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Reactor Containment & Fuel Storage from UCS
Well, okay, probably not. But look at the news from today and tell me there won’t eventually be a really big swing of the regulatory pendulum.
From Kyodo News:
Yukinobu Okamura [is] head of the Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
Okamura … warned in 2009 of massive tsunami based on his study since around 2004 of the traces of a major tsunami believed to have swept away about a thousand people in the year 869 after a magnitude 8.3 quake off northeastern Japan.
[Records show that] he had warned two years ago about the possible risk of a massive tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant in Japan, but Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crippled by the March 11 earthquake and ensuing tsunami, had brushed off the warning.
He had found in his research that tsunami from the ancient quake had hit a wide range of the coastal regions of northeastern Japan, at least as far north as Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture and as far south as the town of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture — close to the Fukushima Daiichi plant — penetrating as much as 3 to 4 kilometers inland.
TEPCO asserted that there was flexibility in the quake resistance design of its plants and expressed reluctance to raise the assumption of possible quake damage citing a lack of sufficient information.
And the money quote from Okamura: “There should be ample flexibility in the safety of a nuclear power plant. It is odd to have an attitude of not taking into consideration indeterminate aspects.”
So the head of the Earthquake Lab says you need to have better plans in place in case of a large earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan and the company says “not my problem” — and there was no regulatory apparatus strong enough to move TEPCO.
That is the central problem with capitalism. Efficiency concentrates power in the hands of a few. In other words, efficiency concentrates risk, and the risks are borne by all. Without rules — without government regulation, and lots of it — the wolves will eat everything and everyone.
Another incriminating report from Kyodo News:
TEPCO’s Fukushima office acknowledged Saturday that it had known earlier that the radiation in the underground level of the turbine building of one of the reactors was extremely high, but had not made the information available to pertinent parties.
Labor? Not my problem, says management.
Facts? Nothing to worry about, either. They’re Master of the Universe, doncha know. Look how rich they are! Markets don’t lie!
——————–
Capitalism is essentially a system for putting the lives of the many into the hands of a few. And far too often, those few don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves.
90 Comments
A continuous dose of radation at 10 uSv / hour translates to about 7.2 mSv / month. The current legal limit for civilian exposure in Japan is 1 mSv / year.
Clearly, therefore, Japanese law requires that people who are living in a radiation field of 10 micro-Sv / hour must be permanently evacuated.
In fact, if you work the numbers the other way, even as much as 20 milli-Sv / year is:
20 milli-Sv / year = 20,000 uSv / year = 20,000 uSv / year
= 2.3 uSv / hour.
(And so 1 milli-Sv / year ~ 0.12 uSv / hour).
1 mSv / year is the current legal limit for exposure in Japan (for people who do not work in power plants, etc).
There are sites outside the 20 km mandatory evacuation zone (and even outside the 30 km voluntary evacuation zone) with higher rates than 2.3 uSv/hr. Examples here (Iidate Mura Town Hall; Fukushima Health Office (presumably in Fukushima City); Takahagi)
What to do? Clearly, increase the civilian exposure limits.
Funny how that works, huh? In all likelihood the rate will have to be raised a lot more or the evacuations will begin anew.
So true Lobster, the problem is the MIC has near total control and Total Information Awareness. In the past when weaknesses and flaws were discovered at least something was done to calm public concerns. Today our Capitalist Overlords no longer fear any group or individual enough to even minimally respond to public opinion.
We are entering a very dark time as the Powerful consoildate their grip on the mass of humanity.
The NYT (Onishi and Glanz) says the tsunami was 46 feet high at Fukushima Daiichi — three times higher than the bluff the plant itself is on.
Do the people who deny these facts think that they and their families are going to magically escape the “fallout” of these tragic events? I am always puzzled by the denial of global warming. I guess they will admit the problem when they are starving from lack of food and don’t have any water.
Twain, many people seem to suffer from willful ignorance. If a GW denier is on an island when the sea rises they will blame Socialists for undermining their world and sinking their island.
yep
It’s heralding the end of the oncological model of capitalism, that’s for sure.
