reality none of them are. The key thing is that we’ve forgotten how to issue the Kill command — now where was that danged manual? Can President Obama remember the command before before the system runs out memory and resources and locks up? Maybe it’s locked up already.
Oh well, there’s always the golf course.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the Greenies getting back on track. They’re finished or soon will be, though not before they finish the rest of us. The world they thrived in is gone. The international system’s engagement queue is not only saturated, it’s backlogged. And still the bandits are incoming. How long can it continue?
The Japanese authorities are making soothing noises.
They claim the design of the building means that the inner containment system is unlikely to be affected. Dare we believe them? Back in World War 2 the Japanese showed a huge capacity for denial.
From what i understand, the critical need is for electricity to run the cooling water pumps –before the fuel rods start melting. If they do start melting, and the old 40 year-old containment structure design (which the talking heads are saying is ‘not good’ and ‘should have been retrofitted as that GE model has been elsewhere’) will not contain the radiation –that’s the ‘meltdown’ of the vernacular, where your goose is cooked if you’re under the fallout.
Anyhoo, the navy should be able to rig electricity to the system, right? Just needs some hours to do it?
***
as far as the hypothetical ”how long can this stuff continue?” –i’d say, there’s no natural resistance point until the end of all authority, when every survivor is completely his own man, living hand to mouth.
I think this is basically a good thing. But pictures always need to be placed in context. For example, if you show a police officer firing into a crowd of protesters, people will find that shocking. But what if, just prior to that event but NOT shown on that same video, some of the protesters threw a molotov cocktail at the police officer, nearly killing him? Context is everything when reporting the news. Countries like Iran and some arab dictatorships are masters at manipulating both the news and photo images to inflame their populations. It’s called propaganda. So while these photos are useful when recording catastrophic events such as natural disasters, just remember that these photographers can also be used for some pretty terrible purposes too.
Nyquist’s column from yesterday is (in view of the hot ongoing dispute between Japan and Russia over the northern territories Russia has occupied since their short war against Japan in the closing several months of WWII, when the issue was no longer in any doubt) suddenly more pertinent.
To wit, if Russia now continues the multiprong militarization and economic exploitation just underway on the disputed islands, even now in Japoan’s weakest moments, then we will know to read Nyquist even closer than usual.
O’meltdown.
Hope is dead. Hope to be exiled/banished from leftist lexicon.
There oughtta be a flaw; and, there were “Flaws”.
…-
“How Flaws Undid Obama’s Hope for High-Speed Rail in Florida”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/12/us/12rail.html
“the emergence of literally millions of unique data capturing points, especially in a place as dense with electronics as Japan, means that we have a far richer dataset on which to base history.”
Searching desperately for that elusive silver lining; the Tsunami has also reduced the MSM’s cries for the US Military to start slaughtering 3rd worlders in Libya.
My theory is that the MSM has been bleeding money for years. As a purveyor of death and destruction, they see combat operations as an excellent way to boost their revenue stream.
With live shots of ships being carried down city streets by huge waves and people falling into the water to drown, the MSM feels there is money to be made.
After all the much anticipated blood in the streets of Madison ( A boxum co-ed with blood flowing down her comely face after being bashed between her normally vacant eyes by a riot stick is always an ad producer) didn’t pan out.
The push for war in Libya isn’t gaining much traction either. So while Japs drowning isn’t that big a draw as far as misery, death and mayhem goes; it still beats Charlie’s antics or the daily Lindsey.
AS you might guess, I’m avoiding the telly for the next few days. Let those poor people cope in dignity.
The news and video this morning is not good, not good at all. This was a serious explosion with a significant shock wave as shown in the condensation cloud in the video. My earlier post was based on status reports from TEPCO as I left work at 6 pm Pacific time. My US colleagues and I spent much of Friday trying to interpret the public reports against our knowledge of boiling water reactors. Oddly, one of my earlier responsibilities involved writing press releases for the emergency team at a US plant.
The explosion showing on BBC this morning was a very large one. I HOPING it was from the hydrogen in the turbine building. The electrical generator uses this for efficient coiling of the electrical coils with the least possible losses to windage.
That non-nuclear hydrogen system is not considered “safety-related” and not up to the tightest nuclear piping codes and might have been damaged in the explosion. All eyes were on the reactor and ignored the non-nuclear side.
Of course, that’s speculation on my part as TEPCO’s site is down – it could have been from nuclear core damage side effects. I had guessed at least some earlier damage to the zirconium cladding which releases some gaseous fission products into the containment But with little reports of radioactivity, one can hope for the best. Those gases would have driven up the containment pressure.
I would point out that this is one of the earliest model commercial reactors, probably a BWR/3, designed circa 1963. We’re now building the fourth generation of progressively improved BWR design. In the US, we’ve done a lot of upgrades on the four operating BWR/3s in the US. The Japanese industry is organized, regulated, and operated differently from the US industry so can’t say which country’s versions are safer. One can reasonably expect the US taking a hard look at shutting down these, old, smaller plants. Replacing them with new, improved designs of larger capacity will be an option that should remain on the table although the Left and the hard-core anti-nuke crowd will press for measures far more drastic and damaging to industrial economies. Congressman Ed Markey was out of the gate immediately, grabbing camera time to call for such drastic measures.
As W has noted, even with a large-scale meltdown, thousands have perished due to natural causes from this earthquake compared to the (hopefully) few from the nuclear side-effects. Should Japan have been importing oil from the Middle East these last 40 years to make electricity that these reactors made instead?
Even with no immediate nuclear releases as officially reported, this probably killed a number of the plant staff and makes further recovery even more risky and difficult. My deepest respect to my colleagues who have stuck to their posts and have done their duty for better or worst.
I’ll post more interpretation of events later today.
Whitehall -
Thanks for your professional’s perspective.
Where are the four operating BWR/3s in the U.S. located?
The key thing is that we’ve forgotten how to issue the Kill command — now where was that danged manual? Can President Obama remember the command before before the system runs out memory and resources and locks up? Maybe it’s locked up already. – Wretchard
Obama has lost the moment, lost the initiative.
The basic problem with Obama’s approach to every situation is: “wait, watch, evaluate the political impact, spread any possible blame should things turn South” except for “if it furthers our key social agenda, seize the moment, use the crisis, and move ASAP”. He subordinates every responsibility of his office to his leftist political prerogatives.
