Crack In Fukushima Structure May Be Leaking Radiation 280
SillySnake writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it had found a crack in the pit at its No.2 reactor in Fukushima, generating readings 1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour in the air inside the pit. 'With radiation levels rising in the seawater near the plant, we have been trying to confirm the reason why, and in that context, this could be one source,' said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), said on Saturday."
Also of interest: Cryptome is featuring high-res photos of the reactor site, taken by UAV.
Re:This discussion maybe ? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Chernobyl. Despite being the worst nuclear plant disaster, finding cancer after the original accident has been difficult. It's been mostly estimation using statistical analysis.
maybe it has been difficult for private think-thanks in usa, but it hasnt been difficult here around the black sea. the cancer rate around black sea among youth has skyrocketed and still much higher than normal.
i dont know why you people pull that 'chernobyl didnt cause much problem' bullshit from. people are dying here for decades.
Re:Incompetence (Score:4, Interesting)
What I find most disturbing is the lack of information they are telling us.
Have you seen anything in the news about the reactor in #3 blowing the lid off the primary containment vessel?
The Hydrogen explosions at 1 and 4 were the same shape cloud. It was a gas explosion. Number 3 on the other hand was a tall cylinder explosion with a cap of debris that fell out of the top of the cloud. I have not said anything about it yet as I could not confirm my finding, but today they released the high resolution drone photos. Another item is buildings 1 & 4 blew because of a hydrogen explosion. The hydrogen exploded and the resulting pressure blew the buildings apart. Number 3 on the other hand had a hydrogen explosion after the building ruptured. The big flash of the hydrogen fire lit when the building blew. Listen to the explosion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ [youtube.com] It is different.
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm#20%20March [cryptome.org]
Reactor 1 and 4 have a more traditional shape for a confined gas explosion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK0-scxGEak&NR=1 [youtube.com]
Take a very good look at the photos. Locate the primary containment dome in #4. It is bright yellow just like in the drawings. Note it is NOT in the center of the building. Note the roof truss of #4. The roof blew off, but most of the truss is intact. Now look at the elevation in #4 of the yellow containment dome.
Using that as a reference, now look at #3. Look for anything as high as the dome in #4. In the middle is a rubble pile. Note in the corner of the building in a mirror location to #4 look at the circular hole in the truss. It's where a plume of steam is rising. The fire and charred truss is at the other end of the rubble pile, or over the cooling pond. Where there is supposed to be a yellow dome is a steaming hole. Now look at the roof of the turbine hall next to it. Notice a hole in the roof about the right shape and size for that dome lid to have fallen in?
I'm not sure yet if the core blew off it's lid, but the primary containment did blow the top.
The above is my opinion based on my personal examination of the photos in the link above and the noted difference of the explosion of #3.
Due to the radiation levels, the torris may have ruptured resulting in the top blowing out of the primary containment building. This would explain the relatively low amount of radio active parts blown about the area.
Re:The cost of nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
Because coal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org] ) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal [wikipedia.org] ) and natural gas ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking [wikipedia.org] ) and dams ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure [wikipedia.org] ) are all 100% safe and contain zero ill effects to anyone, anywhere living within any distance to the source.
I just went with wikipedia because I felt really really lazy. A monkey randomly typing characters into Google search could find something like this without remotely trying. Yes, nuclear power has downsides. EVERY option of generating power has a downside.
Ok, fine, I'll play your little game. Let's shut down and replace every nuke plant with...well...what?
Re:"May be" "Possibly" "Calm down" "Sleep" (Score:4, Interesting)
I think YOU need to calm down. Nobody is saying that there MIGHT be a radiation leak. There is a leak, and that's confirmed. There's no denying the radiation in the water. The question is, where is it coming from. This cray MAY BE the source of that leak (or it may turn out to be something else, or a combination of several things...they aren't sure yet). If you RTFA:
Nishiyama told reporters on Saturday that the crack "could be one source" of the radiation leaks that have hobbled efforts to quell the damaged reactor.
On Sunday he added: "This(crack in the pit) for the first time clarified the relationship (of the contaminated water) with the sea."
As far as your other comment:
European energy commissioner said 'biggest disaster of the century' over chernobyl, yet, talking heads in mainstream media almost trying to convince people that radiation is good for their health. Despite EPA found 1000 times allowable radiation in groundwater in massachusetts.