The fact that the wind farms of Japan, even the offshore ones, survived without a scratch (the only ones offline are down because the grid in their area is damaged; once the grid’s repaired, they’ll be up and running too), is going to tell the Japanese government something very important.
Lobster, thanks for the great job of explaining the rad readings and their possible effects from this disaster. I don’t know if you have the background to answer the following questions but someone at your University might.
The explosion at reactor #4 has been attributed to a hydrogen explosion and the hydrogen supposedly was generated in the storage pool located on the upper level of the reactor building. The reactor was not involved and empty.
Does hydrogen a low energy gas have enough explosive power to explain the extensive damage to that building and how much gas was needed for that explosion?
How did the hydrogen gas, the lighest element, generated in the upper level manage to destroy the outer building down to the ground level?
If the cutaway view of the reactor building above is correct the hydrogen gas would have collected in the upper floor area above the storage pool and it would have been impossible for it to migrate to the lower floors without mechanical help.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: The earthquake was merely the trigger. The crazy logic we apply in dealing with technical risks is to blame. We only protect ourselves against hazards to the extent that it’s economically feasible at a given time, and to the extent to which they can be controlled within the normal operations of a company. But the Richter scale has no upper limit. Why is a Japanese nuclear power plant only designed to withstand a magnitude 8.2 earthquake, not to mention tsunamis?
We are looting both the past and the future to feed the excess of the present. It’s the dictatorship of the here and now.
der Spiegel.
At the heart of capitalism are the laws of supply and demand. Those are like gravity and we ignore them at our peril.
Crony capitalism, or phony capitalism certainly has failed to properly account for the true costs of things. Clean air and clean water are capital. When their degradation is “socialized,” it opens the door to “privatization,” of profits from abusing them.
Socialism works great in families and homogeneous groups, religious communities for example. It hasn’t worked at the level of a nation state.
IMHO, the corporate media is the single most immediate impediment to proper cost accounting of risk. If and when we make progress in terms of getting more accurate messaging out to a wider audience, there’s some reason to hope we can wrestle control away from the MOTU’s.
Workers evacuated due to hi radiation at #2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12872707
#2 10 MILLION times normal. Crap.
I’ll try to explain:
1.Does hydrogen a low energy gas have enough explosive power to explain the extensive damage to that building and how much gas was needed for that explosion?
Yes. All combustible gases (one that combine with oxygen) can cause explosions at the correct concentrations. The energy produced is the difference between the H-H and O-O bonds and the H2O bonds. (Sorry no subscripts). That difference is great, 118 kcal for 2 mole of water. Here’s the numbers, for decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen, the same energy is released on combustion,
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/B/BondEnergy.html
A building full of hydrogen will generate one hell of a big bang.
“Since one mole of any gas will occupy 22.4 litres at STP ” and ther probably were 10,000 cu m of hydrogen in the reactor, or 10,000,000 litres, that’s about 500,000 mole of hydrogen or about 500,000,000 kcal of energy or about 500 tons on TNT.
One half a kiloton of explosion. One hell of a bang.
2. How did the hydrogen gas, the lighest element, generated in the upper level manage to destroy the outer building down to the ground level?
The shock wave (a pressure wave) from the about explosion travels in all directions. All of the building gets it’s fair share, and disintegrates.
3. it would have been impossible for it to migrate to the lower floors without mechanical help.
True. The hydrogen did not migrate. The shock wave did.
Just read thru that link @1:44am you posted YSD . . .
Thanks for the linky.
This one is gonna impact the whole planet severely before it’s over I think.
I’m thinking 6 melted reactors, n all them spent fuel rods . . . all melted down.
I wonder how there will not be an explosion at some point, but if science don’t work that way, the radiation alone is gonna poison a hell of a lot of land and water on this rock.
The worst is yet to come it would seem, and no one is tawkin bout it.
I mean, just how bad could it get? (thinkin it could get globally bad and further poison the oceans).
N my bad Lobster . . great read and rcc’d.
Capitalism?
Um, well . . . . that’s a label like communism, socialism, etc.
Marx, n Engels, n many others like Plato have all labeled and defined systems of governance, as do all the religions of the world.
Since well, long ago.
