I was waiting for “Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon” and J. N. Nielson’s take on the disaster at the nuclear plants in Japan.
He did not disappoint.
Please read this excellent piece.
James Pilant
Author: southwerk
I am a 53 year old teacher. I have double major in Speech and Criminal Justice resulting in a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and a law degree.
United States Nuclear Regulations Are “Gold Standard” or Just Gold Plated Fakery?
It appears virtually no American politician has lost any faith whatsoever in nuclear power. It also appears from numerous pro-nuclear power commentators that none of Japan’s problems could happen here (although their plants are based on U.S. designs and we have 54 virtually identical ones).
Please read the first “happy, happy, U.S. Number 1” story and then compare it with story number 2 and 3.
It gives an excellent picture of our American beltway political fantasy versus unpalatable facts.
James Pilant
Graham: U.S. nuclear regulations are ‘gold standard’ (via McClatchy)
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday that the Japanese crisis hasn’t shaken his confidence in nuclear power and praised President Barack Obama for moving ahead with federal loan guarantees to build new plants.
Graham said four new reactors planned for South Carolina and Georgia — two in each state — have different designs than the Fukishima Daiichi plant facing possible core meltdowns at as many as six reactors.
“These new designs are completely different than the Japanese reactors built in 1971,” Graham said. “The new designs do not depend on electrical pumps or mechanical systems to cool the reactors. The water going into the cooling system is gravity fed, so it’s not reliant on electricity to cool the reactor.”
House Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn said the Japanese catastrophe will deliver “important lessons,” but he also pushed back against calls from some lawmakers to freeze all permitting of new nuclear plants in the United States.
“I have absolute confidence in the rigorous inspection and licensing regime in place at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Clyburn, of Columbia, said. “I remain convinced that a clean energy future will not be possible without an investment in a diverse set of energy sources, including a renewed commitment to nuclear energy.”
U.S. nuclear plants store more spent fuel than Japan’s (via McClatchy)
U.S. nuclear plants use the same sort of pools to cool spent nuclear-fuel rods as the ones now in danger of spewing radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, only the U.S. pools hold much more nuclear material. That’s raising the question of whether more spent fuel should be taken out of the pools at U.S. power plants to reduce risks. Workers in Japan have been struggling for days to get water into the spent-fuel pools at the plant, so that the fuel rods won’t be exposed to the air, burst into flames and set off a large radiological release.
Experts are debating whether America’s spent fuel pools would fare as badly or worse in an accident, and whether they could be made safer.
Nuclear safety: Five recent ‘near miss’ incidents at US nuclear power plants (via The Christian Science Monitor)
Fourteen safety-related events at nuclear power plants required follow-up inspections from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC reported in 2010. These “near-miss” events “raised the risk of damage to the reactor core – and thus to the safety of workers and the public,” concluded a new report, “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2010,” by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Iodine-131 and Cesium-137
I found this on the web and added Wikipedia’s description of the dangers.
James Pilant
From Popular Mechanics
The biggest radioactive risk right now comes from the byproducts of fission. Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the reactors, has reported releases of both iodine-131 and cesium-137, the two primary radionuclides that nuclear fission creates. According to Hutchinson, strontium-90 has also been detected, and the presence of cesium and strontium indicates fuel melting.
Iodine-131 moves through the atmosphere more easily than cesium-137, but it has a half-life of only eight days, according to Classic. That means it would be all but gone within weeks. Cesium-137, on the other hand, attaches itself to particles or debris. That means that eventually cesium-137 will fall out of the air onto the ground, and there it will stay until it decays. The isotope’s half-life is about 30 years, so it would be a long time before an area it traveled to would be free from radiation. Depending on the level of radiation, the area would have to be sectioned off or the material dealt with by a hazardous waste disposal team. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, exposure to radiation from cesium-137 near a nuclear accident site could significantly increase the risk of cancer. Trace amounts of cesium-137 are already in the environment worldwide, mostly because of nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and ’60s, but most of that has decayed.
