Update
But see also Fuel rod fire? maybe not. IAEA never actually reported the fuel rod fire, and I’ve seen several skeptics in the interval.
While I was asleep, there was a new and unhappy event at Fukushima Daiichi: stored spent fuel rods apparently caught fire. At least right now, this is considerably more exciting than the actual reactor problems. Here’s what the IAEA says:
As reported earlier, a 400 millisieverts (mSv) per hour radiation dose observed at Fukushima Daiichi occurred between units 3 and 4. This is a high dose-level value, but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time. The IAEA continues to confirm the evolution and value of this dose rate. It should be noted that because of this detected value, non-indispensible staff was evacuated from the plant, in line with the Emergency Response Plan, and that the population around the plant is already evacuated.
As they say, that’s in one nasty spot in the plant, and unlike most of the radiation panic, this really is a kind of nasty dose. In the US, we more commonly do dose rates in “rem” — Roentgen Equivalent Man — and one rem is roughly 1/100 Sievert. So this is 40 rem/hr, and that’s not a neighborhood you want to be in a long time. 50 rem is about where you start seeing observable radiation changes, 100 rem in a short time will actually make you sick.
That being said, the dose rate at the gate they report is this:
At 00:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 11.9 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed. Six hours later, at 06:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 0.6 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed.
That’s 1.2 rem/hr, going down to 0.06 rem/hr.
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.
Proves the people that instruct storing spent nuclear fuel rods at the reactor site are as smart as those forcing making sub prime mortgages to anyone who can sign an X.
I guess they never heard of what France does with “spent fuel” … They recycle it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokkasho_Reprocessing_Plant
Bless the people who stay behind and do dangerous jobs. The people working on the nuclear plants right now have my highest admiration.
My sympathies are with the brave American servicemen who, it is reported, will be asked to fly helicopters into that hell-hole.
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/03/14/another-good-source-on-the-fukushima-accidents/#comment-13483
My severest condemnation goes to those TECO corporate executives whose dereliction of duty, willful ignorance, panglossian press releases, hysterical incapacity to lead, and long history of outright corruption and fraud, have made a major disaster infinitely worse.
D*mn them … d*mn them all.
Who are you, and why should we listen to your panicked voice?
Your condemnation can be justly applied to all US corporate manufacturing management as well as TECO even in the face of the exaggerations by some US news sources.
Shareholders generally condone the accepted practice of placing energy production and distribution in higher priority than risk in all manufacturing facilities that can lose total production from the effect of failure of a single production stage and cause massive restart headaches. Down time is measured in $1000 / sec and wide supported by the “investing class” that only sweats while jogging and wrongly consider their parasite income activity to be work.
Naturally, consumers are seldom privileged to be made aware of such events even if their lights temporarily fail. Single energy production facility failure is more easily concealed due to the the vast common grid of distribution.
Now turn your concern to the same FDA information control concerning public health here where patented pharmaceutical products are protected from being recalled for five years after being pushed into public consumption by trusted doctors and soon proven to increase statistical mortality beyond all denial. Don’t be surprised if you discover mass deception dating back fifty years when data was recovered by pharmaceutical reps from records kept on both German and Japanese human experimentation during WW II. Astute observation may even reveal the connection between legislatively protected GMO food consumption, health care forced drugs for symptom relief, uneducated consumers, and warped minds among elected representation. with neurosis having been reclassified as a lesser degree of psychosis. Information necessary for rational conclusions is out there on the web. Try climbing out of the box to GET IT.
More not so carefully disguised Marxism.
Pan·gloss·i·an (pn-gls-n, -glôs-, png-)
adj.
Blindly or naively optimistic.
——————————————————————————–
[After Pangloss, an optimist in Candide, a satire by Voltaire.]
I had to look it up, figured i’d save others the trouble….
Charlie’s not behaving at all odd. Unless you count acting like a grown-up odd…
Oh. OK.
TO: Rob Crawford
RE: Soooo…..
….does deleting comments that you disagree with behaving ‘grown up’?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth....please....]
It just shows that you’ve been banned again.
Proof positive of my assessment of your behavior…..
In your own terms:
“Can you say psychological deflection? Sure you can!”
“But don’t worry. Charlie tells US everything is ‘juz fine’.”
Where do you get that from “So let’s go ahead and make this clear: no, it’s still not Chernobyl. But no, it’s not nothing.”?
Don’t interrupt the man while he’s running in circles and screaming.