A “wait and see” approach may work well in the academic arena, but life isn’t a controlled academic exercise. Events have their own tempo, and life moves without script.
Obama is behind life’s tempo in Afghanistan, Libya, half the Middle East, Europe, the American economy and national debt, American politics, and now the Far East. Obama fails to lead, misses the singular moment when American Presidential leadership could make a difference and then acts retroactively mostly in CYA mode. He ran his 90 or 120 day script post election and achieved much of his socialist agenda, but since then has been a clueless leader.
Even Obama’s supporters understand by now that “The One” was unprepared for the job they gave him, and has proven himself utterly unqualified to lead America or the free world. He’s a midget looking up at the mountain of world events. Worse, there is no one in his party with the poise, position, power, or credibility to walk into the White House, sit down with him, and explain that failure to lead IS leadership nonetheless, i.e. it leads to uncontrolled chaos.
At this point I see America and the free world in total “reactive” mode. We can’t “fight the ship”; we’re struggling to simply “right the ship”.
Folks, whether or not we were “in trouble” a month or six months ago, we’re sure as hell in trouble now.
Old Salt
It also illustrates the vulnerability of an online / Facebook revolution.
For almost 48 hours now, not a word from Libya.
Next time we look, the uprising will be a thing of the past.
It will be business as usual in Libya.
Whitehall, what do the reports that TEPCO is flooding the reactor with seawater tell you?
Japan has a debt. We are told that it is 200% of her GDP. They could harness their talent and repair the damage except for the debt. Who do they owe it to? What happens if Japan just says “No?” Is the debt held by China, by Yanks, by Yurps, by Arabs? America has a debt. Who do they owe it to? Europeans have a debt. Who do they owe it to? Is the value of the debt roughly equal to the wealth transferred to Arabs and Iranians after the Oil Embargo? Before the Yom Kippur War of 1973 the price of oil was about $3/bbl. That included a significant markup following nationalizations and expropriations after the 1967 Six Day War. If the Japanese choose to can they fight back? Can they force the Americans and Europeans to choose between Japan and Islam? If Japan implodes then China does too. Will the Chinese fall into a militant reaction, similar to Japan in the 1930s? If so then they will opt for hegemony and war, seeking to coerce Taiwan, Korea and Japan while pushing overland to the Persian Gulf? If China does not do so then they could back Japan in repudiating the debt and transferring it back to the oil exporters. Doing so would still result in war but it would be less catastrophic. Japan would still likely fall into China’s orbit as China replaces America in the role of guarantor of security. This could however lead to a long term American revival.
I see three possible outcomes here.
1. Surrender and decline with a series of small wars leading to the absorption of Europe by Islam and Japan by China. The US will eventually be carved up like a steak. The long term results will of course be constant wars and suffering across most of the globe. But the Green Dreams will be realized as the human population declines to maybe a fifth of what it now is.
2. Default leads to a fascist explosion in China and global war.
3. Repudiation leads to the implosion of Islam and the temporary domination of China followed by an American revival.
Widespread ramifications: nice MSM words.
From the birthland of the Red-Green watermelons.
Der government is a pressured vessel now.
Ich Bin Ein Chain Reaction.
…-
“Reaction to Japan Catastrophe”
“Accident Triggers Nuclear Power Debate in Germany”
“The nuclear accident in Japan has sparked a discussion about atomic power in Germany, where a massive anti-nuclear protest was already planned for Saturday. A senior Green Party politician has said that some German plants are vulnerable to the same kind of failure as happened at Fukushima 1.”
“Saturday’s nuclear accident in Japan looks likely to lend new impetutus to the ongoing debate about the safety of nuclear power in Germany.
The first reaction of German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen was to assure the public that Germany would not be at risk if there was a meltdown in the Fukushima 1 plant, the scene of Saturday’s explosion. “We assume that damage to our country can be ruled out,” Röttgen told reporters on Saturday, explaining that the distance between Japan and Germany, plus the weather conditions and wind direction in the crisis area, meant that Germany was not in danger.
Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle left a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Hungary early to return to Berlin for discussions about the situation in Japan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to hold a crisis meeting on Saturday evening with Westerwelle and Röttgen to discuss the consequences of the reactor accident. A government crisis task force has been set up in Berlin to address the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
The German government is under pressure. Members of the governing coalition parties — the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) — fear that the accident will reignite a long-running debate in Germany about extending the operating lives of the country’s nuclear plants. On Saturday, Environment Minister Röttgen, referring to the “current emergency situation” in Japan, criticized “political discussions” about the safety of nuclear power plants in Germany and the question of extending their operating lives. “I think this is totally out of place,” the minister said.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,750545,00.html
fc @ 12: I agree with the idea of inherently safe reactors – but how likely do you think it is that is going to be possible to get that message past all the “NUKES ARE EEEVIL!!!” BS from the watermelons?
My concern is how you get that idea past the supposedly professional leaders who are pro-nuke.
We fight this issue every day in software development, do you run a wild process with “cowboy coders” because you’re in a hurry, or do you run a process with checks and balances? Of course the problem is that once you bite the bullet and say you want the checks and balances, you can end up with analysis paralysis and spend all your time on high ceremony actions, far too much of a good thing. In virtually all cases, people go cowboy. This is semi-rational I suppose – if your process is going to be cheap and bad or expensive and bad – choose cheap! So you get medical radiation machines with no sanity checks and a bunch of dead patients. And my new flatscreen tv has bugs in its software, even though it’s a third-generation Sony.
With each failure (in whatever field), the cost/benefits of safety are recomputed. This too is rational, people stay with the old and familiar until they have enough evidence to move on. Well, meltdowns are evidence. People cut corners if they think they can get away with it. (cough) BP (cough). Our intuitions, and even our judgements, are not very good when it comes to big, rare events.
So I’m asking you, if we are about the embark on a large increase in nuke energy in the US, wouldn’t it be “nice” if they were inherently safe designs?
