Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Status
POSTED BY: HAKEN
UPDATED: Monday, December 22, 2025 19:24
VIEWED: 51428
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The Union of Concerned Scientists’ All Things Nuclear blog http://allthingsnuclear.org/ is a useful source of informed information, including the fact that the level of radiation leakage at Fukushima Dai-Ichi considerably exceeds the design limitations imposed by the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC itself also has a blog http://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/ where they’re doing updates that may be of interest.
The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two
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Reactor 4 in Flames at Fukushima Daiichi.
ABCNEW.GO.COM - The company that operates the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said firefighters are trying to put out a fire at Reactor 4 at the plant. It was just the latest setback in the effort to stabilize the plant, which has already suffered three reported explosions at its six reactors...
http://abcnews.go.com/International/japan-earthquake-radiation-leaking
-fukushima-reactors-containment-vessel/story?id=13136890
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Possibly a bad development.
Large amounts of smoke is billowing from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. No official press release as to the cause.
Speculation is that it could possibly be another hydrogen gas explosions from either Reactor 3 or Reactor 4. Either way, not good. Although not active, Reactor 4 contains 20 years worth of spent fuel rods that can ignite if exposed to air.
You can watch the NHK Live broadcast here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv
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What of the rain falling through all of that radioactive material? That can't be good.
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So, you guys have followed this more than me. Maybe you know the answer to this. I keep reading that the backup generators were damaged. So, the plants couldn't pump fresh water in to cool the reactors.
So, in all these days of the crisis we couldn't get some new generators shipped in? There must be another problem there, but I haven't seen anything more than the generators being the base cause of the issues.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Zeek:
So, you guys have followed this more than me. Maybe you know the answer to this. I keep reading that the backup generators were damaged. So, the plants couldn't pump fresh water in to cool the reactors.
So, in all these days of the crisis we couldn't get some new generators shipped in? There must be another problem there, but I haven't seen anything more than the generators being the base cause of the issues.
That is the official, somewhat simplified story, but no doubt on the scene it's much more complicated than that (like the tsunami broke things beyond just hooking up another generator). I have been on and off the story and pretty much always feel like no one quite knows exactly what's going on beyond the 50 people still on site.
And - maybe more importantly considering the Japanese Nuclear track record of misinformation, cover ups and cultural sensitivities to admitting mistakes - I can't say I trust anything that is related to the media outlets. If dangerous levels of radiation were streaming into the Japanese countryside right now I wouldn't be surprised if they'd put a lid on it thinking it's better to apologize tomorrow than admit failure today. It may be years before we really know.
Scifi movie music + Firefly dialogue clips, 24 hours a day - http://www.scifiradio.com
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Posted this on the RWED thread as well... Seems fairly informative.
3 separate cooling systems failed. The newer generation designs have cooling systems which would have kept working under these exact same scenarios.
Costly lesson to learn. Hopefully not a deadly one.
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I did some math on this. According to Fick's Law, the flux of the concentrations and the diffusivity being the same, the only factor between the concentrations seen in surrounding regions after Chernobyl and the concentrations seen in the US after a theoretical containment failure like Chernobyl at these Japanese reactors should be the difference in distance. I calculated the first of the fallout would hit us eight days after the event, based on a report that it took 36 hours for the contamination to reach Sweden. I read that fallout 1000 km away from Chernobyl they found radiation in some boars at about 40000 Becquerels per kilogram, and from that I estimated the radiation in air about 48400 Becquerels per meters cubed. The distance between Japan and the US is 6000 km, so a good estimate for the fallout in America would be reduced to 1/6 of that, or about 7260 Becquerels per meters cubed. So we might end up with maybe 7260 Bq/kg in our system compared to the about 4400 Bq/kg which is normal.
So in Germany, where I pulled the Chernobyl fallout number from, there was about a nine month increased incidence of kids with Down Syndrome after Chernobyl, but they were getting six times the dose we'd be getting, which is twice our normal dose. This is still pretty minor, as calculating the dose-rate units from the activity rate for Iodine 131 here we get about 0.04 rad per hour. No where near the levels on the map.
Used a lot of fuzzy math for that, though, so don't quote me on that.
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NEWSCIENTIST.COM - The situation at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has become extremely unnerving. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has now admitted that the spent fuel rods could go critical - that is, a nuclear chain reaction could restart...
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/03/nuclear-cr
isis-radioactive-fue.html
http://about.me/haken
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