Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster!!!

[CrankyBastard]

The levels in your area aren't anything to be worried about, CS.

Can't speak for CS, but I'm not so much worried about the level, although it is over twice the norm, but more concerned about the interval of time it has been at this level and are we to expect this to be the new norm. And how much above present levels can we expect?
Not only that but I have go to the hospital tomorrow for a scan or Xray.
Was up all night curled into the fetal position nursing another bout of fuckin kidney stones!! So I guess I'll be getting more radiation than the rest of you.
Lucky me!

[AML]

According to a BBC program I watched, the Fukushima plant had 8hours of backup power in the form of batteries before the cooling failed....

So even with 8 hours they couldn't start cooling? Before the overheating started?

[cstaylor]

According to a BBC program I watched, the Fukushima plant had 8hours of backup power in the form of batteries before the cooling failed....

So even with 8 hours they couldn't start cooling? Before the overheating started?

Good question. FGL?

[bidayuhboy]

Normal shutdown did occur but they remain hot for a long time. After shutdown the rods remain very hot for at least a week, then they are moved to a storage pool where they can take years to fully cool. The cooling system was powered by normal power, batteries and backup diesel generators which failed due to tsunami damage, so they need to get the reactor cooled then move them to the cooling pool, not fun - especially if they are "zircon encrusted" (thanx FZ).

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0316/Meltdown-101-Why-is-Fukushima-crisis-still-out-of-control

[Mulboyne]

Tokyo Shimbun reports that nuclear plant staff are being offered 400,000 yen a day to go to Fukushima.

Here (Japanese)

[omae mona]

FTFY. Here's some more "armchair quarterbacking."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110327/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_quake_tsunami_risk

I agree with elements of what both you guys are saying. I think people in the risk assessment business and the geophysics business probably look at future events as a probability distribution (if they don't, they're doing it wrong!!). I kind of doubt TEPCO ever thought 18 feet was the largest imaginable tsunami. Most likely they thought it was the largest tsunami within a particular confidence interval (e.g. 95%).

We know nobody can plan for 100% safety in just about any enterprise on earth. We are always willing to take some risk in exchange for some progress and affordability. The art is in deciding where to draw the line. For example (sorry, bear with me, I am just making this exaggerated scenario up to make a point), say you used the best research available and legitimately thought there was only 1 in 1,000,000 chance of a tsunami that could damage the plant. And you legitimately thought that the maximum effect on health might be up to 5 individuals with a 1% increased probability of developing cancer. And you have a solution to protect against the tsunami, but it is so expensive that it will literally double electricity costs to all consumers. I think we would all say it's not worth it to add the safety measures. And if that one in a million event happened and 5 folks got exposed to a tiny bit of radiation, we'd probably say "it's still good we cut our power costs in half for all these years".

But now bring the numbers down to a 1 in 100 chance of something that might kill 5 people instantly, and would increase everybody's electricity costs by 25% to protect against this. Now is it worth it? Hard for me to say. It's easy to see how, as the numbers shift, the judgment call can be difficult.

And that's the problem I see. The downside is borne by the victims much more than TEPCO. I am not sure TEPCO is properly incentivised to make the right calls in these decisions, especially when they're so cozy with the government. Strict regulation by the government, who I trust more to choose the proper balance between risk and progress, is needed. The judgment calls about what is worth paying for need to be taken out of private companies' hands, when it comes to safety.

So yes, on the "armchair quarterbacking" issue, we can't judge TEPCO based on what we know now. We need to judge them based on whether their risk assessment ahead of time was correct, and whether they chose a fair balance between risk and cost. I don't think we really know enough to answer that yet, but this will come to light eventually. HOWEVER, I think it's really likely we will find out they made many decisions that an informed and rational public would have disagreed with ahead of time, even without the benefit of hindsight.

[FG Lurker]

I agree with elements of what both you guys are saying. I think people in the risk assessment business and the geophysics business probably look at future events as a probability distribution (if they don't, they're doing it wrong!!). I kind of doubt TEPCO ever thought 18 feet was the largest imaginable tsunami. Most likely they thought it was the largest tsunami within a particular confidence interval (e.g. 95%).

