AI
Friday, April 08, 2011 5:34:54 AM
WRAPUP 7-Japan says economy in "severe" condition after disaster
* No damage reported at Fukushima plant
* Tsunami warning lifted, workers return
* Power cut in north Japan shuts factories (Updates throughout)
By Chizu Nomiyama and Yoko Nishikawa
Fri Apr 8, 2011 1:59am EDT
TOKYO, April 8 (Reuters) - Japan said on Friday its economy was in a severe condition following last month's triple disaster triggered by one of the biggest earthquakes on record, with sentiment in its service sector registering the sharpest fall ever.
Underlining the ferocity of the damage to the economy from the disaster, in which a nuclear power plant was crippled by the giant tsunami following the March 11 quake, the government also asked major companies to cut electricity use in the peak summer months by up to a quarter.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange said the power cuts meant it would have to delay plans to extend trading hours.
"Japan's economy is suddenly in a severe condition due to the effects of the earthquake," the Cabinet Office said after the release of its March survey of workers such as taxi drivers and restaurant staff.
A strong aftershock on Thursday night -- one of the strongest of more than 400 of magnitude greater than 5.0 since the massive March 11 tremor -- shook the already ravaged northeast, forcing two companies, including Sony Corp, to stop production because of power cuts.
At least two people were killed after the 7.4 magnitude tremor.
There was a brief scare when water leaks were found on Friday at the Onagawa nuclear plant in the northeast but Japan's nuclear safety agency said it had not detected any change in radiation levels.
And a relieved Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the latest quake had not caused any more damage to its wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, though it did have to briefly evacuate workers because of a tsunami alert that was later withdrawn.
An encouraging note was sounded by the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, with one of its officials saying there were signs of progress in stabilising the Fukushima plant, though the situation remained very serious.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had not detected any change in radiation levels following Thursday night's quake. [ID:nLDE736288]
"The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious ... (but) there are early signs of recovery in some functions such as electrical power and instrumentation," the IAEA's head of nuclear safety, Denis Flory, said.
The agency said radiation in the region around the plant, as measured by gamma dose rates, had peaked in the early days of the crisis, and aside from a rise on March 22, had since fallen to "a level very close to background".
Japan's neighbours have grown increasingly anxious at the risk of contamination from radiation, with some schools in South Korea closing because of fears of toxic rain. Officials there said the radiation levels in the atmosphere were harmless.
About 28,000 people are dead or missing after last month's triple disaster of quake, tsunami or nuclear crisis in Japan's northeast.
DISRUPTS BUSINESS
It has disrupted business, affected supply chains around the world, and reduced industrial output from Japan, a major exporter.
The central bank said it expected both output and exports to remain weak because of the impact of the quake.
"Output will hover at a low level for the time being but then start to increase as supply constraints are mitigated," the Bank of Japan said in its monthly report for April.
Companies and households will need to cut back significantly on power usage this summer when demand is at its peak, Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said after a cabinet meeting.
He urged major companies to cut electricity consumption by 25 percent.
But some ministers at Friday's cabinet meeting did call for an end to a campaign for "self restraint" by ordinary people adopted immediately after the March 11 disaster to cut fuel or electricity use and discourage stockpiling of necessities.
"Some cabinet ministers said excessive self-restraint could worsen the economy, weakening economic power for reconstruction," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters.
PREVENTING MORE EXPLOSIONS
Utility TEPCO said it was continuing to inject nitrogen into one of its Fukushima reactors to prevent a repeat of last month's hydrogen explosions.
The plant is still far from under control and engineers have been forced to pump in tonnes of wanter to cool down reactors, in the process creating radioactive water which has to be stored, though some has already been released into the sea.
Officials say it could take months to bring the reactors under control and years to clear up the toxic mess left behind.
The government has already set up a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the plant, banned fishing along much of the northeast coast and set up evacuation centres for the tens of thousands forced to leave their homes following the crisis.
($1=85.475 Japanese yen) (Additional reporting by Mayumi Negishi, Chisa Fujioka, Yoko Nishikawa and Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo, Sui-lee Wee in Beijing, Jack Kim in Seoul; Writing by Daniel Magnowski and Jonathan Thatcher; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
© Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/08/japan-idUSL3E7F72Y220110408 [no comments yet]
===
Japan aftershock troubles another nuclear plant
Last Updated : 08 April 2011 at 12:05 IST
TOKYO (Commodity Online) : The after quake that hit Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture Thursday created some more troubles to country’s nuclear reactors as Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant reported water leakage from its spent fuel pool.
Tohoku Electric Power Co, which runs the Plant said water leaked from spent-fuel pools at two reactors and also from other parts of the plant but levels of radiation were unchanged outside the plant.
The Company said external power supply was disrupted at the No. 1 reactor of the Higashidori nuclear station. The emergency generator is being used to cool the spent fuel pool.
A Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official said Friday that it appears that the reactor systems are basically working "as designed" because emergency diesel generators are operating in reactors that lost external power.
The plant, whose operations have been suspended since a magnitude-9 March 11 earthquake, lost two of its three external power connections in Thursday night's aftershock, causing the cooling system for the spent-fuel pools to temporarily stop.
A strong quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 jolted on Thursday evening Japan's Miyagi Prefecture and its vicinity but no major troubles were reported at nuclear facilities in the areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake, including the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power station.
The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warning immediately after the 11:32 p.m. quake, whose seismic center was off Miyagi Prefecture at a depth of some 40 kilometers, but it was lifted shortly before 1 a.m. Friday.
The quake measured upper 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in Kurihara and Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture and lower 6 in Ofunato, Kamaishi, Ichinoseki and several other cities in Iwate Prefecture as well as some other parts of Miyagi, according to the agency.
Blackouts occurred all over Aomori, Iwate and Akita prefectures as well as several parts of Miyagi and Yamagata prefectures, according to the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency.
Copyright 2011 Commodity Online India Limited
http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Japan-aftershock-troubles-another-nuclear-plant-38009-3-1.html [no comments yet]
===
Japan’s Stricken Nuclear Reactors Spared Damage From Latest 7.1 Earthquake
By Akiko Nishimae, Jim Polson and Ichiro Suzuki - Apr 7, 2011 2:52 PM CT
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake minutes before midnight spared the stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in Japan, although workers struggling to cool radioactive fuel were evacuated, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said based on its initial assessment.
The aftershock was the strongest since March 11 when a record 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami devastated the coast of Northeast Japan. No unusual conditions were observed at the plant afterward, the utility, known as Tepco, and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in statements.
No unusual measurements of water level, pressure or other operations were found at the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the six-unit plant, Tepco officials told reporters today.
“Indications of new leakage or a change in radiation levels will be the only way they’ll tell if there’s further damage,” Murray Jennix, a nuclear engineer who specialized in radioactive containment leaks and teaches at San Diego State University, said in a telephone interview. “You’ve got cracks that could have been made bigger.”
Tepco said April 6 engineers had plugged a leak of radioactive water into the ocean from a pit near the No. 2 reactor after several failed attempts. Concentration of radioactive iodine in seawater near the reactor discharge pipe fell by half, to 140,000 times the regulatory limit, the company said yesterday.
‘The Main Fear’
“The main fear is more structural damage, leading to additional cracks or reopening of the fixed crack,” Peter Hosemann, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an e-mailed message. “Radioactivity can leak again if cracks open.”
A day may be needed to detect additional damage at the plant, he said.
Crews at the crippled nuclear station north of Tokyo will continue pumping nitrogen into the No. 1 reactor to prevent hydrogen explosions of the type that damaged radiation containment buildings last month. Injection of nitrogen, the inert gas that comprises most of air, may take six days spokesman Yoshinori Mori said before today’s quake.
“They are manually injecting nitrogen through a very narrow pipe,” Tadashi Narabayashi, a professor of nuclear engineering at Hokkaido University in northern Japan, said by phone yesterday. “High radiation levels in the building are also making it difficult as workers have to keep rotating.”
Cooling the Reactors
The March 11 tsunami flooded emergency generators at the Fukushima plant, triggering cooling-system failures at four of the plant’s six nuclear units.
Tepco is still using emergency pumps to cool the reactors and pools holding spent fuel, almost four weeks after the initial disaster. Three blasts damaged reactor buildings and hurled radiation into the air last month.
About 3.64 million households in six Japanese prefectures were without power following the aftershock, Kyodo News reported, citing Tohoku Electric Power Co., which operates in seven prefectures.
The Rokkasho nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant and the Higashidori nuclear power plant lost power and were operating on backup diesel generators, the nuclear safety agency said today in a statement. Two of three power lines to the Onagawa nuclear power plant also were disabled, it said.
Five other power stations were shut down by the aftershock, broadcaster NHK reported, citing Tohoku Electric.
‘Tremendously Smaller’
“What occurred today is an aftershock in the same area and rupture zone to the magnitude-9 main shock that occurred about a month ago,” said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist in the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado. “It is tremendously smaller than the main shock. The main shock caused about 80 times more ground movement.”
The 7.1 aftershock was the fourth of magnitude-7 or higher since the major quake on March 11, according to the Japanese Meteorological Agency. The largest measured 7.7, about 30 minutes after the record quake, according to the agency’s website.
Police and fire officials reported the number of people injured in today’s earthquake reached 82 as of 3:30 a.m. local time, public broadcaster NHK said on its website.
There have been 464 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater, counting today’s, according to agency statistics.
More than 27,300 people are dead or missing after the initial natural disaster in northeastern Japan, according to the latest figures from the National Police Agency.
