Thread is about the various issues surrounding Japan in the aftermath of the recent earthquake. Don't bring the shit side of the internet to the thread, and post with the realization that this thread is very important, and very real, to your fellow members.
Do not post speculative and unconfirmed news you saw on TV or anywhere else. Generally the more dramatic it sounds the less likely it's true.
On March 18 2011 10:48 Souma wrote: Just got an e-mail from my study abroad program. They are evacuating all students from Japan and are suspending all study abroad activity atm.
They say they might cancel the 2011-2012 study abroad term; decision will be made within the coming weeks.
w-t-f.
I have a friend from OU that's being evacuated. He has a 2 year phone contract among various other commitments there and he's being forced back. He's really upset and it's a shame he doesn't even have the option to stay. Fear mongering, gg.
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.
Woah , did you actually watch the video of the helicopters dropping water? The wind was strong that day , maybe as little as 1/10th of the water from the helicopters reached target.
<Unit 1> ・ Seawater was injected to RPV via the Fire Extinguishing System Line (Started up 11:55 March 13th) →Temporary interruption of the injection (01:10 March 14th) ・ The sound of explosion in Unit 1 occurred. (15:36 March 12nd) ・ Seawater is being injected. (as of 15:00 March 18th)
<Unit 2> ・ Water injection function was sustained. (14:00 March 13th) ・ The Blow-out Panel of reactor building was opened due to the explosion of the Unit 3 reactor building. (After 11:00 March 14th) ・ Reactor water level was decreasing. (13:18 March 14th) TEPCO reported to NISA the event (Loss of reactor cooling functions) falling under the Article 15 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness. (13:49 March 14th) ・ Seawater injection to RPV was ready through the Fire Extinguishing System line. (19:20 March 14th) ・ TEPCO evaluated core damage of Unit 2 was “less than 5%” (22:14 4 March 14th) ・ Water level in RPV in Unit 2 is decreasing. (22:50 March 14th) ・ A sound of explosion was made in Unit 2. As the pressure in Suppression Chamber decreased (06:10 March 15th), there was a possibility that an incident occurred in the Chamber. (06:20 March 15th) ・ Seawater is being injected. White smoke continues to be generated from the Blow-out Panel of reactor building.(As of 15:00 March 18th)
<Unit 3> ・ Fresh water was injected to RPV via the Fire Extinguishing System Line (FESL). (11:55 March 13th) ・ Seawater was injected to RPV via FESL. (13:12 March 13th) ・ Injection of seawater for Unit 1 and Unit 3 to the Primary Containment Vessel (PCV) was interrupted due to the lack of seawater in pit. (01:10 March 14th) ・ For Unit 3 injection of seawater into PCV was restarted (03:20 March 14th) ・ The pressure in PCV of Unit 3 rose unusually. (7:44 March 14th) TEPCO reported to NISA the event (Loss of reactor cooling function) falling under the Article 15 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness. (7:52 March 14th) ・ For Unit 3 the explosion like Unit 1 occurred around the Reactor Building (11:01 March 14th) ・ The white smoke like steam generated from Unit 3. (08:30 March 16th) ・ Because of the possibility that PCV of Unit 3 was damaged, the workers evacuated from the central control room of Unit 3 and 4 (common control room). (10:45 March 16th) Thereafter the operators returned to the room and restarted the operation for water injection. (11:30 March 16th) ・ Seawater was discharged 4 times to Unit 3 by the helicopters of the Self-Defence Force. (9:48, 9:52, 9:58 and 10:01 March 17th) ・ The riot police arrived at the site for grand discharge. (16:10 March 17th) ・ The Self-Defence Force started the water spray from 19:35 March 17th. ・ The water spray from the ground was carried out by the riot police (from 5 19:05 till 19:13 March 17th) ・ The water spray from the ground was carried out by the Self-Defence Force using 5 cars (March 17th) (The starting time of water spray by each car: 19:35, 19:45, 20:00 and 20:07 March 17th) ・ The water spray from the ground using 6 fire engines (6 tons of water per car) was carried out by the Self-Defence Force. (from before 14:00 till 14:38 March 18th) ・ The water spray from the ground using a fire engine provided by the US Military was carried out. (finished at 14:45 March 18th) ・ Hyper rescue vehicles (30 cars) arrived at J village for the water spray from the ground. (14:45 March 18th) ・ Seawater is being injected to RPV. White Smoke continues to be generated. (As of 15:00 March 18th)
<Unit 4> ・ It was confirmed that a part of wall in the operation area of Unit 4 was damaged. (06:14 March 15th) ・ The fire at Unit 4 occurred. (09:38 March 15th) TEPCO reported that the fire was extinguished spontaneously. (11:00 March 15th) ・ The temperature of water in the Spent Fuel Storage Pool at Unit 4 had increased. (84 ℃ at 04:08 March 14th) ・ The fire occurred at Unit 4. (5:45 March 15th) TEPCO reported that no fire could be confirmed on the ground.(06:15 March 16th) ・ Because of the replacement work of the Shroud of RPV, no fuel was inside the PRV. White Smoke continues to be generated (As of 15:00 March 18th)
<Units 5 and 6> ・ Emergency Diesel Generator (1 unit) for Unit 6 is operable and supplying electricity to Units 5 and 6. Water injection to the PRV and Spent Fuel Pool through MUWC is progressing. <Spent Fuel Storage Facility> ・ It was confirmed that the water level of spent fuel storage pool was maintained full at after 06:00 March 18.
