Yep. The Fukushima reactor #4 may be in the process of an accidental restart.
— Reactor No. 4 – Under maintenance when quake struck, no fuel rods in reactor core, temperature in spent-fuel storage pool reached 84 C on Monday, fire Tuesday possibly caused by hydrogen explosion at pool holding spent fuel rods, fire observed Wednesday at building housing reactor, pool water level feared receding, renewed nuclear chain reaction feared, only frame remains of reactor building roof.
You can read more about the status of the six reactors at the link.
The authorities, such as they are, claim to be getting things under control. I’m not seeing it. I see efforts. I do not see results. But of course that could change.
As to the dangers from an accidental restart? There are a lot of them. More radioactive stuff. Maybe a blast of photons (X-rays and Gamma Rays). Maybe a steam blast. Maybe a hydrogen blast. It is hard to say because it is happening by accident.
There seems to be a credibility gap in Japan.
“A senior Japanese minister also admitted that the country was overwhelmed by the scale of the tsunami and nuclear crisis. He said officials should have admitted earlier how serious the radiation leaks were.
Dang. Telling the truth works better than lying? Hard to believe.
And there are more lies by omission.
According to the latest Digitalglobe overflight, the situation in Reactor 4 continues to deteriorate. We wonder where precisely in the Reactor 1,3, and 4 wreckage are the working water pumps that are about to be electrified? Far more importantly, since heat appears to be the biggest issue, why have no thermal or IR photos been released to the public, and most importantly why is the Japanese government actively covering up thermal data? From the JPost: “As the world continues to gaze with concern at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, hi-tech security cameras installed by an Israeli defense firm are recording events at the troubled core from an insider’s vantage point. The Arava-based Magna BSP company, which specializes in producing and installing stereoscopic sensory and thermal imaging cameras, had been contracted to place cameras around one of the plant’s six cores – the core that has been experiencing explosions and overheating. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Monday, Magna’s head, Haim Siboni, said the thermal cameras also had the ability to detect the presence of radioactive clouds in the air, but added that Magna had not been able to gain access to the images recorded by the cameras at this time.”
I guess the images are too hot to handle. The Charlie Foxtrot continues. No Bravo Zulus for management. The guys who have gone in to fight the fires and do what they can on site? BZs all around. Even if they were among those who screwed the pooch at the beginning.
Ah more bad news.
March 19 (Bloomberg) — Engineers missed a deadline to restore power to the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi atomic plant, prolonging efforts to prevent more radiation leaks as Japan’s government told people nearby to cover up and avoid the rain.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. pushed back its target to reconnect a power cable to the No. 2 reactor to later today after working through the night. Power may be restored to all six reactors by tomorrow, Hikaru Kuroda, chief of the utility’s nuclear facility management department, told a briefing in Tokyo.
Troops and firefighters again started pumping seawater on the plant today in an attempt to prevent fuel rods from overheating, as Tepco cautioned the tsunami-damaged cooling systems may not work even after electricity is restored. Weather forecasts indicated changing winds could start moving radiation closer to Tokyo this weekend.
Yeah. The tsunami. No mention of hydrogen explosions. I wonder why?
In any case, I was saying the same thing two days ago.
They are bringing in electrical power. Excellent. But some one had better be checking the pumps, the pumped coolant, and the coolant pipes so that the pumps last beyond a few minutes.
I expect more surprises from this situation. Bad surprises. Very bad surprises.
In the very best case world GDP with a big hole in the Japanese supply chain should fall no more that 5% this year. Possibly as little as 2%.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
16 responses to “Fukushima Reactor Restart?”
‘renewed nuclear chain reaction feared’? By who? GreenPeace? Where’s your moderator in an empty spent fuel pool?
I’m just guessing, but they probably have the same restrictions that US plants have- that is, the ‘hotter’ fuel is spread further apart in the spent fuel pool to reduce reactivity even further.
They might melt some of the fuel in the spent fuel pool-maybe-but it’s not going to generate power, normal configuration or molten heap.
I’m checking nei.org and IAEA.org, personally. Too much fear-mongering horse shit everywhere else.
Nuclear power is probably dead for another generation.
I once knew a construction management researcher who had reviewed nuclear power plant construction costs for the DOE. He said that the power utilities had never fully factored decommissioning costs into their capital budgets. Back then these costs amounted to about $2B per plant. Decommissioning would have been burial in concrete in situ. It is likely that the cleanup costs at Fukushima will be much larger than this.