To contact the reporters on this story: Akiko Nishimae in New York at anishimae3@bloomberg.net; Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net; Ichiro Suzuki in Tokyo at isuzuki@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Teo Chian Wei at cwteo@bloomberg.net; Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net
©2011 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-07/japan-workers-pump-nitrogen-into-damaged-reactor-to-reduce-risk-of-blast.html
===
WRAPUP 3-Japan focuses on hydrogen buildup after nuclear leak stopped
* Nitrogen pumped into reactor to prevent hydrogen explosion
* Nuclear crisis far from under control
* UN expert sees no health damage from Fukushima
* Nuclear safety debate, inspections in United States (Adds preparations for injections in other reactors, UN, US officials)
By Chizu Nomiyama and Shinichi Saoshiro
Wed Apr 6, 2011 7:36pm EDT
TOKYO, April 7 (Reuters) - Japan pumped nitrogen gas into a crippled nuclear reactor on Thursday, trying to prevent an explosive buildup of hydrogen gas as the world's worst nuclear disaster in 25 years stirred atomic safety debate and inspections in the United States.
Engineers worked through the night injecting nitrogen into the containment vessel of reactor No.1 at Fukushima Daiichi power plant, following success in stopping highly radioactive water leaking into the sea at another reactor in the complex.
"It is necessary to inject nitrogen gas into the containment vessel and eliminate the potential for a hydrogen explosion," an official of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) told a news briefing.
The possibility of another hydrogen explosion like those that ripped through reactors No.1 and No.3 early in the crisis, spreading high levels of radiation into the air, was "extremely low," he said.
But TEPCO suspected that the outside casing of the reactor vessel was damaged, said the official.
"Under these conditions, if we continue cooling the reactors with water, the hydrogen leaking from the reactor vessel to the containment vessel could accumulate and could reach a point where it could explode," he added.
A second TEPCO official said 6,000 cubic metres of hydrogen gas would be pumped into reactor No.1 and the utility was preparing nitrogen gas injections for reactors No.2 and No.3 in the six-rector plant as a safety precaution .
Although TEPCO succeeded after days of desperate efforts to plug the leak at reactor No.2, they still need to pump 11.5 million litres (11,500 tonnes) of contaminated water back into the ocean because they have run out of storage space at the facility. The water was used to cool overheated fuel rods.
Nuclear experts said the damaged reactors were far from being under control almost a month after they were hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
In Vienna, the head of a U.N. scientific body said the Fukushima accident is not expected to have any serious impact on people's health, based on the information available now.
Wolfgang Weiss, chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), also said the Fukushima disaster was less dramatic than Chernobyl in 1986 but "much more serious" than Three Mile Island in 1979.
Asked what health consequences he expected from Fukushima, he said: "From what I know now, nothing, because levels are so low."
"We have seen traces of iodine in the air all over the world now but they are much, much, much lower than traces we have seen at similar distances after Chernobyl," Weiss added. [ID:nLDE73529F]
Growing concerns in nearby South Korea and China over radioactive fallout from Japan were underscored when China's health ministry reported trace amounts of radioactive iodine in spinach in three Chinese provinces.
The government is preparing to revise guidelines for legal radiation levels, designed for brief exposure to high levels of radiation in emergencies and not cumulative absorption, for people living near the damaged plant.
Workers are struggling to restart cooling pumps -- which recycle the water -- in four damaged reactors.
Until those are fixed, they must pump in water to prevent overheating and meltdowns, but have run out of storage capacity for the seawater when it becomes contaminated.
Radioactive iodine detected in the sea has been recorded at 4,800 times the legal limit, but has since fallen to about 600 times the limit. The water remaining in the reactors has radiation five million times legal limits.
Martin Virgilio, a top official for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said at a House of Representatives hearing that the NRC did not believe that the core of Fukushima's reactor No. 2 had melted down. [ID:nN06263616]
Earlier, a Democratic lawmaker had said the NRC informed him the core had become so hot it had probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel. Lawmakers also grilled the NRC on whether the U.S nuclear power industry was doing enough to ensure American reactors can withstand worst-case scenarios.
The NRC is conducting special inspections at two Illinois nuclear plants operated by Exelon Corp after routine checks in February found a problem with backup pumps that would be used to remove heat from the reactors in case of an accident.
COOLING REACTORS KEY
Japan is facing its worst crisis since World War Two after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami left nearly 28,000 people dead or missing and thousands homeless, and rocked the world's third-largest economy.
It will likely take months to finally cool down the reactors and years to dismantle those that have been damaged. TEPCO has said it will decommission four of the six reactors.
Two Fukushima plants together provide 4 percent of Japan's electric power and local politicians warn that reopening them will be politically difficult. [ID:nTKB007431]
The key to bringing the reactors under control is the extent of damage to the plant's cooling system, said analysts.
The Sankei newspaper reported that the government and TEPCO were considering building new cooling systems for three reactors to operate from outside the reactor buildings.
Japan's fishermen, who are part of the politically powerful agricultural lobby, made clear they were not assuaged by assurances that ocean radioactivity levels were low and safe.
"From now on, our fishermen will never cooperate with or accept nuclear power generation. I would like them to stop even those reactors that are now in operation right away," Ikuhiro Hattori, chairman of the Japan Fisheries Cooperatives, told NHK state television.
(Additional reporting by Sui-lee Wee in Beijing, Roberta Rampton and Ayesha Rascoe in Washington, and Scott DiSavino in New York; Writing by Paul Eckert, editing by Jonathan Thatcher)
© Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/japan-idUSL3E7F62A520110406 [with comments]
===
Cleaning up Japan's radioactive water could take decades
Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plan's No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4 reactors, from right to left, in this photo taken March 31 and released by Japan's Defense Ministry on April 1.
(Reuters)
No one is sure how to safely dispose of millions of gallons of highly radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. 'There is nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before,' a U.S. expert says.
By Julie Makinen and Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
April 7, 2011
Reporting from Tokyo and Los Angeles— For nearly four weeks, Japanese emergency crews have been spraying water on the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, a desperate attempt to avert the calamity of a full meltdown.
Now, that improvised solution to one nuclear nightmare is spawning another: what to do with the millions of gallons of water that has become highly radioactive as it washes through the plant.
The water being used to try to cool the reactors and the dangerous spent fuel rods is leaking through fissures inside the plant, seeping down through tunnels and passageways to the lowest levels, where it is accumulating into a sea of lethal waste.
No one is sure how to get rid of it safely.
"There is nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before," says Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Energy Department.
Japanese officials estimate that they already have accumulated about 15 million gallons of highly radioactive water. Hundreds of thousands of gallons are being added every day as the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., continues to feed coolant into the leaky structures.
Ultimately, the high-level radioactive substances in the water will have to be safely stored, processed and solidified, a job that experts say will almost certainly have to be handled on a specially designed industrial complex. The process of cleaning up the water could take many years, even decades, to complete. The cost could run into the tens of billions of dollars.
Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and longtime advisor on nuclear waste, said the problems facing Japan are greater than even the most highly contaminated nuclear weapons site in the U.S., the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state.
The Department of Energy is decommissioning eight reactors at Hanford and plans to process about 58 million gallons of radioactive sludge now in leaky underground tanks, all at an estimated cost of $100 billion to $130 billion, according to outside estimates. But unlike Fukushima Daiichi, none of the Hanford reactors melted down and virtually all of the site is accessible to workers without risking exposure to dangerous levels of radioactivity.
"It will be a big job, bigger than Hanford," Gilinsky said, though he cautioned that U.S. costs are unnecessarily high and that the Japanese may be able to do the work more economically.
The immediate problem facing the Japanese is how to store all that water until the reactors and the spent fuel pools are brought under control. The plant's main storage tanks are nearly full. To make room, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco, released a couple of million gallons of the least contaminated water into the ocean this week, with the expectation that its radioactive elements would be diluted in the ocean's mass.
But international law forbids Japan from dumping contaminated water into the ocean if there are viable technical solutions available down the road.
So Tepco is considering bringing in barges and tanks, including a "megafloat" that can hold about 2.5 million gallons. Japan has also reportedly asked Russia to send a floating radiation treatment plant called the Suzuran that was used to decommission Russian nuclear submarines in the Pacific port of Vladivostok. The Suzuran was built in Japan a decade ago.
Yet even using barges and tanks to temporarily handle the water creates a future problem of how to dispose of the contaminated vessels.
U.S. and Japanese experts say the key to solving the disposal problem involves reducing the volume of water by concentrating the radioactive elements so they can be solidified into a safer, dry form. But waste experts disagree on exactly how to do that.
The difficulty of concentrating and then solidifying the contaminants depends on how much radioactivity is in the water, the type of isotopes and whether the work can be done on the Fukushima site.
UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Edward Morse said the water needs to be diverted into a concrete-lined holding pond fairly soon, where natural evaporation can help reduce its volume.
Youichi Enokida, a specialist in nuclear chemical engineering at Nagoya University in Japan, agrees that the material should be put into some type of storage that would concentrate it through evaporation, though Japanese experts generally talk about the need for a sealed pool.
"We must concentrate the liquid," he said.
Even with a pond, it could take up to 10 years before the radioactivity would decay enough for the material to be handled, Morse said. Building a storage pond "buys you time," he said.
But other experts sharply disagree, saying exposing the material to open air could allow radioactive iodine and other volatile substances to blow off the site, adding to the remote contamination that is already spreading dozens of miles from the plant.
A factor that could vastly complicate the problem is the presence of tritium, or heavy water, which is produced during fission. Tritium cannot be filtered out of water, instead requiring an extremely expensive treatment process.
"If the contaminated water has relatively high tritium or tritiated water concentration, then treatment could be more complicated," said Joonhong Ahn, a nuclear waste expert at UC Berkeley.
Nuclear power plants normally have systems in place to treat tritium on site. But the condition and capacity of the Fukushima system is not known.
Enokida and Morse contend that if the water can be concentrated, it can then be put into dry form or even turned into glass, as is planned at Hanford and other contaminated sites around the world. But this process, called vitrification, is expensive and requires a small-scale industrial facility.
The alternative — processing the waste elsewhere in Japan — is likely to be controversial.
"The fishermen will protest; this is inevitable," Enokida said.
Morse said that the plant faces at least six months of emergency stabilization, about two years of temporary remediation and anywhere from two years to 30 years of full-scale cleanup. Furthermore, the high levels of ground contamination at the site are raising concerns about the viability of people working at the site in coming decades.