Anyhoo, the navy should be able to rig electricity to the system, right? Just needs some hours to do it? #24 Buddy
We have the people and equipment to so something like that, but it depends. I commanded a small reserve unit which could put full fuel bladders in place in an unimproved environment in six to twelve hours. We obviously have the portable generators. But how much power is required, how tough would it be to mate generator power to the power plant grid, what are the conditions on the ground (e.g. flooding, radiation, etc.)? We have to assume that the transportation network makes air supply the only option.
As far as directly mating, say ships power of the USS Reagan to land purposes, mating it’s grid to the civilian power grid would require and technology. The Reagan might be able to sail into Tokyo harbor and hook up, but as far as supplying aux power to that Nuclear power plant? Forgetaboutit.
Old Salt
watching the video linked from Drudge of the explosion (from a very safe distance), it looks to me like that’s water on the core, not that I’m any kind of expert but you see a burst of containment, then a shock wave, then a building cloud hundreds of feet high and wide, that’s a continuous expenditure of energy and I think there’s only one source of energy on that scale in the equation.
In which case the Japanese statement that the inner containment is unbreached, is either wishful thinking or moot, if it’s 5,000 degrees even with water spewing on it. The water won’t last and then goodbye core. May already have happened by now. Wouldn’t they have been able to scram the core, why would it still be so hot 24 hours later? Ugh.
#29 Whitehall
I second bogie wheel’s thanks. Now I am writing pre-caffeine, so this may not be as coherent as I want. First, roughly how much electrical power, at what voltage is needed to get those freaking pumps working? It is my understanding that the problem is the loss of electrical power to run the cooling pumps, and the backup power source is down also. I have heard that there is a tertiary battery backup, but only from one source.
If the aerial photos are accurate, at least some of the troubled reactors are right on the coast. Is that correct?
Back when California was last having rolling blackouts/brownouts [I expect them again soon] I was doodling around with an idea. At the time we had several SSN’s up in Washington queued awaiting their turn to have their nuclear power plants de-fueled and decommissioned.
I remembered the Navy publicity stunt back in the late 1950′s-early 1960′s when either the first nuclear powered destroyer BAINBRIDGE or the nuclear powered missile cruiser LONG BEACH tied up to a pier, ran power lines, and furnished electrical power to some city for a day or so. And there is the long term working example of USS STURGIS that was down in the Panama Canal Zone furnishing power. My idea was if there was a total collapse of the power grid in a major city [I used San Francisco as an example.] that these SSN’s with still working and fueled power plants could be brought to the port areas and electrical lines run enough to support mininal life safety functions in critical areas as a purely temporary measure. Those SSN’s and their reactors are of course long gone.
We have a limited number of sites in Japan, near the coast, that desperately need a relatively finite amount of electrical power to prevent a horrific disaster. We cannot get anything large in there, because of the shallowness of the coastal waters; but if we could get an SSN on the surface as close to shore as possible; could we jury rig a tap off of her electrical system with the appropriate transformers, etc. to match the Japanese power grid output, that is just enough to run those pumps for long enough for relief workers to get shore based power sources on site and operational? Yeah, it would put that sub at risk of grounding damage, of being present if things at the reactor(s) go TANGO UNIFORM, and of course of being caught up on a lee shore if there is another tsunami. But the consequences if one or more reactors goes south and we have a Chernobyl in the middle of Japan would seem to make the risk worth it.
I am not an engineer, and as I said, I am about 3 cups of coffee shy of full operating capacity. But do the power requirements to run the pumps match what could be produced through a breadboard rig from a LOS ANGELES class SSN [1 GE PWR S6G nuclear reactor, 2 turbines 35,000 hp (26 MW)] to do this? Or alternatively, if the power requirements are low enough, could the normal generating capacity on a conventional vessel be similarly rigged?
We know it is technically possible to use shipboard power sources to operate shore based equipment. But do the numbers work?
Subotai Bahadur
Either the Tokyo Electric Power Company didn’t have enough diesel fuel on hand or their plant did not protect what fuel they did have from wave action.
My experience with back-up generators is that they are consistently under-fueled. Their owner-operators simply assume that troubles will be minor and that an hour or four of fuel will do.
I can’t square the fact that the diesels could run for an hour on massively contaminated fuel.
It also strikes me as very odd that these plants were sited on the east coast of Japan where tsunamis are chronic — instead of the west coast where tsunamis are rare — and modest.
All over the world back-up facilities are going to be hardened against tsunamis, that’s for sure.
someone on tv said the seawater was strictly stopgap and meant the runoff of the good options already. Also a blurb across Fox that ”190 cases of radiation sickness are being treated”. I dunno whayt this means –where the terminology levels are –
Salt water means that the unit is being abandoned. It’s 40-years old. It’s the smallest of the six. It’s toast.
—–
BTW, Chernobyl did not ‘melt down’ — it burnt up! The Soviets used a Hanford style scheme. It’s based upon carbon bricks as the moderator. Think of Kingsford Charcoal piled around radiant uranium cooled only by water pipes.
Now take out the water.
You end up with a steam explosion and briquettes everywhere. Then it was off to the heavens with radionuclides.
Atomic decay made for the worlds peppiest fire starter.
there was a confusing report yesterday that “fourteen generators” had been moved to the nuke plant. And apparently that was not enough. Either these were fourteen Honda 1hp generators, or they could not match voltages or something, or forgot the fuel – I mean, how much power could even some pretty big water pumps really need (assuming the generators were actually x1000hp diesels). likely as not there was a non-electrical failure of some kind early on, it seems to me. maybe no (fresh) water to pump, hence the seawater report? seems to be going as fubar as the BP rig explosion and capping. this being Japan, there’s probably one guy in a suit standing there insisting on paperwork and fouling it all up.
Unless adjacent to an American military base, Japan’s grid is 50Hz pretty much everywhere.
The kind of high power pumps used for nuclear cooling run at medium voltages: 4160V would be typical for America.
That uncontaminated diesel fuel is not being flown in — come what may — makes me suspicious that the engines were run until their fuel filters were clogged — or that they’ve got air in the fuel lines. ( Ran out of fuel.)
Most portable power ( special 18-wheel rigs ) is only hours away in the USA.
There must be some reason why such units can’t get to the site.
The best equipment for the need is our hovercraft — if they can get there in time. We could simply hover in some fire engines and have them flood the system. Fire boats may be needed, too. Hose everything down.
Josh…
In answer to your query:
During normal operations heat is generated two ways — promptly by fission and belatedly through radioactive decay chains.