As a scientist (but not a physicist) I noticed the problem with the nuclear “experts” right away. It’s a dead-giveaway when none of them are associated with a university or have a PhD after their names, except the “policy studies” people, and Lord knows what kind of PhD they have- not the hard sciences I presume or they’d say so. It’s a sad commentary on the state of mainstream journalism when CNN quotes an anti-nuclear activist whose training is in journalism as the main source for their lead article on Sunday, when the Daily Beast managed to snag an interview with a physicist from MIT.
BTW, the guy from MIT was pretty much in agreement with you, Mr. Martin.
To be fair, I’m skeptical that there were many real nuclear experts that were ringing up the TV and newspaper offices to offer learned, soothing perspective, particularly with the apparent lack of readily-available truth.
This is a perfect opportunity for the so-called “experts” of the anti-nuke crowd to incite pandemonium.
Check the last section of my piece on the PJM front page today: a very large proportion of the “experts” turn out to be associated with hard-core antinuclear groups like “Beyond Nuclear” and Greenpease, and are being heavily flogged by their PR firms.
Since officials are thinking of asking for helicopter support that implies that some time in the future they are concerned that the water in the spent fuel storge POOL will evaporate enough to expose stored fuel assemblies and that normal procedures to refill or maintain the water level will not be operating. A not unreasonable contingency consideration.
Your interpretation of the statement implies that there is active (not spent) reactor fuel exposed to air. If that were the case and those same officials were wanting it cooled they’d would not be saying “they may seek” they would be asking for it RIGHT NOW.
Its really a bad job on the media’s part. There is no shortage of non experts willing to go on air and tell you how bad it is. The people who do know, don’t want to go on air and say its not that bad –because its not over yet. So meanwhile, the media scares the crap out of people who don’t know any better. Still, its not great for those that live in the area. There is absolutely no reason for the media to allow on air specualtion about “clouds” coming over the pacific ocean. Just scaring stupid and old people. Meanwhile, we miss the forest (whole tsunami) for the trees (nuke plants) because the later comes with easy video including exposions.
Get used to it Joe. Public reaction to their lies and half truth is also measured for adjustment and further application in public control in either natural, rigged, or combination disasters. Dont look now but they’re after your second amendment again.
I read with interest the article about the nuclear problem caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It is nice to know both sides of the story. It gives you more of a realistic outline with which to form an opinion. So many times we hear just one side of the story. But even at that we are not sure what is going to be the actual outcome of the catastrophe. I thank you for your input and will continue to use your line of information as a reference guide to balancing my thought process. Thanks again Ren Whitney
Funny, the news here tonight is saying radiation from Japan could reach the U.S. tomorrow.
Of course, this is the lamestream media news….
Didn’t they upgrade the incident to a level 6 today? I don’t expect many adverse effects as the rods will eventually cool even if they meltdown completely. The TMI meltdown reportedly ate through less than a inch of the thick bottom of the containment, never coming close to a real breach.
Is this radiation alfa or gamma source?
Mostly beta and gamma.
Well, “A physicist” undoubtedly qualifies for a position with the NYT or Obama Administration for that little bit of hyperbole. I suppose being “a physicist” rather than “A physicist” is relative (pun intended).
However, Mr. Martin is quite correct by stating, “no, it’s still not Chernobyl. But no, it’s not nothing”. The question is what, exactly is happening with the fission cycle and fissile material. From what I’ve seen and read on the four reactors that are currently in crisis I see no “meltdown” in process. There are, to be sure, several signs that meltdown status could be reached but that would require breaching the main reactor containment of at least one of the four crisis reactors.
Compare and contrast the current situation with TMI and Chernobyl.
TMI: NO reactor breach, minimal radiation leakage, ZERO killed.
Chernobyl: Reactor breached, massive radiation leakage, several killed (mostly in explosions but some from radiation immediately and later as doses led to death)
Obviously, FD currently resides somewhere in the middle with potentials for either end. It all depends upon future events.
Those peddling scare tactics about this situation without an understanding of the physics involved disgust me…but I’m just “a physicist”, not “A physicist”.
(Mr. Martin, could “A physicist” be Jimmy Carter?)
Nah. Too sensible.
I suppose it was a bit of a stretch.
Thanks to the people that are posting logical assesments of this situation.
I knew the anti-nuke people would jump all over this 2 minutes after this happened and that mainstream media would spin up the fear. It takes a catastrophe of epic proportion to push the Sheen’s, Lohan’s and Spears to page 2. Disgustingly sad.
I am trying to educate myself on this subject as I live in close proximity,(surrounded), to several nuke plants. I have a few questions that I hope will be answered responsibly and without malice. Good natured jabs are cool.
Approx. distances to nuke plants where I live in NJ. 30 miles to Oyster Creek, 60 miles to Salem, Limerick 40 miles, 150 to Three Mile Island.
