Current News and Info on Post-quake Nuclear Problems

[Huang_Guang_Chen]

Yeah, ORSM source there, Bereal. One thing I’ll say about your posts, they’re reliable, if not downright predictable.

From your esteemed link.

[quote]Secret Federal Court To Payoff Parents Whose Children Suffered Autism From Vaccines Exposed!
A Press Release from Safe Minds reveals the Federal Government has been running a secret vaccine court for over 20 years to cover up brain damage and autism caused by forced vaccinations.[/quote]
Meanwhile . . .

[quote]Expatriates Tiptoe Back to the Office
Life in Japan is showing tentative signs of returning to normal, but a fresh challenge may be facing the expatriates and Japanese who left and are now trickling back to their offices: how to cope with ostracism and anger from their colleagues who have worked through the crisis.

One foreigner, a fluent Japanese speaker at a large Japanese company, said that his Japanese manager and colleagues were “furious” with him for moving to Osaka for three days last week and that he felt he was going to have to be very careful to avoid being ostracized upon returning to work in Tokyo.

The flight of the foreigners—known as gaijin in Japanese—has polarized some offices in Tokyo. Last week, departures from Japan reached a fever pitch after the U.S. Embassy unveiled a voluntary evacuation notice and sent in planes to ferry Americans to safe havens. In the exodus, a new term was coined for foreigners fleeing Japan: flyjin.[/quote]
So what about Mount Fuji?

[quote]A Flyjin Blog Survey: Will You Fly When Mount Fuji Looks Likely to Erupt?
So you stuck around after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima accident. But when Mount Fuji erupts, what will you do? Let me know in the comments below.

Some factoids for your consideration. Mount Fuji has erupted once every 30 years on average over the past two millennia.[/quote]
Well I dunno where I’m a goina’ go . . .

HG

[Ducked]

[quote=“yuli”]

Radioactive substances such as iodine are generated during nuclear fission inside a reactor.

Is that their way of saying that core material blew out of reactor 3 during the accident? Or that such material is leaking out right now?
Although some people in the forensic analysis thread in the physicsforums had found information related to a crack in the reactor housing, TEPCO had until now not given any such information, and even the New York Times has cut it out of an article that initially contained it. Interesting, to say the least…

[quote]TEPCO says these substances may have come from damaged fuel rods in the reactor rather than the damaged spent fuel rods in the pool, because it has detected radioactive iodine, which has a short half-life. Radioactive substances such as iodine are generated during nuclear fission inside a reactor.
The company says the radioactive substances may have become attached to debris and entered the pool together.[/quote][/quote]

Its true that “Radioactive substances such as iodine are generated during nuclear fission inside a reactor.”, and if they’re pointing that out, it looks like an indirect way of saying No.3 is leaking.

However, its also true that radioactive substances such as iodine would be generated during nuclear fission outside a reactor, as in, if the pool had gone critical, and since thats arguably an even worse possibility, they may attempting to misdirect attention away from it.

I’m not up to date on the “forensic physicist” discussion but a while ago they were fairly convinced of criticality in one of the pools (4 IIRC) and were referring to it as an “open air reactor”

That was the first time I’d heard that phrase, and I wouldn’t miss it if I never had to hear it again.

[bereal]

[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]Yeah, ORSM source there, Bereal. One thing I’ll say about your posts, they’re reliable, if not downright predictable.

From your esteemed link.

[quote]Secret Federal Court To Payoff Parents Whose Children Suffered Autism From Vaccines Exposed!
A Press Release from Safe Minds reveals the Federal Government has been running a secret vaccine court for over 20 years to cover up brain damage and autism caused by forced vaccinations.[/quote]
Meanwhile . . .

[quote]Expatriates Tiptoe Back to the Office
Life in Japan is showing tentative signs of returning to normal, but a fresh challenge may be facing the expatriates and Japanese who left and are now trickling back to their offices: how to cope with ostracism and anger from their colleagues who have worked through the crisis.

One foreigner, a fluent Japanese speaker at a large Japanese company, said that his Japanese manager and colleagues were “furious” with him for moving to Osaka for three days last week and that he felt he was going to have to be very careful to avoid being ostracized upon returning to work in Tokyo.

