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Greetings!
I stumbled across this excellent article from Asahi Shimbun. It presents an excellent summary of where we are. Go read it.
Back already? Good. I’ve a few comments. You noticed the graphic at the top right? Notice how much cooler #1 is than the others? There’s not as much corium in #1.
Quoting the last paragraph of the story:
“Despite the (officially declared) cold shutdowns of the reactors, the cooling functions have been maintained there with no knowledge of where the melted fuel lies and in what state,” Tanabe said.
They’re starting to break it to us gently. This is the first admission they’ve made I’m aware of that the corium might not be in containment. If it was in containment, they’d know where it was.
Also notice that the amount of water in the basement of ANY of the reactor buildings is enough to max out their storage capacity. In practical terms, they’re using the basements of those damaged building as additional storage.
Boxturtle (Land south of the equator is currently cheap, but that might change)
22 Comments
holy crap.
x2
Thanks for this important update.
Thanks for the update, BoxTurtle. Funny how the world’s ignoring a problem doesn’t make it just go away.
Not good news, but thank you for the report.
South of the Equator. Is that because of prevailing winds?
The corium has left the building.
Thanks for the link BoxTurtle.
Yes. Fallout maps of Fuku show almost all the impact north of the border, mostly between 20-45 degrees latitude. A lot depends on what happens and when, but it’s pretty clear you’re safer from whatever might happen south.
Looked like the best place to be was South Africa. According to predictions.
Boxturtle (As always, this is a brand new world. We don’t know, we’re taking our best guesses)
It think so too. All three buildings. The effect of the neutron radiation on the concrete floor will eventually turn it to powder, even if you assume it’s still holding. How long is anyone’s guess, but my guess is it’s already happened.
Hot corium, sitting directly on the floor and bombarding said floor with neutrons and gamma radiation. Now add hot seawater. How long will it last?
Boxturtle (or rather, how long did it last?)
I really just stumbled on to it and felt it was worthy of wider reading. I try to keep up on Fuku.
I don’t think they’ve managed to get people into 1,2 or 3 yet. All the survey has been done remotely. Talking about “decommissioning” when you can’t get within sight of the work area is kinda silly.
The groundwater may be the only thing keeping the melts cool. I think the pumped water is only cooling the SPF’s.
Boxturtle (And I think the #3 explosion was a runaway reaction in the SPF)
Unit 1, the fuel is not located. At least some of it may be in the torus room or in the torus. There is some analysis that thinks it may have flowed across the containment floor. The torus room of unit 1 is a mess and has very high radiation levels the lower you go into the standing water in the torus room. The inside of containment on this unit has charred walls and chunks of black matter gobbed here and there. There are also what looks like broken concrete bits in the containment.
Unit 2, spewed the highest radiation release of the early disaster when they vented the containment of the reactor in an attempt to lower pressure. They really have no clue where the melted fuel is in this unit. The inside of containment has lots of really damaged paint. The torus room looks in very good shape. The top gasket for the containment cap is failed. Where the fuel is at is anyone’s guess.
Unit 3, it has some weird internal damage from the blast. Things are sucked in on one side and bowed out on the other. The tips room steel door was sucked or blown down the tips room hallway. The lower torus room door on the other side of the building is bowed out. They think unit 3 had the containment cap gasket fail. Where the fuel is, nobody knows.
They have been able to get workers into the buildings on many occasions. They do so as briefly as possible and in shifts. They also try to avoid the high radiation areas in the buildings. They really are at an impasse. Some work really needs human hands on work and they don’t have robots that can do what is needed. The new 4 leg walking robot they sent into 2′s torus room locked up and a worker had to run in and retrieve it.
As far as using buildings to store water, absolutely. That has been part of the plan. They were desperate for somewhere to store water. I managed to speak to someone working at the plant through a journalist/translator early on who told me they were considering sealing up some buildings to use them as holding tanks. The water gets transferred through various building basements as part of the water handling process. What to do with all the water is an ongoing really big problem. Pumped water is run through the reactor vessels constantly. Where it goes from there really is anyone’s guess. The reactor vessels and containment do not hold water. So they recirculate water but having it run out the reactor vessel into the building basement isn’t exactly an ideal plan. Each of the spent fuel pools has their own closed cooling loop now. It is an improvised heat exchanger that sits outside the building.
TEPCO’s decommissioning plan doesn’t account for the melted fuel not being in containment. They really don’t know what to do and are doing very little to really try to find the bulk of the melted fuel. They at least have a plan to deal with the spent fuel but that has plenty of hurdles to overcome.
BTW, some rough calculations we did on burn rate of the concrete base mats all put the melted fuel through the base mats fairly early in the disaster. But corium doesn’t always sit in a nice neat pile and burn straight down. It can flow like lava. It did so at Chernobyl and there is some analysis that shows it could have done the same at Fukushima.