We know nobody can plan for 100% safety in just about any enterprise on earth. We are always willing to take some risk in exchange for some progress and affordability. The art is in deciding where to draw the line. For example (sorry, bear with me, I am just making this exaggerated scenario up to make a point), say you used the best research available and legitimately thought there was only 1 in 1,000,000 chance of a tsunami that could damage the plant. And you legitimately thought that the maximum effect on health might be up to 5 individuals with a 1% increased probability of developing cancer. And you have a solution to protect against the tsunami, but it is so expensive that it will literally double electricity costs to all consumers. I think we would all say it's not worth it to add the safety measures. And if that one in a million event happened and 5 folks got exposed to a tiny bit of radiation, we'd probably say "it's still good we cut our power costs in half for all these years".

But now bring the numbers down to a 1 in 100 chance of something that might kill 5 people instantly, and would increase everybody's electricity costs by 25% to protect against this. Now is it worth it? Hard for me to say. It's easy to see how, as the numbers shift, the judgment call can be difficult.

Before the disaster happened TEPCO would have had a hard time convincing users to accept even a 25% rate hike to cover the costs of protecting against a once in a 1000 year event. A 100% increase?

Of course now that the disaster has happened and is fresh in people's minds many will claim that they would gladly pay that extra 25%, and more than a few will say that even a 100% increase would be acceptable.

This is the same as seen in Kansai before and after the Kobe quake. Before the Kobe quake most people gave little thought to how quake resistant their "mansion" buildings or houses were. After the quake though many people refuse to rent or buy anything built before 1995 as the quake resistance standards were all improved after the destruction in Kobe.

It's classic human nature: Closing the barn door after the horse has departed.

And that's the problem I see. The downside is borne by the victims much more than TEPCO. I am not sure TEPCO is properly incentivised to make the right calls in these decisions, especially when they're so cozy with the government. Strict regulation by the government, who I trust more to choose the proper balance between risk and progress, is needed. The judgment calls about what is worth paying for need to be taken out of private companies' hands, when it comes to safety.

It would be much better to have a strong and independent regulator for nuclear power in Japan. The situation with amakudari makes it questionable as to if this will ever really happen though.

So yes, on the "armchair quarterbacking" issue, we can't judge TEPCO based on what we know now. We need to judge them based on whether their risk assessment ahead of time was correct, and whether they chose a fair balance between risk and cost. I don't think we really know enough to answer that yet, but this will come to light eventually. HOWEVER, I think it's really likely we will find out they made many decisions that an informed and rational public would have disagreed with ahead of time, even without the benefit of hindsight.

I don't think TEPCO is perfect. I won't be surprised if some of their past decisions went against what GE recommended in the way of plant upgrades, for example. I also won't be surprised to see that many decisions that seemed reasonable when they were made get called into question now that the once in a millennium event has happened.

[FG Lurker]

Containment holds when cooling functions. No water over the cores means no cooling, which leads to heating past engineering tolerances and finally the fuel pellets drop out of the bottom of the containment vessel. There goes your containment.

There are multiple layers of containment.

The first layer is the zirconium tubes that hold the fuel pellets. These have at least partially melted in the reactors that have had hydrogen explosions as the melting of the zirconium is what produces hydrogen. (Zirconium's melting temperature is much lower than the fuel's melting temperature.)

There are other layers of containment beyond this however, both steel and concrete. These layers of containment could be damaged by a strong quake, a big enough hydrogen explosion, or too much internal pressure in the reactors. At the current time it does not seem as though those layers of containment have been damaged however.

As long as these layers of containment remain in place it doesn't matter if the fuel all melts and turns to corium lava (a so-called complete fuel meltdown), it will just collect at the bottom of the containment, spread out, and cool down over time. That's what the containment is designed to do.

[Coligny]

Before the disaster happened TEPCO would have had a hard time convincing users to accept even a 25% rate hike to cover the costs of protecting against a once in a 1000 year event. A 100% increase?

Can't we just stop overvaluating the necessary precaution that were needed ?

Plant survived quake and tsunami. Battery bank survived and everything was cooled during their 8h runtime. Generator was killed. Mobile generator was not plug compatible or something.

To take the matter to it's bare bones:

Do you think it would have been that costly to check the mobile generator was specced for its intended purpose or that buying the proper kind of mobile generator would have caused such a great expense as to affect the price of electricity delivered ?

AS a recap again, if failure of the onsite diesel generator was not considered why were those 8h batteries installed.

[FG Lurker]

Can't we just stop overvaluating the necessary precaution that were needed ?

It's not me who has been coming up with these scenarios, and it's not me who is panicking over a situation that doesn't warrant panic. I just don't think people would have been willing to pay much more for their denki to build a safer plant.