My bottom line is that history proves when the masses are not cared for and nurtured, then the word ‘unsustainable’ comes into play. Hard.
So, as far as ‘capitalism’ goes, it’s unsustainable as it is, n so are most forms of governance, it would seem.
When the few elites own and control too much of the masses then the odds of nature and human nature tend to erupt.
Capitalism has failed. Miserably.
N the planet and the people are erupting.
It won’t get any better . . . it’s only gonna get uglier as the masses get further screwed and begin to erupt. Planet wide.
N there’s that other thang to consider.
Mama Nature.
Global warming, poisoning of our land, water and oceans from abuse of them all.
This is stuff humans can’t control once it spins out of control.
N sustainability is out of control, governance wise, and mama nature wise.
There’s no doubt the human species is it’s own worst enemy.
N that’s not new news . . . .
If pertinent parties means the chain of command that included the workers working in that turbine building, such a reckless disregard of life would put a US company and its managers in jeopardy of having committed criminal homicide, if any of those workers die.
Nice, helpful summary. I would add that an explosion contained by a sealed building would have concentrated its force over a smaller volume, increasing the damage caused.
An analogy would be a firecracker exploding on a sidewalk, which generates a sonic wave and a little light, but little heat or force. One contained inside a tin can or wrapped inside a closed fist is another problem altogether.
Fucked up priorities. US and other western govts can’t wait to go fighting in other countries, wasting billions of tax payers money, but when a major crisis is unfolding that has the potential to ruin a one of the world’s biggest cities and possibly that entire country and severely disrupt the global economy, only the US is helping, at the request of the Japanese govt, at what seems to be a small scale comparatively to the amount of effort they put into wars.
1. why are they allowing this company to run this operation?
2. when are they going to bury this mess in concrete? what are they waiting for? trying to save these $%^& reactors?
3. they are serial liars.
They are mostly over fifty and figure the shit won’t really hit the fan till they are gone. Their kids, screw them too.They don’t care, period.
Go hang around the rich, they have a humanity disconnect that’s why the French may have been on to something way back then.
Same reason BP ran ours Gulf “spill”…They OWN us,they OWN the government and they act like they OWN the planet.
Lobster, it just got worse with 1 MILLION times usual radiation in seawater from water coming out of the plant & air in the same unit was four times higher than the occupational limit set by Japan’s government.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/radiation-levels-reach-new-highs-as-conditions-worsen-for-workers/2011/03/27/AFsMLFiB_story.html
“But look at the news from today and tell me there won’t eventually be a really big swing of the regulatory pendulum.”
You mean the really big swing just like after the huge disaster in the Gulf? /s
Japan may be different, I can’t speak to what will happen there. But in the U.S. I have a pretty good idea where this is going.
There won’t eventually be a really big swing of the regulatory pendulum.
Too busy watching the killing in Libya. I still that war was initiated to distract form Fukishima
I agree. My Reps and Senators stay bought for Noocluar. I wonder how much they sold out for? $5000.00 or more for the seniors?
They may have to change their tunes. I really don’t see how, in any way, they can say Noocluar is “transitional” when, by the time they have them online, the world will be a radioactive ball.
Reminds me of our calls during the bleeding BP well in the Gulf? “Why is BP being allowed to run this operation?”
Thanks for another informative diary Lobster. I have also been thinking this latest environmental disaster bringing forward the serious questions as to the role of governments and may be a turning point for the now obviously failed laissez faire capitalism.
Competition does not create the best product. It creates the most selfish cleaver flim flam individuals. It is a video game with meaning only to the players but consequences now to the lives of billions. Even the great classic libertarian guru Hayek recognized the need for strong government management of the essentials of life, even health care!
Add that to the funding for nuclear power not available from the gamblers and game players in the private sector, energy management may well be the first essential product to shift to the governments.
Coincidentally, the meme on Sunday US time is that those extremely high readings were a “mistake”. For some reason, though, TEP hasn’t disclosed what the readings were or are now.
Without at least conflicting or inconsistent data, it’s not possible to evaluate TEP’s claim, except to observe that its claim would be much better for them. Funny that.