The flight of the foreigners—known as gaijin in Japanese—has polarized some offices in Tokyo. Last week, departures from Japan reached a fever pitch after the U.S. Embassy unveiled a voluntary evacuation notice and sent in planes to ferry Americans to safe havens. In the exodus, a new term was coined for foreigners fleeing Japan: flyjin.[/quote]
So what about Mount Fuji?

[quote]A Flyjin Blog Survey: Will You Fly When Mount Fuji Looks Likely to Erupt?
So you stuck around after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima accident. But when Mount Fuji erupts, what will you do? Let me know in the comments below.

Some factoids for your consideration. Mount Fuji has erupted once every 30 years on average over the past two millennia.[/quote]
Well I dunno where I’m a goina’ go . . .

- YouTube

HG[/quote]

Yeah, ORSM source there, Bereal. One thing I’ll say about your posts, they’re reliable, if not downright predictable.

I’d have to agree with you on that one.

A Press Release from Safe Minds reveals the Federal Government has been running a secret vaccine court for over 20 years to cover up brain damage and autism caused by forced vaccinations.

You should take some time to reseach vaccines. When it come to Govt and independent research,I’ll side with independent almost everytime.

Everything esle seems to be irrelevant to the current situation in FUKUshima.

[yuli]

The cat’s out of the bag: reactor 1 core completely melted down

physicsforums.com/showthread … 0&page=423
The story starts at message #6759

Check out the links given on that site, too - some are in Japanese, but the graphics may tell enough, for example, this report from the Asahi Shinbun:
“Hole in pressure vessel in which fuel mostly melted”
asahi.com/national/update/05 … 20174.html (the words followed by questions marks to the left and right of the slumped core mean “water leakage?”)

(Note:
Links on news websites may become unusable or closed to the general public after a while.
To ensure future access to information that is posted here, please download the linked articles to your own computer)

[Icon]

[quote=“bereal”][quote=“Icon”]Mmm, better keep an eye on those radiation levels around the island:

[quote]The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the Taiwan representative office in Japan last night that they had opened the double doors to the reactor engine room of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Plant’s No. 1 plant and that there may potentially be radiation leaks.
Although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still has not received any governmental documents regarding the power plant news as of noon yesterday, officials of the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) have researched the case and explained that opening the double doors, unlike releasing contaminated water into the ocean, is a mere procedural action.

According to the officials, because the opening of the double doors is done inside the power plant, so long as the negative pressure within the plant is maintained, the radiation leakage situation will not get out of control.

The reason why neighboring countries were informed about this procedure, officials said, was to prevent uproars similar to that which happened when the Japanese government released radioactive water into the ocean earlier last month.

[/quote]
chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/fore … -warns.htm[/quote]

And that’s the good news…

youtube.com/watch?v=2B8hAEzz93Y

youtube.com/watch?v=bntAUpW44Mw[/quote]

The first video has to do with reactor number 4. It is from Chinese TV and cites US authotrities saying that the reactor’s pool has no water, but that the Japanese deny this information is true. I posted about reactor 1, so I dunnot know what’s the relationship. Plus I do not see the date the video was broadcasted -I can see when it was posted, but not when the news were first broadcasted.

The second video is about some people returning to the exclusion zone.

[yuli]

@Icon

The first video has to do with reactor number 4. It is from Chinese TV and cites US authotrities saying that the reactor’s pool has no water, but that the Japanese deny this information is true.

Not sure who those US authorities are, but Japan has quite recently published a video that consists of underwater footage in pool 4 and shows that there is hardly any damage and that not much debris has fallen into the pool. (Some of the items that have fallen into the pool, such as a short metal staircase from one of the machines, had been seen on previously taken photos from that pool.)

I posted about reactor 1, so I dunnot know what’s the relationship.

Each reactor has its own specific problems. :s So it is quite possible to get really bad news about one reactor and on the same day something that under the current circumstances might be called “good news” from another one.

[Icon]

Yep, it is true each reactor is a whole enchilada of trouble on its own. What I was asking about was Bereal’s quoting my quote but talking about something else entirely.

[yuli]

@Icon

Yep, it is true each reactor is a whole enchilada of trouble on its own. What I was asking about was Bereal’s quoting my quote but talking about something else entirely.