These costs are what will kill nuclear power. And the death of nuclear power will also kill the movement to reduction carbon dioxide emissions.
King Coal yet reigns.
dfenstrate:
‘renewed nuclear chain reaction feared’? By who? GreenPeace? Where’s your moderator in an empty spent fuel pool?
No. 4 reactor is the only one that has MOX, a mixture that contains plutonium.
Dr. Michael Allen’s new interview at Atomic City:
http://blogs.knoxnews.com/munger/2011/03/dr-michael-allen-if-my-childre.html#more
He’s advising people to vacate up to 600 miles from the Fukushima reactors.
600 miles would include Tokyo, Kobe, & Osaka, and would also include most of Honshu Island with a population of 103,000,000. Maybe Dr. Allen is overstating the danger. Let’s hope.
dfenstrate,
Moderator? Well there seems to be a lot of water about. Is it borated? Maybe. Maybe not. Will the junk have enough reactivity? Well that depends on the excess reactivity when the core was shut down. And the condition of the rubble.
By now the Xenon is mostly gone and available reactivity will be at a max.
Kyodo News is not Greenpeace.
Frank,
This would roughly be equivalent to a ground burst. I wonder if dispersion maps are available for the area.
The thing is that the average may be low but a plume could keep the concentrations up for some distance. Laminar flow and all that. Lots of variables. And since you can’t tell in which direction the plume might flow you have to evacuate the whole area to be safe. Or be prepared to accept casualties. Which will probably be less than moving 10 million or 50 million people.
This whole thing totally sucks.
I find Dr. Allen’s scenarios- and the talk of Unit 4 spent fuel pool melting being equivalent to a ‘ground burst’- to be more than a little fantastic.
Spent Fuel pools in the US are required to be loaded in such a fashion that they’ll be very subcritical, even with demin water. I’d imagine the japanese have a similar requirement, though I’ve not confirmed it. If it’s all molten slag than the math might be a bit different, but hardly a ‘ground burst.’
The MOX isn’t terribly interesting either, honestly. Plutonium is a fission product in a ‘normal’ core. It’s presence doesn’t automatically mean the fuel is prone to going prompt critical (‘ground burst’)
Oh, and there were a couple ‘ground bursts’ in japan a few decades ago, and those cities- and everything within 600 miles- is doing reasonably well. Sure, there’s more material in those pools than in a bomb- still doesn’t mean there’s gonna be a ‘ground burst.’
Allen spent years at Sandia doing insane things with nuclear material. Good for him, sounds like he had fun. I’m sure he had to go far out of his way to make all those things happen. Doesn’t mean any of those conditions exist in japan.
Time will tell who’s right, of course. Yes, I’m pitching my qualitative long-distance appraisal against Dr. Dooms… uh… Allens…. fantastic expirements and doomsday scenarios.
Once you here a few people preach about the end of the world over a few decades, similar claims just come across as noise.
dfenstrate,
Sure, there’s more material in those pools than in a bomb – still…
Thanks for pointing that out. Here are the figures
from zerohedge today:
Specifically, Tepco very recently transferred many more radioactive spent fuel rods into the storage pools. According to Associated Press, there were – at the time of the earthquake and tsunami – 3,400 tons of fuel in seven spent fuel pools plus 877 tons of active fuel in the cores of the reactors.
That totals 4,277 tons of nuclear fuel at Fukushima.
Which means that there is almost 24 times more nuclear fuel at Fukushima than Chernobyl.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/amount-radioactive-fuel-fukushima-dwarfs-chernobyl
Great, there’s 24 times more nuclear fuel at Fukushima that Chernobyl.
Now all you have to do is add a bunch of graphite as a moderator, have a safety test run late at night by folks who were never trained about the finer points of their jobs, have a number of grid disturbances that delay the test by several hours, disable lots of safety systems, try to trip an active reactor with slow control rods that actually cause a power spike upon insertion, and then have a Fukushima reactor blow up with a power spike 100x normal full power…..
….And then your comparison to Chernybol might make a little bit of sense.
There was one massive energetic event at chernobyl that ruined the surrounding area.
This’ll be a slow melt of certain fuel elements, if anything. I’d wager many of the older fuel elements in those pools will stay at acceptable temperatures with just air cooling.
