Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_45.html

by anigbrowl • 15 years ago

27 56 15 years ago

www3.nhk.or.jp

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_40.html - nuclear medical teams dispatched

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_38.html venting halted

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv civilians instructed on radiation protection procedures - seal buildings, do not consume food or water, emergency situation now exists

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

'Concrete wall of Reactor #1 blown away in explosion' 'Radiation level outside plant now 1015 micro Sieverts.' 'Huge probability of major event.'

- govt. press conference, next update in 20-30 minutes. Local time in Japan is 5:37pm / 1735.

Most recent reports from power company - several hours out of date right now but still informative:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031219-e....

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031220-e....

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.htm...

Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency - English, also out of date

http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/

DennisP3• 15 years ago

A micro Sievert is equivalent to .1 millirem, according to wikipedia. So we're looking at about 100 millirem.

According to the book Physics for Future Presidents, you can calculate the odds of getting cancer from radiation by dividing the exposure by 2500 rems. 100 millirem gives you a 1 in 25,000 chance of developing cancer. Or to put it another way, your chance of getting cancer has gone from 20 percent to 20.004 percent.

The average American is exposed to 200 millirems of radiation each year from natural sources.

Of course it's not over yet and could get worse.

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

I was trying to post up material as soon as I heard it, which is why I didn't take time to add context. I was finding the US media coverage largely useless and many hours out of date, while the Japanese media/agencies were also slow at getting English versions up on the net (for obvious reasons).

waterlesscloud2• 15 years ago

I was a pretty solid supporter of nuclear power, but if Japan can't make it safe, I don't believe anyone can.

rosser4• 15 years ago

Fukushima Daiichi #1 is a couple weeks shy of 40 years old (from first criticality, 26 March 1971) at this point. There are a number of prototype, and production, reactor designs that are in principle "meltdown"-proof. That a reactor that old didn't survive one of the most massive earthquakes ever recorded is no basis for abandoning nuclear power.

Unfortunately, that's all we're going to hear from some corners of the nuclear debate, regardless of the facts.

maigret11• 15 years ago

German politicians voted runtime extensions for many nuclear plants. Many plants in the world are just old, because regularly rebuilding plants would make real green energies much more interesting. I think such a disaster on the environment justifies stopping using nuclear energy, even if it means more constraints on energy price and availability. If I look at the German nuclear energy discussion, there is a lot of greed involved. That is not something we can afford.

geuis4• 15 years ago

This is kind of like saying, "I really believe that commercial airlines are the safest way to travel, but if they can't keep them from crashing sometimes I won't ever fly again."

I know, its not an exact paraphrasing but the intent it still there. For one thing, the Japanese are not the super awesome technology supergiants that the common wisdom from the 1980's in the US makes them out to be. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. are all technologically equivalent. Its more of a matter of how much certain tech is spread out. When it comes to stuff like nuclear plants, we're all basically the same.

Gotta give 'em a break. Japan, as far as I know, has not had many accidents. We've had a number of them including Three Mile. When something the size of a continental plate snaps with enough power to shift the speed of the planet and a country's position on the globe by over 10 feet, there's not a lot of blame that can be put if it happens near a nuclear reactor.

waterlesscloud2• 15 years ago

I'm not criticizing Japan.

gnosis• 15 years ago

This is kind of like saying, "I really believe that commercial airlines are the safest way to travel..."

Except nuclear power is not the safest form of energy. Not by a long shot.

What's the worst that could happen if an earthquake or a terrorist strike devastated a solar array or a wind farm?

Apart from cutting off the power supply, nothing much.

Compare that to a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Or the nuclear proliferation risk caused by the theft of fissile material. Not to mention the hazards posed by nuclear waste.

maigret11• 15 years ago

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

geuis4• 15 years ago

Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry.

Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable.

More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York.

To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium.

Any plant takes years, if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.

rosser4• 15 years ago

I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful.

As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors.

In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.)

Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer.

That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources.

What, exactly, should we do in the interim?

(EDIT: math is hard past 0300.)

dmfdmf2• 15 years ago

You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.

potatolicious2• 15 years ago

The alternatives are even more dangerous, just not quite so visibly. For example:

Coal ash produced by coal power plants actually release more radioactive waste than the equivalent power generated via nuclear. Not only that, nuclear waste is highly controlled and the general population has no contact with it save extremely rare catastrophes - compare with pumping this ash into the atmosphere. Not to mention that inhaling radioactive material is orders of magnitude more dangerous than physical contact.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...

Nuclear energy isn't perfect - but it's a hell of a lot better than anything else we've got.

DennisP3• 15 years ago

Pollution from coal is estimated to kill 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. Nuclear is way safer than that, and probably the only power source that can replace coal anytime soon.

panarky3• 15 years ago

48-hour forecast of jet stream over the Pacific: http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_pac_h48_00.gif

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

Video: http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=npac_250

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

'Japanese people should be prepared for worst case scenario.' - officials

Helpful English translation feed, non-sensational: http://yokosonews.com/live

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

There are actually whole websites and news channels dedicated to this sort of news. We don't need to turn HN into a sort of live streaming play-by-play about what's happening in Japan.

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

not cool to penalize my karma for a reasonable and honest comment trying to preserve site quality.

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

I can't downvote your comment, nor did I want to. I'm only posting this here because the English language media has been slow with their coverage and this is an exceptional situation.

geuis4• 15 years ago

Its the one site left in the world serving content for Windows Media Player exclusively left.

nathanhammond• 15 years ago

The official line from the press conference being given by the Secretary General of Japan is "We don't know and we are investigating further, however radiation is still within acceptable levels." This means the only real update from this press conference is that the evacuation perimeter for Fukushima 2 (the second power plant) has been increased to 10km (from 3km).

To the contrary, however, somebody was quoted that the explosion was the containment building for reactor vessel 1. If that is the case it would pretty much be the worst case scenario for both Japan and the future of nuclear power.

panarky3• 15 years ago

This was a zero-information press conference.

Authorities still investigating, stay calm, 'it depends on the circumstances', etc.

Several reporters asked if a 10km evacuation radius was sufficient, and the reply was '10km is what we decided'.

This looks like an unmitigated disaster in the making.

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

NISA press conference: 3:36 pm (2.5 hours ago) explosion was reported to them as containment breach, exact situation unknown at present. Further evacuations will be necessary, people should not travel alone. Official says radiation level data 'unavailable at present'. 'We are not sure if the station is devastated or not.'

Not a panic situation yet, according to NISA.

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

Apparently the reactor roof has collapsed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4uogOEUrU if you haven't seen it or can't get to a TV. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMEV-_X5b_8 is a better video.

panarky3• 15 years ago

Radiation level currently at 1015 μSv/h. [1]

It would take 1000 hours of exposure at this level to cause health effects. [2]

[1] http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/status/46490355461406720

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

Japanese Govt. will supply radiation medicine, 'may quarantine area' - spokesperson. Sorry, didn't catch agency affiliation. There is some confusion over whether the reactor containment or the cooling system itself has exploded.

TEPCO updates - but pre-explosion

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031222-e....

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031221-e....

anigbrowl11• 15 years ago

Evacuation zone widened to 20km, per NHK

Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

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