Nuclear accident follows Japanese earthqauke

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 24 Apr 2011, 18:13

Here's a neat little calculator:

http://www.radprocalculator.com/Gamma.aspx

Not all Becquerels are equal.

2 As and a B · Post by **2 As and a B** » 25 Apr 2011, 07:17

Enough debris has been removed to fill 50 containers, and it is being kept in a field on the mountainside.

How quaint.

At least they'll always be able to refind it, should it happen to get lost again.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 25 Apr 2011, 07:32

I suspect there a bit of translation drift going on. For 'mountainside' read 'the sloping bank behind the power station that is well above sea level'!

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 26 Apr 2011, 11:55

Monitoring radiation in Fukushima City

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxUZbnlzSv0

Taking the instrument display at face value i.e. dated 24th April and the numbers showing micro Sieverts per hour, ranging from very little to over ten and sometimes approaching 100 uSv/hr near the pipe ends, I would conclude that any child playing in the dust at those locations is in trouble. If she licks her fingers....

Average values are not a good indicator of harm. A roof draining via gutters to a downpipe opening to a gravel soakaway is going to concentrate fallout dust by a couple of orders of magnitude.

300 000 people live in this city. Some of the smaller ones will play near drainpipes.

Mean Mr Mustard · Post by **Mean Mr Mustard** » 26 Apr 2011, 13:30

From the Automatic Earth -

There are increasingly reports coming out that claim that at least one of the explosions witnessed at Fukushima was not a hydrogen blast, but a nuclear explosion -in a spent fuel pool.

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2 ... es-to.html

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 26 Apr 2011, 14:30

Probably following Chris Busby's interview yesterday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-3Kf4Ja ... ideo_title

There are a lot of unanswered question but the Japanese government and TEPCO are so reluctant to say what they know one is left to speculate.

Post by **kenneal - lagger** » 26 Apr 2011, 14:59

Has anyone else noticed that the Inspector keeps well away, most of the time, from this thread about actual happenings in a nuclear industry disaster but is happy to bull sh*t about the grand theory elsewhere?

Mean Mr Mustard · Post by **Mean Mr Mustard** » 26 Apr 2011, 15:35

kenneal wrote:Has anyone else noticed that the Inspector keeps well away, most of the time, from this thread about actual happenings in a nuclear industry disaster but is happy to bull sh*t about the grand theory elsewhere?

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 26 Apr 2011, 19:31

I've noticed that apart from one (commendable) comment about bee-keeping, all he's done here is try and trash wind power and any anti-nuclear-power positions. And, erm, failed.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 26 Apr 2011, 21:06

Oliver Richtenstein gives us a thoughtful essay, concluding thus:

And, to you, dear citizen, if you have doubts about your own knowledge: Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have the brain or time or will to learn and think and understand whatever the problem is. That’s what the political and corporate charlatans want you to believe: They want you to be as ignorant as possible. So they can continue to insult our intelligence by claiming that only they can understand what they understand and treat us like fools promising that nuclear energy will save humanity, free of charge. That’s too good to be true. It is your civil duty to know what is what.

In reality, most people will understand enough about nuclear energy if they spend 15 Minutes on Wikipedia. Let anyone who is reasonable enough to care about the problem have a voice in this, whether they’re shoe makers, nurses, gymnastic teachers, grandmothers or hairdressers. There is not just a scientific, political and managerial perspective on nuclear energy. There are many different very reasonable perspectives, and they all count–as long as they are honest and thought through.

Maybe the machines we need are not those that help us lifting heavier weights than our arms can carry, running faster than our legs can move, seeing further than our eyes can see, hearing more than our ears can hear — what we need is support to be able to think clearly. A thinking that allows us to rely on less technology. Wishful thinking? Pretty words? Lame dreaming? Just look at the insane amount of energy all these Japanese electric air conditioners pump into the atmosphere because of bad isolation…

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ ... fukushima/

Ippoippo · Post by **Ippoippo** » 26 Apr 2011, 21:25

biffvernon wrote:Monitoring radiation in Fukushima City

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxUZbnlzSv0

Taking the instrument display at face value i.e. dated 24th April and the numbers showing micro Sieverts per hour, ranging from very little to over ten and sometimes approaching 100 uSv/hr near the pipe ends, I would conclude that any child playing in the dust at those locations is in trouble. If she licks her fingers....

