U.S. nuclear officials suspect Japanese plant has a dire breach

[aquart]

Source: Ralph Vartabedian, Barbara Demick and Laura King, Los Angeles Times March 18, 2011

Reporting from Los Angeles, Kesennuma, Japan, and—
U.S. government nuclear experts believe a spent fuel pool at Japan's crippled Fukushima reactor complex has a breach in the wall or floor, a situation that creates a major obstacle to refilling the pool with cooling water and keeping dangerous levels of radiation from escaping.

That assessment by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials is based on the sequence of events since the earthquake and information provided by key American contractors who were in the plant at the time, said government officials familiar with the evaluation. It was compelling evidence, they said, that the wall of the No. 4 reactor pool has a significant hole or crack.

snip

A breach in the pool would leave engineers with a problem that has no precedent or ready-made solution, said Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"My intuition is that this is a terrible situation and it is only going to get worse," he said. "There may not be any way to deal with it."

more


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-wrapup-20110318,0,2262753.story

[Adsos Letter]

1. Damn.

:(

[aquart]

27. Damn to the max.

[flamingdem]

2. This will make the radiation so high

that it will be hard to work at the plant other than at a distance ..

[inademv]

3. Horray for robotics? n/t

[flamingdem]

7. Ironically, they apparently asked the Germans for help with robotics

since the Germans have some very highly develope drobotic remote systems ...

[hlthe2b]

4. "There may not be any way to deal with it."

What a statement... !

[Ex Lurker]

23. there's always a way to deal with it

even if it means burying the whole building under a four story pile of concrete.

[Demeter]

49. That does nothing for the water table, though

[wordpix]

55. the concrete option is what happened with Chernobyl

and this plant won't be operating again, so why not?

[Baclava]

5. Is this what a 'dire breach' looks like?

my intuition says I think I can see the pool

[tavalon]

14. That would be your dire breach, yes

As to being able to see the pool, I can't but there is steam or dust coming up from something.

[Turbineguy]

26. If that is the pool

you can see the water level and it is above the fuel. The green machinery above it is the travel crane.

[Baclava]

58. Thanks. It does looks warm and inviting though...

aqua colored water is so soothing

[Turbineguy]

60. 84 deg C

A little warm for my taste!

TEPCO confirmed that there was sufficient water in #4 pool although it is getting warmer. I think if they can start cooling in in the next few days we'll be OK. At least that one will...

[Baclava]

61. I don't do math. I agree water is the answer for now - keep it flowing. n/t

[NutmegYankee]

30. The breach is at the side or bottom of the pool

The top isn't as much of a concern as long as it's filled with water, which is a good radiation shield.

[leveymg]

35. Spent fuel pool and refueling bay are on that level, if this diagram is accurate. More #4 photos:

[gateley]

6. If there isn't "any way to deal with it" -- what happens then?

Has Japan/TEPCO acknowledged this? I wonder if this assessment is accurate.

This just goes from bad to worse. Poor Japan! :(

[No Elephants]

47. Yes, but not only Japan. Wind circles the planet. Japan will be hit the worst, but

we'll all share to one degree or another.

[gateley]

59. That's always been my belief - we're ALL affected. The waters circle the planet, too. nt

[PoliticAverse]

8. No precedent ?

[readmoreoften]

10. We may not be able to get close enough it seems.

Good grief.

[tavalon]

15. How many people died building that?

Honest question. I don't know if there even is an official answer.

[thereismore]

29. Exactly. The Soviet people knew they had to sacrifice for the rest of us. They did not leave. nt

[nodehopper]

36. not to downplay their heroism

but there is a lot of mixed evidence about whether the first responders there knew how dangerous the levels of radiation were. Given that it was the USSR, I would guess they did not know because they were told--if they knew, it was because they were able to put the facts together independently.

[thereismore]

37. You are right. They were not told the levels, but being nuclear powerplant firefighters,

they knew they could be terribly exposed. They did not expect the truth from their government, yet they knew they had to sacrifice for all. Their children were sleeping in a nearby town. The soldiers that assumed the role of "liquidators" later on were not informed either, but how much do you need to know when there is a gaping hole where the reactor used to be, and all your friends are vomiting from radiation sickness, to realize your life is being sacrificed. You are right about that too. And yet they did it. Russians always knew how to sacrifice. See the history of WWII, Eastern front, for example.