The effects of exposure to Iodine-131 from Wikipedia
Iodine in food is absorbed by the body and preferentially concentrated in the thyroid where it is needed for the functioning of that gland. When 131I is present in high levels in the environment from radioactive fallout, it can be absorbed through contaminated food, and will also accumulate in the thyroid. As it decays, it may cause damage to the thyroid. The primary risk from exposure to high levels of 131I is the chance occurrence of radiogenic thyroid cancer in later life. Other risks include the possibility of non-cancerous growths and thyroiditis.
The risk of thyroid cancer in later life appears to diminish with increasing age at time of exposure. Most risk estimates are based on studies in which radiation exposures occurred in children or teenagers. When adults are exposed, it has been difficult for epidemiologists to detect a statistically significant difference in the rates of thyroid disease above that of a similar but otherwise unexposed group.
The risk can be mitigated by taking iodine supplements, raising the total amount of iodine in the body and therefore reducing uptake and retention in tissues and lowering the relative proportion of radioactive iodine. Unfortunately, such supplements were not distributed to the population living nearest to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the disaster,[6] though they were widely distributed to children in Poland.
The effects of exposure to Cesium-137 : from Wikipedia –
Caesium-137 is water-soluble and chemically toxic in small amounts. The biological behavior of caesium-137 is similar to that of potassium and rubidium. After entering the body, caesium gets more or less uniformly distributed through the body, with higher concentration in muscle tissues and lower in bones. The biological half-life of caesium is rather short at about 70 days.[4] Experiments with dogs showed that a single dose of 3800 μCi/kg (approx. 44 μg/kg of caesium-137) is lethal within three weeks.[5]
Accidental ingestion of caesium-137 can be treated with the chemical Prussian blue, which binds to it chemically and then speeds its expulsion from the body.[6]
Fallout from Chinese Nuclear Test Traveled to the United States in Six Days
I’ve been looking for this for days. I remembered that when I was a little boy that the Chinese tested a nuclear weapon and the fallout reached the United States very quickly. (I was ten years old.) My father used to make sure I saw historical things on television like all the Mercury and Gemini launches, so it was probably something he made sure I saw. I did not think I would find it but there it is, fallout traveling from the Lop Nur Test Site in China to all over the United States.
If any of you have any more on this, I want to see it.
James Pilant
Fig. 1. The Fifth Chinese Nuclear Test was Detonated on Dec. 28, 1966. It “involved thermonuclear material,” and, according to the AEC press release, was a nuclear test in the atmosphere at their test site near Lop Nor.” As indicated above, by the end of Dec. 31, 1966 the leading edge of its fallout cloud extended as far east as the dotted line shown running from Arizona to the Great Lakes. ORNL DWG. 73-4611
From the web site –Nuclear War Survival Skills
It produced fallout that by January 1, 1967 resulted in the fallout cloud covering most of the United States. This one Chinese explosion produced about 15 million curies of iodine- 131 – roughly the same amount as the total release of iodine- 131 into the atmosphere from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. (The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s preliminary estimate is that 10-50 million curies of iodine- 131 were released during the several days of the Chernobyl disaster; in contrast, its estimate of the iodine- 131 released during the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, the worst commercial nuclear power plant accident in American history, is about 20 curies.)
Fig. 1 is from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory report, Trans-Pacific Fallout and Protective Countermeasures (ORNL-4900), written by the author of this book in 1970, but not published until 1973. No classified information was used in any version of this report, that summarized findings of the unclassified Trans-Pacific Fallout Seminar funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. This seminar was attended by experts who came from several research organizations and deliberated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for two days in March of 1970.
Later in 1970 a final draft of this report was submitted to Washington for approval before publication. It was promptly classified. Publication without censorship was not permitted until after it was declassified in its entirety in 1973. None of the recommendations in this pioneering report were acted upon, but many of them are given in this chapter.