It will take hundreds or even thousands of workers years or decades to handle the cleanup, experts said.
U.S. officials have not yet discussed the water management problems with their Japanese counterparts. But Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Scott Burnell said the nuclear industry has a long experience with filtering radioactive contamination out of water, though never at a plant that has suffered such damage. At Three Mile Island it was decided to allow the tritium-contaminated water to evaporate, though that meant the tritium escaped as well.
At some point, however, Japan will have to add facilities to existing treatment plants in order to vitrify the radioactive material into glass logs or other dry forms that could be stored in alloy canisters. Those logs or canisters would have to be buried somewhere.
Where that burial ground is built is a question that the Japanese are only beginning to consider.
julie.makinen@latimes.com
ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com
Makinen reported from Tokyo and Vartabedian from Los Angeles.
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-water-20110407,0,2011011.story [ http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-water-20110407,0,873990,full.story ] [with comments]
===
Japan Weighs Wider Evacuation Zone
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Monday, as seen from the deck of a U.S. military barge hauling water
Japan Ministry of Defense via Bloomberg News
By TOKO SEKIGUCHI and MITSURU OBE
APRIL 8, 2011
TOKYO—Japan's government said Thursday it is considering extending the evacuation zone around its hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, as the government recalculates the risk of radioactivity that continues to issue from the plant four weeks after Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami.
Later on Thursday, Japan suffered its strongest temblor since the March 11 quake, highlighting the ongoing uncertainty over whether further aftershocks could damage the reactors further and release more radiation, or put other nuclear plants at risk. Some other plants were running on emergency generators but no operating problems were reported in the hours after the 7.1-magnitude quake.
The government's top spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, said Thursday the current 20-kilometer (12-mile) evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant may need to be enlarged, because the original parameters were established to protect against too much exposure in the short term and radiation continues to emanate from the complex.
Officials intended the evacuation zone to prevent anyone getting more cumulative exposure to radiation than a nuclear plant worker is limited to in a year—50 millisieverts.
"Current evacuation orders apply to areas where people are in danger of having received 50 millisieverts [of cumulative exposure]," Mr. Edano said. "We are now looking into what to do with other areas where, with prolonged exposure, people may receive that amount."
Two weeks ago, a state-funded monitoring body released a computer simulation that showed that in the first 12 days of troubles at the plant, certain areas beyond the evacuation zone had exceeded Japan's recommended cumulative exposure.
The body, the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, hasn't released an updated assessment since. A commission official said Thursday the group is collecting more data to improve the quality of its model.
Tepco said it has provided radiation figures from several locations near the complex and is awaiting government analysis before making the data public.
The government hasn't said when it would make a decision on expanding the zone, what measures it would use or how it might house those it relocates. It said it hasn't set a timetable.
The discussion is likely to renew international scrutiny of the government's 20-kilometer (12-mile) zone, which is smaller than 80-kilometer (50-mile) zone recommended by U.S. officials.
Several municipal officials in the area expressed anger at the government's handling of the situation. The mayor of one town just outside the 30-kilometer radius said the government should have thought ahead earlier in the crisis.
"We are hearing that it may take months for the plant to settle down—and only now are they talking about expanding the zone?" said Michio Furukawa, mayor of Kawamata, a town to the northwest with elevated radiation levels that is one of seven municipalities from which sales of local produce have been banned. "When this will all end?"
Last week, the government reported that just a handful of people have remained inside the 20-kilometer exclusion zone. It said thousands remain in the band 20 to 30 kilometers from the plant, where the government has urged residents to remain indoors as much as possible. It said others travel into the band daily to check on people and property.
Senior nuclear regulator Hidehiko Nishiyama apologized for the possible further dislocation to those living in the area. He identified a series of hydrogen explosions at the plant days after the earthquake as the primary cause of the widespread radiation.
"The explosions sent radioactive materials flying to areas far outside the nuclear complex," Mr. Nishiyama, of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a news conference. "Radioactive materials, once spread, cannot be put back. The best we can do is to stabilize the damaged reactors and prevent further emissions of radiation."
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a March 26 assessment of the plant that was made public this week, said a hydrogen explosion in a spent-fuel cooling pool threw particles of nuclear fuel up to a mile from the complex.
An NRC spokesman said it is "not our place" to comment on Mr. Edano's remarks on possibly widening the evacuation zone. "The Japanese government makes its decisions based on what they consider appropriate for their citizens," the spokesman said.
In the hours after the late Thursday quake, NISA said the Fukushima Daiichi plant hadn't reported immediate problems but that it was sending workers to check on the status of its reactors.
In an effort to head off further hydrogen explosions, the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., early Thursday began streaming nitrogen gas into reactor No. 1, one of the less damaged of the three crippled units. Tepco said these operations continued Friday morning.
Reactor No. 1's pressure and containment vessels are seen to have come out relatively unscathed by the overheating of the reactor core following the failure of the cooling system on March 11.
However, as the fuel cooled down and more steam condensed into water, fears grew that the pressure inside the containment vessel would fall sharply, allowing air to come in and create a dangerous mix of hydrogen and oxygen. Nitrogen injection is designed to forestall the entry of oxygen.
"The injection of gas is proceeding smoothly," a Tepco company official said at a briefing. The process began around 1 a.m. local time Thursday and will continue for about six days, he said, adding that the measure was having the desired effect of slightly raising the pressure within the container vessel.
Tepco also said that its president, Masataka Shimizu, had returned to work after being hospitalized for more than a week as his company was blamed for power outages and radioactive contamination that swept eastern Japan.
Mr. Shimizu will assume the role leading a joint task force with the government to support evacuees, allowing Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata to continue his role of overseeing the company's effort to bring the plant under control, according to Tepco spokesman Naoyuki Matsumoto.
The other two heavily damaged units—reactors Nos. 2 and 3—stayed in a relatively stable condition Thursday, as workers continued to pump cold water to cool the reactor cores.
The recovery efforts have received some support from the British government, which said it was easing its travel restrictions to Tokyo based on its scientific analysis of the current situation.
"Although the situation at Fukushima will remain of concern for some time, the risks are gradually declining as the reactors cool and as facilities to stabilise them are established," the government's Foreign and Commonwealth Office said on its website.
Copyright ©2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013604576248204196506240.html [with comments]
===
Getting Realistic About Evacuation Zone for Nuclear Plant Disaster
By Karl Grossman [ http://www.opednews.com/author/author14729.html ]
April 6, 2011 at 13:42:25
Among the many obvious lessons of the ongoing nuclear power disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan is that the 10-mile evacuation zone the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has insisted upon for nuclear plants here is a product of the pro-nuclear NRC's wishful thinking.
The U.S. government has been directing Americans within 50 miles of the Fukushima reactors to evacuate. That's a somewhat more realistic distance than a 10-mile evacuation zone.
This acknowledgement, long in coming, has special meaning to a third of the U.S. population--some 108 million Americans--who live within 50 miles of nuclear power plants.
The largest concentration is the 20 million people who live within 50 miles from the Indian Point two-nuclear plant complex in Buchanan, New York--just 28 miles north of the New York City line.
A 50-mile evacuation zone for Indian Point would cover all of Manhattan and much of the rest of New York City and Long Island, as well as large portions of Connecticut and New Jersey.
The two Indian Point plants have long been troubled, having undergone numerous minor accidents. Moreover, they sit at the intersection of two earthquake faults.
The situation involving a disastrous accident at Indian Point would be particularly intense if the winds were blowing from the north--which they commonly do--down the Hudson River Valley enveloping Manhattan in radioactivity. If electricity stopped flowing, people would be trapped in elevators and in other ways many would be frozen in place as the radiation descended.
There would be complete gridlock as attempts were made to evacuate through the two tunnels and on the George Washington Bridge, the only egress from Manhattan in the direction of where people would need to flee--into the radioactivity in New Jersey and then further west.
Importantly, since the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has set as a condition for a U.S. nuclear plant to operate there being a workable evacuation plan to be implemented by state or local government.
An evacuation plan for Indian Point, based on a 50-mile zone as made clear is needed by Fukushima is clearly impossible. Westchester County Legislator Michael Kaplowitz this week called for such a zone for Indian Point in the wake of Fukushima and commented that it would take in "all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and most of Staten Island, New Jersey and up through Connecticut. How could we evacuate that many people?"
The answer is they could not--and Indian Point should be shut down.
To the east of New York City, a large concentration of people live near the two-nuclear plant Millstone complex, also long-riddled with minor accidents, near New London, Connecticut. A 50-mile evacuation zone for Millstone would encompass much of eastern Long Island --including communities such as Southampton, East Hampton, Southampton, Greenport, Westhampton Beach and Montauk--and extend west into central Long Island.
How could nearly a million people living on Long Island within 50 miles of the Millstone nuclear plants evacuate? Indeed, it was established two decades ago that an evacuation of Long Island would be impossible in the event of a severe nuclear plant accident because of its dead-end nature.
That understanding came as the Long Island Lighting Company built the Shoreham nuclear plant, the first of what were to be seven to 11 nuclear plants on Long Island, similar to the six-nuclear plant cluster at Fukushima. The Suffolk County Legislature commissioned an extensive study which found that with a disaster at Shoreham there would be gridlock and havoc on Long Island as its residents sought to evacuate in the only ways off the island--through the Queens Midtown Tunnel to Manhattan and on a few bridges. Shoreham was stopped from going into commercial operation and the utility abandoned its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Suffolk County Legislator Jay Schneiderman last week wrote to the area's Congressional delegation urging it to press for expansion of the 10-mile evacuation zone. "If one lesson can be clearly learned from the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, it is that the current U.S. requirement of evacuation planning within 10 miles of a nuclear facility is woefully inadequate," wrote Schneiderman. "Our own president urged that any U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the Fukushima Daiichi plant be evacuated."
Meanwhile, citizen action on evacuation has begun on Long Island. Priscilla Star of Montauk is organizing a Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition to get citizens and environmental and safe-energy groups to campaign for an extension of the 10-mile evacuation zone to 50 miles.