I see… i obviously misunderstood your comment. :s Fortunately nobody got hurt this time…

[yuli]

NHK reports that high levels of radioactive cesium have been found in Tochigi Prefecture and Ibaragi Prefecture.
www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/13_01.html

Some related information is here:
physicsforums.com/showpost.p … count=6939
A link to a Google satellite photo:
maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source= … 67&t=h&z=9
If you look at this photo you will see the tourist destination Nikko (one of the places where cesium was detected) where the red marker “A” is located.
The damaged power plant cannot be seen directly, but you can find its location as follows: to the eastnortheast of Nikko, you can see the town Iwaki right at the coast. You can also see roads (orange, yellow) and a railway line (green) going northward out of Iwaki, but while the (orange) road goes all the way to Minamisoma (off the screen at this resolution), the railway ends at some point. The power plant is located to the southeast of the railway’s end point, right at the coast (you can faintly see some wave breaker walls in the water off the coast - those are right in front of the plant).

(Note:
Links on news websites may become unusable or closed to the general public after a while.
To ensure future access to information that is posted here, please download the linked articles to your own computer)

[Charlie_Jack]

[quote=“yuli”]The cat’s out of the bag: reactor 1 core completely melted down

physicsforums.com/showthread … 0&page=423
The story starts at message #6759[/quote]

Check out this assortment, beginning with the post you linked to:

They now believe 100 percent fuel melt in reactor one, with some water cooling still occurring in the bottom of the vessel, as indicated by the relatively low temperatures measured outside the vessel.

TEPCO officials confirmed today the months-long of suspicion that the Reactor No. 1 at Fukushima suffered a full meltdown.

On the other hand:

Still, the worst fears did not materialize. Experts have long worried that such melting would allow a nuclear chain reaction to restart, producing enough heat to burn through all barriers — resulting in a full meltdown and a catastrophic release of radioactive material.

They’ve worried about a full meltdown. Didn’t actually have one, just worried about it. Well, that’s a relief.

Nevertheless:

MARK COLVIN: The company that owns the Fukushima nuclear plant, Tepco, has finally admitted what many have long suspected, that one of their reactors underwent a full meltdown after the tsunami that hit Japan’s east Coast.

But still:

The discovery of the leak provides new insight into the sequence of events that triggered a partial meltdown of the uranium fuel in the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima after the plant was struck by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, officials said

What? A hole did you say? Leakage? Whoa, breaking news! By the way, what’s the latest on the Hindenberg?

[yuli]

@Charlie Jack

What? A hole did you say? Leakage? Whoa, breaking news!

It was/is: until now there had been no way of confirming (or disproving, as the case might have been) the existing strong suspicion/inference/deduction.

By the way, what’s the latest on the Hindenberg?

Didn’t someone see it explode? But can we trust so called eyewitnesses? What if they were drunk or on LSD - wait there was no LSD around in those years, but that does not prove those so called eyewitnesses could not have been high on some other substance that was not generally known. Given the many uncertainties, it looks like this question may never be answered…

[yuli]

[quote=“yuli”]The number of confirmed dead and missing now stands at 24,829 (with the view that it might slightly increase yet)

www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/2011051 … 51000.html[/quote]
Another report:
www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/13_33.html

[quote]The National Police Agency said on Friday that the number of confirmed deaths including those from 2 major aftershocks on April 7th and 11th stands at 15,019. […]
The agency also says 9,500 people have been reported to police as missing.[/quote]
That adds up to at least 24,519 (since the figure for those reported missing is apparently just an approximation), so the previously mentioned figure of 24,829 looks still current.

Meanwhile, the police say 115,500 people are still in shelters, mostly in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures.

But among them, [quote]a total of 21,000 people are in evacuation centers set up by municipalities in 15 prefectures including Tokyo.[/quote]

(Note:
Links on news websites may become unusable or closed to the general public after a while.
To ensure future access to information that is posted here, please download the linked articles to your own computer)

[Charlie_Jack]

@yuli

[quote=“Charlie Jack”]What? A hole did you say? Leakage? Whoa, breaking news!

It was/is: until now there had been no way of confirming (or disproving, as the case might have been) the existing strong suspicion/inference/deduction.[/quote]

OK, so it’s a different leak, or something. Imagine that, yet another leak. Reminds me of the coal miner who discovered a lump of coal down in the mine:

Peter Cook - The Miner

I guess I’ll attempt an analogy on this; maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.