Worst case casulties for Salem is 200k+, Oyster Creek 80k, Limerick 718K, TMI 118K. I don’t know how worst case is calculated or what the cause is. IE: Oyster creek plant explodes, 80K dead instantly or 80k die over 10 years.
I realize there are many scenarios that could potentially happen with any of these plants that could not possibly be discussed or answered in this forum due to space constraints.
Q’s:
1) Chernobyl – Was this reactor basically a moonshine still? GE reactors seem to be basically chambers within chambers. Was Chernobyl just a single wall vessel or was it’s top open to the atmosphere?
2) How is radiation spread? If a fuel rod in a nuke plant explodes and a piece of that rod lands in my soup, the soup is now radio active, I take the rod out, is my soup still radio active? Does dust, (from a nuke explosion) become radio active just from exposure to the core or does a particle of the rod have to be attached to that particle of dust?
3) What exactly is fallout?
4) How do I protect my family from fallout? Don’t say duct tape my windows and doors shut.
My idea is to have basic equipment,(if such a thing for this situation), to be able to leave the region without inhaling or ingesting anything radioactive whilst exiting.
5) When will the inventor of the internet and global warming seer get back up on his soap box?
“Trust in the Lord but tie up your camel!”
Jack,
The answer to your ultimate question of what are the risks is, unfortunately, “it depends”. So, plan for the worst and pray for the best.
Worst case scenario for you: Oyster Creek goes “BOOM”. Reactor completely blows all containment features and experiences true meltdown. Winds take whatever particulate matter from the site directly to your home town and blanket the nearby region. The explosion also carries ‘large’ pieces of nuclear fuel into your region and, in fact, drops a chunk into your soup which you are currently eating.
Most likely you are dead rather shortly from receiving a lethal dose of radiation via the radioactive chunk in your soup and breathing the radioactive particulate fallout thanks to the winds. (does that count as a ‘good-natured jab’?
)
Answers to questions (over-simplified in many cases and maybe not even cogent…sorry):
3) (via Merriam-Webster) Fallout – the often radioactive particles stirred up by or resulting from a nuclear explosion and descending through the atmosphere; also : other polluting particles (as volcanic ash) descending likewise
1) Chernobyl: yes, your analogy is actually quite nice. No, it was not open to the atmosphere…until it went boom. I don’t remember its particular structure/construction and am too lazy to go look it up right now. It was simply very substandard in almost every way conceivable from materials, to personnel, to safety precautions, to…etc.
2) ‘Radiation’ due to radioactive sources (particles) comes from unstable substances. Uranium 238 is the classic example though a bit imprecise. What happens is the radioactive substance ‘decays’ into a stable substance by ‘shedding’ various ‘parts’…generally from the nucleus of an element/isotope such as U238. (A bit of an aside: You might recall the term “half-life”…which basically means the time it takes for a radioactive substance to decay 1/2 of its original mass into a non-radioactive substance.)
4) Respirators, haz-mat suits, goggles, and getting ‘out of the path’ as quickly as possible. Believe it or not, duct-taping windows is actually functional…just don’t open the door, right? Or forget to stop up all vents and HVAC entries/exits to your house…etc.
5) He hasn’t? I am SHOCKED…and OUTRAGED!!! Where oh where could the Goreacle be!?!? … Oh, right…houseboat/yacht re-counting his millions.
Hope that answers some things. Anyone else, feel free to jump in and add/correct/de-simplify as you wish.
Oh boy, you had no idea how accurate your comparison is of the RBMK reactor design at Chernobyl to a moonshine stil is. I’m going to use it in the future.
Basically it’s a design that came out of their nuclear weapons program for breeding moonshine, err plutonium, which can’t stay in a reactor for very long without generating too much in the way of undesirable plutonium isotopes.
That plus the fact that early on the Soviets could make good steel pipe but a big reactor pressure vessel was beyond their capabilities. So they bulked out this approach to make a lot of thermal and therefore electrical energy (all the while retaining the ability to breed weapons grade plutonium) and it included a bunch of terrible design decisions, the “positive void coefficient” being the big one: In it, burnable graphite is the moderator and water is a neutron poison, so if the reactor gets too hot voids of water vapor can form, which don’t stop as many neutrons, allowing more atoms to be split, increasing the heat … I suspect you can see where this is going….
Edward Teller made sure no such reactors could be licensed in the US, which is why we won’t accept any CANDU reactors from up north (a much safer design but it still needs active control to handle that issue).
To answer questions 2-4, I strongly suggest you look at this book, which is all about expedient nuclear war survival and will fill you in on everything you want and need to know: Nuclear War Survival Skills. The on-line copies you can get off of that Wikipedia article will give you the basic education, but eventually you’ll want to get the paper book to get the KFM design to scale and because if you need it desperately you’re not likely to have access to much electrical power.