Ms. Star said the coalition would "stand for truth about radiation by demanding that evacuation plans increase to 50 miles from 10." She said: "If the U.S. government is now on record of having demanded a 50-mile evacuation zone for U.S. citizens in Japan, it's the least our elected officials can do for U.S. citizens here."
In fact, U.S. government officials have known for many years that a 10-mile nuclear plant evacuation zone is unrealistic. Government studies have projected death and damage miles beyond that. "There could be deaths out to 150 km," states a report titled "WASH-740-update" done at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. An earlier report, "WASH-740," also done at that government laboratory, states "the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania."
However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an avid booster of nuclear power. It has never denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S. The commission seeks not to do anything that would discourage the development of atomic energy--so it has kept to an evacuation zone artificially low, as is being tragically demonstrated by the nuclear power disaster in Japan.
Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury and host of the nationally syndicated TV program Enviro Close-Up.
http://www.karlgrossman.com
Copyright © 2011 Karl Grossman
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Getting-Realistic-About-Ev-by-Karl-Grossman-110405-116.html [with comments]
===
The Manhattan Meltdown Scenario
Indian Point officials brief the press during a drill.
Bettmann-Corbis
by Helen Caldicott
March 20, 2011
The two operating nuclear reactors known as Indian Point are situated in Buchanan, N.Y.—just 35 miles from midtown Manhattan. More than 17 million people live within 50 miles of these plants.
How might a meltdown start? An earthquake, obviously, is among the scenarios. Others include various forms of terrorist attacks. Regardless of the trigger, a meltdown would follow several specific stages.
First, as cooling water dissipated from the reactor core, intensely hot radioactive pellets in the fuel rods would overheat and swell, and their zirconium cladding would oxidize and rupture. Then the pellets themselves would begin to melt. (Many details described here reflect a study of Indian Point by Edwin S. Lyman.)
If the molten fuel core were to hit the bottom of the reactor vessel, it would trigger massive steam explosions that could blow the reactor vessel apart. The eventual distribution of radioactive elements would depend on several factors, including the weather.
Both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency require an evacuation plan for a 10-mile radius of the reactor: an off-site alarm set to go off 30 minutes after an event began would allow time for the operators to determine the extent of the damage. That would leave 78 minutes from the alarm’s sounding to the beginning of the radioactive release.
Early fatalities from acute radiation sickness for those within the 10-mile evacuation zone would range from 2,440 to 11,500. Late cancer deaths, which would occur two to 60 years later, could range from 28,100 to a staggering 518,000 people in the 50-mile zone.
Fatalities could be reduced within the 10-mile zone if people were to shelter indoors during the acute phases of the radioactive fallout. (Evacuation tends to increase doses received, because people would be in non-airtight vehicles or on foot.) Also, if everyone were to take inert potassium iodide tablets immediately, peak doses to their thyroids of radioactive iodine could be cut by 30 percent.
Imagine the scene: more than 300,000 people are running and driving away from the stricken reactor along winding Westchester roads, trying to reach their children, their spouses, and their mates. Then they begin to taste a strange, metallic flavor in their mouths. The radio blasts out dire warnings, yet nobody knows what they are doing and nobody is in control.
The economic consequences of a meltdown would be stupendous. New York could be rendered virtually uninhabitable, with $1 trillion or more in costs from attempts at decontamination, the condemnation of radioactive property, and compensatory payments to people forced to relocate temporarily or permanently. Add to that the extraordinary economic consequences if the world’s financial capital were closed forever.
Caldicott, who was trained as a pediatrician, is cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Adapted from Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595580670 ] copyright 2006 by Helen Caldicott. Reprinted by permission of the New Press.
© 2011 The Newsweek / Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/the-manhattan-meltdown-scenario.html [with comments]
===
Nuclear crisis man-made, not 'an act of god': experts
Safe distance: The crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is shown in this photo taken by an unmanned aircraft on March 24.
KYODO PHOTO/AIR PHOTO SERVICE
Government, Tepco blamed for failure to prepare for tsunami
By MINORU MATSUTANI
Staff writer
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Despite protestations from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. that the tsunami that knocked out the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant was unforeseeable, noted seismologists and nuclear experts say the crisis is largely man-made.
Kojiro Irikura, an honorary professor of seismology at Kyoto University who was on the committee drawing up quake resistance guidelines for nuclear plants in September 2006, said that the Fukushima plant lacked effective "multiple protections" at some key facilities.
Another committee member and nuclear plant expert, Kunihiko Takeda of Chubu University, criticized the government for not demanding that power companies be prepared for natural disasters, in particular tsunami like the massive waves that knocked out the critical cooling systems at three of the six nuclear reactors at the No. 1 plant.
"The Fukushima No. 1 plant crisis was not caused by tsunami, but by lack of multiple safeguards," Irikura said. "The guidelines stipulate nuclear plant operators must minimize risk even from unexpected events."
The multiple safeguards that Irikura referred to are anything but complicated. "I mean, for example, surrounding key facilities with walls and ceilings," he said.
Of the four nuclear power stations on the Pacific coast, only the Fukushima No. 1 plant lost its cooling systems and ended up emitting radioactive substances.
It's not uncommon for nuclear reactors to be located near the sea, where seawater can easily be used to cool the water that then cools the reactors.
In all there are 14 reactors at the four facilities along the Pacific coast, where the tsunami triggered by the March 11 quake killed thousands of people. All shut down automatically after the quake and their emergency diesel generators kicked in. But at the Fukushima No. 1 plant the subsequent tsunami knocked out all the power that was supposed to keep critical safety systems running to cool the reactors' fuel rods until external power could be restored.
In contrast, two of the three emergency diesel generators at the Tokai nuclear plant in Ibaraki Prefecture withstood the tsunami thanks to 3.3-meter walls put up by operator Japan Atomic Power Co around the two seawater pumps. The pumps are critically important because they send water to cool the emergency generators, which in turn power the cooling systems for the reactors.
The walls were built specifically to defend against tsunami, while the one for the third pump had not been completed yet, spokesman Koji Otake said.
At the Fukushima No. 1 plant, the seawater pumps were exposed to the environment.
The seawater pumps at the Fukushima No. 2 plant are housed in buildings and therefore remained intact. Tepco was able to bring the reactors there under control once external power was restored.
Still, Otake of the Japan Atomic Power Co. admitted the three pumps might have been severely damaged if the tsunami had been as high as in Fukushima, where it is believed to have been at least 10 meters.
The Tokai plant is located 6.11 meters above sea level, which means the tops of the walls protecting the pumps are 9.41 meters above sea level.
The emergency diesel generators at the Onagawa nuclear plant in Miyagi Prefecture were not submerged because the plant is 14.8 meters above sea level, Tohoku Electric Power Co. spokesman Sota Notsu said, adding that the company took tsunami into account when building the plant.
The exact heights of the tsunami that hit the four nuclear plants aren't known.
While Irikura pointed to Tepco's unpreparedness at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, Takeda of Chubu University said the government, which promotes nuclear power as a clean source of energy to the world, is responsible for checking the safety of nuclear plants.
Quake guidelines for nuclear plants, revised by the Nuclear Safety Commission in September 2006, essentially order power companies to design plants without compromising safety in case of earthquakes "that can be expected no matter how rare."
In the only place in the guidelines where tsunami are mentioned — the last sentence of the 14-page document — it stipulates that plants must be designed "not to have their safety greatly compromised by tsunami, which can be expected no matter how rare."
"The guidance is not very specific and thus it is up to the power companies' discretion to assume the scale of quakes and tsunami," Takeda said.
It does not use terms understandable to ordinary people to describe the power of quakes, such as magnitude and "shindo," the Japanese seismic scale that tops out at 7. The wording is meant for seismic experts and construction designers, he said.
"I am a nuclear expert, not a quake expert. I didn't understand the guidance very much, so I asked other committee members to use words people understand. But they didn't listen," he said.
"The guidance is useless. The truth is that the government made sure in the guidance that it doesn't take responsibility in case disasters beyond expectation break out," said Takeda, who promotes safe nuclear power plants.
Meanwhile, Irikura of Kyoto University expressed regret that the tsunami risk is hardly mentioned.
"I am sorry and feel responsible," he said. "We should not use an excuse that disasters beyond expectation have broken out."
The Japan Times (C)
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110406a4.html
===
U.S. officials doubted nuclear safety plans-watchdog
By Scott Malone
BOSTON | Wed Apr 6, 2011 7:39pm BST
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators privately have expressed doubts some of the nation's nuclear power plants are prepared for a Fukushima-scale disaster, undercutting their public confidence since Japan's nuclear crisis began, documents released by an independent safety watchdog group show.
Internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission e-mails and memos obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists questioned the adequacy of the back-up plans to keep reactor cooling systems running if off-site power was lost for an extended period.
Those concerns seem to contrast with the confidence U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed since the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl began to unfold on March 11, UCS officials said on Wednesday.
"While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about -- that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan -- it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure," said Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert.
The e-mails in question are part of an NRC review of how the operators of nuclear plants in Delta, Pennsylvania, and Surry County, Virginia, would cope with a prolonged power outage that knocked cooling systems offline, as occurred at the Tokyo Electric Power Co-operated Fukushima plant.
In a July 28, 2010, e-mail, one NRC staffer said that contingency plans for the Peach Bottom nuclear plant "have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents."
Another, undated document, said backup plans included just having equipment on the plant grounds that could be useful "when used by knowledgeable operators if post-event conditions allow."
The document went on to note, "If little is known about these post-event conditions, then assuming success is speculative."
The Peach Bottom site, located in Delta, Pennsylvania, and operated by Exelon Corp uses a General Electric Co reactor with a similar design to four of the reactors at Fukushima.
Officials at the NRC and Exelon did not immediately respond to calls seeking a comment.
The UCS said it obtained the e-mails through a Freedom of Information Act request.
