Japan: Earthquake, Tsunami + Nuclear Disasters

[PersianPaladin]

That's rather alarming. Are there any other sources of the news? If this a one off report then it may be just being overplayed but if the concerns are being expressed elsewhere and publicly then its a lot more worrying.

It seems a lot of the mainstream media is burying the bad news.

[BornFromTheVoid]

http://www.scienceda...20402162700.htm

An international research team is reporting the results of a research cruise they organized to study the amount, spread, and impacts of radiation released into the ocean from the tsunami-crippled reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The group of 17 researchers and technicians from eight institutions spent 15 days at sea in June 2011 studying ocean currents, and sampling water and marine organisms up to the edge of the exclusion zone around the reactors...

...the team found that the concentration of several key radioactive substances, or radionuclides, were elevated but varied widely across the study area, reflecting the complex nature of the marine environment. In addition, although levels of radioactivity in marine life sampled during the cruise were well below levels of concern for humans and the organisms themselves, the researchers leave open the question of whether radioactive materials are accumulating on the seafloor sediments and, if so, whether these might pose a long-term threat to the marine ecosystem

[PersianPaladin]

The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor building has a total of 1,535 fuel rods, or 460 tons of nuclear fuel, in it. The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building's third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk.

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant's No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be "the weakest link" in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant's other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.

Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan's advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style. An inspection of the pool floor, however, led TEPCO to conclude that the pool was strong enough without additional concrete. The plans were scrapped, and antiseismic reinforcements were made to the reactor building instead.

"Because sea water was being pumped into the reactor, the soundness of the structure (concrete corrosion and deterioration) was questionable. There also were doubts about the calculations made on earthquake resistance as well," said one government source familiar with what took place at the time. "It's been suggested that the building would be reinforced, and spent fuel rods would be removed from the pool under those conditions. But fuel rod removal will take three years. Will the structure remain standing for that long? Burying the reactor in a concrete grave is like building a dam, and therefore expensive. I think that it was because TEPCO's general shareholders' meeting was coming up (in June 2011) that the company tried to keep expenses low."

http://mdn.mainichi....0na002000c.html

Edited April 4, 2012 by PersianPaladin

[Methuselah]

It seems a lot of the mainstream media is burying the bad news.

So it's a conspiracy?

[PersianPaladin]

http://www.scienceda...20402162700.htm

"The radioactivity of the fish we caught and analyzed would not pose problems for human consumption," said Fisher.

Sorry, but that does not re-assure me.

[PersianPaladin]

The legal limit is 500 becquerels/kg. (used to be 100 before they changed it after Fukushima).

18,700 Bq/Kg of cesium was measured from trout caught in Niidagawa of Iidate mura, Fukushima prefectural government reported on 3/28/2012. This is the highest reading among all the fish caught from sea and river.

The former highest reading was 14,400 Bq/kg from young lancefish, caught offshore of Iwaki shi last April.

They fished this for a test before lifting the restriction of fishing trout.

Additionally, On 3/23/2012, Ibaraki prefectural government reported they measured cesium from77 of 87 samples (88%) of fish caught from 3/8~3/21 offshore Ibaraki. (0.7~218 Bq/Kg)

With this test, bass (218 Bq/Kg) and blowfish (111 Bq/Kg) were newly added to the list.

http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/03/18700-bqkg-from-fish-in-iidate-mura/#.T3Oe1isM_CQ.facebook

[BornFromTheVoid]

"The radioactivity of the fish we caught and analyzed would not pose problems for human consumption," said Fisher.

Sorry, but that does not re-assure me.

Directly after which it says

"It does not mean all marine organisms caught in the region are perfectly safe to eat. That's still an open question. There are still likely to be hot spots in sediments close to shore and closer to the power plant that may have resulted in very contaminated species in those areas. Further study and appropriate monitoring will help clarify this issue."

[PersianPaladin]

Directly after which it says

"It does not mean all marine organisms caught in the region are perfectly safe to eat. That's still an open question. There are still likely to be hot spots in sediments close to shore and closer to the power plant that may have resulted in very contaminated species in those areas. Further study and appropriate monitoring will help clarify this issue."

Indeed. There are. And the radiation is ongoing.

Edited April 4, 2012 by PersianPaladin

[PersianPaladin]

Consider that it only takes a few days for tuna fish to swim from that location and reach the west coast of America.

[Osbourne One-Nil]

Is there any key to go along with that map PP? Yellow could merely show double the background radiation, and double of nothing much is still nothing much.....see what I mean? Looks very impressive and scary but without a key, it's pretty meaningless.

