Fukushima Daiichi latest - hows the clear up going?

[tokabochi 9]

High levels of a toxic radioactive isotope have been found in groundwater at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator says.

 

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said tests showed strontium-90 was present at 30 times the legal rate.

 

The radioactive isotope tritium has also been detected at elevated levels.

 

The plant, crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, has recently seen a series of water leaks and power failures.

 

The tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors, which melted down.

 

Water is now being pumped in to the reactors to cool them but this has left Tepco with the problem of how to safely store the contaminated water.

 

There have been several reports of leaks from storage tanks or pipes.

 

Strontium-90 is formed as a by-product of nuclear fission. Tests showed that levels of strontium in groundwater at the Fukushima plant had increased 100-fold since the end of last year, Toshihiko Fukuda, a Tepco official, told media.

 

Tritium, commonly used in glow-in-the-dark watches, was found at eight times the allowable level.

 

A Tepco official said that samples from the sea showed no rise in either substance and the company believed the groundwater was being contained by concrete foundations.

 

But the discovery is another set-back for Tepco's plan to pump groundwater from the plant into the sea, correspondents say.

[grungy-gonads 54]

Just be totally reassured that TEPCO are sorry.

Possibly even very sorry.

 

More on that here:

 

http://www.snowjapanforums.com/index.php/topic/20368-tepco-they-are-very-sorry/

[pie-eater 207]

TEPCO dudes being sorry, 20 minutes ago

 

 

They are currently reading the Gambarimasho thread.

[NoFakie 45]

Tritium, commonly used in glow-in-the-dark watches, was found at eight times the allowable level.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk0WzCtF0yY

[pie-eater 207]

commonly used in glow-in-the-dark watches

 

Looking on the bright side, this could quite possible mean a boom for glow in the dark watch manufacturers.

 

That's Abenomics for you!

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Dalgety Bay in Fife, Scotland has been contaminated with Radium since the end of WWII, 10 mega becquerels worth of radium that came from old WWII fight plane instruments that were landfilled there....dunno exactly what that means but that sounds bad. The fact that Fifers have 3 legs should've been a dead giveaway

[muikabochi 208]

[BagOfCrisps 24]

The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant has said contaminated ground water had likely been flowing into the sea, acknowledging such a leakage for the first time.

 

Tokyo Electric Power Co, or Tepco, also came under fire on Monday for the revelation that the number of plant workers with thyroid radiation exposure times exceeding the threshold levels for increased cancer risks was ten times the number it had released previously.

 

Tepco has been repeatedly blamed for overlooking early signs, and covering up or delaying the disclosure of problems and mishaps.

 

The head of Japan's new Nuclear Regulation Authority, created since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami wrecked Fukushima, said this month he believed contamination of the sea had been continuing since the accident.

 

The admission came when company general manager, Masayuki Ono, told news conference that plant officials have come to believe that radioactive water that leaked from the wrecked reactors and is likely to have seeped into the underground water system and escaped into sea.

 

Nuclear officials and experts have suspected a leak from the Fukushima Dai-ichi since early in the crisis, but Tepco had previously failed to confirm the ground water leakage more than two years.

 

"We would like to offer our deep apology for causing grave worries for many people, especially for people in Fukushima," Ono said.

 

Tepco said that based on water sample tests, any impact of the leakage appeared to be contained by silt fences erected near the devastated reactors.

 

The utility is already injecting the chemical sodium silicate into part of the seawall separating the ocean from the plant site to prevent ground water from seeping through.

 

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima plant, triggering fuel meltdowns and causing radiation leakage, food contamination and mass evacuations.

 

Tepco this month acknowledged that levels of radiation in groundwater had soared, suggesting highly toxic materials from the plant were getting closer to the Pacific.

[muikabochi 208]

The important thing, of course, is that they are sorry.

[69 5]

Shhhh, try to keep it quiet.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant has said contaminated ground water had likely been flowing into the sea, acknowledging such a leakage for the first time.

 

Tokyo Electric Power Co, or Tepco, also came under fire on Monday for the revelation that the number of plant workers with thyroid radiation exposure times exceeding the threshold levels for increased cancer risks was ten times the number it had released previously.

 

Tepco has been repeatedly blamed for overlooking early signs, and covering up or delaying the disclosure of problems and mishaps.

 

The head of Japan's new Nuclear Regulation Authority, created since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami wrecked Fukushima, said this month he believed contamination of the sea had been continuing since the accident.

