Tokyo Electric Says Radioactive Water Leaking Into Sea Near Nuclear Plant
By Shinhye Kang and Jae Hur - Apr 3, 2011 1:56 AM CT
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said radioactive water is draining into the sea from a power cable storage pit at its stricken nuclear plant, and it will try using a special polymer to stop the leak later today.
Work to inject the polymer through a pipe connected to the pit will start this afternoon after appropriate checks, Naoki Tsunoda, a company spokesman, said by phone. Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, also said it had found the bodies of two workers at the plant that have been missing since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami struck Japan.
Tokyo Electric also plans to start infusing nitrogen gas into the reactors today to reduce the threat of a hydrogen explosion, and is connecting power cables to cooling pumps as it tries to contain the spread of radiation and avert a meltdown at the plant.
“The water-absorbent polymer has never been used before in these cases so I’m not sure whether this works well or not,” said Suh Kune Yull, a professor of Nuclear Energy System Engineering at Seoul National University. “It may not be easy as the leaking pit is very wide.”
Radiation in contaminated seawater near the Fukushima Dai- Ichi plant was measured at more than 1,000 millisieverts an hour, Tepco said yesterday in a statement. Exposure to that level for an hour would trigger nausea, and four hours might lead to death within two months, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The level of radiation may not affect the seawater and fish, which are moving, but it’s enough to contaminate sea algae and clams near the plant if Japan fails to block the leak soon,” Suh said by phone from Seoul.
Bodies Found
The two male workers found today had been performing maintenance in the basement of the No. 4 reactor at the plant on the day of the disaster, Tepco said today on a news conference streamed over the Internet. The latest deaths bring to seven the number of workers killed at Tokyo Electric’s two nuclear power complexes in Fukushima, including five employees of sub- contractors whose deaths were confirmed on March 12 and 14.
The total number of dead and missing from the disaster in Japan was 27,481 as of 10 a.m. Tokyo time today.
It may take several months to stop the emission of radioactive material, Goshi Hosono, a lawmaker in the Democratic Party of Japan in the ruling coalition, told reporters. Hosono is an envoy between the government and Tepco.
Radiation Levels
A company executive said earlier today he isn’t optimistic about the prospect of containing damage at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi nuclear power plant’s No. 3 reactor.
“I don’t know if we can ever enter the No. 3 reactor building again,” Hikaru Kuroda, the company’s chief of nuclear facility management, said at a press conference.
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency yesterday ordered Tepco to increase monitoring of seawater near the No. 2 reactor after the leaks led to a rise in radiation, agency Deputy Director Hidehiko Nishiyama said. Above-normal levels of radioactive iodine were detected in seawater 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the plant, the agency said.
About 10 centimeters (4 inches) to 20 centimeters of radioactive water was found in the leaking pit, which is 1.2 meters by 1.9 meters across and 2 meters deep, and had a crack about 20 centimeters wide, Takashi Kurita, a company spokesman, told reporters at a briefing at Tepco’s Tokyo headquarters.
Tokyo Electric tried to plug the crack by filling the pit near reactor No. 2 with concrete yesterday, Junichi Matsumoto, another company official, said at a later press conference. Water in the pit was found to have 10,000 times the normal level of toxic iodine 131, he said. Kyodo News first reported the leak yesterday.
Offering Help
The pit is at a different site from the trenches where the company found contaminated water earlier, Susumu Tsuzuki, a Tepco nuclear facility maintenance official, told reporters.
General Electric Co. (GE) Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt will meet officials from Tepco as the utility struggles to stabilize its damaged reactors, designed by the U.S. company.
Immelt is traveling to Japan “to meet with employees, partners and customers including Tepco,” Deirdre Latour, a GE spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. Reactors at the crippled plant are based on a four-decade-old design from Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE.
“If they’re meeting now, it’s probably to discuss how to cool the reactors quickly, or how to scrap them, as Tepco doesn’t have the technology to do this,” said Jeffrey Bor, head of the economics department at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei and a former vice president of the International Association for Energy Economics. Taiwan operates six nuclear power reactors.
Nitrogen Infusion
Tepco plans to begin infusing nitrogen into the plant today, Tsunoda said, without specifying where. The threat of a hydrogen explosion emerged when the gas was released from overheating reactors after the March 11 tsunami knocked out their cooling systems.
A 9-magnitude temblor and subsequent tsunami severed power and damaged reactors at the Fukushima complex about 220 kilometers (136 miles) north of Tokyo. Workers have been spraying water on the reactors to cool radioactive fuel rods in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu estimated as much as 70 percent of the core in one of the six reactors may have been damaged. High radiation levels have impeded progress at the plant, Chu said April 1 during a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington.