LOL...are you expecting me to believe that fukushima is causing massachusetts ground water to be 1000 times allowable levels? Sorry, but that seems INCREDIBLY far fetched...so far fetched, I'm not even sure how to explain it to you. I'll just stick to what the EPA has said: “these detections were expected and the levels detected are far below levels of public-health concern.”
And you think the media is trying to keep people calm? Doesn't seem that way to me. For instance, a few days ago I'm watching the news and they give a teaser for an upcoming story saying that "radiation from fukushima has reached detroit". Then they go to commercial, come back, do another story, then do the fukushima story, which is about 4 minutes long, and then at the very end of the story, they throw in a quick note about "oh yeah, it's about 1/15 of the radiation you get from eating a banana". Seems to me they're more interested in freaking people out for ratings and then just throwing in a calming footnote at the end.
Re:The cost of nuclear (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not the number for Fukushima reactor cleanup.
The Three Mile Island cleanup "took 12 years and cost approximately US$973 million" [world-nuclear.org] and was completed in the early 1990s. Here we're talking about a worse accident (not much debate anymore), with 3 operating reactors with damaged fuel, one of which may have a containment breach (reactor #2), and 4 spent fuel pools in various states of damage, and (unlike Three Mile Island) significant amounts of radiological material spread around the region, into the sea, and apparently also into groundwater. Plus there is a lot of damaged reactor building (non-containment-related) to clear away and dispose of before even getting to the difficult stuff, whereas in Three Mile Island the reactor building was fine.
It's a total wild-assed and non-expert guess, but I think a factor of 4 for the multiple damaged reactors, spent fuel pools, and buildings, and a factor of 10 for either cleanup of or losses in the surrounding region (which were insignificant in the case of Three Mile Island) would be conservative. If people can't safely come back to their homes and businesses, can't fish the waters or farm the land around there anymore, it will be very expensive. Make a reactor cleanup an even billion for inflation since the 1990s for Three Mile Island and do the math. So, yes, 300 billion is an exaggeration. We're probably "only" talking about tens of billions, maybe "only" 10 billion via the economy of scale from dealing with 4 reactors at the same site as they learn how to do it. But it's definitely billions.
The 300 billion is the number being bandied about in news reports as an estimate for the total tsunami reconstruction costs.
Re:Fixing this leak solves nothing! (Score:4, Interesting)
Just to say up front, I think this is the most significant nuclear incident ever, and I expect it to have a huge effect on nuclear safety design and regulation. Chernobyl was being intentionally operated outside of spec and was a stupid design to begin with and TMI didn't actually release any harmful materials.
But to put it simply... you do not know very well what you are talking about.
No, in reality, there are many layers to the containment, each of which contains different things to varying degrees. The outermost containment is the building itself, and in the case of a boiling water reactor this includes the turbine building because H20 that comes in contact with the core is circulated through the turbines. For example, steam containing radioactive contaminants can be vented into the building (outside the steel vessel) and still maintain zero external contamination. The big problem at Fukushima is that the top half of the reactor buildings are GONE. "containment" by your definition was lost with the first hydrogen explosion because the vented gas could then escape into the environment.
This is so far beyond a simple loss of containment accident that it is not funny. But the containment of raw core material itself is not really in terrible shape. The big problem is that the buildings are half-demolished from the hydrogen explosions. So all the plumbing and wiring and such are completely trashed. Things don't just need to be "fixed" they have to be rebuilt almost completely. Working on site is difficult, but not impossible. Every time they localize some contamination is a huge step forward because it means they know what they are dealing with and can make progress.
But back to the core breach, or to be more precise the core coolant leak. They have been saying all along that there were good chances of a leak from the reactor core, and what is happening seems like one of the less bad types of that. The cores have partially melted, so that radiative materials can mix into the water. That water has been able to leak. So far there is evidence of mostly "volatiles", mostly iodine and cesium, not much heavier stuff. But they seem to have isolated it to reactor 2. This breach was caused by, wait for it... a hydrogen explosion (you seeing a theme here?).
If they can get the contaminated water under control then a big piece of the wider impact will be more or less under control. This is why they are trying to pump this stuff out of the basements, because nobody thinks they will be strictly water tight. But that has proven challenging (where do they put it?). In the mean time if they can plug a few leaks they can reduce (not yet stop) the external impact, so that's what they are trying to do.