[Polar Maritime]

THIS IS NOT A REPRESENTATION OF THE RADIOACTIVE PLUME CONCENTRATION.

We use a Lagrangian particles dispersal method to track where free floating material (fish larvae, algae, phytoplankton, zooplankton...) present in the sea water near the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station plant could have gone since the earthquake on March 11th. THIS IS NOT A REPRESENTATION OF THE RADIOACTIVE PLUME CONCENTRATION. Since we do not know exactly how much contaminated water and at what concentration was released into the ocean, it is impossible to estimate the extent and dilution of the plume. However, field monitoring by TEPCO showed concentration of radioactive Iodine and Cesium higher than the legal limit during the next two months following the event (with a peak at more than 100 Bq/cm3 early April 2011 for I-131 as shown by the following picture).

http://www.asrltd.com/japan/plume.php

[PersianPaladin]

Is there any key to go along with that map PP? Yellow could merely show double the background radiation, and double of nothing much is still nothing much.....see what I mean? Looks very impressive and scary but without a key, it's pretty meaningless.

http://www.asrltd.com/japan/plume.php

[PersianPaladin]

What would you do if you were Japan and there was enough radiation being released to kill off 20 - 50 million people on the Northern Half of your main island within a few year's time. Consider the fact that you have 3 reactors completely out of control in full on melt down, you can't entomb it like Chernobyl because the stuff is down in the ground causing water down there to be split into hydrogen and oxygen by the ongoing fission reaction of those rods which if encased will cause huge hydrogen explosions. You can't send workers in to do anything because there is so much interference from radiation with the electromagnetic fields of all electronic equipment that it can't function and beside that workers are getting lifetime doses of radiation in between 2 weeks to 2 days dependent upon where exactly in the plant you send them. You're frantically building a "back up" Tokyo on the West coast to move your most vital industry and business too but it's only going to house maybe 50 - 100K of your key personnel. You've sent an advanced team over to India trying to buy up property to build a gated private city there for another 100K of your elites to escape the death and destruction.

Now........... put yourself in the shoes of one of the Japanese elites and tell me what you would do. Think about the logistics of the thing before you answer.

What are they doing about it now?

Apparently they've chosen to accelerate the die off by burning radioactive material in 23 conventional garbage incinerators around the country and carting all the radioactive debris left over and planting it all around the populated areas instead of dragging it all to the exclusion zone in Fukushima.

Ironically, the mayor of one of the cities that is going to be using some sort of machine to handle burning up radioactive concrete subccumbed to one of those "mysterious sudden deaths" they keep reporting in the news over there the day after he was present for the demonstration that supposedly showed that the radiations levels were safe. My guess is just another cesium induced cardiac failure. Japan won't die from cancer. It will die from cardiac death in my opinion and it won't be in 10, 20 or 30 years. It's happening now.

Edited April 4, 2012 by PersianPaladin

[BornFromTheVoid]

What would you do if you were Japan and there was enough radiation being released to kill off 20 - 50 million people on the Northern Half of your main island within a few year's time. Consider the fact that you have 3 reactors completely out of control in full on melt down, you can't entomb it like Chernobyl because the stuff is down in the ground causing water down there to be split into hydrogen and oxygen by the ongoing fission reaction of those rods which if encased will cause huge hydrogen explosions...

... Japan won't die from cancer. It will die from cardiac death in my opinion and it won't be in 10, 20 or 30 years. It's happening now.

Can you post a few sources for that stuff PP?

Edited April 4, 2012 by BornFromTheVoid

[PersianPaladin]

http://fukushima-dia...ushima+Diary%29

http://fukushima-dia...tEN5r0.facebook

http://www.nytimes.c...ner=rss&emc=rss

http://enenews.com/k...rete-partitions

http://enenews.com/p...re-seriously-wo

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-technology/japans-nuclear-meltdown/the-fate-of-japan-hangs-in-the-balance/

http-~~-//vimeo.com/38373787

Edited April 4, 2012 by PersianPaladin

[PersianPaladin]

They are pumping in nitrogen and have been for months, but how do you get nitrogen gas down 20+ meters into the ground and these hot rods sink further and further down in the first place? You think that there is just like an open pit in the two reactors that the containment vessels have been breached in OR do you think that as they sink, melting into the earth that they sort of get covered as they go down? In my humble opinion, it's more like dropping something into mud and now there's somewhat of a barrier between them and the nitrogen being pumped in. That's just my guess. We do however see on the live cams quite often vapor coming up from the ground that appears to be hydrogen venting but we don't know. We can only speculate what it is but when you can see it, it's substantial especially when the weather is cold.