I look at this as things having turned out better than expected considering the plants came through a quake 45x stronger than they were designed for and a tsunami 2x higher than they were designed for.

Plant survived quake and tsunami. Battery bank survived and everything was cooled during their 8h runtime. Generator was killed. Mobile generator was not plug compatible or something.

Do you think it would have been that costly to check the mobile generator was specced for its intended purpose or that buying the proper kind of mobile generator would have caused such a great expense as to affect the price of electricity delivered ?

I think (but could be wrong) that the mobile generators were supplied by the US military. If this is the case then I suspect the generators produced power at 60Hz but the plants would have required 50Hz. Plug compatibility problems could be overcome but a difference in Hz isn't fixable AFAIK.

AS a recap again, if failure of the onsite diesel generator was not considered why were those 8h batteries installed.

I believe that nuke plants generally have battery banks to take up the slack in power between when external power is cut and the generators start up.

8 hours also provides enough time to restore power from the grid in almost any scenario. It would take something very severe (say, an earthquake 45x stronger than design specs followed by a tsunami 2x higher than design specs) to fuck the grid up badly enough that it can't be repaired in 8 hours.

It's easy to say now that TEPCO should have had mobile generators available, and an private fleet of helicopters to get them to the site. It's not so easy to justify these things when the likelihood of having to use them is miniscule. In a privately owned company beancounters need to be satisfied. In the government taxpayers would complain about it being a waste of taxpayer money to have these idle helicopters and highly paid pilots around. If the gov't made use of the helicopters for gov't business people would complain that the nuke plants were just an excuse to get helicopters for government use... I can't imagine there is anyone here who hasn't read headlines complaining about equivalent levels of government waste at some point.

Funnily enough, many of the people who are complaining loudest about TEPCO's fuckups are the same ones who would have been complaining loudest about "unnecessary expenses" to protect against a once in a millennium event.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

as easy as it is to heap blame onto the japanese government, i have to say that i have a lot of respect for how well they've stood up under all the pressure. was at a 'prayers for japan' event today put on by the kenyan red cross, and the speech that the japanese ambassador gave was phenomenal, and very moving (his wife and kids are still in tokyo). he also reminded people to choose their news sources carefully in order to avoid all the panic reporting.

whether or not the 'man' is fucking up royally, the amount of calm they've been able to keep is pretty impressive. i keep thinking about what could have happened if everyone had panicked when the quake hit in shinagawa station and there had been stampedes.

/end of late night rambling

[omae mona]

Of course now that the disaster has happened and is fresh in people's minds many will claim that they would gladly pay that extra 25%, and more than a few will say that even a 100% increase would be acceptable.
..
It's classic human nature: Closing the barn door after the horse has departed.

I fully agree. There's going to be a lot of this, and I think we will unfortunately see public policy tragically affected by this nonsense logic, which will probably dominate the public debate.

However, I just wanted to make the point that I think there's going to be some legitimate criticism of TEPCO also. I am going to reserve judgment until the true story comes out. But my prediction is we will find that their risk assessment suffered from groupthink or internal political pressure to lower the probability of certain events. Why wouldn't they do this? There is no downside if they're not being adequately regulated. It's like the U.S. invading Iraq because of WMD. I think Bush had overwhelming supporting evidence that there was WMD which was a threat to the U.S. The problem is that this evidence was essentially fake, generated by subordinates who were pressured (by Bush, directly or indirectly) to come to that conclusion and ignore other possibilities.

On the other hand, I also predict there will be absolutely ZERO perspective on what this all means. There's going to be tons of energy put into criticizing, legitimately or not, whether TEPCO should have spent more money. And on the back of this, we have zero fatalities and economic damage that's a drop in the bucket. At the same time, I don't hear anybody asking why the government did not do more to protect against the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed so many towns (the same eventuality we're criticizing TEPCO about). And in the latter case, we have 30,000 dead, hundreds of thousands whose lives have been destroyed, and an estimated $250 billion of economic damage.

Where's the outrage about the dead people?

[Kanchou]

Is it just me or is the TEPCO spokesman a creepy little rat man?

[Mulboyne]

Tokyo Disneyland re-opening on a reduced scale from April 6th.

Source (Japanese)

[cstaylor]

It's not me who has been coming up with these scenarios, and it's not me who is panicking over a situation that doesn't warrant panic.

Tell that to the farmers in Ibaraki, Gunma, and Tochigi.

I just don't think people would have been willing to pay much more for their denki to build a safer plant.