Emergency Measure
“Injecting nitrogen is done to cool reactors quickly,” said Chinese Culture University’s Bor. “Nitrogen should be considered an emergency measure and can’t be used for prolonged periods because you don’t have such large quantities of it.”
Tepco said it is connecting power cables to cooling systems on three of four damaged reactors. Connecting power may not work because of potential damage caused by blasts that ripped through the plant in the days after the quake.
Katsumata, 71, took charge at Tepco last week when President Masataka Shimizu, 66, was hospitalized March 30 because of high blood pressure. Shimizu won’t be gone from his post “for long,” Katsumata said.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan yesterday made his second visit to the areas hit by the quake and tsunami, according to the prime ministers website. Kan flew on a helicopter to Iwate prefecture in the northeast to meet with evacuees and then went to neighboring Fukushima prefecture to talk with Self-Defense Forces members and other workers at the Dai-Ichi nuclear plant.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jae Hur in Tokyo at jhur1@bloomberg.net; Shinhye Kang in Seoul at skang24@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net
Two workers' bodies recovered at Fukushima nuclear plant The two are believed to have been killed when the tsunami struck. Meanwhile, Fukushima nuclear plant officials try to use concrete to stanch a leak of radioactive water, to no avail. April 3, 2011 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-20110403,0,2146668.story [with comments]
UPDATE 2-Radiation eases in Japan village near no-go zone-IAEA
* Radiation down in village outside evacuation zone-IAEA
* But situation at Fukushima plant still "very serious"
* Putting end to crisis will take time - Amano
(Adds Amano quotes, byline)
By Fredrik Dahl and Michael Shields Fri Apr 1, 2011 2:37pm EDT
VIENNA, April 1 (Reuters) - Radiation measured at a village 40 km (25 miles) from Japan's crippled nuclear plant is falling by the day, the U.N. atomic agency said on Friday, two days after warning the level exceeded a criterion for evacuation.
Wednesday's statement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had added to pressure on Japan's government to extend the exclusion zone beyond 20 km around the severely damaged Fukushima atomic power station.
But while the amounts of radioactive iodine particles detected in the soil at Iitate village appeared to be declining from high levels, the Vienna-based U.N. body said the overall situation at Fukushima remained very serious.
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano warned it would "take more time than people think" to end the crisis and stabilise the plant, which has leaked radioactivity since it was hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
"Putting an end to the crisis will take some time, to stabilise the reactors will take more time," he told a news conference in Nairobi.
"I would say it will take more time than people think. It will not happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."
On Wednesday, the IAEA said radiation measured in Iitate village northwest of the power plant had exceeded recommended levels and urged Japanese authorities to "carefully assess" the situation there.
Japan's nuclear safety body had earlier rebuffed a call by environmental group Greenpeace to widen the evacuation zone, a move that could force tens of thousands of more people to leave their homes.
NUCLEAR POWER IMPACT
But on Friday IAEA officials said further soil samples from Iitate showed the average value of radioactive iodine-131 down at 7 megabecquerels a square metre against 20 megabecquerels earlier -- twice the level of an IAEA criterion for evacuation.
"This value is lower than what was reported on Wednesday," senior agency official Gerhard Proehl told a news conference.
"Because there are more samples ... and together with the radioactive decay the situation improves daily," he said, adding 15 soil samples had been taken between March 19 and March 29.
Japanese opposition politicians have lambasted Prime Minister Naoto Kan for sticking with the original exclusion area, nearly three weeks after an earthquake and tsunami sparked the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.
But Denis Flory, an IAEA deputy director general, said the U.N. agency had never recommended evacuation from the area, saying this was up to Japan.
"It is in the hands of the Japanese government. They are assessing the situation and it is their role to take actions based on their assessment," Flory said.
The disaster has prompted a rethink of nuclear power around the world, just as the technology was starting to regain momentum as a way to fight global warming.
"This will affect, of course, the future of use of nuclear power," Amano said in Nairobi.
"The IAEA is not influencing member states to take decisions, but if countries opt for use of nuclear power, the IAEA is in a position to help to do it safely, securely and sustainably," he said. (Additional reporting by Aaron Maasho and Helen Nyambura in Nairobi; editing by Matthew Jones)
From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis
Members of Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force towed a United States military barge carrying water for cooling toward the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Thursday. Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force, via Reuters
Assessing the Radiation Danger, Near and Far Current assessments of the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant by the Japanese authorities, the International Atomic Energy Agency and others.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: April 2, 2011
For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.