(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Dave Zimmerman)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/uk-usa-nuclear-safety-idUKTRE73564S20110406 [no comments yet]
* No damage reported at Fukushima plant
* Tsunami warning lifted, workers return
* Power cut in north Japan shuts factories (Updates throughout)
By Chizu Nomiyama and Yoko Nishikawa
Fri Apr 8, 2011 1:59am EDT
TOKYO, April 8 (Reuters) - Japan said on Friday its economy was in a severe condition following last month's triple disaster triggered by one of the biggest earthquakes on record, with sentiment in its service sector registering the sharpest fall ever.
Underlining the ferocity of the damage to the economy from the disaster, in which a nuclear power plant was crippled by the giant tsunami following the March 11 quake, the government also asked major companies to cut electricity use in the peak summer months by up to a quarter.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange said the power cuts meant it would have to delay plans to extend trading hours.
"Japan's economy is suddenly in a severe condition due to the effects of the earthquake," the Cabinet Office said after the release of its March survey of workers such as taxi drivers and restaurant staff.
A strong aftershock on Thursday night -- one of the strongest of more than 400 of magnitude greater than 5.0 since the massive March 11 tremor -- shook the already ravaged northeast, forcing two companies, including Sony Corp, to stop production because of power cuts.
At least two people were killed after the 7.4 magnitude tremor.
There was a brief scare when water leaks were found on Friday at the Onagawa nuclear plant in the northeast but Japan's nuclear safety agency said it had not detected any change in radiation levels.
And a relieved Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the latest quake had not caused any more damage to its wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, though it did have to briefly evacuate workers because of a tsunami alert that was later withdrawn.
An encouraging note was sounded by the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, with one of its officials saying there were signs of progress in stabilising the Fukushima plant, though the situation remained very serious.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had not detected any change in radiation levels following Thursday night's quake. [ID:nLDE736288]
"The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious ... (but) there are early signs of recovery in some functions such as electrical power and instrumentation," the IAEA's head of nuclear safety, Denis Flory, said.
The agency said radiation in the region around the plant, as measured by gamma dose rates, had peaked in the early days of the crisis, and aside from a rise on March 22, had since fallen to "a level very close to background".
Japan's neighbours have grown increasingly anxious at the risk of contamination from radiation, with some schools in South Korea closing because of fears of toxic rain. Officials there said the radiation levels in the atmosphere were harmless.
About 28,000 people are dead or missing after last month's triple disaster of quake, tsunami or nuclear crisis in Japan's northeast.
DISRUPTS BUSINESS
It has disrupted business, affected supply chains around the world, and reduced industrial output from Japan, a major exporter.
The central bank said it expected both output and exports to remain weak because of the impact of the quake.
"Output will hover at a low level for the time being but then start to increase as supply constraints are mitigated," the Bank of Japan said in its monthly report for April.
Companies and households will need to cut back significantly on power usage this summer when demand is at its peak, Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said after a cabinet meeting.
He urged major companies to cut electricity consumption by 25 percent.
But some ministers at Friday's cabinet meeting did call for an end to a campaign for "self restraint" by ordinary people adopted immediately after the March 11 disaster to cut fuel or electricity use and discourage stockpiling of necessities.
"Some cabinet ministers said excessive self-restraint could worsen the economy, weakening economic power for reconstruction," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters.
PREVENTING MORE EXPLOSIONS
Utility TEPCO said it was continuing to inject nitrogen into one of its Fukushima reactors to prevent a repeat of last month's hydrogen explosions.
The plant is still far from under control and engineers have been forced to pump in tonnes of wanter to cool down reactors, in the process creating radioactive water which has to be stored, though some has already been released into the sea.
Officials say it could take months to bring the reactors under control and years to clear up the toxic mess left behind.
The government has already set up a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the plant, banned fishing along much of the northeast coast and set up evacuation centres for the tens of thousands forced to leave their homes following the crisis.
($1=85.475 Japanese yen) (Additional reporting by Mayumi Negishi, Chisa Fujioka, Yoko Nishikawa and Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo, Sui-lee Wee in Beijing, Jack Kim in Seoul; Writing by Daniel Magnowski and Jonathan Thatcher; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
© Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/08/japan-idUSL3E7F72Y220110408 [no comments yet]
===
Japan aftershock troubles another nuclear plant
Last Updated : 08 April 2011 at 12:05 IST
TOKYO (Commodity Online) : The after quake that hit Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture Thursday created some more troubles to country’s nuclear reactors as Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant reported water leakage from its spent fuel pool.
Tohoku Electric Power Co, which runs the Plant said water leaked from spent-fuel pools at two reactors and also from other parts of the plant but levels of radiation were unchanged outside the plant.
The Company said external power supply was disrupted at the No. 1 reactor of the Higashidori nuclear station. The emergency generator is being used to cool the spent fuel pool.
A Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official said Friday that it appears that the reactor systems are basically working "as designed" because emergency diesel generators are operating in reactors that lost external power.
The plant, whose operations have been suspended since a magnitude-9 March 11 earthquake, lost two of its three external power connections in Thursday night's aftershock, causing the cooling system for the spent-fuel pools to temporarily stop.
A strong quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 jolted on Thursday evening Japan's Miyagi Prefecture and its vicinity but no major troubles were reported at nuclear facilities in the areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake, including the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power station.
The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warning immediately after the 11:32 p.m. quake, whose seismic center was off Miyagi Prefecture at a depth of some 40 kilometers, but it was lifted shortly before 1 a.m. Friday.
The quake measured upper 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in Kurihara and Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture and lower 6 in Ofunato, Kamaishi, Ichinoseki and several other cities in Iwate Prefecture as well as some other parts of Miyagi, according to the agency.
Blackouts occurred all over Aomori, Iwate and Akita prefectures as well as several parts of Miyagi and Yamagata prefectures, according to the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency.
Copyright 2011 Commodity Online India Limited
http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Japan-aftershock-troubles-another-nuclear-plant-38009-3-1.html [no comments yet]
===
Japan’s Stricken Nuclear Reactors Spared Damage From Latest 7.1 Earthquake
By Akiko Nishimae, Jim Polson and Ichiro Suzuki - Apr 7, 2011 2:52 PM CT
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake minutes before midnight spared the stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in Japan, although workers struggling to cool radioactive fuel were evacuated, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said based on its initial assessment.
The aftershock was the strongest since March 11 when a record 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami devastated the coast of Northeast Japan. No unusual conditions were observed at the plant afterward, the utility, known as Tepco, and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in statements.
No unusual measurements of water level, pressure or other operations were found at the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the six-unit plant, Tepco officials told reporters today.
“Indications of new leakage or a change in radiation levels will be the only way they’ll tell if there’s further damage,” Murray Jennix, a nuclear engineer who specialized in radioactive containment leaks and teaches at San Diego State University, said in a telephone interview. “You’ve got cracks that could have been made bigger.”
Tepco said April 6 engineers had plugged a leak of radioactive water into the ocean from a pit near the No. 2 reactor after several failed attempts. Concentration of radioactive iodine in seawater near the reactor discharge pipe fell by half, to 140,000 times the regulatory limit, the company said yesterday.
‘The Main Fear’
“The main fear is more structural damage, leading to additional cracks or reopening of the fixed crack,” Peter Hosemann, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an e-mailed message. “Radioactivity can leak again if cracks open.”
A day may be needed to detect additional damage at the plant, he said.
Crews at the crippled nuclear station north of Tokyo will continue pumping nitrogen into the No. 1 reactor to prevent hydrogen explosions of the type that damaged radiation containment buildings last month. Injection of nitrogen, the inert gas that comprises most of air, may take six days spokesman Yoshinori Mori said before today’s quake.
“They are manually injecting nitrogen through a very narrow pipe,” Tadashi Narabayashi, a professor of nuclear engineering at Hokkaido University in northern Japan, said by phone yesterday. “High radiation levels in the building are also making it difficult as workers have to keep rotating.”
Cooling the Reactors
The March 11 tsunami flooded emergency generators at the Fukushima plant, triggering cooling-system failures at four of the plant’s six nuclear units.
Tepco is still using emergency pumps to cool the reactors and pools holding spent fuel, almost four weeks after the initial disaster. Three blasts damaged reactor buildings and hurled radiation into the air last month.
About 3.64 million households in six Japanese prefectures were without power following the aftershock, Kyodo News reported, citing Tohoku Electric Power Co., which operates in seven prefectures.
The Rokkasho nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant and the Higashidori nuclear power plant lost power and were operating on backup diesel generators, the nuclear safety agency said today in a statement. Two of three power lines to the Onagawa nuclear power plant also were disabled, it said.
Five other power stations were shut down by the aftershock, broadcaster NHK reported, citing Tohoku Electric.
‘Tremendously Smaller’
“What occurred today is an aftershock in the same area and rupture zone to the magnitude-9 main shock that occurred about a month ago,” said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist in the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado. “It is tremendously smaller than the main shock. The main shock caused about 80 times more ground movement.”
The 7.1 aftershock was the fourth of magnitude-7 or higher since the major quake on March 11, according to the Japanese Meteorological Agency. The largest measured 7.7, about 30 minutes after the record quake, according to the agency’s website.
Police and fire officials reported the number of people injured in today’s earthquake reached 82 as of 3:30 a.m. local time, public broadcaster NHK said on its website.
There have been 464 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater, counting today’s, according to agency statistics.
More than 27,300 people are dead or missing after the initial natural disaster in northeastern Japan, according to the latest figures from the National Police Agency.
To contact the reporters on this story: Akiko Nishimae in New York at anishimae3@bloomberg.net; Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net; Ichiro Suzuki in Tokyo at isuzuki@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Teo Chian Wei at cwteo@bloomberg.net; Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net
©2011 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-07/japan-workers-pump-nitrogen-into-damaged-reactor-to-reduce-risk-of-blast.html
===
WRAPUP 3-Japan focuses on hydrogen buildup after nuclear leak stopped
* Nitrogen pumped into reactor to prevent hydrogen explosion
* Nuclear crisis far from under control
* UN expert sees no health damage from Fukushima
* Nuclear safety debate, inspections in United States (Adds preparations for injections in other reactors, UN, US officials)
By Chizu Nomiyama and Shinichi Saoshiro
Wed Apr 6, 2011 7:36pm EDT
TOKYO, April 7 (Reuters) - Japan pumped nitrogen gas into a crippled nuclear reactor on Thursday, trying to prevent an explosive buildup of hydrogen gas as the world's worst nuclear disaster in 25 years stirred atomic safety debate and inspections in the United States.