When the reactor was emergency stopped the prompt fissions stopped. The chain reaction being terminated within split seconds via the control rods.
But you still have radioactive decay from the daughter products. While this energy is not as huge as fission — it keeps coming and coming. That’s why — upon shutdown — reactors can’t even be started up again. The daughter chains include neutron poisons. Until these bleed off even pulling out the control rods will not establish a successful reboot. ( Naval nukes use higher enrichments to overcome this. )
Hence, it is the decaying daughter products that are cooking the reactor.
The CSM is quoting sources saying that Japanese officials are breathing a sigh of relief; that the inner containment vessel is apparently unbreached; that there was no large scale release of radiation and the amounts released were “tiny”.
They also claimed the 4 workers near the blast received only minor injuries, though 3 persons who were apparently nearby but not with the workers may have been exposed to some radiation. So there is still a fog of uncertainty around events. Atmospherically, the Japanese officials are sounding like they’ve turned the corner.
The French Greens, however, have called for an end to nuclear power. I suppose the Casino is now open for business. Countries which decide to avoid nuclear power lose one set of risks only to gain another. Every country can place its bet. Lack of power and the poverty therefrom is a risk in itself, as Haiti has shown. What could be more nuclear free? What could be worse?
If the Japanese pull this off, despite the age of the plant, its old design, the effect of a giant natural disaster and an imperfect human response they will have answered one question: that the Japanese can hack it. Other countries, with fewer engineering resources, but possibly better geology, will have a different risk profile. Nukes might continue to make perfect sense in Japan and China while never being a good option in say, Zimbabwe or Tonga.
But the crisis isn’t over yet. So we shall see what we shall see.
Thousands, maybe tens of thousands dead. An entire oil refinery burned to the ground. And our media can only get excited about some possible long-term problems from a damaged nuclear power plant that probably won’t result in a single death. To echo a commenter on this site, this truly is the “Age of Idiocy”.
Some Japanese bullet trains disappeared — as in vanished — during the earthquake/tsunami. Does this mean the end of Obama’s love affair with High Speed Trains? That would be just as sensible as claiming that damage to a nuclear plant in the same disaster means the end of nuclear power.
Meanwhile, wise heads are noting that insurance companies will have to start liquidating assets to pay claims in Japan — assets like Eurobonds and US Treasuries. And Japan will have to start raising $Billions to pay for reconstruction. The camel’s back of the global economy may finally have met its straw. But by all means let’s keep focusing on that nuclear power plant.
Unless some further catastrophe occurs at the nuclear plant, it sounds like the crisis is basically over….
Update from Tokyo Electric Power Company:
Unit 1 (shut down at 2:48PM on March 11th)
- Reactor is shut down and reactor water level is stable.
- Offsite power is available.
- Control rods are fully inserted (reactor is in subcritical status)
- Status of main steam isolation valve: closed
- Injection of water into the reactor had been done by the Reactor Core
Isolation Cooling System, but at 3:48AM, injection by Make-up Water
Condensate System begun
- At 6:08PM, we announced the increase in reactor containment vessel pressure,
assumed to be due to leakage of reactor coolant. However, we do not believe
there is leakage of reactor coolant in the containment vessel at this moment.
Note: the other 3 Units have been safely shut down and are now sub-critical.
More Update:
Indication from monitoring posts installed at the site boundary did not show
any difference from ordinary level.
No radiation impact to the external environment has been confirmed. We will
continue to monitor in detail the possibility of radioactive material being
discharged from exhaust stack or discharge canal.
There is no missing person within the power station.
We are presently checking on the site situation of each plant while keeping
the situation of aftershock and Tsunami in mind.
Fox just reported that Japan TV has just announced “a second reactor has just been put on red alert”
Wretchard, apropos to your basic theme, I have come here to this site explicitly to hear what our resident nuclear engineer, Whitehall has to say about the nuclear power plant explosion in Japan. It is the only place where I can be sure to get cogent, sober, expert analysis.
The daytime Fox newsbabe just had an “expert” from the Center for American Progress on nuclear energy to give his spin, er, 2 cents. Good grief. In what way is that man an expert? A poli sci or sociology major who has learned the anti nuke talking points well? That’s what passes for expertise on the left. I didn’t bother to listen to him.
I’d much rather hear from the scientists and engineers, like Whitehall, who frequent this blog. I’d be much more likely to get the straight story from them.
One of the ironic things is that China, companies in the US, and Toshiba of Japan have been flogging various of fail-safe mini-reactors. On one US design the steam turbine and the generator remain in place while the self contained nuclear core is removed and replaced from an underground station. The container is delivered by an 18 wheeler and removed from the site the same way.
The refurbishing of the core takes place off site. Toshiba has been flogging their design around Asia as a simple and safe solution to escape some of the oil demand shock. The US of course would be the last place to get anything like this do our watermelons lawfare against all forms of reliable power.
I suppose they might relent when they become part of the menu as long pig.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
Of course, developing energy resources for our entire world that will be fully renewable, clean and cheap is jolly well easy to do. The boys and girls at the BBC have a show on just How to Do It.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfCvQRe87Y&feature=related
PS, lefties really really think this way. Just the other day, one of my Facebook friends had a comment on how, if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to make things cheaply in America that will compete with products from China while at the same time being environmentally sound. I could just hear the happy music in the background. No real clue on what the issues really are. Just, lets make it all better, now.
La dee da dee dah dee dah. We can certainly solve all our problems quite easily if we just all get together and think really hard about it! Or at least, if we can put a man on the moon, someone else surely can think it up!!! Or maybe they have and THEY won’t tell us. Especially about that car that runs on water. Or compressed air. Or whatever. Must be the 33rd degree Masons who are keeping it all from us! Or the BIG OIL companies. Or big somebody. Well, we don’t want to think to hard on these things.
I also had some ditz on Facebook call me to task because I left a comment on a “Gas Strike” event calling it stupid. I was labelled a sad person, who was really the stupid one. The idea behind it was to not buy gas on March 10th. Ridiculous. I wrote back that I didn’t see how buying gas on March 9th or March 11th, and not March 10th was going to solve anything. I explained, in a pithy way, that the cause of the gas spike was commodities ramping up due to Quantitative Easing and unrest in the middle east. But no, reality must not impinge the happy bubble. Let’s all do something pointless and pat ourselves on the back for caring!