Thanks to the unfamiliar but sophisticated art of atomic forensics, experts around the world have been able to document the situation vividly. Over decades, they have become very good at illuminating the hidden workings of nuclear power plants from afar, turning scraps of information into detailed analyses.
For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant’s reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.
Scientists in Europe and America also know from observing the explosions of hydrogen gas at the plant that the nuclear fuel rods had heated to very dangerous levels, and from radioactive plumes how far the rods had disintegrated.
At the same time, the evaluations also show that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi escaped the deadliest outcomes — a complete meltdown of the plant.
Most of these computer-based forensics systems were developed after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, when regulators found they were essentially blind to what was happening in the reactor. Since then, to satisfy regulators, companies that run nuclear power plants use snippets of information coming out of a plant to develop simulations of what is happening inside and to perform a variety of risk evaluations.
Indeed, the detailed assessments of the Japanese reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave on Friday — when he told reporters that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged, and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown — came from forensic modeling.
The bits of information that drive these analyses range from the simple to the complex. They can include everything from the length of time a reactor core lacked cooling water to the subtleties of the gases and radioactive particles being emitted from the plant. Engineers feed the data points into computer simulations that churn out detailed portraits of the imperceptible, including many specifics on the melting of the hot fuel cores.
Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as “safety codes.” Many of these institutions — including ones in Japan — are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.
“The codes got better and better” after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.
Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.
“They don’t want to go there,” said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. “The spin is all about reassurance.”
If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.
By definition, a meltdown is the severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor that results in either the partial or full liquefaction of its uranium fuel and supporting metal lattice, at times with the atmospheric release of deadly radiation. Partial meltdowns usually strike a core’s middle regions instead of the edge, where temperatures are typically lower.
The main meltdowns of the past at civilian plants were Three Mile Island in 1979, the St.-Laurent reactor in France in 1980, and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.
One of the first safety codes to emerge after Three Mile Island was the Modular Accident Analysis Program. Running on a modest computer, it simulates reactor crises based on such information as the duration of a power blackout and the presence of invisible wisps of radioactive materials.
Robert E. Henry, a developer of the code at Fauske & Associates, an engineering company near Chicago, said that a first sign of major trouble at any reactor was the release of hydrogen — a highly flammable gas that has fueled several large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi. The gas, he said in an interview, indicated that cooling water had fallen low, exposing the hot fuel rods.
The next alarms, Dr. Henry said, centered on various types of radioactivity that signal increasingly high core temperatures and melting.
First, he said, “as the core gets hotter and hotter,” easily evaporated products of atomic fission — like iodine 131 and cesium 137 — fly out. If temperatures rise higher, threatening to melt the core entirely, he added, less volatile products such as strontium 90 and plutonium 239 join the rising plume.
The lofting of the latter particles in large quantities points to “substantial fuel melting,” Dr. Henry said.
He added that he and his colleagues modeled the Japanese accident in its first days and discerned partial — not full — core melting.
Micro-Simulation Technology, a software company in Montville, N.J., used its own computer code to model the Japanese accident. It found core temperatures in the reactors soaring as high as 2,250 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to liquefy many reactor metals.
“Some portion of the core melted,” said Li-chi Cliff Po, the company’s president. He called his methods simpler than most industry simulations, adding that the Japanese disaster was relatively easy to model because the observable facts of the first hours and days were so unremittingly bleak — “no water in, no injection” to cool the hot cores.
“I don’t think there’s any mystery or foul play,” Dr. Po said of the disaster’s scale. “It’s just so bad.”
The big players in reactor modeling are federal laboratories and large nuclear companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva, a French group that supplied reactor fuel to the Japanese complex.
The Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque wrote one of the most respected codes. It models whole plants and serves as a main tool of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Washington agency that oversees the nation’s reactors.
Areva and French agencies use a reactor code-named Cathare, a complicated acronym that also refers to a kind of goat’s milk cheese.
On March 21, Stanford University presented an invitation-only panel discussion on the Japanese crisis that featured Alan Hansen, an executive vice president of Areva NC, a unit of the company focused on the nuclear fuel cycle.
“Clearly,” he told the audience, “we’re witnessing one of the greatest disasters in modern time.”
Dr. Hansen, a nuclear engineer, presented a slide show that he said the company’s German unit had prepared. That division, he added, “has been analyzing this accident in great detail.”
The presentation gave a blow-by-blow of the accident’s early hours and days. It said drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and that peak temperatures hit 2,700 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt steel and zirconium — the main ingredient in the metallic outer shell of a fuel rod, known as the cladding.