Another reason to *trust* TEPCO:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12875327
This information reminds me of the deception about barrels of oil per day gushing into the Gulf.
Hi lobster!
I do not believe, in terms of long-long term survival for our planet,that nuclear power has a future, because it generates dangerous waste, and the planet cannot support infinite disposal sites.
Of course I am concerned about radiation. But also, and this may sound odd, but I believe that our earth harbors, in reservoirs, viruses, bacteria, and yet-to-be-mutated in Darwin fashion, forms of disease, that can emerge if we continue to blow up, drill, play God…and disturb things that are meant to be left alone.
Something like Ebola comes to mind.
At the moment our focus is on the reactors themselves, but we already see, as we always do, disaster-related disease becoming an issue.
Not too much of a leap, in my mind anyway, if at someitme in the future, some superbug preceeded the natural disaster, but was, rather THE cause of our environmental diregard and toxic waste storage.
Recommended, and also, where is that bestseller, “Six Easy Nuclear Reactor Disaster Pieces,” by Professor lobster and his class?
“A spokesman for Japan’s nuclear watchdog, Hidehiko Nishiyama, said the level of radiation in puddles near reactor 2 was confirmed at 1,000 millisieverts an hour.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12875327
I’m already reading in popular press a renewed theme that wind and solar are inefficient and not ready for massive deployment, that the grid won’t support an increase in wind farms, that off-shore wind farms are vulnerable to tsunamis and look bad as well (funny, when my beach has a lovely view of an easy dozen off-shore drilling rigs).
It’s Business As Usual, at least around these parts.
Thanks for the reply Synoia, but i still have some doubts. The volume of hydrogen gas you state was produced is huge and i’m not sure it would even fit in the volume of the building. The source of the gas is supposed to be from zirconium oxidation which produces free hydrogen but no oxygen. Some gas and oxygen could be produced thermally but that requires extreme temperatures.
The upper floor of the reactor building where the gas was generated is not sealed and is covered with sheet metal, The explosion at reactor #1 is evidence of this fact. Also that explosion didn’t destroy the lower concrete walls of the upper structure. The picture i saw of the building showed the upper floor had been blown upward from below since there was no rubble on the equipment that was visible below the floor. How did the gas manage to get below the floor where it was generated?
Thanks!
W.r.t. my class notes, two words: Spring Break. I ended up running the first big discussion without notes the other day because the situation is so fluid and taking this week to do other things. Next week I’m going to be on a panel that discusses the event, open to the student body. Oddly, I’m not sure anyone will show up. Fukushima has not yet turned out to be the media magnet I thought it would be. Too slow, too boring, and too far away, I guess. Plus, GE owns NBC, etc.
I would add a few go-to places to the list on Scarecrow’s main Japan thread:
NYT
TEPCO press releases (I know, but this is where much of the “information” starts.)
fleep.com/earthquake
NHK press releases
The Breakthrough Institute (including the Twitter feeds)
Capitalism will end when people decide that they truly have had enough. It would help towards that end if the Left would present a coherent/persuasive vision and counterargument.
Apart from my allusion to Fukuyama and the end of history, I’m also alluding to the end of Soviet communism.
If you can pull yourself away from the canonization of Reagan that Americans have a hard time ignoring, you will find that the actual driver of the collapse of the Soviet Union was Chernobyl. It was the tremendous mistrust of the communist state that came from the Chernobyl accident that forced Gorbachev to embrace Glasnost, and it was Glasnost that ended the Soviet empire.
Fukushima really could be the beginning of the end of whatever political/economic system we are currently living within, particularly if it were to end up with a full meltdown.
Please. That war’s about oil and corporate power. Remember coincidence is more common than dirt. And a lot more common than radiation from nuclear power plants broken by a 9.0 earthquake.
No, it won’t be any worse than Chernobyl. Which was bad enough, but did not have global effects.
Of course, if it DOES become as bad as Chernobyl, a lot more people will get sick and maybe die because there a lot more people living near that plant.
It’s just insane to build a nuclear power plant on a fault line. I think fission power is pretty insane to begin with, due to the radioactive waste problem, but building one on a fault line? That’s just begging the Universe for trouble.