On final note: if Oyster Creek went BOOM you’d be in a bad way, but before you worry too much about that someone has to come up with a plausible mechanism to bring that about; pretty much the only practical thing is a nuclear warhead….
like the Toyota gas pedal problem’s the media just likes to report half truths because they sell papers and make people watch TV. While Im not sure I still have all the information on this accident I’m sure there well be things that will be changed after all the smoke clears an a study of what could have been done differantly for this area of the world that may experiance another earthquake
To add to these comments, yesterday I read on the CBC web page http://www.cbc.ca that “there was the concern that the fuel stored in the spent fuel bay became critical again”. This is telling you the pile of rubbish the media is throwing at us without any sort of restrain. How on earth depleted fuel on U235 and without a neutron source can become critical is a mistery to me, but I am quite sure the journalists have the answer…
Giving the benefit of a doubt, they may have meant “critical” as in acute or serious, rather than “going critical” in a nuclear sense. In any case, the use of the term is unfortunate.
Actually, there is a neutron source- the fuel itself undergoes small amounts of spontaneous fission, which does produce neutrons. But you’re right about the cross section being too low for the reaction to go critical.
Surprisingly I’ve read that there’s some theoretical basis to this speculation, for Daiichi Unit 4. In what strikes me as something less than a best practice, the operators of the plant were unloading all the fuel in Units 4-6 (I think it was to get better access below) and had finished this process at Unit 4.
Whereas what I’ve read is that normally, at least for refueling, only 1/3 of the rods are swapped in a single cycle and in that case the “Spent Fuel Pool” is just that.
Here in the SFBay area the radio said this am that the US Surgeon General has recommended people in CA start taking potassium iodine as a precaution. Is this dangerous, stupid or both?
Suggesting you start taking it is both, but from what I Googled she just replied to a question that having some is a good idea. Which it true.
“The greatest irony of the information age is the credibility it gives to uninformed opinion.” Quoted from Michael Crighton’s book Airframe
“When in danger, fear or doubt, run in circles scream and shout.” R.A. Heinlien
First off, remember that no one received severe radiation exposure from 3 Mile Island. Secondly, if one looks at the safety record of nuclear power generation, one finds it to be much safer than the use of, and refining of, fossil fuels. Many more people will die from exposure, fies and similar accidents in refineries, cracking plants and distribution networks of petrochemicals in a single year than will die from decades of operation of the types of reactors being used in Japan – even with events like the current situation.
I am not an expert in nuclear energy, but I do come from an engineering background. Sure this is serious, but it is not critical at this point. The media responses to this situation are tantamount to declaring the removal of a splinter by a doctor as major, life-threatening open heart surgery.
Could someone please explain why everyone only wants to talk about the short term effects of this disaster, what about the long-term economic damage to the Chernobyl/Priyat area? They keep quoting how many deaths were involved in the 1986 accident. I think that is a extremely short-term view. Like in all serious accidents, people die. But not all serious accidents involve the permanent social and economic destruction, a nuclear accident can create. I’m conflicted about this. I want to feel the love for nuclear power, but Im losing that loving feeling.
This kind of stuff is why I quit watching the news on any sort of consistent basis after 9/11/2001… *rolls eyes*
I hate to change the subject but back to the “Fuel Rod Fire”.
Below are some of the discussions I’ve been reading.
There’s more but after reading through these, the question I ask myself is “what happens if we have a series or combination of steam and hydrogen explosions with some 700 plus fuel rods in the spent fuel pools sitting on top of these 3 or 4 reactors, at various stages of decomposition and exposure?”. It seems we need to estimate how much of this material is subject to airborne debris that will carry into the prevailing winds, how far, how high, etc.. and try to estimate the impact. Hopefully it won’t come to this and the nuclear material in the reactors will be contained and not add to the problem and hopefully none of the fuel pools will disintegrate or erupt in steam/hydrogen/whatever explosions. But if I were living downstream of this potential flotsam I might find these estimates useful for planning purposes. I would like to hear what others think.
Regards, George
Used Nuclear Fuel Storage at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
http://resources.nei.org/documents/japan/Used_Fuel_Pools_Key_Facts_March_16_Update.pdf
PEAK CLADDING TEMPERATURE IN A SPENT FUEL STORAGE OR TRANSPORTATION CASK
http://www.dis.anl.gov/publications/articles/PCT-PATRAM07.pdf
My Attempts To Understand Spent Fuel
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/16/956759/-My-Attempts-To-Understand-Spent-Fuel
Here is a refreshing article in my local paper.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7483614.html
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