“Zirconium in the cladding starts to burn,” said the slide presentation. At the peak temperature, it continued, the core experienced “melting of uranium-zirconium eutectics,” a reactor alloy.
A slide with a cutaway illustration of a reactor featured a glowing hot mass of melted fuel rods in the middle of the core and noted “release of fission products” during meltdown. The products are radioactive fragments of split atoms that can result in cancer and other serious illnesses.
Stanford, where Dr. Hansen is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun.
The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster.
“We cannot comment on that,” Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was “because it was not an officially released document.”
A European atomic official monitoring the Fukushima crisis expressed sympathy for Japan’s need to rely on forensics to grasp the full dimensions of the unfolding disaster.
“Clearly, there’s no access to the core,” the official said. “The Japanese are honestly blind.”
Needing a human touch, TEPCO may turn to "jumpers"
An aerial view of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is seen in Fukushima Prefecture in this photo taken by the Air Photo Service on March 24, 2011. REUTERS/Air Photo Service
Terril Yue Jones, Reuters April 1, 2011, 8:34 pm
TOKYO (Reuters) - It's a job that sounds too good to be true -- thousands of dollars for up to an hour of work that often requires little training.
But it also sounds too outrageous to accept, given the full job description: working in perilously radioactive environments.
In its attempts to bring under control its radiation-gushing nuclear power plant that was severely damaged by last month's massive earthquake and tsunami, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) is trying to get workers ever closer to the sources of stubborn radiation at the plant and end the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.
Workers are reportedly being offered hazard pay to work in the damaged reactors of up to $5,000 per day -- or more accurately, a fraction of a day, since the radiation-drenched shifts must be drastically restricted.
A TEPCO official said this week that the beleaguered company has tasks fit for "jumpers" -- workers so called because they "jump" into highly radioactive areas to accomplish a job in a minimum of time and race out as quickly as possible.
Sometimes jumpers can make multiple runs if the cumulative dosage is within acceptable limits -- although "acceptable" can be open to interpretation.
In cases of extreme leaks however the radiation might be so intense that jumpers can only make one such foray in their entire lives, or risk serious radiation poisoning.
For three weeks the reactors at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, have been explosive cauldrons of hydrogen blasts, radioactive steam and contaminated water that has apparently run off into the ocean, where levels of radioactive iodine have been found at several thousand times the normal level in recent days.
TEPCO said 18 employees and three contractors were exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation on Friday. The average dose for a nuclear plant worker is 50 millisieverts over five years.
Last week two workers in Reactor 3 were admitted to hospital after their feet were exposed to 170-180 millisiverts, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The company said this week it will shut down permanently at least four of the six reactors at the plant. But it first must stabilize and then cool the fuel, and has been desperately trying to douse fuel rods with water, and now clean up the radiation-contaminated water that's stagnating on reactor floors.
DUMP THE PUMP, THEN RUN
Asked on Monday how the contaminated water could be pumped out and how long it would take, a TEPCO official replied, "The pump could be powered from an independent generator, and all that someone would have to do is bring one end of the pump to the water and dump it in, and then run out."
Translation: jumpers wanted.
In fact TEPCO and its contractors are already trying to recruit jumpers, according to reports in the Japanese press.
"My company offered me 200,000 yen ($2,500) per day," one subcontractor in Iwaki city about 40 km south of the crippled plant told the Weekly Post magazine.
"Ordinarily I'd consider that a dream job, but my wife was in tears and stopped me, so I declined," said the unidentified worker who is in his 30s.
"The working time would be less than an hour, so in fact it was 200,000 yen an hour, but the risk was too big."
Ryuta Fujita, a 27-year-old worker also from Iwaki said he was offered twice that amount as hazardous duty pay to venture into Fukushima Daiichi's Reactor 2.
But Fujita, who evacuated his 3-year-old son and 26-year-old wife to a shelter in a sports arena just outside Tokyo, said the 400,000 yen a day wasn't worth it.
"I hear that guys older than 50 are being hired at high pay," Fujita told the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper. "But I'm still young, and radiation scares me. I don't want to work in a nuclear plant again."
The reluctance of workers to enter the stricken plant highlights one of TEPCO's basic dilemmas -- it can't get people close enough to see if its efforts to cool fuel rods are working; indeed, to confirm what the exact problems are in the first place.
Most of its efforts have involved pouring water on exposed fuel rods in a bid bring down their temperature and rein in their toxic emissions.