Suppose there was a building which, according to news reports, contained fire hazards. Suppose further that these fire hazards had caused some fires over some period of time. One day, in response to a call, firefighters rushed to the scene to find that the building had burned down completely. What would you think of a news report, coming out the next day, entitled “New Fire Hazards Discovered in Building”? Furthermore, what would you think upon reading such a news report, if it said that fire officials had long worried that the building would burn completely down, but fortunately, the worst had not happened yet? And finally, what would you think if you discovered such news reports among other news reports, coming out on the same day, which said that the building had in fact burned down? And incidentally, all of this in the context of a posting a day earlier on a fire investigators’ website, which said that the building had burned down?

That’s what intrigued me about those news reports. Did I get something wrong? Did I misunderstand something? I mean, I know there are time-zone differences, but I don’t see how that could have had a major effect on things. (And the topper is that the wrong ones were The New York Times and Reuters. And one was entitled “Update 2” , giving the impression that they were johnny-on-the-spot and watching events like a hawk.) Did I misread, or something? I mean, I’m getting old, maybe I misread the whole thing. I kind of hope so.

@yuli

[quote]By the way, what’s the latest on the Hindenberg?

Didn’t someone see it explode? But can we trust so called eyewitnesses? What if they were drunk or on LSD - wait there was no LSD around in those years, but that does not prove those so called eyewitnesses could not have been high on some other substance that was not generally known. Given the many uncertainties, it looks like this question may never be answered… [/quote]

I wasn’t addressing you in my Hindenberg wisecrack; I was “fictionally” addressing the author(s) of the quoted news report. Sorry if I created any confusion.

Anyway, based on those news reports that I posted earlier, I think TEPCO must have hired the ghost of Akira Kurasawa as its PR consultant: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect

[yuli]

@Charlie Jack

Imagine that, yet another leak.

I think everybody understands your sarcasm, but until that recent confirmation arrived nobody outside of TEPCO - nor even inside of TEPCO - could say with reasonable certainty that they knew what the situation was like. For example, for two months TEPCO has been reporting data (derived from sensors in reactor 1) that, as it turns out, were just fiction: some sensors/meters apparently don’t work at all and simply send spurious data. But the problem was that there had been no way to confirm that. So, until now almost all information in that regard had been speculation (if to a large extent educated speculation). Thus my comment “the cat is out of the bag” - to me the “revelation” about the hole was simply a confirmation of what technically well-educated people had surmised long ago. And there are over 3,000 cubic meters of water that have “disappeared” and nobody knows where they are, because the radiation in the "basement"of reactor 1 is so high - nothing surprising there, either, of course - that nobody has been going in there until now. Anyway, for two months we have been fed information of the kind “a noise was heard and smoke was seen”, and at first i didn’t believe it when i read that the government spokesman said, about the hole(s) in the reactor, “it is a fact that…” - i have so gotten used to the fluff and haze coming from there.

I guess I’ll attempt an analogy on this; maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.

No, it worked. But surely you must have seen how exasperated many of the regular posters in the “physicsforums” are at times about the way information has not been forthcoming from Japan (both from the TEPCO and from the government). Yesterday we had at least one of the newspapers publish information from two months back that they got from internal documents they recently got their hands on - so even inside Japan people are not happy with the lack of information. :s Information has not been flowing in logical order of time for as long as the problem has existed , and i have no idea where US papers get their information from and how, so i can’t comment on that time warp you noticed there…

I wasn’t addressing you in my Hindenberg wisecrack; I was “fictionally” addressing the author(s) of the quoted news report. Sorry if I created any confusion.

Not confusion, i just sometimes take funny balls and run with them…

Anyway, based on those news reports that I posted earlier, I think TEPCO must have hired the ghost of Akira Kurasawa as its PR consultant

Perhaps you now understand better why a Japanese film maker would address such a topic as he did: artists quite often express the neuroses of their society (that’s the same i have always thought about Hollywoods obsession - at some time in the not so recent past - with sex: people were trying to come to grips with their society’s puritan heritage). Oh, and about TEPCO’s attempts at obfuscation there has been hardly any doubt from day one - it is just that with such a complex situation, contradictions in the information that is released become apparent pretty quickly - whether anybody wants to hide stuff or not - and so the revelations now are to a some extent conformations of what forensic analysis has already brought to the fore. But there are still many (and major) questions that nobody knows the answers to - and some will answers may never come. And what at some point may have been known may become hazy over time and what once was speculation (in the absence of data) may become accepted as fact (that’s what my run-on about the “Hindenburg” was about).