Engineers worked through the night injecting nitrogen into the containment vessel of reactor No.1 at Fukushima Daiichi power plant, following success in stopping highly radioactive water leaking into the sea at another reactor in the complex.
"It is necessary to inject nitrogen gas into the containment vessel and eliminate the potential for a hydrogen explosion," an official of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) told a news briefing.
The possibility of another hydrogen explosion like those that ripped through reactors No.1 and No.3 early in the crisis, spreading high levels of radiation into the air, was "extremely low," he said.
But TEPCO suspected that the outside casing of the reactor vessel was damaged, said the official.
"Under these conditions, if we continue cooling the reactors with water, the hydrogen leaking from the reactor vessel to the containment vessel could accumulate and could reach a point where it could explode," he added.
A second TEPCO official said 6,000 cubic metres of hydrogen gas would be pumped into reactor No.1 and the utility was preparing nitrogen gas injections for reactors No.2 and No.3 in the six-rector plant as a safety precaution .
Although TEPCO succeeded after days of desperate efforts to plug the leak at reactor No.2, they still need to pump 11.5 million litres (11,500 tonnes) of contaminated water back into the ocean because they have run out of storage space at the facility. The water was used to cool overheated fuel rods.
Nuclear experts said the damaged reactors were far from being under control almost a month after they were hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
In Vienna, the head of a U.N. scientific body said the Fukushima accident is not expected to have any serious impact on people's health, based on the information available now.
Wolfgang Weiss, chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), also said the Fukushima disaster was less dramatic than Chernobyl in 1986 but "much more serious" than Three Mile Island in 1979.
Asked what health consequences he expected from Fukushima, he said: "From what I know now, nothing, because levels are so low."
"We have seen traces of iodine in the air all over the world now but they are much, much, much lower than traces we have seen at similar distances after Chernobyl," Weiss added. [ID:nLDE73529F]
Growing concerns in nearby South Korea and China over radioactive fallout from Japan were underscored when China's health ministry reported trace amounts of radioactive iodine in spinach in three Chinese provinces.
The government is preparing to revise guidelines for legal radiation levels, designed for brief exposure to high levels of radiation in emergencies and not cumulative absorption, for people living near the damaged plant.
Workers are struggling to restart cooling pumps -- which recycle the water -- in four damaged reactors.
Until those are fixed, they must pump in water to prevent overheating and meltdowns, but have run out of storage capacity for the seawater when it becomes contaminated.
Radioactive iodine detected in the sea has been recorded at 4,800 times the legal limit, but has since fallen to about 600 times the limit. The water remaining in the reactors has radiation five million times legal limits.
Martin Virgilio, a top official for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said at a House of Representatives hearing that the NRC did not believe that the core of Fukushima's reactor No. 2 had melted down. [ID:nN06263616]
Earlier, a Democratic lawmaker had said the NRC informed him the core had become so hot it had probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel. Lawmakers also grilled the NRC on whether the U.S nuclear power industry was doing enough to ensure American reactors can withstand worst-case scenarios.
The NRC is conducting special inspections at two Illinois nuclear plants operated by Exelon Corp after routine checks in February found a problem with backup pumps that would be used to remove heat from the reactors in case of an accident.
COOLING REACTORS KEY
Japan is facing its worst crisis since World War Two after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami left nearly 28,000 people dead or missing and thousands homeless, and rocked the world's third-largest economy.
It will likely take months to finally cool down the reactors and years to dismantle those that have been damaged. TEPCO has said it will decommission four of the six reactors.
Two Fukushima plants together provide 4 percent of Japan's electric power and local politicians warn that reopening them will be politically difficult. [ID:nTKB007431]
The key to bringing the reactors under control is the extent of damage to the plant's cooling system, said analysts.
The Sankei newspaper reported that the government and TEPCO were considering building new cooling systems for three reactors to operate from outside the reactor buildings.
Japan's fishermen, who are part of the politically powerful agricultural lobby, made clear they were not assuaged by assurances that ocean radioactivity levels were low and safe.
"From now on, our fishermen will never cooperate with or accept nuclear power generation. I would like them to stop even those reactors that are now in operation right away," Ikuhiro Hattori, chairman of the Japan Fisheries Cooperatives, told NHK state television.
(Additional reporting by Sui-lee Wee in Beijing, Roberta Rampton and Ayesha Rascoe in Washington, and Scott DiSavino in New York; Writing by Paul Eckert, editing by Jonathan Thatcher)
© Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/japan-idUSL3E7F62A520110406 [with comments]
===
Cleaning up Japan's radioactive water could take decades
Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plan's No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4 reactors, from right to left, in this photo taken March 31 and released by Japan's Defense Ministry on April 1.
(Reuters)
No one is sure how to safely dispose of millions of gallons of highly radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. 'There is nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before,' a U.S. expert says.
By Julie Makinen and Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
April 7, 2011
Reporting from Tokyo and Los Angeles— For nearly four weeks, Japanese emergency crews have been spraying water on the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, a desperate attempt to avert the calamity of a full meltdown.
Now, that improvised solution to one nuclear nightmare is spawning another: what to do with the millions of gallons of water that has become highly radioactive as it washes through the plant.
The water being used to try to cool the reactors and the dangerous spent fuel rods is leaking through fissures inside the plant, seeping down through tunnels and passageways to the lowest levels, where it is accumulating into a sea of lethal waste.
No one is sure how to get rid of it safely.
"There is nothing like this, on this scale, that we have ever attempted to do before," says Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Energy Department.
Japanese officials estimate that they already have accumulated about 15 million gallons of highly radioactive water. Hundreds of thousands of gallons are being added every day as the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., continues to feed coolant into the leaky structures.
Ultimately, the high-level radioactive substances in the water will have to be safely stored, processed and solidified, a job that experts say will almost certainly have to be handled on a specially designed industrial complex. The process of cleaning up the water could take many years, even decades, to complete. The cost could run into the tens of billions of dollars.
Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and longtime advisor on nuclear waste, said the problems facing Japan are greater than even the most highly contaminated nuclear weapons site in the U.S., the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state.
The Department of Energy is decommissioning eight reactors at Hanford and plans to process about 58 million gallons of radioactive sludge now in leaky underground tanks, all at an estimated cost of $100 billion to $130 billion, according to outside estimates. But unlike Fukushima Daiichi, none of the Hanford reactors melted down and virtually all of the site is accessible to workers without risking exposure to dangerous levels of radioactivity.
"It will be a big job, bigger than Hanford," Gilinsky said, though he cautioned that U.S. costs are unnecessarily high and that the Japanese may be able to do the work more economically.
The immediate problem facing the Japanese is how to store all that water until the reactors and the spent fuel pools are brought under control. The plant's main storage tanks are nearly full. To make room, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco, released a couple of million gallons of the least contaminated water into the ocean this week, with the expectation that its radioactive elements would be diluted in the ocean's mass.
But international law forbids Japan from dumping contaminated water into the ocean if there are viable technical solutions available down the road.
So Tepco is considering bringing in barges and tanks, including a "megafloat" that can hold about 2.5 million gallons. Japan has also reportedly asked Russia to send a floating radiation treatment plant called the Suzuran that was used to decommission Russian nuclear submarines in the Pacific port of Vladivostok. The Suzuran was built in Japan a decade ago.
Yet even using barges and tanks to temporarily handle the water creates a future problem of how to dispose of the contaminated vessels.
U.S. and Japanese experts say the key to solving the disposal problem involves reducing the volume of water by concentrating the radioactive elements so they can be solidified into a safer, dry form. But waste experts disagree on exactly how to do that.
The difficulty of concentrating and then solidifying the contaminants depends on how much radioactivity is in the water, the type of isotopes and whether the work can be done on the Fukushima site.
UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Edward Morse said the water needs to be diverted into a concrete-lined holding pond fairly soon, where natural evaporation can help reduce its volume.
Youichi Enokida, a specialist in nuclear chemical engineering at Nagoya University in Japan, agrees that the material should be put into some type of storage that would concentrate it through evaporation, though Japanese experts generally talk about the need for a sealed pool.
"We must concentrate the liquid," he said.
Even with a pond, it could take up to 10 years before the radioactivity would decay enough for the material to be handled, Morse said. Building a storage pond "buys you time," he said.
But other experts sharply disagree, saying exposing the material to open air could allow radioactive iodine and other volatile substances to blow off the site, adding to the remote contamination that is already spreading dozens of miles from the plant.
A factor that could vastly complicate the problem is the presence of tritium, or heavy water, which is produced during fission. Tritium cannot be filtered out of water, instead requiring an extremely expensive treatment process.
"If the contaminated water has relatively high tritium or tritiated water concentration, then treatment could be more complicated," said Joonhong Ahn, a nuclear waste expert at UC Berkeley.
Nuclear power plants normally have systems in place to treat tritium on site. But the condition and capacity of the Fukushima system is not known.
Enokida and Morse contend that if the water can be concentrated, it can then be put into dry form or even turned into glass, as is planned at Hanford and other contaminated sites around the world. But this process, called vitrification, is expensive and requires a small-scale industrial facility.
The alternative — processing the waste elsewhere in Japan — is likely to be controversial.
"The fishermen will protest; this is inevitable," Enokida said.
Morse said that the plant faces at least six months of emergency stabilization, about two years of temporary remediation and anywhere from two years to 30 years of full-scale cleanup. Furthermore, the high levels of ground contamination at the site are raising concerns about the viability of people working at the site in coming decades.
It will take hundreds or even thousands of workers years or decades to handle the cleanup, experts said.