UNDER PRESSURE TO RETURN TO WORK
What TEPCO needs is surgical-strike jumpers.
Jumpers were common at U.S. nuclear power stations in the 1970s and 1980s. "It's still a job that exists but it's much rarer than in the past," said Rock Nelson, a manager at Nelson Nuclear Corp in Richland, Washington.
These days such jobs are more commonly performed by robots, but the interiors of Fukushima Daiichi's mangled reactor buildings are so filled with debris that using robots is too difficult.
Some workers have said they feel they are being pressured to take the high-risk jobs at the plant.
"It's dangerous work there, I'm sure, but if I refuse, I don't think I would keep my job," one 41-year-old contractor, who was asked by his employer to return to his job of scanning work areas to see if they are safe, told the Tokyo Shimbun. He said he will go back to work there this month.
So will another contractor in his 40s who is worried about putting food on the table.
"The reactors may be stopped, but I still have expenses," he told the Weekly Post. "I have to support my family. And more than anything, if I refuse to go back I'm genuinely afraid I won't get work again."
Japan PM tells nuclear workers 'you can't lose this battle'
Shingo Ito April 3, 2011 - 6:24AM
Japan's premier on Saturday visited emergency crew who have struggled to stabilise a tsunami-hit nuclear plant that has leaked radiation into the air, ground and ocean.
The visit came as the firm operating the Fukushima power station announced it had discovered a crack in a pit leaking highly radioactive water straight into the sea.
Donning a blue workman's outfit, Prime Minister Naoto Kan arrived by military helicopter to give a pep talk to the atomic plant workers, firefighters and troops battling to shut down the plant.
Advertisement: Story continues below "I want you to fight with the conviction that you absolutely cannot lose this battle," Kan told them at their base, the J-Village football academy 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the plant, Kyodo News reported.
He urged military personnel there to "fight to determine Japan's fate".
The hundreds of workers and troops have battled to stabilise the plant since the tsunami three weeks ago knocked out its water cooling system, leading fuel rods to overheat, partially melt down and release radioactivity.
The crew have endured gruelling conditions and the threat of high radiation. The government has hiked the exposure limit for emergency workers from 100 to 250 millisieverts, the equivalent of 10 brain scans.
The workers have used fire engines and concrete pumps to pour thousands of tons of water into overheating reactors and spent fuel rod pools, creating clouds of radioactive steam and highly contaminated runoff.
The nuclear safety agency said a 20-centimetre (eight-inch) crack had been found in a concrete pit from where water has leaked into the sea, where iodine-131 over 4,000 times the legal limit has been measured.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said workers would cement over the crack.
In longer term efforts to control the emergency, two of the world's largest cement boom pumps with a 70-metre reach were to be shipped to Japan from the United States, supporting models already sent by Germany and China.
The truck mounted pumps -- similar to those used to seal off Ukraine's Chernobyl plant after its 1986 meltdown -- can be remote-controlled and shoot either water or, if necessary, cement to entomb the facility.
TEPCO "didn't specifically say that they wanted to pump concrete, but it is the option. They don't have to bring in more equipment should that need occur," said Kelly Blickle of the US subsidiary of German pump maker Putzmeister.
The two pumps are scheduled to fly to Japan on April 9 aboard Russian Antonov AN-225 transport planes, the world's largest aircraft.
Japan also planned to deploy a floating steel pontoon that can hold 18,000 tonnes of water, to safely store the highly radioactive runoff that has accumulated in turbine room basements and tunnels, media reports said.
As Fukushima has belched radiation that has been measured in minuscule traces as far as New York, Japan has imposed a 20-kilometre exclusion zone around it and has urged people within 30 kilometres to move away.
"I can't tell you how bitter I feel," said one evacuee, a retired Fukushima plant worker who now lives in a school sports hall with more than 1,300 other people in Kazo city, Saitama prefecture, near Tokyo.
"I still don't know how I should look at all of this," said the man, who declined to give his name. "I had never dreamed of such an accident."
In Tokyo, Japan's foreign minister promised a full investigation.
"Japan will thoroughly examine the accident and wants to contribute to the international community by doing so," said Takeaki Matsumoto after meeting his German counterpart, who called for international nuclear safety standards.
Beyond those displaced by the nuclear crisis, tens of thousands of people lost their homes in the massive quake and tsunami that by the latest count left 11,800 dead and 15,540 missing.
A massive US-Japanese military search for bodies -- with 25,000 personnel on helicopters, planes, ships and on the ground -- went into its second day, recovering 57 bodies on Saturday.
On Friday, they found 110 bodies on the coastlines and inland.