Ah, thanks for that additional point. Maybe the Japanese people will wake up and start demanding that unabashed capitalism be reined in. I doubt this will have much impact on that subject in this country, though. Maybe on new nuclear power plants and calls for greater safety precautions. Which will be ignored.
Obama just doesn’t have any luck with timing, does he? “Drill, baby, drill. The oil industry tells me it’s safe.” BOOM goes the BP well in the Gulf. “Let’s get to work on clean coal.” CRASH goes the mine in West Virginia. “Nuclear energy is safe and clean. Let’s build more nuke plants!” CRACK go the domes in Japan.
I beginning to think some Odd God of the Galaxy out there hates this lying fascist bastard of a con artist.
Kassandra @8:46, I think you’re correct.
Obama had already decided NOT to intervene in Libya. I think his polling numbers were split. Then comes the disaster at Fukushima. I think the nuke lobby became the tipping point. IMHO, they begged Barry to bomb Libya, because they knew it was the only thing that would dilute the 24/7 coverage.
Shhh! Don’t tell anyone that every single one of Japan’s wind farms, including the offshore ones, rode out the earthquakes and tsunamis just fine. In fact, they’re being pressed to generate more power to compensate for the damaged nuke power plant at Fukushima The only ones currently not running are turned off because their part of the power grid is damaged.
The anti-nuclear backlash is already changing the political landscape in Europe.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/03/201132722346939687.html
Well, there’s putting one on the slope of a supposedly-dormant supervolcano, like we did with Los Alamos. And I believe that there’s a plant near NYC that sits on or near a fault line.
So yeah, capitalism as cancer: The race to build and exploit and who cares about consequences.
This format sucks for a discussion!
Thanks Lobster for sticking with this. I don’t see this thing ending before it gets a whole lot worse and why isn’t anybody talking about THAT outcome and what people should be doing?
What’s all this holding our breaths while they wrestle this to the ground?
Outside the US, yes. Inside the US, not unless we get a Fukushima here.
If votes mattered, of enough people were informed, of we had decent candidates and not rigged and paid for elections, we might see the will of the people expressed.
If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a trolley.
Don’t forget Diablo Canyon in CA. Built on two, 2, II, fucking faults.
If it’s as Chernobyl, it is very bad.
Warning. At 1:24:40 images of deformed children are shown. Those with weak stomachs should not watch.
Because the Japanese emissions are not reaching the gulf stream, the distribution is more localized than Chernobyl. If the total radioactive emissions are already 50% of Chernobyl, that is not good news for the region of Japan near the plant.
I have you agree to you about the fall of the Soviet Union point. Reagan really did not a thing, just helped play the perception part that we could keep bashing the Ruskies into dust even while our economy and society were spinning in circles.
The loss of their military prowess in Afghanistan was really one of the nails in the coffin, and the loss of nuclear power safety, as well as the lies and way the disaster was handled probably played a strong role as well. Once the public really has no reason to support you country for national defense, or for society being protected and nurtured, there really isn’t much point to listening to your leaders.
Thank you so much lobster for your continued dedication to this emergency and staying with it even to the greatest detail that can be forthcoming!!! and the same to Scarecrow and EdTeller and the other Dr I can’t remember their name now and many others and thanx for all the links!!!
lobster, the documentary backs up your claim that Gorbachev was pushed against the Glasnost wall by Chernobyl.
As much as I hate thinking too far into things like this, its clear something shifted in the calculus of the president’s thinking. I think he honestly did want the rebels to win, while staying out of it, then shifted to thinking more along the lines of not letting them loose entirely. This obviously isn’t a justification, but from the squirming to change positions from the far right, you can see they didn’t even expect him to “intervene”.
It was pretty apparent that our current state of world journalism isn’t able to keep the money off the table as far as the issue of nuclear power goes.
What about all the people, especially in the U.S., who keep wasting and demanding more energy? Similar to the drug war, it’s the demand that drives governments and suppliers to resort to practices that are dangerous to the environment and to humans. Our form of capitalism, which we are aggressively exporting to other countries, is totally dependent on this exponential growth and consumption pattern which is unsustainable.
