Mag 8.9 Sendai Earthquake
By
Acemace,
Posted on: 2011-03-11 04:28 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
I have a friend in Japan who had their home completely demolished with the earthquake, but they and their family are thankfully safe. Thoughts go to everyone who is affected by this disaster.
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Variations of that map have appeared all day at conspiracy, disaster, anti-nuclear web sites, but with different "official" logos and radiation values and units (easy to get wrong if you aren't schooled in radiation detection/measurement and just use wikipedia).
Somebody is having a busy day with Photoshop.
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This. A million times, this.
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas
/facepalm
Variations of that map have appeared all day at conspiracy, disaster, anti-nuclear web sites, but with different "official" logos and radiation values and units (easy to get wrong if you aren't schooled in radiation detection/measurement and just use wikipedia). Somebody is having a busy day with Photoshop. |
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The disclaimer at the bottom of that image is pretty hilarious. As are the inaccuracies of even how many and where the meltdowns are occurring. According to that, four different sites are experiencing meltdown, with two on the west coast of the island.
Back to fact based stuff, sounds like core three is at significant risk of meltdown. There is more concern about this core reportedly because it is unique from the other three in that it uses plutonium and uranium at its core. As I understand it, plutonium degrades into much longer lived and more heavily radioactive elements.
I honestly didn't pay close attention to Chernobyl coverage as that disaster unfolded, but this is starting to sound more and more like similar results in that the immediate vicinity may have to be abandoned. From threads with industry experienced engineers, such as those at the oil drum, I'm getting the sense that the steps now being taken to cool cores 1 and 3, including pouring boron enriched sea water over them is essentially ruining the reactors. So the officials in charge have basically said "trash the equipment, prevent any further meltdown at all costs." Someone with better knowledge can fill in here, but what's the next step? Encase the reactor cores in tons of concrete after the process is cooled down? Or does stuff get salvaged and whatever is left of the fuel rods get reclaimed and then treated as one would any other solid nuclear plant waste?
Edit: there's a pretty good FAQ diary on daily Kos currently by a diarist claiming to have a nuclear engineering background. Pretty level headed and answers a number of my questions above and others I hadn't even thought of yet: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...e-Fukushima-QA
The detailed back and forth in the comments there is especially informative.
The exact magnitude is something that is entirely academic. My heart goes out to all the people who've lost loved ones, lost their beloved pets and lost their homes. The stuff can be replaced, the lives never can.
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No Chernobyl wasn't remotely a modern reactor design, was running at full power when it exploded and caught on fire and had no containment structure at all. The damage from the explosion prevented the core from being shut down fully by the control rods.
None of that has happened in Japan. All the reactors were successfully shut down but they lost some of the ability to thermally cool them off. The results are more similar to Three Mile Island than Chernobyl.
Boron is a neutron absorber. It should squelch any remaining fission going on in those reactors and the sea water, well it's readily available but it does mean those two reactors are now officially toast, meltdown or not.
As for the Daily Kos piece, there is better info in some of the comments that the piece itself.
Here is the news feed from the International Atomic Energy Agency about reactor problems in Japan. FYI CET is +1 UTC, Japan is +9 UTC, New York is currently with DST -4 UTC if you want to know what time events are happening.
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Thanks for the clarification. Additional reading I've been doing since posting that had me pointed in that direction already. I think it may have been even in the comments of that Kos diary that I read parts of the core at Chernobyl are still smoldering within the concrete containment. ugh!|
Originally Posted by Father Xmas
No Chernobyl wasn't remotely a modern reactor design, was running at full power when it exploded and caught on fire and had no containment structure at all. The damage from the explosion prevented the core from being shut down fully by the control rods.
None of that has happened in Japan. All the reactors were successfully shut down but they lost some of the ability to thermally cool them off. The results are more similar to Three Mile Island than Chernobyl. |
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As for the Daily Kos piece, there is better info in some of the comments that the piece itself. Here is the news feed from the International Atomic Energy Agency about reactor problems in Japan. FYI CET is +1 UTC, Japan is +9 UTC, New York is currently with DST -4 UTC if you want to know what time events are happening. |
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Not surprising. Like the Huffington Post, The Daily Kos is best read with a keg of beer on hand to dull the abject stupidity.
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas
As for the Daily Kos piece, there is better info in some of the comments that the piece itself.