Now consider this............ the boiling point of nitrogen is 195.79 °C and there have been reports of the temp in reactor #2 in excess of 272°C.

http://www.globalres...xt=va&aid=29273

If you encapsulate this mess in a closed system and try to pump stuff into it where most of it never even reaches the rods on the first place and they you get nitrogen boiling........ well I just don't think it sounds like a very workable situation.

I don't know but to me it just seems that if you could have done it, it would have been done. Chernobyl was entombed completely within 9 months at the cost of thousands of lives. They didn't waste any damn time moving on that. To me the fact that this plant still looks worse than the Beirut Barracks 1983 says that they don't know WTF to do and why is it that the nuclear agencies and engineers from all over the world are not absolutely crawling all over Japan in an attempt to do something? Why does it in the media appear that there's relatively NOTHING going on there?

We do know one thing, they're running out of disposable workers to go in there with paper suits and work for $50/hr for the duration of their viability of 2 weeks to a couple of days because the media has reported that the government has been toying around with the idea of CONSCRIPTION to provide workers when they've used up all the willing poor.

Edited April 4, 2012 by PersianPaladin

[yamkin]

FUKUSHIMA - RADIATION IS EXTREMELY HIGH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9J6FuclMEU&feature

[weatherobsuk]

Nuke it. Better to have a nuke going off and vapourising the rods/reactor within the plant than to have these acting like a slow-burner and releasing billions of tonnes of radioactive material into the atmosphere. With a nuke the problem is instantly solved in a nanosecond. Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived, a small price to pay in order to save the entire country from ruin and disease.

[PersianPaladin]

Nuke it. Better to have a nuke going off and vapourising the rods/reactor within the plant than to have these acting like a slow-burner and releasing billions of tonnes of radioactive material into the atmosphere. With a nuke the problem is instantly solved in a nanosecond. Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived, a small price to pay in order to save the entire country from ruin and disease.

Won't that just do the same thing?

[weatherobsuk]

The rods can hold unimaginable amounts of stored energy within them, which like with a nuclear weapon relies upon a chain reaction (aka fusing) for the energy to be released. The difference however is that this fusing doesn't even come close to reaching Critical Mass but instead if left to its own devices, as now at Fukushima, the rods bake into the ground as a result of kinetic heating and the radiation can still leak outside of the power plant via groundwater and faults.

A tactical nuke would vapourise these rods within a nanosecond, meaning 1 nuke going off will save the world from the radiational equivalent of a billion and that's just one fuel-rod. I don't know the schematics of the Fukushima plant so its impossible to say how many they were holding in the reactor and not forgetting the MOX cartridges ontop of it all.

[BornFromTheVoid]

Michio Kaku discussing the situation in Fukushima, though it sounds more like a looming global disaster than anything...

http://soundcloud.co...ly-newsmag-05-6

[lfcdude]

http://www3.nhk.or.j...3290991000.html

In the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station TEPCO, before 7:00 pm on 18, a power outage occurs, Unit 3 and Unit 1, in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4, and has stopped the system to cool the nuclear fuel it, and TEPCO I am looking into the cause.

Results before 7 pm April 18, a power outage occurs instantaneously at building important seismic isolation has become the center of the work convergence of the accident of the nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi, TEPCO was examined, one of the power supply facility within the site I have found that the unit is stopped.

Although it would not affect the water injection into the reactor in Unit 3 Unit 1 Unit 1 and Unit 3, the system has stopped to cool the nuclear fuel in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4 it.

Unit 1 and Unit 3, water temperature is turned 25 degrees and 13.7 degrees on the current from 18 to 4 pm, in the spent fuel pool of Unit 4, the temperature rise of 0.1 degrees per hour from 0. about three times, it is expected to be about 04 to more than 65 degrees that are prescribed by the provisions of TEPCO's house.

TEPCO is based on that you are looking into the cause, cause to enter the recovery process of the cooling system of the spent fuel pool as soon as identified.

That's according to the Nuclear Regulatory Authority of the country, of the power plant, that there was trouble in the vicinity of high-voltage cable that leads to the power distribution board.

In this trouble, it is not to change the value of the monitoring post to measure the value of the radiation that is disposed around the primary.