U.S. officials have not yet discussed the water management problems with their Japanese counterparts. But Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Scott Burnell said the nuclear industry has a long experience with filtering radioactive contamination out of water, though never at a plant that has suffered such damage. At Three Mile Island it was decided to allow the tritium-contaminated water to evaporate, though that meant the tritium escaped as well.
At some point, however, Japan will have to add facilities to existing treatment plants in order to vitrify the radioactive material into glass logs or other dry forms that could be stored in alloy canisters. Those logs or canisters would have to be buried somewhere.
Where that burial ground is built is a question that the Japanese are only beginning to consider.
julie.makinen@latimes.com
ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com
Makinen reported from Tokyo and Vartabedian from Los Angeles.
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-water-20110407,0,2011011.story [ http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-water-20110407,0,873990,full.story ] [with comments]
===
Japan Weighs Wider Evacuation Zone
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Monday, as seen from the deck of a U.S. military barge hauling water
Japan Ministry of Defense via Bloomberg News
By TOKO SEKIGUCHI and MITSURU OBE
APRIL 8, 2011
TOKYO—Japan's government said Thursday it is considering extending the evacuation zone around its hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, as the government recalculates the risk of radioactivity that continues to issue from the plant four weeks after Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami.
Later on Thursday, Japan suffered its strongest temblor since the March 11 quake, highlighting the ongoing uncertainty over whether further aftershocks could damage the reactors further and release more radiation, or put other nuclear plants at risk. Some other plants were running on emergency generators but no operating problems were reported in the hours after the 7.1-magnitude quake.
The government's top spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, said Thursday the current 20-kilometer (12-mile) evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant may need to be enlarged, because the original parameters were established to protect against too much exposure in the short term and radiation continues to emanate from the complex.
Officials intended the evacuation zone to prevent anyone getting more cumulative exposure to radiation than a nuclear plant worker is limited to in a year—50 millisieverts.
"Current evacuation orders apply to areas where people are in danger of having received 50 millisieverts [of cumulative exposure]," Mr. Edano said. "We are now looking into what to do with other areas where, with prolonged exposure, people may receive that amount."
Two weeks ago, a state-funded monitoring body released a computer simulation that showed that in the first 12 days of troubles at the plant, certain areas beyond the evacuation zone had exceeded Japan's recommended cumulative exposure.
The body, the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, hasn't released an updated assessment since. A commission official said Thursday the group is collecting more data to improve the quality of its model.
Tepco said it has provided radiation figures from several locations near the complex and is awaiting government analysis before making the data public.
The government hasn't said when it would make a decision on expanding the zone, what measures it would use or how it might house those it relocates. It said it hasn't set a timetable.
The discussion is likely to renew international scrutiny of the government's 20-kilometer (12-mile) zone, which is smaller than 80-kilometer (50-mile) zone recommended by U.S. officials.
Several municipal officials in the area expressed anger at the government's handling of the situation. The mayor of one town just outside the 30-kilometer radius said the government should have thought ahead earlier in the crisis.
"We are hearing that it may take months for the plant to settle down—and only now are they talking about expanding the zone?" said Michio Furukawa, mayor of Kawamata, a town to the northwest with elevated radiation levels that is one of seven municipalities from which sales of local produce have been banned. "When this will all end?"
Last week, the government reported that just a handful of people have remained inside the 20-kilometer exclusion zone. It said thousands remain in the band 20 to 30 kilometers from the plant, where the government has urged residents to remain indoors as much as possible. It said others travel into the band daily to check on people and property.
Senior nuclear regulator Hidehiko Nishiyama apologized for the possible further dislocation to those living in the area. He identified a series of hydrogen explosions at the plant days after the earthquake as the primary cause of the widespread radiation.
"The explosions sent radioactive materials flying to areas far outside the nuclear complex," Mr. Nishiyama, of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a news conference. "Radioactive materials, once spread, cannot be put back. The best we can do is to stabilize the damaged reactors and prevent further emissions of radiation."
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a March 26 assessment of the plant that was made public this week, said a hydrogen explosion in a spent-fuel cooling pool threw particles of nuclear fuel up to a mile from the complex.
An NRC spokesman said it is "not our place" to comment on Mr. Edano's remarks on possibly widening the evacuation zone. "The Japanese government makes its decisions based on what they consider appropriate for their citizens," the spokesman said.
In the hours after the late Thursday quake, NISA said the Fukushima Daiichi plant hadn't reported immediate problems but that it was sending workers to check on the status of its reactors.
In an effort to head off further hydrogen explosions, the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., early Thursday began streaming nitrogen gas into reactor No. 1, one of the less damaged of the three crippled units. Tepco said these operations continued Friday morning.
Reactor No. 1's pressure and containment vessels are seen to have come out relatively unscathed by the overheating of the reactor core following the failure of the cooling system on March 11.
However, as the fuel cooled down and more steam condensed into water, fears grew that the pressure inside the containment vessel would fall sharply, allowing air to come in and create a dangerous mix of hydrogen and oxygen. Nitrogen injection is designed to forestall the entry of oxygen.
"The injection of gas is proceeding smoothly," a Tepco company official said at a briefing. The process began around 1 a.m. local time Thursday and will continue for about six days, he said, adding that the measure was having the desired effect of slightly raising the pressure within the container vessel.
Tepco also said that its president, Masataka Shimizu, had returned to work after being hospitalized for more than a week as his company was blamed for power outages and radioactive contamination that swept eastern Japan.
Mr. Shimizu will assume the role leading a joint task force with the government to support evacuees, allowing Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata to continue his role of overseeing the company's effort to bring the plant under control, according to Tepco spokesman Naoyuki Matsumoto.
The other two heavily damaged units—reactors Nos. 2 and 3—stayed in a relatively stable condition Thursday, as workers continued to pump cold water to cool the reactor cores.
The recovery efforts have received some support from the British government, which said it was easing its travel restrictions to Tokyo based on its scientific analysis of the current situation.
"Although the situation at Fukushima will remain of concern for some time, the risks are gradually declining as the reactors cool and as facilities to stabilise them are established," the government's Foreign and Commonwealth Office said on its website.
Copyright ©2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013604576248204196506240.html [with comments]
===
Getting Realistic About Evacuation Zone for Nuclear Plant Disaster
By Karl Grossman [ http://www.opednews.com/author/author14729.html ]
April 6, 2011 at 13:42:25
Among the many obvious lessons of the ongoing nuclear power disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan is that the 10-mile evacuation zone the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has insisted upon for nuclear plants here is a product of the pro-nuclear NRC's wishful thinking.
The U.S. government has been directing Americans within 50 miles of the Fukushima reactors to evacuate. That's a somewhat more realistic distance than a 10-mile evacuation zone.
This acknowledgement, long in coming, has special meaning to a third of the U.S. population--some 108 million Americans--who live within 50 miles of nuclear power plants.
The largest concentration is the 20 million people who live within 50 miles from the Indian Point two-nuclear plant complex in Buchanan, New York--just 28 miles north of the New York City line.
A 50-mile evacuation zone for Indian Point would cover all of Manhattan and much of the rest of New York City and Long Island, as well as large portions of Connecticut and New Jersey.
The two Indian Point plants have long been troubled, having undergone numerous minor accidents. Moreover, they sit at the intersection of two earthquake faults.
The situation involving a disastrous accident at Indian Point would be particularly intense if the winds were blowing from the north--which they commonly do--down the Hudson River Valley enveloping Manhattan in radioactivity. If electricity stopped flowing, people would be trapped in elevators and in other ways many would be frozen in place as the radiation descended.
There would be complete gridlock as attempts were made to evacuate through the two tunnels and on the George Washington Bridge, the only egress from Manhattan in the direction of where people would need to flee--into the radioactivity in New Jersey and then further west.
Importantly, since the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has set as a condition for a U.S. nuclear plant to operate there being a workable evacuation plan to be implemented by state or local government.
An evacuation plan for Indian Point, based on a 50-mile zone as made clear is needed by Fukushima is clearly impossible. Westchester County Legislator Michael Kaplowitz this week called for such a zone for Indian Point in the wake of Fukushima and commented that it would take in "all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and most of Staten Island, New Jersey and up through Connecticut. How could we evacuate that many people?"
The answer is they could not--and Indian Point should be shut down.
To the east of New York City, a large concentration of people live near the two-nuclear plant Millstone complex, also long-riddled with minor accidents, near New London, Connecticut. A 50-mile evacuation zone for Millstone would encompass much of eastern Long Island --including communities such as Southampton, East Hampton, Southampton, Greenport, Westhampton Beach and Montauk--and extend west into central Long Island.
How could nearly a million people living on Long Island within 50 miles of the Millstone nuclear plants evacuate? Indeed, it was established two decades ago that an evacuation of Long Island would be impossible in the event of a severe nuclear plant accident because of its dead-end nature.
That understanding came as the Long Island Lighting Company built the Shoreham nuclear plant, the first of what were to be seven to 11 nuclear plants on Long Island, similar to the six-nuclear plant cluster at Fukushima. The Suffolk County Legislature commissioned an extensive study which found that with a disaster at Shoreham there would be gridlock and havoc on Long Island as its residents sought to evacuate in the only ways off the island--through the Queens Midtown Tunnel to Manhattan and on a few bridges. Shoreham was stopped from going into commercial operation and the utility abandoned its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Suffolk County Legislator Jay Schneiderman last week wrote to the area's Congressional delegation urging it to press for expansion of the 10-mile evacuation zone. "If one lesson can be clearly learned from the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, it is that the current U.S. requirement of evacuation planning within 10 miles of a nuclear facility is woefully inadequate," wrote Schneiderman. "Our own president urged that any U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the Fukushima Daiichi plant be evacuated."
Meanwhile, citizen action on evacuation has begun on Long Island. Priscilla Star of Montauk is organizing a Standing for Truth About Radiation Coalition to get citizens and environmental and safe-energy groups to campaign for an extension of the 10-mile evacuation zone to 50 miles.