But please, don’t let me interupt your doom and gloom. Continue to preach UNMITIGATED NUCLEAR DISASTER!!! when 10,000 + folks have already died by more mundane causes from this earthquake.
Fuck them, right? We need to make inapplicable comparisons and get our panties in a bunch right now.
Look, this is far worse than TMI. You should understand that’s not saying much. It will pale in comparison to Chernobyl.
Find something else to get worked up about. I’ll be content to be shown right when the dust settles. I put my email address in. If I’m wrong, Simon can email me and say “Ha! I told you so! A whole bunch of people have terminal cancer now!”
dfenstrate,
There is little use in speculating about an event that may never happen. I haven’t.
But pointing out the 8,554,000 lbs. of fuel at this site, even if most is spent fuel, in comparison to Chernobyl, shows that it is potentially a huge problem.
Dr. Allen and M. Simon who have worked with nuclear energy, have opinions that indicate this could be a disaster.
Actions by our Navy in evacuating, placing a 50 mile no-man’s zone around the site, and moving ships away from the existing radioactive plume, confirm the seriousness of the situation. Also the fact that Japan is withholding important information like the readings surrounding the plant, or suppressing info like thermal readings, lest they panic their own people, tells me that it is far worse than they will admit.
Also, the number of workers there prior to all this was in the hundreds. Now, after explosions and fires, destroyed wiring and at least one breached containment vessel and sea water contamination, a handful of suicide heros are expected to get pumps working, and water levels up on cores that are fused. At the same time over 3,000 tons of spent fuel has been exposed because the water has either evaporated or leaked out of the ponds it is stored in.
Do you really think that with that much damage and loose radiation it is possible to restore the cooling system? And, given your knowledge of nuclear fission, do you think this jumbled mess will just sit there quietly?
Or have you convinced yourself it will, because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate?
It might make sense to avoid using suggestibility drugs while commenting on this.
Okay, my preceding comment was uncalled for.
On the other hand, this looks like a game of telephone in which, at each stage, everybody assumes that the preceding stage was an underestimate. It might make sense to lean in the other direction.
It might make sense to avoid using suggestibility drugs while commenting on this.
Maybe not called for, but funny, especially after re-reading my last post. Point well taken 🙂
Joseph,
One of the things to consider is that you have hot rods (heh) mixed in with cooler stuff.
So the hot rods boil the water away and then start burning. Could this lead to a type of chain burning? Well it is not likely. But this is an accident. So I will not discount the possibility.
And no ordinary accident: earthquake (9.0) and tsunami (10 meters?) followed by a nuclear accident.
And then for a week we had TLOEPA. Total Loss Of Electrical Power Accident.
Design margins exceeded.
Chernobyl had no containment vessels, which means that once the external building blew, the radiocative blasted out everywhere. What’s more, the Chernobyl plant was also used to process plutonium for weapons, making it more susceptible to “neutronic excursion” i.e. explosions. Finally, the moments preceding the accident operates were, ironically, testing a new safety protocol that spun out of control. Basically, you had idiots running a run-down, very poorly designed plant that was likely to blow up anyways.
The problem with the Fukushima plant was that it uses Mk1, which has been criticized for having less robust containment vessels than even other plants in that era. Further, it has a design feature shared with other older reactors. In all those systems, spent fuel rods are stored in a pool inside the concrete reactor building for at least 10 years before being transferred to long-term storage. As long as water circulates constantly the pools remain stable. When power is lost, the circulation stops. When the roof blows off, the pools are exposed to the air..etc.
The problem wasn’t so much the earthquake, but the combination, a combination that is rarely ever going to occur in this manner. The Japan coastline is protected by seawalls, but near Fukushima the 33ft tsnumai, a very big one, easily overtopped them. Simply because the region flooded didn’t mean the diesel-powered generators had to be swamped. Situating them above the waterline could have kept them running, meaning the reactors would have cooled properly, and this entire situation would have been diverted. Unfortunately, the designers assumed the seawall would be sufficient, a mistake no one is likely to make again after this incident. They instead put the diesels on the ground floor ofthe plant. The quake caused grid power to be lost, and within an hour, the generators stopped as well.
The plant was supposed to have redundant systems to prevent this, but if you have four diesels on site and they can all be wiped out at once that’s not real redundancy.
Michael,
Nice.