TEPCO "I was trying to announce compiled after confirming the status of the equipment, it took time for the confirmation. Not sorry" for the delay in announcing I'm talking with.

Would of thought would have lots of electric generators their by now..

No power for last 4 and a half hours...

http://english.kyodo.../03/214898.html

Electricity trouble occurs at crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant

TOKYO, March 18, Kyodo

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday a problem with electric power has occurred at its crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to the suspension of the system to cool spent fuel pools of the Nos. 1, 3 and 4 units.

The incident, however, so far has not affected the ongoing water injection to the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors, which suffered core meltdowns in the early days of the March 2011 nuclear crisis, according to the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

No abnormality has been detected in radiation levels in areas surrounding the plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

Unit 4 cooling is down then..

Edited March 18, 2013 by lfcdude

[Coast]

It's not over yet:

 

 

300 tons of radioactive water leaks out at Fukushima

 

About 300 tons of highly radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, according to Tepco, the plant's operator. In a statement TEPCO said that the water level in one of the 1000-ton steel tanks was found to be down by a third. 

 

A TEPCO employee found a big puddle of water outside the tank on Monday morning.  This tank is one of a group of 26 similar tanks near reactor No.4 in which contaminated water is being stored. The stored water became contaminated with radioactive strontium, cesium and tritium when it was used to cool the crippled reactors.  The water has a concentration of 80 million becquerels per litre, which translates into 24 trillion becquerels for 300 tons. A radiation level of 100 millisieverts per hour was detected near the surface of a puddle around the tank. The figure is 100 times the government's annual limit of radiation exposure for the public. (Becquerel is a measure of radioactivity in a substance while sievert is a measure of radioactivity received by living tissue, like in a human being.) 

 

"This means you are exposed to the level of radiation in an hour that a nuclear plant worker is allowed to be exposed to in five years," a TEPCO official told reporters.  The Nuclear Regulation Authority on August 19 provisionally rated the incident as a Level 1 "anomaly" on the eight-level International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), one notch above Level 0 "deviations," which have no safety significance.  The earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 had destroyed the nuclear plant causing a meltdown in its reactors. The catastrophe had been given the highest Level 7 designation under the INES. 

 

The nation's nuclear watchdog also instructed TEPCO to identify where the water leaked and collect soil contaminated by the radioactive water.  TEPCO says it is possible the toxic water could contaminate groundwater and flow into the Pacific Ocean "in the longer term", but says it is working to avoid such a situation. "We are transferring the contaminated water from a tank with a leakage problem to unbroken tanks, and retrieving leaked water and soil around it," the TEPCO official said. 

 

There have been a series of reports pointing towards the leakage of radioactive water into the nearby sea or into the water table below. Things had reached such a pass that the Japanese prime minister had recently announced that it would have to step in to help the company sort out the mess. Meanwhile, over 150,000 people from the surrounding areas continue to remain evacuated as radioactive contamination prevents them from moving back to their homes.

 

 

 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/300-tons-of-radioactive-water-leaks-out-at-Fukushima/articleshow/21933476.cms

 

300 tonnes, that's quite some puddle....

[Coast]

Sounds like there is more to it than just a puddle:

 

 

Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the cleanup of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The storage tank breach of about 300 metric tons of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday. The latest leak is so contaminated that a person standing half a meter (1 ft 8 inches) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers.

 

After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells. "That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse," said Michiaki Furukawa, who is professor emeritus at Nagoya University and a nuclear chemist.

 

The embattled utility Tokyo Electric has struggled to keep the Fukushima site under control since an earthquake and tsunami caused three reactor meltdowns in March 2011. Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has classified the latest leak as a level 1 incident, the second lowest on an international scale for radiological releases, a spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday. It is the first time Japan has issued a so-called INES rating for Fukushima since the meltdowns. Following the quake and tsunami, Fukushima was assigned the highest rating of 7, when it was hit by explosions after a loss of power and cooling.

 

A Tokyo Electric official said workers who were monitoring storage tanks appeared to have failed to detect the leak of water, which pooled up around the tank. "We failed to discover the leak at an early stage and we need to review not only the tanks but also our monitoring system," he said. Tokyo Electric, also known as Tepco, said it did not believe water from the latest leak had reached the Pacific Ocean, about 500 meters (550 yards) away. Nonetheless, continued leaks have alarmed Japan's neighbors South Korea and China.