On March 19 2011 00:45 a176 wrote: All three reactors with fuel are being cooled.
Is there a "crisis" anymore?
yes. Reactor 4 spent fuel pool (where fuel rods where being stored during maintenance of reactor 4) is the most problematic right now.
Actually this is wrong/old news. Currently it's been confirmed that the pool in reactor #4 is filled with water so right now efforts are being focused on reactor #3's pool.
Spraying of spent fuel pools at Units 3 and 4 is still underway. Visual inspection of Unit 4’s pool showed water in the pool, and so efforts have been temporarily focused upon Unit 3. While efforts at using helicopters to dump water onto the pools had been largely unsuccessful , army firetrucks used in putting out aircraft fires have been employed with some success. The elite Tokyo Hyper Rescue component of the Tokyo fire department has arrived on scene and is conducting missions of roughly two hours in length, during which they spray the pools for 7-8 minutes, wait for steam to dissipate, and spray again.
A cable has been laid from a TEPCO power line 1.5 km from the facility, which will be used to supply power to emergency cooling systems of the reactors at Units 1 and 2.
that video is actually in a laymen's point of view, pretty accurate. I think it's targetted towards the children of japan who are probably very confused about the issues going on right now, but explains it to them in a way they'll get it, which sadly is probably the best way to explain it to the general masses outside of japan as well. I like that they don't try to sugar coat too much about it though, that the "doctors/engineers" are the heroes here, and they are at risk, and that if there is a leak, people will need to move, but they're trying their best to prevent that.
On March 18 2011 13:21 Sanctimonius wrote: Note from Fukushima: Since this all began the govt here, the Tokyo Power Company had been saying they would concentrate on containment, making sure the reactors were stable, making sure they wouldn't have a meltdown. Anything and everything else was secondary to that, including repairing the electrical grid to the plant, or setting up new pumps capable of dealing with pumping sea water. Now they are using water cannons to cool the plant's reactors, radiation has been dropping consistently. Furthermore they are repairing the electrical grid and trying to get pumps back online. Once these are set up the reactors will be consistently and automatically cooled with water until they are no longer dangerous, which will be after a few weeks of consistent cooling. Simply the fact they are doing this kind of things, they are talking about setting up these pumps and electrical grids, is a sign that things are stable enough to properly cool the reactors.
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..
you got to keep in mind, that the heating power is decreasing exponentially once the chainreaction isn't going on anymore! So basicly every second nothing is happening it's going to be easier and less heat. After 3 days you got muuuuch less heating. I'm checking for a few numbers as I saw some a few days ago (somewhere^^) based on a 30 to 40% degree of efficiency, which should be accurate. I know by heart its a 30% decrease from day 3 to day 7, but I don't know about 1 to 3 :-/ Will edit if I find those.
Edit: Can't find it... wikipedia got to solve the problem: Time | heat decay in % 10 sec 3,72% 1 min 2,54% 1 hour 1,01% 1 day 0,44% 3 days 0,31% 1 week 0,23% 1 month 0,13%
those numbers are for a long running reactor (it says 11 months ongoing) so they should be to high. You may do the math yourself if you know for how long the reactor was running (<--noob grammar? ) before it was shut down.
I was only refering to the spent fuel pools and made this crude math based on the limited informations available. The actual reactors probably had sea water injections for most of the time, so trying to calculate anything for them would be pointless. But the pools only contain rods that haven't been used for months/years so we can probably assume that they have a rather stable heat generation with only minor drops over time. Then again in case of #3 they might have routed some of the water from the pool to the core, which could explain why the situation there is worse and the math would be off, but this isn't true for #4 and it's assumed that the water levels there are quite low or even empty too.
I mean if you break those 250t down, it's only 10t per hour, which means pumps would have to exchange around 170l per minute, which sounds quite reasonable. Let's cut it by 4 to 2.5t, still rougly one bathtub lost per minute and with 50t of water sprayed at most that saved them 20h, almost the time wasted until the second operation that only sprayed around 50t either (and afaik only for #3 too) and that already assumes that my numbers are very wrong and 100% efficent water spraying.
They need to spray a lot more water to improve the situation, right now they are only delaying the inevitable. With the possibility to restore power to all 4 units until sunday that might buy enough time, but it's still a gamble. Of course maybe you're right, but it's seems rather odd that almost 2.000t should evaporate in 1 week+ and just a bit later down to a trivial amount.