Ms. Star said the coalition would "stand for truth about radiation by demanding that evacuation plans increase to 50 miles from 10." She said: "If the U.S. government is now on record of having demanded a 50-mile evacuation zone for U.S. citizens in Japan, it's the least our elected officials can do for U.S. citizens here."
In fact, U.S. government officials have known for many years that a 10-mile nuclear plant evacuation zone is unrealistic. Government studies have projected death and damage miles beyond that. "There could be deaths out to 150 km," states a report titled "WASH-740-update" done at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. An earlier report, "WASH-740," also done at that government laboratory, states "the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania."
However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an avid booster of nuclear power. It has never denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anywhere, anytime in the U.S. The commission seeks not to do anything that would discourage the development of atomic energy--so it has kept to an evacuation zone artificially low, as is being tragically demonstrated by the nuclear power disaster in Japan.
Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury and host of the nationally syndicated TV program Enviro Close-Up.
http://www.karlgrossman.com
Copyright © 2011 Karl Grossman
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Getting-Realistic-About-Ev-by-Karl-Grossman-110405-116.html [with comments]
===
The Manhattan Meltdown Scenario
Indian Point officials brief the press during a drill.
Bettmann-Corbis
by Helen Caldicott
March 20, 2011
The two operating nuclear reactors known as Indian Point are situated in Buchanan, N.Y.—just 35 miles from midtown Manhattan. More than 17 million people live within 50 miles of these plants.
How might a meltdown start? An earthquake, obviously, is among the scenarios. Others include various forms of terrorist attacks. Regardless of the trigger, a meltdown would follow several specific stages.
First, as cooling water dissipated from the reactor core, intensely hot radioactive pellets in the fuel rods would overheat and swell, and their zirconium cladding would oxidize and rupture. Then the pellets themselves would begin to melt. (Many details described here reflect a study of Indian Point by Edwin S. Lyman.)
If the molten fuel core were to hit the bottom of the reactor vessel, it would trigger massive steam explosions that could blow the reactor vessel apart. The eventual distribution of radioactive elements would depend on several factors, including the weather.
Both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency require an evacuation plan for a 10-mile radius of the reactor: an off-site alarm set to go off 30 minutes after an event began would allow time for the operators to determine the extent of the damage. That would leave 78 minutes from the alarm’s sounding to the beginning of the radioactive release.
Early fatalities from acute radiation sickness for those within the 10-mile evacuation zone would range from 2,440 to 11,500. Late cancer deaths, which would occur two to 60 years later, could range from 28,100 to a staggering 518,000 people in the 50-mile zone.
Fatalities could be reduced within the 10-mile zone if people were to shelter indoors during the acute phases of the radioactive fallout. (Evacuation tends to increase doses received, because people would be in non-airtight vehicles or on foot.) Also, if everyone were to take inert potassium iodide tablets immediately, peak doses to their thyroids of radioactive iodine could be cut by 30 percent.
Imagine the scene: more than 300,000 people are running and driving away from the stricken reactor along winding Westchester roads, trying to reach their children, their spouses, and their mates. Then they begin to taste a strange, metallic flavor in their mouths. The radio blasts out dire warnings, yet nobody knows what they are doing and nobody is in control.
The economic consequences of a meltdown would be stupendous. New York could be rendered virtually uninhabitable, with $1 trillion or more in costs from attempts at decontamination, the condemnation of radioactive property, and compensatory payments to people forced to relocate temporarily or permanently. Add to that the extraordinary economic consequences if the world’s financial capital were closed forever.
Caldicott, who was trained as a pediatrician, is cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Adapted from Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595580670 ] copyright 2006 by Helen Caldicott. Reprinted by permission of the New Press.
© 2011 The Newsweek / Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/the-manhattan-meltdown-scenario.html [with comments]
===
Nuclear crisis man-made, not 'an act of god': experts
Safe distance: The crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is shown in this photo taken by an unmanned aircraft on March 24.
KYODO PHOTO/AIR PHOTO SERVICE
Government, Tepco blamed for failure to prepare for tsunami
By MINORU MATSUTANI
Staff writer
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Despite protestations from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. that the tsunami that knocked out the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant was unforeseeable, noted seismologists and nuclear experts say the crisis is largely man-made.
Kojiro Irikura, an honorary professor of seismology at Kyoto University who was on the committee drawing up quake resistance guidelines for nuclear plants in September 2006, said that the Fukushima plant lacked effective "multiple protections" at some key facilities.
Another committee member and nuclear plant expert, Kunihiko Takeda of Chubu University, criticized the government for not demanding that power companies be prepared for natural disasters, in particular tsunami like the massive waves that knocked out the critical cooling systems at three of the six nuclear reactors at the No. 1 plant.
"The Fukushima No. 1 plant crisis was not caused by tsunami, but by lack of multiple safeguards," Irikura said. "The guidelines stipulate nuclear plant operators must minimize risk even from unexpected events."
The multiple safeguards that Irikura referred to are anything but complicated. "I mean, for example, surrounding key facilities with walls and ceilings," he said.
Of the four nuclear power stations on the Pacific coast, only the Fukushima No. 1 plant lost its cooling systems and ended up emitting radioactive substances.
It's not uncommon for nuclear reactors to be located near the sea, where seawater can easily be used to cool the water that then cools the reactors.
In all there are 14 reactors at the four facilities along the Pacific coast, where the tsunami triggered by the March 11 quake killed thousands of people. All shut down automatically after the quake and their emergency diesel generators kicked in. But at the Fukushima No. 1 plant the subsequent tsunami knocked out all the power that was supposed to keep critical safety systems running to cool the reactors' fuel rods until external power could be restored.
In contrast, two of the three emergency diesel generators at the Tokai nuclear plant in Ibaraki Prefecture withstood the tsunami thanks to 3.3-meter walls put up by operator Japan Atomic Power Co around the two seawater pumps. The pumps are critically important because they send water to cool the emergency generators, which in turn power the cooling systems for the reactors.
The walls were built specifically to defend against tsunami, while the one for the third pump had not been completed yet, spokesman Koji Otake said.
At the Fukushima No. 1 plant, the seawater pumps were exposed to the environment.
The seawater pumps at the Fukushima No. 2 plant are housed in buildings and therefore remained intact. Tepco was able to bring the reactors there under control once external power was restored.
Still, Otake of the Japan Atomic Power Co. admitted the three pumps might have been severely damaged if the tsunami had been as high as in Fukushima, where it is believed to have been at least 10 meters.
The Tokai plant is located 6.11 meters above sea level, which means the tops of the walls protecting the pumps are 9.41 meters above sea level.
The emergency diesel generators at the Onagawa nuclear plant in Miyagi Prefecture were not submerged because the plant is 14.8 meters above sea level, Tohoku Electric Power Co. spokesman Sota Notsu said, adding that the company took tsunami into account when building the plant.
The exact heights of the tsunami that hit the four nuclear plants aren't known.
While Irikura pointed to Tepco's unpreparedness at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, Takeda of Chubu University said the government, which promotes nuclear power as a clean source of energy to the world, is responsible for checking the safety of nuclear plants.
Quake guidelines for nuclear plants, revised by the Nuclear Safety Commission in September 2006, essentially order power companies to design plants without compromising safety in case of earthquakes "that can be expected no matter how rare."
In the only place in the guidelines where tsunami are mentioned — the last sentence of the 14-page document — it stipulates that plants must be designed "not to have their safety greatly compromised by tsunami, which can be expected no matter how rare."
"The guidance is not very specific and thus it is up to the power companies' discretion to assume the scale of quakes and tsunami," Takeda said.
It does not use terms understandable to ordinary people to describe the power of quakes, such as magnitude and "shindo," the Japanese seismic scale that tops out at 7. The wording is meant for seismic experts and construction designers, he said.
"I am a nuclear expert, not a quake expert. I didn't understand the guidance very much, so I asked other committee members to use words people understand. But they didn't listen," he said.
"The guidance is useless. The truth is that the government made sure in the guidance that it doesn't take responsibility in case disasters beyond expectation break out," said Takeda, who promotes safe nuclear power plants.
Meanwhile, Irikura of Kyoto University expressed regret that the tsunami risk is hardly mentioned.
"I am sorry and feel responsible," he said. "We should not use an excuse that disasters beyond expectation have broken out."
The Japan Times (C)
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110406a4.html
===
U.S. officials doubted nuclear safety plans-watchdog
By Scott Malone
BOSTON | Wed Apr 6, 2011 7:39pm BST
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators privately have expressed doubts some of the nation's nuclear power plants are prepared for a Fukushima-scale disaster, undercutting their public confidence since Japan's nuclear crisis began, documents released by an independent safety watchdog group show.
Internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission e-mails and memos obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists questioned the adequacy of the back-up plans to keep reactor cooling systems running if off-site power was lost for an extended period.
Those concerns seem to contrast with the confidence U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed since the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl began to unfold on March 11, UCS officials said on Wednesday.
"While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about -- that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan -- it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure," said Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert.
The e-mails in question are part of an NRC review of how the operators of nuclear plants in Delta, Pennsylvania, and Surry County, Virginia, would cope with a prolonged power outage that knocked cooling systems offline, as occurred at the Tokyo Electric Power Co-operated Fukushima plant.
In a July 28, 2010, e-mail, one NRC staffer said that contingency plans for the Peach Bottom nuclear plant "have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents."
Another, undated document, said backup plans included just having equipment on the plant grounds that could be useful "when used by knowledgeable operators if post-event conditions allow."
The document went on to note, "If little is known about these post-event conditions, then assuming success is speculative."
The Peach Bottom site, located in Delta, Pennsylvania, and operated by Exelon Corp uses a General Electric Co reactor with a similar design to four of the reactors at Fukushima.
Officials at the NRC and Exelon did not immediately respond to calls seeking a comment.
The UCS said it obtained the e-mails through a Freedom of Information Act request.
(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Dave Zimmerman)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/uk-usa-nuclear-safety-idUKTRE73564S20110406 [no comments yet]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