 

The admission came when company general manager, Masayuki Ono, told news conference that plant officials have come to believe that radioactive water that leaked from the wrecked reactors and is likely to have seeped into the underground water system and escaped into sea.

 

Nuclear officials and experts have suspected a leak from the Fukushima Dai-ichi since early in the crisis, but Tepco had previously failed to confirm the ground water leakage more than two years.

 

"We would like to offer our deep apology for causing grave worries for many people, especially for people in Fukushima," Ono said.

 

Tepco said that based on water sample tests, any impact of the leakage appeared to be contained by silt fences erected near the devastated reactors.

 

The utility is already injecting the chemical sodium silicate into part of the seawall separating the ocean from the plant site to prevent ground water from seeping through.

 

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima plant, triggering fuel meltdowns and causing radiation leakage, food contamination and mass evacuations.

 

Tepco this month acknowledged that levels of radiation in groundwater had soared, suggesting highly toxic materials from the plant were getting closer to the Pacific.

 

"..."We would like to offer our deep apology for causing grave worries for many people, especially for people in Fukushima," Ono said...."

 

 

Oh ok then, yeah sure....no problems

[xxx 2]

Japan says it is taking steps (in the other direction) to prevent contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant leaking into the sea.

 

The plant's operator recently admitted for the first time that radioactive water was still going into the sea.

 

A government spokesman said the authorities had taken immediate action and should be well clear soon.

[fukdane 2]

One day in the future, we'll probably know exactly what happened and is currently happening.

[BagOfCrisps 24]

And today,

 

Japan's nuclear watchdog has said the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is facing a new "emergency" caused by a build-up of radioactive groundwater.

 

A barrier built to contain the water has already been breached, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority warned.

 

This means the amount of contaminated water seeping into the Pacific Ocean could accelerate rapidly, it said.

 

There has been spate of water leaks and power failures at the plant, devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

 

Its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), has been criticised heavily for its lack of transparency over the leaks.

 

'Weak sense of crisis'

Tepco admitted for the first time last month that radioactive groundwater had breached an underground barrier and been leaking into the sea, but said it was taking steps to prevent it.

 

However, the head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force, Shinji Kinjo, told the Reuters news agency on Monday that the countermeasures were only a temporary solution.

 

Tepco's "sense of crisis is weak," Mr Kinjo said. "This is why you can't just leave it up to Tepco alone"

 

"Right now, we have an emergency," he added.

 

If the underground barrier is breached, the watchdog warns, the water could start to seep through shallower areas of earth.

 

Once it reaches the surface, it could start to flow "extremely fast", says Mr Kinjo.

 

Contaminated water could rise to the ground's surface within three weeks, the Asahi newspaper predicted on Saturday.

 

The contaminated water is thought to have come from the 400 tonnes of groundwater pumped into the plant every day to cool the reactors.

 

Tepco 'in trouble'

Tepco admitted on Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium may have leaked into the sea since the disaster.

 

It has been clear for months now that the operators of the Fukushima plant are in deep trouble, says the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.

 

The only course of action, he continues, is to pump water out. But this has to be stored, and more than 1,000 giant holding tanks surrounding the plant are nearly all full, he adds.

[NoFakie 45]

Pie eater's got the right idea with a dome. The twist is that they need to build it underground.

[HelperElfMissy 42]

Two domes. Sealed together like a kinder surprise.

 

Only the contents are not such a nice surprise...

[pie-eater 207]

Don't worry folks, even though I'm here in England on holiday (and waking up at 6am every day still ), I'm still planning and moving ahead with the dome plans.

Double domes is something being considered of course. Fairly technical.

 

In the meantime, we have two things to ease our minds regarding Fukushima glowing globs of green:

 

1) TEPCO are very probably - surely - very sorry

2) Abenomics

 

[grungy-gonads 54]

But remember, we can't be having any fannying about with beer and pies, pie-eater!

 

[Tubby Beaver 209]

 

Pump and pray: Tepco might have to pour water on Fukushima wreckage forever

 

Fukushima is a nightmare disaster area, and no one has the slightest idea what to do. The game is to prevent the crippled nuclear plant from turning into an “open-air super reactor spectacular” which would result in a hazardous, melted catastrophe.

 

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin – his control

Stops with the shore; -- upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, not does remain

A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own

 

George Gordon Byron, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II

On April 25, 2011 – one month after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant and the anniversary of Chernobyl - I was interviewed by RT and asked to compare Chernobyl and Fukushima. The clip, which you can find on YouTube, was entitled, “Can’t seal Fukushima like Chernobyl - it all goes into the sea.” Since then, huge amounts of radioactivity have flowed from the wrecked reactors directly into the Pacific Ocean. Attempts to stop the flow of contaminated water from Fukushima into the sea were always unlikely to succeed. It is like trying to push water uphill. Now they all seem to have woken up to the issue and have begun to panic.