The question is how to change people’s mindset on what “progress” is, from having more “stuff” and children, to having enough to live decently but preserving the earth for future generations.
Since young people have so much to lose, why aren’t we seeing a greater awareness of this on their part, instead their blind acceptance of superficial pop culture models and lifestyles that depend on more and more fossil fuels?
I realize that young people have very little influence on the large-scale decision making. But we all have a collective effect through what we consume, and it adds up to an enormous amount of waste and pollution. We are headed toward oblivion, and most people are oblivious.
That’s plenty high enough to worry about.
And those are some pretty deep puddles, too. Someone on a previous thread suggested that we stop calling them puddles. Maybe “POUS” (Puddles Of Unusual Size)?
This is great news for the German Green Party, but the corporate (two) party rule here in America only can spell more control, more surveillance, more poverty. and more industrial disasters without any consequences. Capitalism won’t fall in the USA until the war on humanity ends…and I believe we just launched another war….
The top 10 executives of TEPCO should be forced to work directly on the crews trying to prevent the meltdown. I mean, seriously, they should be required by law to put on the radiation suits and go in there! Then we’ll hear: “Oh please, not us. We are too fucking important to risk our lives. We have families.”
These arrogant con men, thieves and pirates must be asked to take a full dose of their own medicine.
it’s also widely accepted by Russians – at least a popular notion – that Gorbachev was a failure in government, if not a traitor, clinching and insisting on the demise of the Soviet regime.
If it was Gorbachev’s reasoning that led him from Chernobyl to glasnost, I’d be interested to see that. And it may well be the case, I haven’t read say a bio of him or the likes. But Christians all over are just as likely to see the hand of Karol Wojtyla’s (Pope John Paul II) supporting of worker rights in Poland as having a determining factor in Gorbachev’s eventual capitulation.
I think all these things could be factors, just using the old pope as an example of another surprisingly divergent take from the dominant Ray-gun hot topic.
I don’t think capitalism has run it’s course. Not with the effectiveness of the markets to stay afloat in always new markets somewhere. Even the Chinese still think it is glorious to be rich. From Jersey to Saipang eh? Dubai and Singapore effect Baghdad and Tripoli, too. Sadly, I’m more apt to think the next targets of mob rage to be focused on the press – the messengers – rather than the actors, wall street or the real int’l hegemons.
To be fair if the Valles caldera volcano goes pop or the Rio Grande rift starts spreading again, we’re going to have a lot more to worry about than a nuclear reactor sitting on it’s slopes. Granted it could be very problematic if some lesser geologic forces start acting up and I also think it was bad planning to build it there.
lobster,
don’t know how i missed this post previously, but i’m glad it’s now up at the top where i can stumble over it.
good work here.
and thanks for the extraordinary quick-course in the technology of a nuclear power disaster which you and other highly knowledgeable commenters have provided.
I’ll watch that ghostof…
Thanks all! That was my first time on the front page (AFAIK).
Our form of capitalism is also dependent on neoconservative resource management (war) and the neoliberal policies (of most Democrats) that has subjected the Japanese to decades of stagnation, an end there to workers rights and safety, and massive psychological depression and social disintegration. But hey, Mr. Toyota probably made out okay, and I’m sure Mr. Gates will too here in the decaying land of the free
Electing senators and presidents who are owned by their corporate overlords only exasperates the problem. We all know that. But somehow I doubt we will be able to engage any meaningful change in America, the brainwashing is too intense. We WILL get more empty promises of an ineffective, if progressive, empathy from our leaders as well as a continued reliance on weapons to maintain a distant and protected status quo. This keeps us chasing our tails and despising our neighbors….just what the status quo wants.
Isn’t it amazing that the opaque nature and lack of accountability when there’s a problem which has been known and warned about by responsible scientists are the same for nuclear power and good old fossil fuel power?
The bullshit governmental response by the US to the BP criminal acts in the Gulf last year are being mimicked in Japan by TEPCO. You’re right PW, it’s in the nature of capitalism to lie and dissemble as long as that increases profits at the expense of anyone and anything that gets in the way.
I think something that helped to increase the power of the explosion was the use of zirconium alloy on the rods.