 

CRITICISM

 

Tepco has been criticized for its failure to prepare for the disaster and been accused of covering up the extent of the problems at the plant. In recent months, the plant has been beset with power outages and other problems that have led outside experts to question whether Tepco is qualified to handle the clean up, which is unprecedented due to the amount of radioactive material on the site and its coastal location. The government said this month it will step up its involvement in the cleanup, following Tepco's admission, after months of denial, that leaked contaminated water had previously reached the ocean.

 

Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato told an emergency meeting of prefectural officials on Tuesday it was a "national emergency", and that the local government would monitor the situation more strictly and seek additional steps as needed. Massive amounts of radioactive fluids are accumulating at the plant as Tepco floods reactor cores via an improvised system to keep melted uranium fuel rods cool and stable. The water in the cooling system then flows into basements and trenches that have been leaking since the disaster. Highly contaminated excess water is pumped out and stored in steel tanks on elevated ground away from the reactors. About 400 metric tons of radioactive water a day has been stored at Fukushima.

 

In order to keep up with the pace of the flow, Tepco has mostly relied on tanks bolted together with plastic sealing around the joints. Those tanks are less robust - but quicker to assemble - than the welded tanks it has started installing. The latest leak came from the more fragile tank, which Tepco plans to carry on using, although it is looking at ways to improve their strength, said Tepco official Masayuki Ono. A puddle that formed near the leaking tank is emitting a radiation dose of 100 millisieverts an hour about 50 cm above the water surface, Ono told reporters at a news briefing Tepco has also struggled with worker safety. This month, 12 workers decommissioning the plant were found to have been contaminated by radiation. The utility has not yet identified what caused those incidents, which only came to its notice when alarms sounded as the workers prepared to leave the job site.

 

A South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said Seoul had asked Japanese officials to explain what they were doing to stop contaminated water reaching the ocean and fishing grounds. "They also need to make the information available to the public, all over the world, given this is the first case in history where contaminated water from a nuclear plant is flowing into the ocean at this magnitude," he said.

 

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/us-japan-fukushima-leak-idUSBRE97J02920130820

[Coast]

Sounds like there is more to it than just a puddle:

 

and getting worse:

 

 

Japan nuclear agency seeks Fukushima alert level upgrade

 

Japan's nuclear agency wants to raise the severity level of a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima plant from one to three on an international scale.

 

 

Highly radioactive water was found to be leaking from a storage tank into the ground at the plant on Monday. It was first classified as a level one incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Ines).But Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority proposes elevating it to level three on the seven-point scale. This week is the first time that Japan has declared an event on the Ines scale since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

 

The move was announced in a document on the agency's website and was subsequently approved at a weekly meeting of the regulatory body.

 

What is Ines?

 

Overseen by the UN nuclear agency, the IAEA, the scale aims to communicate "to the public in consistent terms the safety significance of reported nuclear and radiological incidents and accidents", its website says:

 

Events are classified at seven levels: Levels 1-3 are "incidents" and Levels 4-7 "accidents"

In order, the levels are classified as: anomaly; incident; serious incident; accident with local consequences; accident with wider consequences; serious accident; major accident

 

The scale is designed so that the severity of an event is about 10 times greater for each increase in level on the scale

Source: IAEA website

 

Japanese reports said it was a provisional move that had to be confirmed with the IAEA, the UN's nuclear agency. Shares of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) fell as much as 13% to 537 yen as investors worried about the impact of the development.

 

'Five-year dose'

 

The March 2011 tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors at the plant, three of which melted down. Water is now being pumped in to cool the reactors but this means that a large amount of contaminated water has to be stored on site. There have been leaks of water in the past but this one is being seen as the most serious to date, because of the volume - 300 tonnes of radioactive water, according to Tepco - and high levels of radioactivity in the water. A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, Kyodo news agency said earlier this week.

 

Masayuki Ono, general manager of Tepco, told Reuters news agency: "One hundred millisieverts per hour is equivalent to the limit for accumulated exposure over five years for nuclear workers; so it can be said that we found a radiation level strong enough to give someone a five-year dose of radiation within one hour." Teams of workers at the plant have surrounded the leaking tank with sandbags and have been attempting to suck up large puddles of radioactive water. But, reports the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo, it is a difficult and dangerous job. The water is so radioactive that teams must be constantly rotated and it is clear that most of the toxic water has already disappeared into the ground.

 

Under the Ines, events have seven categories starting with Level 0 ("without safety significance") and Levels 1-3 denoting "incidents" while Levels 4-7 denote "accidents". The triple meltdown at Fukushima two years ago was classed as a level 7 incident

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23776345