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If I see any more politicking in here, I am getting this thread locked.|
Originally Posted by je_saist
Not surprising. Like the Huffington Post, The Daily Kos is best read with a keg of beer on hand to dull the abject stupidity.
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This loss of human life, irreparable damage, and abject suffering are tremendous. If people need to polish their egos, they can do it elsewhere.
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There is no section for "world news" - but horrendous events like the Sendai earthquake have always shown up in General, and the mods have consistently allowed them to stay as long as it stays civil.|
Originally Posted by LtZerge
Don't mean to bring it up, but isn't this in the wrong section?
:X |
Including foreshocks and aftershocks, Japan has suffered over 100 earthquakes in the last week (the vast majority in the last two days). The majority of them are over 4.5 Mw strength. No one knows when the plates will settle down, it could be DAYS. This scares the **** out of me.
No one knows when power is going to come back for most of the people who are out of power. Gas (gasoline and natural gas) is having trouble getting through to stations. Food is already starting to become scarce, perishables are going bad. Fukushima I and II damaged reactors are still having trouble cooling, still with ongoing partial meltdowns, though some of the undamaged reactors with no issues will be (or have been already?) powered up again. It's going to be raining soon (landslide danger since the soil has been loosened by the repeated earthquakes), even snow further north, getting colder and colder through the week - and so many homeless, and even so many with homes out of power.
So many thousands and thousands of homes and businesses are utterly destroyed. So many lives lost, and so very many more missing. Every time I put more than a moment's thought into it, my heart just...breaks and I can't help but cry. I have donated to two organizations EVERYTHING I have beyond what I need to live, but it's not enough. I'm so afraid that it will never be enough.
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Also, from an article on Robert Cringely's blog:|
Originally Posted by je_saist
I sort of hope this doesn't set Nuclear power itself back though. I can just can see people declaring how unsafe Nuclear power is... entirely forgetting that the reactors got hit with multiple earthquakes and a frigging 3 story high wave of solid water.
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"A boiling water reactor does just what it sounds like it boils water to make steam that drives a turbine generator. This is as opposed to a pressurized water reactor that uses the nuclear reaction to heat a coolant that never really boils because it is under high pressure, then sends that coolant through a heat exchanger which heats water to make steam to drive the generator. Boiling water reactors are simpler, cheaper, but generally arent made anymore because they are perceived as being less safe."
Apparently, these are older reactors using an outdated design.
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Have there been a lot of "false alarms"?
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A second Hydrogen explosion has been reported at Fukushima, this time at unit number 3.
This situation just seems like it gets worse and worse.
@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too
Yep, around 11am their time. Three of the remaining four reactors on site were shut down for inspection before the quake so absolutely no problem with them. The remaining reactor seems to be cooling off okay with a system that uses natural heat convection to bleed off the excess heat.
Reactor 1 was a very early 2nd gen reactor and ironically was actually scheduled for decommissioning this month. Reactor 3 was also 2nd gen but with a somewhat better containment structure. It was scheduled for decommissioning in 2016.
Here is a pdf file about the reactor design used at that power plant, has a few nice cutaway diagrams of the reactor and it's containment structure.
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Meltdowns don't imply any release of radioactive material in and of itself. It implies what it literally implies: reactor components heat to the point where they melt.|
Originally Posted by SilverAgeFan
My understanding is that if/when any meltdown does/has occur/occured from this type of core, it will not be a nuclear explosion but rather a dangerous and significantly high volume release of several highly radioactive isotopes.
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Why this is important for nuclear reactors is that they are designed to use uranium or plutonium to generate heat by placing the reactor fuel in close proximity while using a moderator to control the rate at which the reaction takes place. Obviously, if the fuel and the machinery its within is a molten puddle, control of the reactions becomes impossible.
I understand they are using seawater at some of the reactors to keep the reactors submerged. Water is a good heat conductor, which is why these types of reactors keep their active nuclear components submerged in water for cooling. If that cooling water evaporates and they are exposed to the air, among other problems they will begin to generate more heat than air can remove from them, which means they can overheat to the point of meltdown.
Use of seawater tells me they are past their normal emergency procedures due to the collateral tsunami damage knocking out generators and other systems, and are essentially writing off the reactors and trying simply to permanently shut them down. Seawater is literally the last thing you want to pump into the reactors, because seawater is corrosive especially at high temperatures. But it is probably literally the last thing they have left to use.