The search focused on badly hit Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture. Rescuers scoured an elementary school where many children went missing and 50 divers were deployed to the nearby Kitakami River, Kyodo News reported.
Kan earlier Saturday for the first time set foot in the tsunami zone, visiting the devastated port of Rikuzentakata, a muddy wasteland of concrete ruins, with a lone pine tree left from what used to be a forest.
He visited evacuation centres in the town where more than 1,000 people died and over 1,200 are missing. One of the newly homeless, Michie Sugawara, said she welcomed Kan but voiced fears about the future.
"There will be a long road ahead," the 44-year-old told AFP. "This is an unprecedented disaster. I wish he will not forget about us."
Nuclear's green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril
Pundits who downplay the risks of radiation are ignoring the casualities of the past. Fukushima's meltdown may be worse
John Vidal guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 April 2011 20.00 BST
Every day there are more setbacks to solving the Japanese nuclear crisis [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/01/japanese-nuclear-workers-groundwater ] and it's pretty clear that the industry and governments are telling us little; have no idea how long it will take to control; or what the real risk of cumulative contamination may be.
The authorities reassure us by saying there is no immediate danger and a few absolutist environmentalists obsessed with nuclear power because of the urgency to limit emissions repeat the industry mantra that only a few people died at Chernobyl – the worst nuclear accident in history. Those who disagree are smeared and put in the same camp as climate change deniers.
I prefer the words of Alexey Yablokov [ http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/03/25-4 ], member of the Russian academy of sciences, and adviser to President Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl: "When you hear 'no immediate danger' [from nuclear radiation] then you should run away as far and as fast as you can."
Five years ago I visited the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and the Belarus border where much of the radioactive plume from Chernobyl descended on 26 April 1986. I challenge chief scientist John Beddington and environmentalists like George Monbiot [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima ] or any of the pundits now downplaying the risks of radiation to talk to the doctors, the scientists, the mothers, children and villagers who have been left with the consequences of a major nuclear accident.
It was grim. We went from hospital to hospital [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/apr/26/guardiansocietysupplement7 ] and from one contaminated village to another. We found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards; pitifully sick children in the homes; adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; foetuses without thighs or fingers and villagers who told us every member of their family was sick.
This was 20 years after the accident but we heard of many unusual clusters of people with rare bone cancers. One doctor, in tears, told us that one in three pregnancies in some places was malformed and that she was overwhelmed by people with immune and endocrine system disorders. Others said they still saw caesium and strontium in the breast milk of mothers living far from the areas thought to be most affected, and significant radiation still in the food chain. Villages testified that "the Chernobyl necklace" – thyroid cancer – was so common as to be unremarkable; many showed signs of accelerated ageing.
The doctors and scientists who have dealt directly with the catastrophe said that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency's "official" toll, through its Chernobyl Forum, of 50 dead and perhaps 4,000 eventual fatalities was insulting and grossly simplistic. The Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Radiation, which estimated that infant mortality increased 20 to 30% after the accident, said their data had not been accepted by the UN because it had not been published in a major scientific journal.
Konstantin Tatuyan, one of the "liquidators" who had helped clean up the plant, told us that nearly all his colleagues had died or had cancers of one sort or another, but that no one had ever asked him for evidence. There was burning resentment at the way the UN, the industry and ill-informed pundits had played down the catastrophe.
While there have been thousands of east European studies into the health effects of radiation from Chernobyl, only a very few have been accepted by the UN, and there have been just a handful of international studies trying to gauge an overall figure. They range from the UN's Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation study (57 direct deaths and 4,000 cancers expected) to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), who estimated that more than 10,000 people had been affected by thyroid cancer alone and a further 50,000 cases could be expected.
Moving up the scale, a 2006 report for Green MEPs suggested up to 60,000 possible deaths; Greenpeace took the evidence of 52 scientists and estimated the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers [ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/chernobyl-deaths-180406/ ] already and perhaps 140,000 more in time. Using other data, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences declared in 2006 that 212,000 people had died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl.
At the end of 2006, Yablokov and two colleagues, factoring in the worldwide drop in births and increase in cancers seen after the accident, estimated in a study published in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [ http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1 ] that 985,000 people had so far died and the environment had been devastated. Their findings were met with almost complete silence by the World Health Organisation and the industry.
So who can we trust when the estimates swing so wildly? Should we believe the empirical evidence of the doctors; or governments and industrialists backed by their PR companies? So politicised has nuclear energy become, that you can now pick and choose your data, rubbish your opponents, and ignore anything you do not like. The fact is we may never know the truth about Chernobyl because the records are lost, thousands of people from 24 countries who cleaned up the site have dispersed across the vast former Soviet Union, and many people have died.