For humanity to survive on an ever threatened planet it’s imperative that a stake be driven through the heart of unregulated corporate capitalism. To think that the plutocracy will do what’s “right” for humanity is the height of naivete and folly.
You mean like when Massey closed the vents in the mines and the mine exploded? Like the criminal charges that were leveled against Massey? There never were any criminal charges and no one’s gone to jail.
When the owner is attacked by workers who are fed up with seeing their co-workers die, then jail time is likely; when the owner is guilty of wanton, criminal negligence for workers? No one goes to jail.
Good old Bobby Gates was providing information Reagan and the criminals in that administration wanted to hear about the Soviet Union even as the Soviet system was imploding. And now he’s the guy running the game plan for the GWOT.
We are so fucked.
The first time I went to Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed I was surprised by how vehemently people hated Gorbachev. The dissolution of the CCCP meant destitution for millions of Russians.
Atomkraft. Nein danke!
Recommended fight song: On, Wisconsin!
The turnover for the people who run these high level jobs in the private sector that apparently dictate our positions for us is impressive. I agree with your analysis. We completely ignore how close Reagan came to breaking us over trying to overproduce against the rustbucket soviet army.
Watch one or two of the lower level members of TEPCO get blamed, and then commit suicide before they can be imprisoned. You’d think sending them in to at least save the life of someone less guilty would be reasonable.
thank you lobster & many good commenters too
Very fine!
Will have to watch out for what Obama pushes next…
It’s standing water, it would be puddles if directly translated from Japanese, it does not mean stomping through for fun. There is some misinterpretation of the depth (as opposed to width). There is also confusion between this and the deeper water in lower basement and deeper water in the room with the electric boards.
It is however incorrect to assume that the term puddles denotes any effort to minimize the phenomenon.
Hot Zirconium breaks apart the water molecule to yield Zirconium Oxide and Hydrogen.
Zn + H20 -> H2 + ZrO (More or less, I fudged the valencies)
You are asking about how the blast waves traveled through the building. I don;t know. The only way is to look at the debris field, and I’ve not seen clear enough pictures of the debris field.
Explosive Mixtures:
When a combustible gas is mixed with air in the presence of a flame, the flame will burn, and the combustible gas/air mixtur will not, until the combustible/air mixture reach it’s detonation point. Then there will be a large bang. This is especially true is the in an over supply of combustible gas and then an event (a hole) opened so the air/combustible gas mixture move to more oxygen less combustible gas.
You can prove this with a small coffen can, with holes punched in it, and one in the lid. Fill it with natural gas, light the hole in the lid, and stand back. Well back.
Don’t try this indoors. USE A THE SMALLEST COFFEE CAN YOU CAB FIND.
Volume of gas:
10,000 cu m is an empty building approx 30x30x10 m or about 100 ft by 100 ft by 30 ft high.
I’d bet money there is that much free space around a reactor.
The floors:
I do not know for a fact, but I’d expect the floors to be open metal grating, not solid like a house or office building. From the Hydrogen’s point of view, the floors don’t exist.
If this video has not been mentioned before (or if it has) it needs more viewing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtmU2lD97o
Chemist Dan Nocera at MIT talks about providing the world’s energy needs with the volume of water that would fit in a single olympic-sized pool. Hoping the details are easy to manage for our future scientists.
a wider view than usual, and, as such, very interesting.
tx
Here is Professor Nocera in a longer 1+ hour lecture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAkM_dV6CFs
Tomorrow’s headlines today. Apparently there’s been discovery of 1000 msv water in trenches outside the buildings..
Link here
Kyodo again
Fukushima City is 65 km from the plant and has 300,000 inhabitants.
The annual limit for radiation exposure is 1,000 uSv / year. That translates to roughly 0.114 uSv / hour.
”
The reading in Fukushima City, 65 kilometers northwest of the nuclear power plant, was 3.84 microsieverts per hour [uSv/hour] at 1 AM.”
That is a factor of roughly 34 above the limit and it has been higher than this since 16 March.
To meet their legal requirement, Japan had at most 1/40th of a year to execute a plan for the 300,000 inhabitants of Fukushima City — i.e., 11 days. That clock ran out 27 March (yesterday).