Personally I'm just worried that if they don't step up these operations now, there is a risk that the radiation increases by a lot, which would make the situation for the poor workers a lot worse compared to what it would've been if they acted now.
On March 18 2011 22:56 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Woah , did you actually watch the video of the helicopters dropping water? The wind was strong that day , maybe as little as 1/10th of the water from the helicopters reached target.
I did and from the TV images it looked quite bad. I used a bit more optimistic numbers since it was hard to see. 30t were dropped, I assumed 10t hit and 10% would be 3t so a difference of 2-3h at most, pretty much moot compared to the 30t by ground that could've been a lot more effective.
^I'm sure they are aware of how much water they need, you are speculating too much. You know very little about the actual situation yet you manage to sit here and claim that they are too indecisive, 'riding their luck' and 'gambling' rather than being effective.
'Assuming' something is not good enough of a reason to make up your own theory.
The Japanese people are in my prayers. Although they have had to go through many other related crises, it always amazes me to see how strong they can stand in unity, getting up everytime they stumble on an obstacle thrown their way by the often unfair life.
1848: Tokyo Electric Power Co, which operates Fukushima Daiichi, says it has now connected an external power line to its stricken plant and would first supply reactor 2 because it is less damaged, Reuters reports. The power is needed to operate the plant's badly-needed cooling systems, which were damaged last Friday.
This is great start towards some resolve in this crisis.
Interesting article from Cafferty. Sorry, if people already discussed this. despite the crisis at hand, it seems there is no looting going on in Japan. America can learn alot from them.
He concludes: “You asked what Americans can do to help. When it comes to any response by institutions and volunteers, if the outlet at the area in need is inefficient, all the external aid will be wasted. I strongly believe that the press needs to be firm and show how the government is incompetent so as to pressure the bureaucrats and party in power. I know this is very difficult and too late, but the world needs to understand that incompetence is killing people, even though they were saved from the earthquake.
Mani, is that the feeling you've gotten too from Japanese media? From what I've heard (second hand from my mother) incompetence from TEPCO and the Tokyo's Governor's Office have allowed the earthquake, which did relatively little structural damage, turn into a possible catastrophe.
She also sent me an email about this book that's gotten a lot of attention on Japanese Amazon.
A book titled "Nuclear Reactor Time Bomb" (原子炉時限爆弾) was published last August in Japan, written by an activist writer. Based on the summary and Amazon reviews, the book appears to lay out historic data of Japanese earthquakes and warns of the danger of inadequately prepared nuclear plants in Japan.
The book especially warns about "Hamaoka Nuclear Plant" in Shizuoka which sits right on one of the active faults and is located close enough to wipe out Tokyo and Osaka, the most populated regions in one catastrophe.
Interestingly, reviews posted before Jan. 2011 (and still visible on Amazon Japan) includes those written by self-claimed experts in nuclear science and energy who literally laughed at the book and author's credibility and called the book a fiction and waste of time.
He concludes: “You asked what Americans can do to help. When it comes to any response by institutions and volunteers, if the outlet at the area in need is inefficient, all the external aid will be wasted. I strongly believe that the press needs to be firm and show how the government is incompetent so as to pressure the bureaucrats and party in power. I know this is very difficult and too late, but the world needs to understand that incompetence is killing people, even though they were saved from the earthquake.
Mani, is that the feeling you've gotten too from Japanese media? From what I've heard (second hand from my mother) incompetence from TEPCO and the Tokyo's Governor's Office have allowed the earthquake, which did relatively little structural damage, turn into a possible catastrophe.
She also sent me an email about this book that's gotten a lot of attention on Japanese Amazon.
A book titled "Nuclear Reactor Time Bomb" (原子炉時限爆弾) was published last August in Japan, written by an activist writer. Based on the summary and Amazon reviews, the book appears to lay out historic data of Japanese earthquakes and warns of the danger of inadequately prepared nuclear plants in Japan.
The book especially warns about "Hamaoka Nuclear Plant" in Shizuoka which sits right on one of the active faults and is located close enough to wipe out Tokyo and Osaka, the most populated regions in one catastrophe.
Interestingly, reviews posted before Jan. 2011 (and still visible on Amazon Japan) includes those written by self-claimed experts in nuclear science and energy who literally laughed at the book and author's credibility and called the book a fiction and waste of time.
I have a friend whose mom is in Osaka, and she complains that the highways are still down.
Another in Tokyo complains that her son has to walk 8-9 hours to go grocery shopping. Tokyo is otherwise completely unaffected by the earthquake, tsunami or nuclear crisis.
So yeah, something's seriously wrong with the response, and there are definitely people suffering as a result of it.
With no recent prime minister lasting in office for more than a year, it's not news to anyone that the government is completely incompetent -- especially the mayor of Tokyo. It's a little strange that people have decided to forget that in light of the disasters, when in fact it's now more than ever that the government is being counted on.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/K0UFs.jpg)
) before it was shut down.![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/2/a/62a1060ea2b3b42ab13c89b9a33ccad6.png)