[nodehopper]

62. they weren't all nuclear power plant firefighters

The first responder teams were partially made up of the power plant fire brigade and partially from the local fire brigade of Pripyat. But furthermore, everyone on site had at first mistakenly assumed that the reactor hadn't exploded (this assumption held while the firefighters were doing their work), and there was literally no measurement device that was able to accurately measure the radiation levels, leading everyone at the plant to assume that the radiation levels were such that it would be safe to work for about 5 hours. There was no accurate (or in many cases any) information about what happened in Chernobyl for days--I actually remember this, as my family and I still lived in the USSR at the time. Both Chernobyl and WWII had their share of heroes, but any sort of blanket generalization like "Russians always knew how to sacrifice" makes me intensely uncomfortable--more like "Russians were disenfranchised and under-informed a lot, and forced into many horrible circumstances by criminal leadership on every level, and as a result, their actions are, in historical retrospective, perceived as heroic.'"

[No Elephants]

48. "Given that it was the USSR..." Or Ground Zero. Same shit, different nation.

[madokie]

54. Yes not much difference on that front was there

The ruling class see us peons as expendable and that is true no matter where on earth you go.

[nodehopper]

63. Yep, "The air quality is perfectly safe." "The radiation levels are non-lethal."

Same disregard for human lives.

[readmoreoften]

9. What does "there may not be any way to deal with it" mean exactly?

There may be a hissing pile of nuclear fuel rods emitting x amount--they stopped reported the levels--of radiation until Germany can build new robots to deal with the problem? Fuck, yall. We need a montage!

[tavalon]

16. A montage?

Do you mean like the part of the movie where the music starts and lots of progress toward the inevitable happy ending happens? If so, that would be nice but it isn't going to happen.

[readmoreoften]

17. Exactly. A montage. It compresses time, too.

We need Germans designing new robots quickly. Only a montage can provide this at the pace we need.

[tavalon]

18. That really is sweet

Sadly sweet. The Japanese really do need a quick montage to save them from this Godzilla like horror movie.

[Name removed]

40. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[lostnfound]

11. Not to worry, surely the pro-nuclear people have a plan. Nt

[hlthe2b]

12. Yes... you got the money$$$, they "got the plan..."

Of course it may involve lots of slave labor and very real human sacrifice...:mad:

At this point, this frightening prospect seems all too real.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Some of us suspsected this a couple days ago

when they said crack and ceiling.... cracks can go in different ways.

[SpoonFed]

19. right

some of us suspected this when the building blew up, and/or was burning in fire
and looks like a bomb was dropped on it...

[jtuck004]

20. When they said they were putting water in but didn't know why it wasn't filling every repair plumber

within hearing of a tv set was yelling "You have a leak"!

And at that point you either fix the leak or put in more water than you are losing. Apparently they did neither. Whether they could
have is the question.

[northernlights]

31. it didn't take a plumber to know there was a leak nt

[jtuck004]

34. Well, apparently it took more than the minister on tv had. The interpreter

said he said "We are putting water in, but the level is not going up. We don't know why"

roughly remembered, but pretty close. In theory it could have been turning into steam and venting,
but the simpler explanation is a leak. If he had been heard to say "We are fixing the big monster
hole in the tank" I would have felt better. I have found that repair people and new construction people
are both builders, and then there are operators. Different outlooks, all valuable. But I would hope
there are repair people in this situation.

Somewhere between Secretary Edano and plumber...

[northernlights]

41. agreed. my unstated point being

they're covering up...or at least trying to.

[jtuck004]

44. I know. Makes me sick.

We should have all hands on deck on this stuff, maybe no need to get this far, or further.

The problem isn't nuclear, I think. It's people.

[nadinbrzezinski]

57. You just made me smile

and yes that is the right outlook.

Builders have one... operators another.

[keopeli]

21. Very histrionic for a scientist. More accurately, perhaps, I know of no remedies for my theory?

I only say this because it makes me question the motives of this nuclear scientist when they say something very UNscientific. He begins by admiting he's only using his intuition and predicts and downward trend for the situation in Japan. But, adding "there may not be any way to deal with it" is not a very scientific statement. It's pretty selfish, actually, since he assumes his inability to resolve his own postulated theory based in his intuition, is universal.