Fukushima is not Chernobyl, but it is potentially worse. It is a multiple reactor catastrophe happening within 150 miles of a metropolis of 30 million people. If it happened at Sellafield, there would be panic in every major city in Britain. We still don't know the final outcome but to hear experts claiming that nuclear radiation is not that serious, or that this accident proves the need for nuclear power, is nothing short of disgraceful.
With the decision to entomb four Fukushima reactors in concrete, Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) is moving the disaster into uncharted waters. The heat producing fuel rods cannot be turned off. Concrete will insulate the heat from the fuel rods, and cause the internal temperatures to climb. The nuclear fuel will melt down and pass through the bottom of the reactor vessel and containment structure and enter the environment. The radionuclides, primarily cesium-137 and strontium-90, but also plutonium and others, will enter the sea. The human health and economic costs will be enormous.
TEPCO's choices were limited. The brave workers who were attempting to put a lid on atmospheric releases were fighting a valiant, but losing battle. Iodine was entering the air and the sea. Iodine concentrations in the sea were already over 4,300 times safe limits [ http://en.trend.az/regions/world/ocountries/1853246.html ] and in the plant, greater than 10,000 times safe limits for nuclear workers [ http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-japan-reactor-damage-20110331,0,5950026.story (eighth item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=61600282 )]. Cesium, a semi-volatile metal, was also entering the sea through unknown pathways, likely leakage from below. Clearly the cladding around the nuclear fuel rods and the reactor vessel had been breached. So the choice was to continue to expose workers to extremely high radiation doses, while releasing cesium and iodine to the air and sea, or close it down, cover it with concrete and let the reactor cores and fuel pools melt into the ground and into the sea.
Fukushima Inventory
Assuming four reactors are coated with cement, and reactors 5 and 6 and the common ground level shared fuel pool can be saved, we can give a rough estimate of the radioactive inventory and compare it to two other nuclear disasters: Hiroshima and Chernobyl. Roughly, 2,100 Curies of cesium-137 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_compared_to_other_radioactivity_releases#Chernobyl_compared_with_an_atomic_bomb ] were released at Hiroshima. At Chernobyl, according to the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2000), 2.3 million Curies of cesium-137 were released. The approximate inventory of reactors 1 through 4 is 100 million Curies cesium-137, or more than 40 times the Chernobyl release, and 48000 times the Hiroshima release of cesium-137. (spreadsheet available [ mailto:radwaste@rwma.com ]). Only a fraction of this Fukushima inventory has been released to-date. If a sizable release takes place, say 10% of the Fukushima inventory, this represents 8 times the Chernobyl release and 4,800 times the Hiroshima release. This would be a major catastrophe. Cesium would not just dissipate in the ocean or concentrate in fish; it will also wash back to shore. This will make it difficult for workers to service reactors 5 and 6.
The Implications
The implications of cementing over reactors 1-4 are not clear. With the cesium-137 and iodine-131 releases from Fukushima, the evacuation zone is out to 30 miles, but a much larger coastal zone may ultimately be affected for many decades. The internal heat may explode the containment and cause additional cement cracking. The heat will certainly melt through the bottom of the reactor vessel and containment and into the underlying soil. The human health and cost implications of this accident could be enormous. Four hundred thousand Japanese have already been displaced by the tsunami and the forced evacuation. The present cost estimate of $300 billion [ http://agefool.co.cc/asianews/japan-tsunami-damage-cost-could-top-300-billion-2.html ], before the decision to cement over the four reactors, does not account for the long-term loss of the coast. Based on our cost estimates for potential nuclear transportation accident for the State of Nevada, we believe $300 billion is far too low. TEPCO may go into receivership and be taken over by the government. The Japanese economy, struggling before this accident, will take another hit.
For the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may take a harder look at the safety of the 23 or so Fukushima-type boiling water reactors. While the industry has fastened on the low probability of an earthquake and a tsunami, other factors may also be important. Reactors are complicated high tech machines run by humans, who, as TMI showed, make mistakes.
Vermont Yankee has had leaking and inoperable safety valves and a rundown cooling system. Entergy, the company that runs the plant, has little incentive to put money into the operation, since the State has refused to grant it a Certificate of Public Good to continue operation for an additional 20 years. Its decommissioning fund is half the needed amount. New York State is pushing Entergy to close down its Indian Point reactor. In case of a major accident, the evacuation zone includes New York City and its suburbs.