The findings and conclusions of the above mentioned 1970 Oak Ridge National Laboratory Trans-Pacific Fallout Seminar, summarized in the 1973 report, were confirmed by a later, more comprehensive study, Assessment and Control of the Transoceanic Fallout Threat, by H. Lee and W. E. Strope (1974; 117 pages), Report EGU 2981 of Stanford Research Institute.
Fallout from the approximately 300 kiloton Chinese test explosion shown in Fig. 1 caused milk from cows that fed on pastures near Oak Ridge, Tennessee and elsewhere to be contaminated with radioiodine, although not with enough to be hazardous to health. However, this milk contamination (up to 900 picocuries of radioactive iodine per liter) and the measured dose rates from the gamma rays emitted from fallout particles deposited in different parts of the United States indicate that trans-Pacific fallout from even an overseas nuclear war in which “only” two or three hundred megatons would be exploded could result in tens of thousands of unprepared Americans suffering thyroid injury.
Jet Stream Over the United States – 3/18/2011
Here’s the jet stream as it looked on 3/18 over the United States. Right now it’s covering a lot of ground.
James Pilant
March 17th, 2011 Satellite Image of the Fukushima Daiichi Plant
Institute for Science and International Security –
DigitalGlobe has released a new commercial satellite image of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site in Japan taken at 10:55AM local time on March 17, 2011. Steam continues to vent out of the top of the Unit 3 reactor building. Steam also appears to be continuing to vent out of the side of the Unit 2 reactor building.
Chernobyl Radiation Map
This is a radiation map from Chernobyl from the web site, 14 HERTZ. It shows how much variation occurs through changes in wind direction.
James Pilant
WorldWind NASA Shows World Wind Patterns – Could it show a Meltdown Cloud of Radiation?
One of my commentators asked if there was a way to look at the wind patterns over the whole earth.
An excellent question.
So, I looked around and found WorldWind. After playing with it for a while, and adding a plug in, it is showing me world cloud patterns.
Are these accurate to now?
I’m using data from NRL Monterey “Real Time” Weather v.1.1.
I chose the last two days of cloud in the Eastern Pacific. It gave me cloud patterns. Obviously this is not my field but it looks like if there was a meltdown you might very well be able to see a visible cloud. If the radiation was too dispersed to see it, you could still follow the cloud patterns.
If anybody knows more about this than I do or has better web sites for this kind of thing. Tell me. I’ll put them up.
James Pilant
Is it ethical to send workers into a nuclear meltdown? (via Lauren Bloom’s Blog)
Lauren Bloom writes on ethical issues. I follow her blog on a regular basis (you should too). I like the thoughts in this entry. They are certainly relevant when so many workers are putting their lives on the line in Japan. Some have already died and many have been injured.
Here, she discusses the ethical criteria for decision makers to send people in harm’s way.
James Pilant
An excerpt from the post –
Of course, the world has always been full of dangerous jobs and, luckily for the rest of us, there have always been brave souls willing to do them. Still, if those of us who stay safe at home while heroes risk their lives are going to be able to look ourselves in the mirror, it’s critically important for a few things to happen. First, the folks who go into danger need to do so voluntarily – no coercion allowed. Second, they need to be told honestly in advance how serious the risks appear to be, not misled by falsely optimistic estimates. Third, they need to be given the necessary logistical support – safety equipment, medical attention, escape craft, you name it – to do the job and get out in one reasonably healthy piece.
(this is just a part of the post, you should click on the link and read the whole article – jp)
A Personal Note from James Pilant
I posted 11 times yesterday and I have spent the last six days frantically trying to keep up with events. So, I am only going to post a few times tonight, so I can catch my breath. I will be in the middle of writing something and scanning the Internet at the same time, and what I am writing needs to be revised or dropped because of new events. Tomorrow, I’ll be back at full power.
I want to thank the many people who have commented in the past few days. You have made my work much easier because you have reassured me that what I am writing is informative and useful, you challenge me with your questions, test my knowledge and training regularly, and have been very polite and kind in your comments. Thank You!
James Pilant
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