Warning: reality impingement straight ahead!
My sympathy to the Japanese, it’s terrible !
blert, thanks for the explanation, I’ve just never looked into this in so much detail, remembered only vaguely that even when scrammed the reactor takes a while to completely cool, but never really looked into the shape of that curve, apparently it still generates a lot of energy for many hours.
GIVEN which fact, one would want to design safety systems accordingly.
Well, there have been no later reports of giant glowing clouds or flying rocket-powered turtles, so maybe we’re on a cooldown cycle now … just how many days does it take, for the thing to reach room temperature?
(this is of course assuming that it’s not stuck in active mode after all, which I will stop worrying about only after the seawater is no longer needed)
“exacerbated by its xenophobia which has stifled immigration,”
Where are reports of Japanese women being dragged back into alleyways and raped by “youths”? Where is the mass looting? Where are gangs of youths deliberately setting more fires and throwing stones at firefighters and rescue workers? In other words, why are we not seeing the chaos and bloodshed expected when civil order breaks down in a “diverse” society?
Because Japan is a NATION, not just a country. Japan’s greatest strength is that Japan is populated by the JAPANESE and nothing but the JAPANESE. And Japan’s leaders don’t hate their country and their people the way that our elites hate us.
One of the most fascinating things about watching the Japanese tsunami and earthquake video is that you were looking in on Japan through the “fourth wall” at a time when danger dissolves all pretense. Nobody was putting on an act. The little shopgirls with their white gloves trying to hold back the falling shelves, the eerie lack of screaming, the old people being carried piggyback by the young — all that was all for real.
Ironically it reminded me of something. Then I had it. It was what you would have seen in London, during the Blitz. Maybe the tone would be different, but the it would be essentially the same. The historical accounts were filled with wonder at the sight of what the British people were when they had been sanded down to bare metal. Maybe what they once were. And I wondered whether that Britain, or indeed that Europe of 1940 had gone somewhere when history wasn’t looking, for it is not much in evidence now. Today’s well-bred man is an state of constant anxiety — at Global Warming, at overheard intolerances, at situations in which his Health and Safety might be compromised. The present metrosexual beau ideal is to be a frightened, atheistic child. That was all very well during the long Pax Americana, but what happens to that child now?
Watching the Japanese explains vividly why they beat Percival’s Army in Malaya in 2 weeks; and why when a second rate force held their armies for nearly six months in Luzon, how great an accomplishment that was; if they’ve fixed these reactors while reeling from what amounts to giant terrorist attack by mother nature, while the Russians, in their impulsive, heroic and curiously bipolar stupidity/brilliance failed in peacetime, then I guess we will come close to understanding how they lasted so long when Le May was destroying a city a day and even after two nukes were dropped in close succession.
These “sort-of-white-guys”, and their cultural cousins the Chinese and Koreans, are tough hombres. They are not without their defects and demons, but surely they indicate the level of the game that Europe must now rise to even keep its status as a first rank civilization.
This is going to be truly devastating for the Japanese nation. Many parts of rural Japan were already deep into entropic decay before this tsunami. Does anyone here read Spike Japan? It is a series of photo-journalistic essays chronicling the ennui afflicting Japan outside of the bustling city-centers. Fascinating, beautiful, and tragic.
Josh @ 54. On a cooldown cycle, eh? Nope, we’re on the heating up cycle now. The BP disaster was used as an excuse to shut down deep water drilling in the gulf, and keep it shut down despite a court order. I expect radioactive leftist fallout from this for years to come.
Iodine pills work by replacing all the iodine in your thyroid, preventing the uptake of radioactive iodine. What this society needs is a reality pill. One that fills our minds with enough truth so that they will resist the uptake of poisoned ideas.
Here are our options for generating electricity:
Coal
Nuclear
Hydroelectric
Natural gas
We are not going to run a modern industrial society on wind, solar and cow poop power. Not gonna happen. The numbers ain’t there.
So, if we don’t want nukes, if we as a society decide they are not worth the risk, then we have to deal with the very real risks and downside of the 3 other sources. Coal, I am sure, has killed many more people than nuclear power. And shortened the lives of countless others.
The problem with our insufferable media is they never, ever put the costs, risks and benefits of each idea next to the other. Nope, its all happy bubbly thoughts. We’ll somehow have clean renewable cheap energy that will supply the needs of a modern industrial society. No thinking involved. Whatsoever.
While Japan does have xenophobia it is not as monolithic as a lot of people think. They are undergoing something like a beginning tea party movement. Local leadership has started to rebel against the Tokyo University crowd. The current national leadership is despised by a majority of the voters. You have political groups spreading all the way from extreme nationalist to to communist trans nationalist. You still have the old classes around. They may have lost influence or go by a different nomenclature but in effect you still have people that are from the Nobel class, the Samurai Class and etc. If you are from the right family you can get fast tracked in the federal bureaucracy You get outside of the bigger cities and you’ll find people keeping lists of Etta family names to make sure none of their kids marry into them. There are arguments going on about what makes the Japanese Japanese right now, racial lineage vs. cultural and can immigrants be made cultural Japanese.
While he is seems to be a little to pro Japan at times I find he has a good knowledge of Japanese politics.
http://ampontan.wordpress.com/
Well Chernobyl was a disaster just waiting to happen.
I get a very different vibe off watching the Japanese disaster videos, and it’s a wonder that they’ve gone so completely from Shogun to a degree of technological, urban widgetry that seems to my sensibilities excessive, it seems like a parody of western culture, like those anime cartoons aren’t exaggerations after all.
They just throw themselves into stuff with such abandon.
But is that good?
–
Matt, that’s an interesting blog, I will look at that more later, thanks.
Meanwhile, back on the greens . . . even the MSM has noticed that “even as his administration and the U.S. military help Japan recover from a devastating earthquake, and as the world worries about Fukushima’s nuclear reactor, the president could not resist taking advantage of the 48-degree weather in the Washington, D.C., area. . . . These are never quick ‘work on your swing’ trips; usually the president plays 18 holes, as he did last week.”