 

The problem is this: the fission process in a reactor creates huge amounts of heat. Of course, that is the whole point of the machine - the heat makes steam which runs turbines. Water is pumped through channels between the fuel rods and this cools them and heats the water. If there is no water, or the channels are blocked, the heat actually melts the fuel into a big blob which falls to the bottom of the steel vessel in which all this occurs - the pressure vessel - and then melts its way through the steel, into the ground, and down in the direction of China. Well, not China in this case, but actually Buenos Aires, Argentina (I figured out).

 

 

TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)

 

I have been keeping an eye on developments, and it is quite clear that the reactors are no longer containing the molten fuel - some proportion of which is now in the ground underneath them. Both this material and the remaining material in what was the containment are very hot and are fissioning. Tepco is quite aware - and so is everyone else in the know - that the only hope of preventing what could become an open-air super reactor spectacular is to cool the fuel, the lumps of fuel distributed throughout the system, mainly in the holed pressure vessels, and also in the spent fuel tanks and in the ground under the reactors. That all this is fissioning away merrily (though at a low level) is clear from the occasional reports of short half life nuclides like the radioXenons. The game is to prevent it all turning into the open air super reactor located somewhere under the ground. To do this, they have to pump vast amounts of water into the reactors, the fuel pond and generally all over the area where they think the stuff is or might be. This means seawater since luckily they are near the sea. But they are also unluckily near the sea - since you cannot pump the sea onto the land without it wanting to flow back into the sea.

 

Now a good proportion of the radioactive elements, the radionuclides, are soluble in water. The Caesiums 137 and 134, Strontiums 89 and 90, Barium 140, Radium 226, Lead 210, Rutheniums and Rhodiums, Silvers and Mercuries, Carbons and Tritiums, Iodines and noble gases Kryptons and Xenons merrily dissolve in the hot seawater. There is also a likelihood that the normally insoluble Uraniums, Plutoniums and Neptuniums will dissolve in seawater to some extent, because of the chloride ions. And if they don’t, the micron and nano-particles of these materials will disperse in the water as colloidal suspensions. So a lot of this stuff gets into the sea. Of course, most of the fuss is being made by the Americans who are on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. How unfair that the USA should suffer from the Japanese affair, they think. And also feel a level of fear, underneath all this. As perhaps they should since it is their crappy reactors that blew up.

 

We hear that 400 tons of highly radioactive water is now escaping the barriers that Tepco erected and is reaching the sea. Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said on August 7 that “stabilizing Fukushima is our challenge.” Tepco said, “This is extremely serious — we are unable to control radioactive water seeping out of the Fukushima plant.” CNN quoted “industry experts” saying that “Tepco has failed to address the problem...[the experts] question Tepco’s ability to safely decommission the plant.”

 

 

TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)

 

There are some things I want to say about all this. First is the inevitable discourse manipulation - something that we have seen in the media ever since this disaster occurred. “Decommission the plant” suggests some calm and ordered scientific process akin to shutting down and defueling an old reactor which has reached the end of its design life. It sparks images of a wise nuclear engineer in a lab coat consulting a document, discussing some issue with a worker in brilliant white overalls with a Tepco logo, wearing a white hard-hat. The reality is that this is a nightmare disaster area where no one has the slightest idea what to do and which has always been out of control. All that they can do is continue to pump in the seawater to hope that the various lumps of molten fuel will not increase their rate of fissioning. And pray. The water will then pick up the radionuclides and flow downhill back to the sea. Of course, they can put up a barrier; surround the plant with a wall. But eventually the water will fill up the pond and flow over the wall. All that water will create a soggy marsh and destabilize the foundations of the reactor buildings which will then collapse and prevent further cooling. Then the Spectacular. All this is predictable enough.

 

Let us look at some numbers. Four hundred tons of seawater a day are flowing into the sea. That is 400 cubic meters. In one year, that is 146,000 cubic meters. That is a pond 10 meters deep and 120 meters square. This will have to go on forever, a new pond every year, unless they can get the radioactive material out. But here is the other problem. They can’t get close enough because the radiation levels are too high. The water itself is lethally radioactive. Gamma radiation levels tens of meters from the water are enormously high. No one can approach without being fried.