People say the standard was set at a conservative, low level. It was also determined as a compromise between forces for and against nuclear power, before the accident.
There is now a recommendation from the International Commission on Radiological Protection to raise the limit in northeast Japan by a factor of 20-100. That recommendation is meant to use some of the conservatism of the original limit to offset the suffering and cost of further large-scale evacuations.
Raising the limit by a factor of 20 would buy a few months but, in the theme of this thread, will make the rapidly shifting balance between corporate and public interests crystal clear.
Will the rates of radiation emanating from the NPP go down soon? Probably not with an open trench full of 1 Sievert / hour water outside one of the reactor buildings.
Based on sketchy reporting that continuously referred to “feed and bleed” tactics + escaping steam + an obvious escape route for hydrogen from the system, I have been erroneously assuming that the water they’ve been injecting for two weeks was being vented to the atmosphere along the way, so that the radiation doses that were being recorded were the baseline expectation for continuing cooling of the reactors. The trench, the puddles, and the statements of full SPV tori make it clear that there is a new baseline radiation escape rate now being established, consistent with the need for continuous cooling with continuously increasing amounts of cooling water (open cooling system; the SPV of at least one unit has lost integrity or there could not be a trench full of reactor water).
Another call for understanding the best-case scenario is in the air.
I do not see a solution that does not involve diluting the water in that trench by flushing it into the ocean for months to come.
As Atrios says, happy to be wrong, because this cannot be good for the environment or for health.
There will be continuing political implications. Monopoly corporate power is at stake in one of the most technologically advanced, economically powerful countries in the world. If we are not yet at a tipping point, we are moving in that direction. The political ramifications of Chernobyl took something like 5-7 years to become clear to all, and that was a quite the event. This one is unfolding more slowly, almost gently. It will probably take a long time and the various commenters above who predict business as usual may have it right. What is different about Fukushima vs. the Deepwater Horizon is the dread humans feel about radiation. I don’t know how this plays out, but it is bigger than the Deepwater Horizon accident.
I see by my local papers that Marx is making a comeback in Britain. When you strip out the labour theory of value (which by the way was totally consistent with the analytical apparatus of classical economics (Smith, Ricardo, Mill), you still have the core point that capitalist forms of organization privatize benefits and socialize costs. The generation of economists that followed Marx erected an analytical structure in which the costs are also privatized, but the assumptions required to make this claim true are extremely stringent and for various reasons too technical to discuss here are never satisfied. Needless to say, that is the structure of modern economic theory, which looks at individual trees rather than the wilderness of forest
yysyd @12:08am
this is the issue i’ve been wondering about.
i didn’t see how it was possible to dump water on a set of buildings for two weeks ( in addition to what was initially inside damaged buildings) and not have some of it show up outside due either
to ground-level flooding (i imagine a messy, muddy house building site in march in the eastern u.s.) or
to water from inside the structures migrating into the water table thru cracked concrete structures below ground, damaged piping, or drains.
i am assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that the hydrostic pressures inside are greater than those outside the damaged structures.
Here’s a 2 minute video demonstrating Prof. Nocera’s concept for harnessing solar energy during the day and using water as an energy source at night:
Excess daytime sunlight with the help of a catalyst of cobalt and phospate splits the water into hydrogen gas–which is stored in underground tanks by the house. During the day, sunlight powers the electricity in the house. During the evening the hydrogen gas is then used to power the house, recharge the battery powered car, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7ok8cOJbmo&feature=related
slight correction: water is split into oxygen and hydrogen gas. The oxygen and hydrogen are recombined at night to reform water. That process which takes place in a fuel cell produces the energy to power the house at night, etc.
The press had been hankering for news of plutonium, they now have it couple hundred meters from the site. It doesn’t really add much to where the issue should be going. That’s one of two obsessions the Japanese press has these days, the other being dry venting.
The reactors in Japan have nothing to do with the end of capitalism. What will kill capitalism will be the end of the two things that capitalism requires. One, an unending supply of cheap raw materials and two, an unending supply of consumers to buy the crap. Both are in short supply.