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/03/just-warm-enough-for-golf-obama-back-on-the-course.html
He really does give “stay on course” a whole new dimension of meaning.
Understand that the people who REALLY knew what was going on were next to the explosion.
But let me offer an updated personal profession estimate but remember that I’ve been wrong before. Still, it’s my best guess and I’ve been paid to contemplate accidents similar to this for 35 years.
Flooding the containment with seawater is indeed a last straw move but an effective one for protecting the core and preventing releases. One of the sister plants in the US, Pilgrim in MA, definitely had this feature – I remember it well from the design drawings when I did some work there as a journeyman engineer doing internal flooding analyses. It struck me as a elegant solution.
All of Japan’s reactor that I know of are next to the ocean on either coast. This increases efficiency by a couple of percentage points and saves capital costs. However, the Japanese have underestimated natural forces before. Three years ago, several reactors on their West coast suffered physical damage and a fire due to an unanticipated undersea fault. Japan is a very seismic place with volcanoes to boot.
Flooding containment also implies that there is pumping power available. It could be engine-driven or electrical motor-driven pumps. Even domestic tap water pressure would work if the containment has already been vented. It should prevent both further core damage and smother the radioactive debris if any.
Similar US BWR/3s are Pilgrim near Plymouth, MA, Quad Cities 1 and 2 near Moline, IL, and I think one in upstate NY but I’m not sure on that one. They produce between 500 and 600 MW of electrical power.
As our perceptive commenters have noted, thousands have been washed out to see or crushed in their homes but the remaining drama is a nuclear reactor where one could expect only a handful of casualties.
As to the emergency electrical power, the plant has to have two and might have three large diesel-driven electrical emergency generators – maybe a gas turbine too. These are about the size of a very large locomotive or tugboat engine – maybe 5,000 hp or so each. Each engine is in separate fire-proof cells with a small “day tank” of fuel that can run the engine at full load for maybe an hour or so. There will be a large buried underground tank of fuel oil for each engine with redundant electrical pumps to refill the day tanks automatically. My guess, shared by others, is the proximate chain of events is the earthquake or tsunami failed that fuel oil transfer system.
Once the off-site and on-site AC power has completely failed, a sequence called “station blackout”, a turbine-driven pump can keep the reactor topped off at any pressure from 100 psi to the 1050 psi reactor safety valve lifting pressure. It uses reactor steam as motive power but needs battery-supplied DC for controls and valving. In the US, most plants are required to prove 8 hours of battery power for this system. This covers almost all loss of grid and station blackout scenarios and history in the US. One can operate the turbine manually but if the reactor steam is too radioactive, it would be dangerous duty.
But the land around you has been hit with a 9+ magnitude earthquake and a 23 foot tsunami. The substations are whacked, transmission lines are out, the roads are washed out, and everyone who works at the station but wasn’t on shift is either taking care of their family or a victim of the tsunami and is sleeping with the fish. That’s why the US military was asked to fly in portable generators so the staff could hook them into the plant’s electrical system. 4,160 volts would probably be the preferred voltage and many mil-spec generators have multi-tap transformers outputting at various voltages. Still, it won’t be an easy or quick job.
Now, get this. If you are one of the heroes who stood at your post, trying to save the plant but died trying, US Workman’s Compensation would be your surviving family’s reward. Last I checked, that’s $860 per month for 10 years to your wife and one child in California, just as if a box fell off a shelf and killed a stock clerk at Wal-Mart.
I once wrote my senator, Barbara Boxer, suggesting upgrading this might be a contribution to nuclear safety she could support but I was ignored.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/77172.html
Well it looks like the SDF and the US military are getting together on this. The US forces look like they may start operations Monday.
I kind of wonder how much video/recording the US forces are going to do?
“Now, get this. If you are one of the heroes who stood at your post, trying to save the plant but died trying, US Workman’s Compensation would be your surviving family’s reward.
Last I checked, that’s $860 per month for 10 years to your wife and one child in California, just as if a box fell off a shelf and killed a stock clerk at Wal-Mart.
I once wrote my senator, Barbara Boxer, suggesting upgrading this might be a contribution to nuclear safety she could support but I was ignored.”
—
BB figures Simpsons-level expertise is sufficient.
BB, like BP, figures a crisis can be beneficial to her cause.
(The Riff Raff begging and fighting over their govt allocated energy allotments)
I kept up with a guy I went to HS with by reading of his exploits in the local paper.
While employed as a policeman, he damaged his patrol car on his birthday.
Circumstances were such that he decided to drive it home, park it, and claim it was hit and damaged while parked.
Unfortunately for him, patrol car debris was found at the summit of a pass from SLO CA to the Salinas valley, causing him to lose his job.
When I next heard about him, he was employed in security at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant near San Luis Obispo.
Would a water tower with gravity feed have helped in this situation?
http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20110312D12JFF03.htm\
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Meltdown Caused Nuke Plant Explosion: Safety Body
TOKYO (Nikkei)–The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said Saturday afternoon the explosion at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant could only have been caused by a meltdown of the reactor core.
–
government flacks aka Tokyo Tom are still denying the obvious.
Sir Walter,
One of the latest designs, the AP1000, has such a tank on the roof above the reactor so that cooling water cab flow via gravity. Not too familiar with other design details.
Josh,
Maybe yes, maybe no. Remember that “meltdown” is a bit of a general term. Damage to the core ranges from cladding leaks to cladding exothermic oxygenation to geometry disturbance to uncoolable geometry, to partial melting to in-vessel melting to the end game – “core on the floor.” Hydrogen could be produced in any of these damage states.
The ceramic uranium oxide pellets are encased in a zirconium alloy tube. Zirconium is below titanium on the periodic table so has many useful properties, especially low neutron cross section. The worst property is that about a certain temperature (1800 deg F?) it will react with water to make zirconium oxide and free hydrogen. It also gives off a large amount of heat in the process, an exothermic reaction. Essentially, it can “burn” in water.
The explosion on the video I saw was definitely NOT a nuclear explosion driven by direct fission energy release. Chernobyl was a prompt critical fission reaction, a small nuclear explosion. Fukushima wasn’t like that and the physics wouldn’t support it.
At this point, I’m going to wait for further clarification from Japan. There has been a lot of confused and contradictory words floating about the last few days.
