Crisis in Japan - Page 175

I'd hardly call restoring power/establishing sustained cooling secondary, as these measures are the only thing that can stabilize the situation since the radiation is to high to enter the reactor buildings.

The cooling operations yesterday using water trucks/helicopters only dropped around 60t of water (50t aimed at #3) in a 2h session (no further cooling operations on that day). But maybe 40t actually entered the building and might have poured into the pool. However these pools are estimated to contain around 2.000t of water and we know that they reached dangerous levels in 5 days, assuming that the rods are only partially exposed, half of the required amount of water is still there and the hydrogen explosions didn't remove water from the pool.

Let's play around with numbers..

(2.000t - 300t) / 5 days = 340t/day

(2.000t - 300t) / 6 days = 283t/day
(2.000t - 400t) / 6 days = 266t/day
(2.000t - 500t) / 6 days = 250t/day

Even in a very optimistic case, were only 100t(16%) of the required estimate of 600t are missing, the pool must be losing around 250t of water per day. That makes roughly 10t per hour so their water spraying operation delayed the worst case dry pool situation by merely 4-5 hours. However further cooling operations won't be executed 'til afternoon today (probably around 12-16 hours after the first operation).

Basically they're gambling with very high stakes if they don't step up the operations (which might be the case, since additional trucks have arrived for today with enough firefighters for longer operations) as they haven't actually increased their 'time buffer' or reduced the radiation in a significant way, because whatever they've sprayed in there must have already been evaporated.

Of course my numbers are based on the estimates since the actual size of the pool and the amount of water that the rods&racks displace were not announced. And we don't know if there is a crack that leaks water in the upper half of the pool or if the hydrogen explosion removed huge amounts of water nor do we know how efficient the operation actually is. (since water might get lost in areas outside of the pool)

Keep in mind that they're only sprayed at #3, so levels at #4 must be dropping, but my point is unless they switch the operation to more than 2h per day. The situation can't improve and they're still slowly losing time (and risk the possibilty of heavily increased local radiation levels) by letting the water levels drop further.

As far as the reduced radiation readings go. They were measured at the west gate with quite a delay (at least the figures we got). So it could be as simple as the wind changing to east, blowing more radiation away from the monitoring post.

And even restoring power&pumps are still no guarantee that those reactors will stabilize as the piping&electronics that are required to make it work might be damaged/destroyed.

Personally I find their hesitation to do things much more concerning than the actual state of the power plants. (at one point in a press conference they even said that they might not be able to continue connecting power if the weather is 'bad' nor do they seem willingly to risk peoples lives) Which makes me question their priorities or if they actually realize how much they're riding on luck, when they don't even had data on the water levels in the pools..