There has been progress but I do not consider this an end to the crisis. There are many elements of the crisis that still continues and considering the truthfulness of the Japanese government and TEPCO, I have doubts about the success of the current efforts.
James Pilant
We have gone from contained to desperate and now we have arrived at the surreal. Maybe next they’ll try superglue or shopping carts. Neither will work but like the sawdust, they’ll give the impression that TEPCO, the Japanese utility, cares.
By the way, TEPCO’s shares are publicly traded. If you want to buy low, this is a good time.
James Pilant
Sawdust. It’s not the first thing most people would choose to put between themselves and highly contaminated radioactive water. But a mixture of sawdust — ogakuzu in Japanese — with chemicals and shredded newspaper is precisely what nuclear safety authorities and power plant officials turned to in trying to plug a 8-inch crack in a shaft near reactor 2 at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima over the weekend.
Unfortunately, like the concrete they tried before it, the sawdust didn’t work, and as of Monday, the flow of irradiated water into the sea from the shaft continued unabated. “We have not succeeded yet,” Ken Morita, director of the international affairs office at Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), acknowledged to TIME on Monday morning. “We will try again today.”
What will they try next? For the past three weeks, that has been the question hovering in the irradiated air above Fukushima, where each passing day seems to bring a new and unprecedented challenge for the ebattled Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to shut down the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant safely.
My father tells me that the news from Fukushima is all over the cable news. I wouldn’t know. I’m careful not to watch. I prefer my sources, BBC, Reuters, the New York Times, McClatchy, AP and a few others. The 24 news programs generate a lot of nonsense and I only occasionally use clips.
For my taste there should be more news about these events in the more regular media.
James Pilant
From the New York Times –
Experts estimate that about seven tons an hour of radioactive water is escaping the pit. Safety officials have said that the water, which appears to be coming from the damaged No. 2 reactor, contains one million becquerels per liter of iodine 131, or about 10,000 times the levels normally found in water at a nuclear plant.
“There is still a steady stream of water from the pit,” Mr. Nishiyama said, but workers would continue to “observe and evaluate” the situation overnight.
The leak underscores the dangerous side effects of the strategy to cool the plant’s reactors and spent fuel storage pools by pumping them with hundreds of tons of water. While much of that water evaporates, a significant portion also turns into dangerous runoff that has been discovered in various parts of the plant, endangering workers at the plant and hindering repair efforts. On March 24, three workers were injured when they stepped into a pool of radioactive water in one of the plant’s turbine buildings.
In recent days, workers have tried to clear the contaminated pools, but have struggled to find places to store the water. Meanwhile, levels of iodine 131 that are over 4,000 times normal, as well as levels of cesium 137 that are 527 times normal have been detected in seawater taken 1,080 feet away from the plant, raising fears of damage to sea life.
Tokyo Electric has said it has little choice but to pump more water into the reactors at the moment, since the normal cooling systems at the plant are inoperable and more radioactive material would be released if the reactors were allowed to melt down fully or if the rods caught fire.
You might want to make a copy of this post. When someone is carefully explaining to you as if to a small child that while there have been problems, this kind of thing (meltdowns, leaks, etc.) couldn’t happen in the United States – While he is consigning you to the ranks of the unrealistic tree huggers who unlike him don’t deal with the “real world,” you might wave this in front of his often unseeing eyes and watch a momentary doubt pass like a wedding veil briefly over his face. He’ll think for a moment about claiming that the NRC is also a bunch of tree huggers but decide against it. Then smiling he will regain the offensive by saying, “Thats why it can’t happen here. Our guys are better than there guys when it comes to safety. See right there in the paper. You’ve proved mycase.”
At this point, give up on persuasion. Give up on logic and reason. You are dealing with a religion, a belief that the real world involves cruel often vicious decisions and when someone raises a moral or ethical question or even a simple fact, they are to be considered, “unrealistic.”
They believe that we must be cruel and unflinching, ever striving to be tougher and less principled than our enemies, who are everywhere.
I am willing to consider nuclear power as a part of an energy policy but I want careful safeguards and real assurances. The PR nonsense and hack formulaic writing gives me that impression that once I am consigned to the anti-nuclear wackos, my concerns are irrelevant.
If that is going to be the level of discourse, then I don’t want any nuclear power anywhere on this planet.
The concerns of many that there were problems in safety have been ratified cruelly by events. And yet I read over and over again how this is just a bump in the road while listening to the insults directed against those who committed the greatest crime possible in the dispute over nuclear power, being right.
James Pilant
The Wolf Creek nuclear power plant is among three in the United States that need more intensive oversight, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress on Thursday.
NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko stressed that all 65 nuclear generating stations, which have a total of 104 reactors, are operating safely. But Jaczko said Wolf Creek and two others need a higher level of review because of continuing problems with safety systems and unplanned shutdowns.
Jaczko told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the three plants “are the ones we are most concerned about.” The other two are the H.B. Robinson plant in Hartsville, S.C., and the Fort Calhoun plant near Omaha, about 180 miles northwest of Kansas City.
This crisis just keeps on going. I want an end to it. I want everybody to be okay, unhurt, undamaged. But I am not going to get my wish. The people who created this disaster were so smart, so well placed and so well financed that all warnings no matter how factual bounced off of them.
Those who opposed nuclear power from the fringe to the most respectable were consigned as unrealistic tree huggers.
Well, the treehuggers got it right.
But I tell you, I feel pain every time I come across another article that talks about how this is just like getting another chest x-ray a year and that compared to stepladders and animal attacks the casualties have been few.
There comes a point at which this kind of commentary moves from the average to the mediocre, from opinion writing to caricature.
Even when they admit some unfortunate fact, they still conclude with, “It can’t happen here.”
It can’t happen here. It can, does and will. Human stupidity is a common characteristic. Add human stupidity to the semi-eternal capabilities of radiation and you have a very bad mix indeed.
Tens of thousands of Japanese may never be able to return to their homes and possessions. A thousand of the dead from the tsunami and earthquake cannot be gathered from the area. They rot uncared for.
This is the reality, a reality which will be denied over and over again. It’s already being denied.
The advocates of nuclear power will hope that in time this will all go away. Memories will fade, new PR, friendly hack articles will appear and nuclear power will be heralded as the cure for our problems.
And then some more will be built – until the next “accident.”
James Pilant
From McClatchy –
Radiation levels spiked inside and outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Thursday, slowing work on the facility once again and once more throwing into doubt the integrity of the containment vessels that hold the fuel rods.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials said levels of radioactive iodine in water at the plant spiked to levels 10,000 times permissible limits, preventing workers from getting near the water.
Engineers have been pumping water out of the tunnels in the basements of the facilities and into holding areas in an attempt to permit access to areas where workers are trying to restore electricity to the cooling pumps that could ultimately bring the situation at the stricken facility under control. But they cannot do so when radiation levels are that high.
You’ll want to read this one. It’s kind of poignant.
Probably more than a few of you have been curious as to what the workers are going through. Here’s an idea.
James Pilant
From the NewScientist –
At one point up to 600 of them were living in a building on the grounds of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, without adequate food or sleep. The Fukushima workers – the men and women working round the clock to prevent the reactors deteriorating further – have been at the centre of world media attention, and now a trickle of emails and web postings from them is emerging.
This is incredible. We now have a nuclear zone where people will not be able to live for what must be at least years.
How much land are we talking about? Probably at least the twenty kilometer evacuation zone around the plant. That’s 1,256 square kilometers. Could it include some or all of the ten kilometer zone beyond that? If it does that’s 2,826 square kilometers. What if it keeps spreading? Your guess is as good as mine.
However, the radiation leakage is probably going to decide how much has to be evacuated for how long.
This is the part the advocates of nuclear power never seem to talk about, hundreds of square miles of what was once habitable land off limits to humans save for “safe” exposure times. Essentially a wasteland.
And this crisis is far from over.
James Pilant
From BBC News –
More than 70,000 people have been evacuated from a 20km (12-mile) evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Another 136,000 people who live in a 10km zone beyond that have been encouraged by the authorities to leave or to stay indoors.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the evacuation would be a “long-term” operation.
“So therefore, we are giving instructions on how to proceed with the continuation of children’s’ education, and the employment of people who are unable to work because of the evacuation order,” he said.
Highly radioactive water continues to leak at the plant; for the first time it has been found in groundwater 15m below reactor 1.
From further down –
The authorities are resisting calls from the UN’s atomic agency to expand the exclusion zone around the plant, after it found safe radiation limits had been exceeded at the village of Iitate, 40km away.
In case you are curious, that’s 5024 square kilometers.
Mr. Gunderson has a lot to say about the crisis at the reactors in Japan. I saw one of his videos today for the first time. I am impressed. However, first impressions are not always accurate. If any of my kind readers have any opinion or knowledge about Mr. Gunderson or his organization, Fairewinds Associates, I want you to tell me.
Here are two videos. One is from yesterday and the other is from a network show.
James Pilant
On the Rachel Maddow Show –
Very short video of a newscast. JP
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