Imagine that you’re on shift when the earthquake strikes. The tsunami soon follows. Where is YOUR family? Are they safe or are they dead? You feel torn – stay at your post or try and run to help your wife and children?
I’ve been putting a lot of the most interesting earthquake/tsunami videos up on my personal blog (as opposed to BattleSwarm, which is my political blog). The best early shots were from helicopters and CCVCs, but a lot of the best ones showing up now are from people filming the tsunami coming into their own city in Japan.
w @ 67: my guess is that all containment of hydrogen and water both failed, and if the next step is zirconium tubing burning, then that’s likely too. I’d say the odds of “core on the floor” is about 51%, and the reason things aren’t worse is that it was shut down for some hours before the major failures occurred.
I guess it’s all “daughter” reactions, not primary fission, though the daughter reactions are fission too, aren’t they.
When it’s all over, we’ll see if they clean it up or just pour concrete over it.
I hope this won’t result in proliferation of more teenage mutant ninja turtles.
[ok, a bad joke, couldn't help it]
Daughter reactions are not fission.
Instead:
Beta decay ( emission of an energetic electron ) ( atomic number goes +1 )
Gamma ray ( emission of a photon most of which are extremely energetic )
Alpha decay ( emission of a helium nucleus — always powerful ) ( atomic number goes -2)
Some transitions have very short half-lives; other are very troublesome.
If the fools permitted temperatures to reach 2,500 Celsius then water itself breaks down into hydroxyl and free hydrogen to a meaningful degree. They are totally different animals and act as corrosives more along the lines of lye or sulfuric acid. It is a condition to be avoided at all costs.
For hydrogen to get out of the containment piping it must, of course, start leaking. The first pin hole would have jets of supersonic gas flying out. It’s the kind of thing you’d notice.
Since we’re not getting accurate information and the watermelons are always in hysterics who can you believe?
If the operators have insanely permitted the water level to get that low they have fulfilled the script of the China Syndrome — which BTW featured a failing boiling water reactor of GE design. ( The actual filming site was a pressurized water reactor by Westinghouse. )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D6neBzTnOQ&feature=player_embedded
Anonymous has posted.
—–
W what’s happening with PJ and your post inre NPR?
Okay, I just watched another NHK translation of a press conference given by a cabinet secretary. Apparently they released/vented pressure. The release products gave evidence of an exposed fuel rod(s). The pressure dropped enough so they were able to inject water, not sea water. They followed up with an injection of boric acid. I had trouble following the amount of radiation released, it has apparently been up, down, then up, and down again. They are trying to set up to find out just how many people may have been exposed and also set up centers to check to comfort the populace who may have been exposed.
Saw the pictures of the reactor building. The explosion took place on the top floor, the “operating deck.” This is actually not bad news. There is not much up there that’s needed for accident response except ducting but with the walls and roof off it doesn’t matter. It does invalidate my earlier wishful thinking that it was the electrical generator hydrogen.
There is the spent fuel pool but the fuel is under 33+ feet of water and one only needs 10 feet for shielding. Even without cooling, it will take many hours to start boiling and even that is a trivial event so long as you use a fire hose to keep the fuel covered with that 10 feet of water.
Wretchard, #56
I’ll post this again, in reply: a link to the fantastic (and inspiring) “Professional Mariner” article about the heroic response of New York City’s maritime fleet to the World Trade Center attacks. It’s a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of the American spirit, and is a good example to think on right now.
http://www.fireboat.org/press/prof_mariner_jan02_1.asp
For those who don’t know the remarkable story of how the fleet of NY tugboats and ferryboats spontaneously coordinated and organized a massive evacuation of 1 million New Yorkers from downtown and midtown (per the Coast Guard estimates) and then ran all the supplies, medical relief, and firefighting/rescue forces and supplies into the city, you really should read this article. It’s amazing what those men did. And the government didn’t take over until Day Four.
You see, the tunnels and bridges were all shut down, for the first time in our city’s history. All we had was our boats, and boy, did they come through for us.
In other words, we the people have still “got it.” No need to be quite so gloomy!
FWIW at Chernobyl the pile did melt through the floor. The men who went in knew that they were going to die. They stopped it before it ate through to where it would have reached the nearby river. It was a very near thing. If the molten radioactive mass had reached the water the results would have been a far more catastrophic explosion producing a vast radioactive vapor cloud far beyond what happened. These are things that I know.
Given the current climate in the US I am afraid that anti-nuclear groups will attempt to infiltrate and sabotage our plants. The penalty for any such attempt or conspiracy should be the death penalty, no option. If someone is caught in the act then LEOs should have orders to use deadly force preemptively, as they do if they encounter someone with a MANPADS.
Here, the nuclear experts say that that was a hydrogen explosion too
elby @50 wrote:
‘Wretchard, apropos to your basic theme, I have come here to this site explicitly to hear what our resident nuclear engineer, Whitehall has to say about the nuclear power plant explosion in Japan. It is the only place where I can be sure to get cogent, sober, expert analysis.’
Me too, and I live in Nagoya. Thank you, Wretchard, Whitehall, Blert, et all.
Matt, SpikeJapan is definitely disturbing to read, but yet I wonder: Given the human density of Japan (half the population of the USA squeezed into an area the size of California) isn’t there a good side to having less population? I know the social security and medical insurance system is unsustainable, but all the Japanese have savings.
Someone asked about who owns the Japanese government debt, and who is going to be calling for repayment. I’ve read that the debt is held mostly by the Japanese citizens, which would mean there isn’t a possible threat of hostile threat from another country, financial-wise. I don’t actually know any of this for a fact, it’s what I’ve heard spoken around me.
There are some emerging political parties that promote a message of fiscal responsibility similar to the Tea-Party in the USA, however they are recent and minute, and therefore considered almost irrelevant by most voters. The one party I saw which had the most impressive flyers (explaining the fiscal problems in a reasonable and honest manner) was also primarily a fringe religious group, which undermines their credibility and acceptance. Most parties use the current financial troubles to make complaints, offer promises, and get votes; then the roles simply switch and nothing really changes.
Best regards, Peter Warner (in Nagoya, far south and west of the earthquake damage).
Why call it “first-person ‘shooter view?’” There was no shooting involved, so it was just first-person.