I'm grateful that these statements aren't being made by talking heads and "journalists," but that doesn't mean I'm going to just suck up what a scientist says without analysis, discussion and reason.

Really, there's plenty of crises to go around without resorting to speculation and histrionics, don't you think L.A. Times?

[snagglepuss]

25. A very interesting and helpful observation. nt

[northernlights]

32. you're taking his statement totally out of context

First, he's from the Union of Concerned Scientists, so neither the suggestion nor the analysis behind it were not made in a vacuum and are not based on the same data and information that the rest of us see. They have access to more data than we do, they are discussing and analyzing that data as a group and, as scientists, they have better understanding of how to interpret the data than the rest of us. Up until now, they've been well ahead of the curve.

Second, your statement suggests you don't understand the difference between theory, hypothesis and speculation, which are 3 very different things. His total statement is closer to a hypothesis than theory or speculation.

The context of his so-called "histrionics" is in direct reference to the lack of precedent or pre-packaged solutions. The fact is at this point, TEPCO is making it up as they go along.

Third, scientists are people too, and the best of them don't discount intuition which is simply a composite of all the information taken in and processed.

Fourth, journalists sometimes take things out of context themselves, so we don't even know that was his entire statement. And editors often mangle things, something I know from 20 years of personal experience as a former communications manager.

[marions ghost]

42. thank you!

well said

[karynnj]

53. I agree that it is speculative, but not histrionic or "selfish"

(I never who have used "selfish" there, I think "egotistic" might be closer - but I don't think it that either.) In terms of speculative, anything predicting the future is to some degree speculative, but his answer is based on what he and people in the field he might have consulted with think.

He did not say that "there is no" but "there may not be". That is saying that HE does not know of any, but he is not ruling it out - as would be the case if he said "is not".

I suspect that you might be upset as it is a very scary statement.

[Norrin Radd]

22. Too bad you can't use water + gelatin.

[kentauros]

52. I was just thinking of something similar.

That is, pumped concrete.

They don't need a form of concrete that's going to be structurally sound, just something viscous enough to plug the holes. They could probably even just use mud, or anything that will not only plug the hole but also work as a coolant for the short-term until they can get something better in the breach.

[AsahinaKimi]

24. chikusho!!

忌々しい. It seems the bad news doesn't stop.

[jtuck004]

28. kick - and spent fuel pool pic - link

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/16/world/16contain.html

from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html

[Rex]

33. Fire liquid concrete at the gap or breach with a force cannon?

From an incredible distance?

[ElsewheresDaughter]

38. It's time to ENTOMB it like Cherenobyl...entomb it now !

[TNLib]

39. Get the Russians expertise they've dealt with this

They need to start planning for the Sarcophagus as well as other measures.

[Jersey Devil]

43. If they covered #4 with cement like the Russians maybe they

could reduce radiation enough to work on the other reactors. Those helicopters probably should be dropping cement instead of water if the spent fuel holding tank is breached.

[No Elephants]

45. "There may not be any way to deal with it." And that's why so many oppose nukes anywhere.

[madrchsod]

46. robots will not work unless the plant is designed to use robots

most if not all older nuke plants can not use robots.

[No Elephants]

50. Today Show this a.m. did a bit on Chernobyl now being a tourist attraction.

Some people are nuts.

[JJW]

51. Obama's solution?

Build more nuke plants.

[wordpix]

56. unfortunately true & I don't see their $38 billion in proposed nuke subsidies coming off the table

O and Chu need to seriously rethink this and come out strong against new nukes and for thorough inspections and shutting down old ones that need it. They will both be out in '12 if they don't.

[Aerows]

64. Everyone with a brain suspects the same thing...

...simply because we have seen this dog and pony show before of "be calm", "it isn't a problem right now" and "no one could have foreseen".

You can take one look at the pictures of a reactor with the top blown off of the thing and draw your own conclusions. If I can see the crane inside the building used to move spent fuel rods and wreckage all around it, I'm pretty clear that the situation is not good.

[mybuddy]

65. Chernobyl

They should just bring in some of the engineers that were at Chernobyl during the meltdown to help them. Does anyone know where they could be found?

[progressoid]

66. Believe, suspect, intuition...

Golly, that's a lot of facts and data.