 

But I want to make two other points. The first is that the Pacific Ocean is big enough for this level of release not to represent the global catastrophe that some are predicting. Let’s get some scoping perspective on this. The volume of the North Pacific is 300 million cubic kilometers. The total inventory of the four Fukushima Daiichi reactors, including their spent fuel pools, is 732 tons of Uranium and Plutonium fuel which is largely insoluble in sea water. The inventory in terms of the medium half-life nuclides of radiological significance Cs-137, Cs-134 and Strontium-90, is 3 x 1018 becquerels (Bq) each. Adding these up gives about 1019 Bq. If we dissolve that entire amount into the Pacific, we get a mean concentration of 33 Bq per cubic meter - not great, but not lethal. Of course this is ridiculous since the catastrophe released less than 1017 Bq of these combined nuclides and even if all of this ends up in the sea (which it may do), the overall dilution will result in a concentration of 1 Bq per cubic meter. So the people in California can relax. In fact, the contamination of California and indeed the rest of the planet from the global weapons test fallout of 1959-1962 was far worse, and resulted in the cancer epidemic which began in 1980. The atmospheric megaton explosions drove the radioactivity into the stratosphere and the rain brought it back to earth to get into the milk, the food, the air, and our children’s bones. Kennedy and Kruschev called a halt in 1963, saving millions.

 

 

TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (AFP Photo / Noboru Hashimoto)

 

What we have here in Fukushima is more local, but still very deadly and certainly worse than Chernobyl since the populations are so large. And this brings me to my second point, and a warning to the Japanese people. The contamination of the sea results in adsorption of the radionuclides by the sand and silt on the coast and river estuaries. The east coast of Japan, the sediment and sand on the shores, will now be horribly radioactive. This material is re-suspended into the air through a process called sea-to-land transfer. The coastal air they inhale is laden with radioactive particles. I know about this since I was asked in 1998 by the Irish State to carry out a two-year study of the cancer effects of releases into the Irish Sea by the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield. We looked at small area data leaked to us by the Welsh Cancer Registry covering the period of 1974-1989, when Sellafield was releasing significant amounts of radio-Caesium, radio-Strontium, and Plutonium. Results showed a remarkable and sharp 30 per cent increase in cancer rates in those living within 1km of the coast. The effect was very local and dropped away sharply at 2km. In trying to discover the cause, we came across measurements made by the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Using special cloth filters, they had measured Plutonium in the air by distance from the contaminated coast. The trend was the same as the cancer trend, increasing sharply in the 1km strip near the coast. We later examined cancer rates in a higher resolution questionnaire study in Carlingford, Ireland. This clearly showed the effect increasing inside the 1km radius in the same way. The results were never published in scientific literature but were presented to the UK CERRIE committee and eventually made it into a book which I wrote in 2007 entitled, “Wolves of Water.” Make no mistake, this is a deadly effect. By 2003, we had found 20-fold excess risk of leukemia and brain tumours in the population of children on the north Wales coast. The children were denied of course by the Welsh Cancer Intelligence Unit that supplanted the old Welsh Cancer Registry - which had been shut down immediately after the data was released to us. We did publish this in scientific literature.

 

Nevertheless, the sea-to-land effect is real. And anyone living within 1km of the coast to at least 200km north or south of Fukushima should get out. They should evacuate inland. It is not eating the fish and shellfish that gets you - it’s breathing.

 

And what about the future? The future is bleak. I see no way of resolving the catastrophe. They will either have to pour water on the wreckage forever, and thus continue to contaminate the local sea, or find some more drastic immediate solution. I was told that US experts had the idea at the beginning of bombing the reactors into the harbour. Not so stupid in my opinion. That at least may enable them to get sufficiently close to the pieces to pick them up, and should also solve the cooling problem. Apparently (my contact said) the French argued them out of it because of the negative effect on nuclear energy (and Uranium shares).

[pie-eater 207]

'Or find some more drastic immediate solution'

 

Domes.

 

Though, I am still slightly puzzled why huge ice cubes wouldn't work. Colder than water and take longer to melt.

 

Anyway, folks, it looks like Abe is on the case so it'll all be sorted and cleaned up with time to spare before tea tomorrow night.

[muikabochi 208]

It was sounding somewhat worrying there, pie-eater, but you have brought it back into focus.

[fukdane 2]

I wonder what an "open-air super reactor spectacular" involves?

[BagOfCrisps 24]

Wait a bit and find out!

[Nisoko 6]

I'm just hoping pie-eater's domes can be implemented sooner than later. I'd jolly well feel safer (as the man himself might say).

[muikabochi 208]

 

Justbwish this was more of an urgent story here now.