If I was running the show I would be working on a way to get a scope into the pedestal region directly under the reactor vesselto take a look. I would also be drilling under the reactor buildings to take soil samples and send in a scope, sensors or remote camera to see what could be found. TEPCO isn’t doing anything because it kicks bad news down the road and they honestly are running out of money. TEPCO assets were set aside for dealing with the plant disaster. At the same time TEPCO is dumping millions of dollars into Kashiwazaki Kariwa NPP. They want to restart that nuclear plant assuming income from that will help fund dealing with the Fukushima plant disaster.
If anyone wants to get up to speed on the disaster we report on it daily at simplyinfo.org I work with the research team about 8 hours a day and glad to answer questions if people have any. If I don’t know the answer I can usually ask around and get one.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Actually…I do have a dumbass question. In all scifi shows electronics fail during nuclear disasters. Is that what caused the robot to freeze or was the technology flawed?
Many thanks for the updated info!
Dunno if it’s from the blast or what. There was more than one explosion and the big one was likely the SPF. Plus damage from the hydrogen explosions in #2. Also, when the gasket was damaged, I think the top of the containment lifted off and vented. Pressure went from 125psi to 100 PSI almost instantly.
No, it doesn’t. Even though they have to know that at least some of the corium is outside the buildings.
I have some sympathy for them. They can’t seal it up like Chernobyl, and it’s not contained like TMI. And if they dig down and build a wall and floor to seal the melts in, they may well discover that the groundwater is the only thing cooling the melts.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know how fresh corium behaves and each melt is likely different. The corium produced from the MOX fuel is going to be WAY different from anything else. Lab tests are VERY difficult and Lab created corium is probably nothing like meltdown created corium.
I agree with your plan, it’s what the people running the show should be doing. But they’re not going to ask the question because can’t stand the answer.
I’ve added simplyinfo to my Fukushima list. Dunno how I missed adding it before, I know I’ve been there.
Boxturtle (Thanks for stopping by!)
Christine McCann at Greenpeace is a good source for info as well. This has been an ongoing crisis and corporate media is doing their job of ignoring it. Thanks for keeping it in the news as much as possible.
And to think the recent election puts the pro nuclear politicians back in charge.
Yeah, well, we re-elected Obama. We’re not the only country who has to chose the lesser evil.
Boxturtle (Not sure the pro-nuke folks are going to push. Country is HOSTILE to that)
Yes, this is true but Coprporatocracy is strongly in control in Japan as well as here. P.S. Fish should be avoided since they are still finding cesium in freshly caught fish at levels that could only exist if the contamination was recent.
Thank you for the update. I also saw this among your other excellent catches:
US tax dollars at work! I am not going to miss the MIC and the money it burns when it’s finally cut to smithereens nor even drop by for their bake sale.
Tangential– As nuke waste being produced and moved around/stored is a shell game to keep the bankstas’ gravy train running, please also note the #FAIL monster beast Hanford is still operating, rad glo trails are being made/re-inforced by the transit sector (please do ask who’s involved in that) servicing the facilities inclusive of the issue of industrial-accidents-waiting-to-happen (production, transport, storage, you name it):
13 Dec 2012: DOE Releases Final Tank Closure & Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement – “Hanford Environmental Report Fails to Meet Legal Requirements, Falls Short on Cleanup”
thankyou.
…x 2 and thanks as well BT … this is only still at the begin point(s) with the end point(s) decades away …
Japan may see multiple location atomic incidents taking place that could take place/happen at any time on any day because the planet set(s)them in motion — do not see how TEPCO’s money people can/could keep up.
TEPCO likely is not going to make it without Tokyo injecting big and endless public money/policy shielding backstop(s).
Atomic Japan will see huge cost(s)black hole(s)with the exits/get out zones costly and not easy to open/close.
Any close/long solutions at this point unknown/not known with consequences at the same status.
Atomic Age has been/is being/will be unkind to the Japanese — well — lets make that/it unkind to all humans and to the planet in total.
Atomic H2O boiling needed to wait until it was possible to get all the science and technology well set. Not the case since 1950′s.
Maybe would be by 2050′s — who knows — but based on 1950′s/60′s atomic science/tech? No.
We see why now.
What in the world would the Pro Nuke people have to push?
Obama has already pledged upwards of fifty five billions of dollars to that industry. It is, after all, now being described as a “clean source of energy.” No messy clouds or vapors. No need to blow the top off mountains like the coal industry does.
And Time Magazine lets us readers know, circa summer of 2011, that “there simply has not been any data done to date that shows us the effects of rampant radiation on human beings.” I seem to remember an event called Hiroshima that resulted in lots of data being collected and studied. Including research focusing on actual human victims of that bomb and its radiation. But perhaps those are just weird remembrances of a childhood filled up with far too many sci fi books…