[yuli]

Another “cat got out of the bag” (apparently it’s a big bag, and apparently there are still many cats kept in there - no SPCA in Japan? )

“TEPCO concealed radiation data before explosion at No. 3 reactor”
asahi.com/english/TKY201105130370.html
(This had been published yesterday, but i didn’t have the time to translate it, so i waited until the English version would show up. )

[quote]The Asahi Shimbun obtained a 100-page internal TEPCO report containing minute-to-minute data on radiation levels at the plant as well as pressure and water levels inside the No. 3 reactor from March 11 to April 30.
The data has never been released by the company that operates the stricken plant.[/quote]
Oddly enough, TEPCO doesn’t seem to have complained about this leak of confidential information - maybe it was sanctioned from higher up (conspiracy hypothesis anybody: better release the 2-month-old dirt in bits and pieces than all at once at the end? )

[quote]The unpublished information shows that at 1:17 p.m. on March 13, 300 millisieverts of radiation per hour was detected inside a double-entry door at the No. 3 reactor building. At 2:31 p.m., the radiation level was measured at 300 millisieverts or higher per hour to the north of the door.
Both levels were well above the upper limit of 250 millisieverts for an entire year under the plant’s safety standards for workers. But the workers who were trying to bring the situation under control at the plant were not informed of the levels.[/quote]
Oops… but, then, many of them didn’t get dosimeters later, either…

And a hint of more cats to escape soon:
physicsforums.com/showpost.p … count=7208

Tepco admit to the possibility that all primary containment vessels of all reactors are leaking.

CharlieJack: Is there no appropriate Monty Python skit for a situation like this? Soon we’ll be be overrun by cats here…

[Icon]

Don’t mention the animal situation in the exclusion zones.

[yuli]

@Icon

Don’t mention the animal situation in the exclusion zones.

I think we should, because these are things that many people don’t know. Not all is bad, though.

Three things about animals that i’ve read in the last few days: it has been reported that a large number of farm animals have been put down (by special teams) in areas that have become uninhabitable near the Fukushima power plant; and in other areas residents from the exclusion zone were briefly allowed back in to get stuff from their homes and feed animals, etc.

A third news item concerned a substantial number of pets that survived the tsunami but have been left without care when their people got killed, fled, or had to be evacuated. There appear to be groups concerned with those animals’ welfare that are trying to look after them (are they trying to collect them? not sure, but they seem to have been going into the devastated areas because of the pets who live there…)

Many details of a disaster that one does not see from the distance…

[Charlie_Jack]

@yuli

[quote]Tepco admit to the possibility that all primary containment vessels of all reactors are leaking.

CharlieJack: Is there no appropriate Monty Python skit for a situation like this? Soon we’ll be be overrun by cats here…[/quote] Maybe. They’ve done one on just about everything. We may have to bring a Lenny Bruce skit in for this one, or even go back to the Marx Brothers. We’ve got to manage those cats!

[yuli]

The following reasoning is also based on the data from TEPCO that the Asahi Newspaper revealed a few days ago:

“Key nuclear facilities may have been damaged before tsunami”
english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/05/91126.html

Data taken at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the night of March 11 showing a high level of radiation at a reactor building suggest the possibility that key facilities there may have been damaged by the quake itself that day rather than tsunami-caused power loss that failed the reactor’s cooling function, a utility source said Saturday.

(Note:
Links on news websites may become unusable or closed to the general public after a while.
To ensure future access to information that is posted here, please download the linked articles to your own computer)

[yuli]

@yuli

Also interesting is the question why the temperature inside reactor 3 appears to be rising and rising.

More on that topic here:
physicsforums.com/showpost.p … count=7251
It looks like things are getting worse, not better (or at least more stable): for a few days it seemed things had somewhat improved at reactor 3, but it looks like that was only a pause…
OTOH, nobody knows which data one can trust, so perhaps we may have to wait until the next explosion to know more.