The Fukushima accident has heightened the tension between profits and safety. As the Fukushima accident plays itself out, the nuclear industry and GE in particular, must be vitally concerned. Unlike an oil or gas generating station, the heat at Fukushima cannot be turned off. Nuclear fuel is the gift that keeps on giving. GE, TEPCO and the Japanese economy will take a big hit, but the Japanese people, who have suffered through the earthquake and tsunami, will take the biggest hit, in terms of an expected increase in cancers caused by radiation from Fukushima.
U.S. nuclear plants are storing increasing amounts of highly radioactive spent fuel in pools that are vulnerable to accident or attack. New safety policies are needed.
By Robert Alvarez March 23, 2011
The nuclear crisis at the Daiichi complex in Fukushima, Japan, has turned a spotlight on the severe dangers involved in storing spent nuclear fuel in pools. But the danger is not new.
In 2003, I cowrote a report [ http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/reducing_the_hazards_from_stored_spent_power-reactor_fuel_in_the_united_states ] with a group of academics, nuclear industry executives, former government officials and other researchers warning that spent fuel pools at U.S. nuclear power plants were vulnerable. The drainage of a pool might cause a catastrophic radiation fire, we reported, which could render an area uninhabitable greater than that created by the Chernobyl accident (roughly half the size of New Jersey).
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hotly disputed our paper, which prompted Congress to ask the National Academy of Sciences to sort out the controversy. In 2004, the academy reported that U.S. pools were vulnerable to terrorist attacks and catastrophic fires.
According to the academy: "It is not prudent to dismiss nuclear plants, including spent fuel storage facilities, as undesirable targets for terrorists.... Under some conditions, a terrorist attack that partially or completely drained a spent fuel pool could lead to a propagating zirconium cladding fire and release large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment." The NRC responded with a failed attempt to block the academy's report.
As we're seeing in Japan, it isn't only terrorist attacks that can pose serious threats to spent fuel pools. These ponds were designed to be temporary, and to store only a small fraction of what they currently hold in the United States. But in the absence of a permanent storage site, nuclear plants here have to store increasing amounts of highly radioactive spent fuel at their facilities.
For nearly 30 years, the NRC has made clear that the United States urgently needs to develop a permanent waste repository. But that has taken much longer than anyone envisioned, and it has meant that the nation's 104 nuclear power plants are legally storing spent fuel in onsite cooling ponds much longer, and at higher densities (on average four times higher), than was originally intended. And now that the Obama administration has called off proposed plans to store nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, fuel is likely to remain at the plants where it was used for decades to come.
This presents a serious threat. Our report found that, as in Japan, U.S. nuclear safety authorities don't require reactor operators to have backup power supplies to circulate water in the pools and keep them cool if there is a loss of offsite power. Some reactor control rooms in the U.S. lack instrumentation to keep track of the water levels in pools. At one reactor several years ago, water levels dropped after operators failed to look into the pool area. Some reactors may not have necessary water restoration capabilities for pools.
A variety of events could conceivably cause a loss of pool water, including leakage, evaporation, siphoning, pumping, aircraft impact, an earthquake, the accidental or deliberate drop of a fuel transport cask, reactor failure or an explosion inside or outside the pool building. Industry officials maintain that personnel would have sufficient time to provide an alternative cooling system before the spent fuel caught fire. But if the water level dropped to even a few feet above the spent fuel, the radiation doses in the pool building could be lethal.
A 1997 report that Brookhaven National Laboratory did for the NRC found that a severe pool fire could render about 188 square miles uninhabitable, cause as many as 28,000 cancer fatalities and cost $59 billion in damage.
In the wake of the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan, we clearly need a new policy that takes into account the likelihood that spent fuel will remain in onsite storage for some time to come. In our 2003 study, we recommended that all U.S. spent fuel older than five years should be placed in dry, hardened storage containers, which would greatly reduce the fire risk if water were drained from reactor cooling ponds. Casks should be placed in either thick-walled structures or in earthen berms capable of withstanding plane and missile impacts. We estimated this could be accomplished with existing cask technology in 10 years at a cost of $3 billion to $7 billion.
Moreover, future reactors should be designed so that temporary cooling ponds are encased in heavy concrete. Germany took such steps 25 years ago in response to the threats posed by accidental fighter jet crashes and terrorist attacks.
Safely securing spent fuel should be a public safety priority of the highest degree in the United States. The cost of fixing America's nuclear vulnerabilities may be high, but the price of doing too little is incalculable.
Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as a senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary from 1993 to 1999. http://www.ips-dc.org
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