Even if the cores meltdown or have already melted down, a separate sequence of events would have to happen to generate a catastrophic release of radioactive material. Basically the melted fuel would have to generate a semi-runaway heat reaction (this cannot under any circumstances cause a nuclear explosion because the nuclear reactor fuel isn't generally pure enough to create a critical mass this way) which vaporizes the cooling water or causes a hydrogen reaction, either of which causes the pressure vessel to detonate from the pressure. That's a real threat, but at the moment still not a likely one.
On the subject of Chernobyl. Scientists and engineers hate to use the word "impossible" but the truth is that a Chernobyl-like accident is not just "unlikely" but literally impossible at these reactors. A catastrophic release of radiation is *not* mathematically impossible, but it is impossible to have the same sort of accident. Chernobyl used a reactor design I'm not sure was used at any commercial western power plant. Its a design I first learned about when learning about the Manhattan project. It stacked nuclear fuel rods and moderators within a graphite moderator rather than water. Chernobyl also was conducting dangerously weird tests at the time that had the reactor in a very unstable situation with the reactor control rods removed. Chernobyl was caused basically by a runaway reaction where the water in the reactor flashed to steam, which eliminated the one reaction moderator in the system, accelerating heat generation until the reactor exploded, then this was compounded by the actual reactor graphite igniting causing fires which carried radioactive smoke and ash from the reactor.
I believe the Japanese reactors are all scramed (shut down with control rods in place) and the problem is residual heat: the primary fuel is mostly shut down, but secondary nuclear reaction byproducts are still generating a lot of uncontrolled heat. That's normal for a nuclear reactor (except for losing access to normal external cooling systems), and if the heat is coming from those secondary elements, the reactors will slowly cool down over the next week. If its coming from uncontrolled primary fuel reactions due to partial meltdowns, the reactors could be in a critical state for much longer than that.
I wasn't originally aware the reactors in question were boiling water designs. Those are older reactor designs, although I'm not sure if that fact is significant in terms of cooling them off after a disaster like this.
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Right. Although locking the thread doesn't really take the fact that this is happening away. Opinions I agree, however allowed, can be kept to themselves. We can all agree on that. |
Originally Posted by DumpleBerry
If I see any more politicking in here, I am getting this thread locked.
This loss of human life, irreparable damage, and abject suffering are tremendous. If people need to polish their egos, they can do it elsewhere. |
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We can't stop disasters like this, but we can help them recover. So let's do our best.
Also, sorry, a volcano erupted yesterday, TWICE. They're just not getting any breaks, really. It's on YouTube. There have been residual tremors and another tsunami hit. If anything else happens, Japan may as well be a rock full of mess and debris.
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I know right. They just can't catch a break. Add to that, they're expecting rain this week (hopefully not much), so there's the threat of mudslides cause of the loosened soil.
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Originally Posted by NICKisdaBeast
Also, sorry, a volcano erupted yesterday, TWICE. They're just not getting any breaks, really. It's on YouTube. There have been residual tremors and another tsunami hit. If anything else happens, Japan may as well be a rock full of mess and debris.
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@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too
Unfortunately, I can't add anything but bad news here. Seismologists are predicting a 70% chance of a 7 magnitude quake in the next three days, and a 50% chance of 4 magnitude quakes over the next seven days.
However, I can back up what Arcanaville has said about the reactors; these are significantly better designed and safer reactors than Chernobyl. The primary containment buildings where the reactors actually are have seven feet steel reinforced concrete walls and additional protection to contain a meltdown should it occur.
Seawater is indeed a last resort measure, but the explosions we've seen (which are all hydrogen explosions) are releases of pressure and not dangerous. In a few days, what radioactive material is released will drop to below background levels. In short, the people are safe and the japanese authorities are well on top of people who have had any significant exposure.
We're in a state of wait and see right now, though.
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TheRegister has a surprisingly good write-up of the events at the nuclear power plants: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03...iima_analysis/
They also link into other good coverages of the Nuclear plant events:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/1...e-explanation/
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/...iupdate01.html
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/default.aspx
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I get that this is being stated with the implied "...not dangerous when compared to a full scale meltdown and catastrophic release of radiation." But the sentence still struck me as rather hilarious--like something out of a 1950's industry sponsored film touting the health benefits of cigarette smoke! Put a grin on my face!
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Originally Posted by SuperOz
the explosions we've seen (which are all hydrogen explosions) are releases of pressure and not dangerous.
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