Average values are not a good indicator of harm. A roof draining via gutters to a downpipe opening to a gravel soakaway is going to concentrate fallout dust by a couple of orders of magnitude.

300 000 people live in this city. Some of the smaller ones will play near drainpipes.

I think what this video shows is that you simply can't just say, distance x is safe, distance y is not safe. There's going to be hotspots in 'safe' areas and vice-versa.
The whole way to find out if a place is safe or within acceptable limits (to be determined by sensible debate) is to measure everywhere. And there's the problem, just how time consuming would that be!

What I am noticing though is that third-party, independent readings are starting to get hard to get hold of. Most of the recent readings for Fukushima prefecture and Tochigi (the prefecture to the south of Fukushima) are from local government and seem to be measuring airbourne radiation. And as we saw in that video, those numbers can be quite different.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 26 Apr 2011, 22:08

Barf in a tweet wrote:
Friend of mine says Fukushima will be 100x worse than Chernobyl, so he bought 30 frozen pizzas just in case. I wish I had smarter friends.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 27 Apr 2011, 11:22

biffvernon wrote:Oliver Richtenstein gives us a thoughtful essay, concluding thus:
And, to you, dear citizen, if you have doubts about your own knowledge: Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have the brain or time or will to learn and think and understand whatever the problem is. That’s what the political and corporate charlatans want you to believe: They want you to be as ignorant as possible. So they can continue to insult our intelligence by claiming that only they can understand what they understand and treat us like fools promising that nuclear energy will save humanity, free of charge. That’s too good to be true. It is your civil duty to know what is what.

In reality, most people will understand enough about nuclear energy if they spend 15 Minutes on Wikipedia. Let anyone who is reasonable enough to care about the problem have a voice in this, whether they’re shoe makers, nurses, gymnastic teachers, grandmothers or hairdressers. There is not just a scientific, political and managerial perspective on nuclear energy. There are many different very reasonable perspectives, and they all count–as long as they are honest and thought through.

Maybe the machines we need are not those that help us lifting heavier weights than our arms can carry, running faster than our legs can move, seeing further than our eyes can see, hearing more than our ears can hear — what we need is support to be able to think clearly. A thinking that allows us to rely on less technology. Wishful thinking? Pretty words? Lame dreaming? Just look at the insane amount of energy all these Japanese electric air conditioners pump into the atmosphere because of bad isolation…
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ ... fukushima/

Nice article. Errmm, he's corrected his mistake.

2 As and a B · Post by **2 As and a B** » 27 Apr 2011, 12:58

Radiation Readings in Fukushima Reactor Rise to Highest Since Crisis Began

By Tsuyoshi Inajima and Michio Nakayama - Apr 27, 2011 10:14 AM GMT

Radiation readings at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi station rose to the highest since an earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems, impeding efforts to contain the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Two robots sent into the reactor No. 1 building at the plant yesterday took readings as high as 1,120 millisierverts of radiation per hour, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at Tokyo Electric Power Co., said today. That’s more than four times the annual dose permitted to nuclear workers at the stricken plant.

...article continues

2 As and a B · Post by **2 As and a B** » 27 Apr 2011, 13:00

Water may be leaking from No. 4 reactor fuel pool

The operator of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says water may be leaking from the spent fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor.

More than 1,500 spent fuel rods are stored in the pool, the largest number at the site.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, has been injecting water daily into the pool to make up for the loss of cooling function and prevent the fuel rods from being exposed and further damaged.

TEPCO has poured in 140 to 210 tons of water over each of the last few days. The company found that water levels in the pool were 10 to 40 centimeters lower than expected despite the water injections.

The walls of the reactor building supporting the pool were severely damaged by a hydrogen explosion last month. TEPCO says the pool may have been damaged by the blast as well.

According to a schedule announced earlier on containing the ongoing emergency, TEPCO plans to install concrete pillars to support the fuel pool by around July to increase its earthquake resistance.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 09:05 +0900 (JST)

Original includes video