Whitehall
I am neither a physicist nor an engineer, but this explanation seems to make sense in my slightly informed lay understanding, so that the worst that we are looking at is a local problem or problems and there will be no Chernobyl. The safety systems and defense in depth seem to be working. They may have to scrap one or more reactors instead of fixing them, but that is not a bad thing given the other possibilities.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
It is long, and full of diagrams [including of the specific type of reactor we are dealing with].
I note that on Moonbat sites where it is cross posted, their heads are exploding at the thought that there will not be a cosmic catastrophe and that the evil science and engineering may have worked.
Does this match up with reality as far as you can see?
Subotai Bahadur
67. Whitehall
Sir Walter,
“One of the latest designs, the AP1000, has such a tank on the roof above the reactor so that cooling water cab flow via gravity. Not too familiar with other design details.”
Whitehall, do you think the roof mounted water tower would have survived a 9.1 Richter scale rated earthquake?
That’s an awful lot of weight on high, and the tank, if not full, might even be less stable due to sloshing, unless baffled.
I’m no engineer but that sounds like a very expensive proposition. Perhaps a ground tank with sealed emergency pumping provision would be better.
…or gravity feed from a tank atop a concrete-reinforced mound nearby?
From 80. Subotai’s link above:
Now, where does that leave us?
The plant is safe now and will stay safe.
Japan is looking at an INES Level 4 Accident: Nuclear accident with local consequences. That is bad for the company that owns the plant, but not for anyone else.
Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine. If you were sitting on top of the plants’ chimney when they were venting, you should probably give up smoking to return to your former life expectancy.
The Cesium and Iodine isotopes were carried out to the sea and will never be seen again.
There was some limited damage to the first containment. That means that some amounts of radioactive Cesium and Iodine will also be released into the cooling water, but no Uranium or other nasty stuff (the Uranium oxide does not “dissolve” in the water).
There are facilities for treating the cooling water inside the third containment. The radioactive Cesium and Iodine will be removed there and eventually stored as radioactive waste in terminal storage.
The seawater used as cooling water will be activated to some degree…
—
I believe the most significant problem will be a prolonged power shortage. About half of Japan’s nuclear reactors will probably have to be inspected, reducing the nation’s power generating capacity by 15%. This will probably be covered by running gas power plants that are usually only used for peak loads to cover some of the base load as well. That will increase your electricity bill, as well as lead to potential power shortages during peak demand, in Japan.
If you want to stay informed, please forget the usual media outlets and consult the following websites:
subotai…
I’m with him.
I still figure the explosion was a steam explosion. Krakatoa was a steam explosion.
Hot hydrogen if vented from the system would burst into flame. If it didn’t it would shoot straight up into the ceiling and on out of the building. It’s not like propane which loves to gather in low spots and then go boom.
What heat source outside the containment could store sufficient energy to vaporize enough water to blow the concrete structure to pieces?
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(the article says the reason portable power could not be used was that the plugs did not fit!
I’d be interested to know why a workaround was not found.
…considering the consequences)
The situation at the power plants seems to have stabilized, brought under control.
The news now is focused on the government announcing rolling energy blackouts in the Eastern Japan area. This is from the American Embassy:
‘March 14, 2011 08:00
This warden message is being issued by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to U.S. citizens in Japan to provide prefectural office telephone numbers, information regarding rolling blackouts in Tokyo, and other information.
For information regarding tsunami warnings issued by the Japan Meteorological Agency, please see the JMA website: http://www.jma.go.jp/en or http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/
TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) announced that rolling blackouts in parts of Tokyo and the following 8 prefectures: Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa, Shizuoka and Yamanashi will commence Monday morning, March 14. The wards affected are Taito, Suginami, Shinagawa, Meguro, Ota, Setagaya, Toshima, Kita, Arakawa, Itabashi, Nerima, Adachi, and Katsushika. All of Tokyo’s 26 cities and Tama-gun are also affected. Neighboring areas may experience partial blackouts as well. TEPCO has a website in Japanese listing the schedule for blackouts: http://www.tepco.co.jp/index-j.html Information in English about the rolling blackouts is available at http://yokosonews.com/news/kanto-rolling-blackout-march-14/
The Japanese government is asking the public to reduce the amount of electric power usage as much as possible and not to go out unless necessary. TEPCO advises residents in the Kanto area (comprising the seven prefectures of Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Saitama, Tokyo, Chiba, and Kanagawa) to avoid traveling, to conserve electricity as much as possible even outside of the Kanto area, and to avoid driving because traffic signals may be out.
Due to the blackouts, trains and subways in Tokyo are cutting back on their service. Availability varies by train and subway lines. Reduced service will impact commuters during rush hour as well as throughout the day and night. Information is available on local TV and the website for each subway and train company. For more information in English about train schedules, please see http://yokosonews.com/news/kanto-rolling-blackout-march-14/.
Flights are departing with some delays from Narita and Haneda airports in the Tokyo area.’
In general, all of Japan is being asked to reduce industrial and residential use of electrical and gas energy.
The crises seems to have passed. Now we are finishing rescue, and beginning recovery and reconstruction.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
PS: You may have seen this, it’s very informative:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/14/japan-nuclear-updates/
I want you to see this photo:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/earthquake_hits_japan_iHVA5Lml9UhHbmCZUIlpcK?photo_num=19
If the link doesn’t work, it’s #19 in a series of 97 photos, showing over a hundred people getting water at a local school playground. Standing patiently in an S-shaped line, marked only by chalk laid across the flat dirt.
I’m proud of my neighbors, and humbled by their grace and character. I often look at the Bible’s teachings as the source of our founding values, yet without those teachings, the society here exhibits the attributes that I admire. Where does our better character come from?
Best regards, Peter Warner.
85. Doug
What heat source outside the containment could store sufficient energy to vaporize enough water to blow the concrete structure to pieces?
From what I’ve seen, the concrete is the bottom portion of the structure. The explosion in #1 blew off sheet metal at the top, not concrete. The steel girders underlying the sheet metal were mostly untouched.
The explosion in #3 looked stronger, though. I still don’t know what was and wasn’t damaged in that explosion.
87. rickl,
You’re right, thanks.
Graphics @ Subotai’s link, and “after” pic clearly show that to be the case.
My bet’s still on hydrogen, tho.