It's not up to the people, is it? Considering how TEPCO (thanks to Hz incompatibility with western Japan) has a near monopoly on power in this area, if they needed $50 million to buy portable generators, a chinook, and a pilot to fly them in, the could have easily paid for it with a tiny increase in power rates. They arrogantly thought they didn't need it.

I look at this as things having turned out better than expected considering the plants came through a quake 45x stronger than they were designed for and a tsunami 2x higher than they were designed for.

What, your yardstick is Chernobyl now?

I think (but could be wrong) that the mobile generators were supplied by the US military. If this is the case then I suspect the generators produced power at 60Hz but the plants would have required 50Hz. Plug compatibility problems could be overcome but a difference in Hz isn't fixable AFAIK.

So, going back to Coligny's point: this is criminal negligence on TEPCO's part. Having to rely on backup power from a foreign country's military?

I believe that nuke plants generally have battery banks to take up the slack in power between when external power is cut and the generators start up.

Yes,they do, and most American plants have 4 hour backups. Just to be safe, TEPCO doubled it... and then failed to plan for the 8+ hour.

8 hours also provides enough time to restore power from the grid in almost any scenario. It would take something very severe (say, an earthquake 45x stronger than design specs followed by a tsunami 2x higher than design specs) to fuck the grid up badly enough that it can't be repaired in 8 hours.

And if you had read the article I posted, you'd see that they had been warned years ahead of time that a big earthquake could happen, that a tsunami of this magnitude was possible, and they did... nothing.

In a privately owned company beancounters need to be satisfied. In the government taxpayers would complain about it being a waste of taxpayer money to have these idle helicopters and highly paid pilots around. If the gov't made use of the helicopters for gov't business people would complain that the nuke plants were just an excuse to get helicopters for government use... I can't imagine there is anyone here who hasn't read headlines complaining about equivalent levels of government waste at some point.

So do people complain about the jietai being a waste of money? Considering the wide-spread effect of nuclear contamination on the livelihoods of people over 100km from the power plant, you'd think they'd have a better plan than, "let's abandon the plant!"

Let's agree to disagree here. You keep repeating the same points, about how it was impossible for TEPCO to plan for such an event (even when I show you evidence that it was possible). If the earthquake and tsunami had destroyed the existing cooling system, then I would have agreed with you, but it didn't, so it wasn't nearly as powerful as you claim it to be.

[cstaylor]

And on the back of this, we have zero fatalities and economic damage that's a drop in the bucket.

How much money are we tax payers extending to TEPCO again? It's no mere "drop in the bucket".

[Coligny]

I believe that nuke plants generally have battery banks to take up the slack in power between when external power is cut and the generators start up.

8 hours also provides enough time to restore power from the grid in almost any scenario. It would take something very severe (say, an earthquake 45x stronger than design specs followed by a tsunami 2x higher than design specs) to fuck the grid up badly enough that it can't be repaired in 8 hours.

Here you ignore my whole reasonning aboot the threshold of damage sustainable (plant restart-able) / unsustainable but still manageable (plant written off but safety of the cooling system still warranted).

AND The backup for the power supply of the cooling system is the poster child case for use of a flywheel UPS coupled to a diesel generator, therefore requiring NO BATTERIES by design. UNLESS you expect the diesel generator to be totalled/unavailable. And therefore should have a backup plan for after the 8 hours window. If you plan for the diesel to be fubar, but don't plan for contingency when the 8h window expire ( beside hoping to have restored the grid) you have no place in safety planning. (even if I can totally picture how the meeting leading to this design happened, certainly involving expensive restaurant and people refusing to think too deeply as they would have had to acknowledge gigantic flaws in the flow diagram.)

Your consideration of "8 hours also provides enough time to restore power from the grid in almost any scenario" is incoherent. The 8 hours of batteries being needed in case the diesel failure, that imply something big would have impaired them, therefore putting grid restoration out of reasonable consideration. (if something is big enough to ruin the diesel, the grid would be certainly fubar beyond hopes).

It's easy to say now that TEPCO should have had mobile generators available, and an private fleet of helicopters to get them to the site. It's not so easy to justify these things when the likelihood of having to use them is miniscule. In a privately owned company beancounters need to be satisfied. In the government taxpayers would complain about it being a waste of taxpayer money to have these idle helicopters and highly paid pilots around. If the gov't made use of the helicopters for gov't business people would complain that the nuke plants were just an excuse to get helicopters for government use...

STOP JUST RIGHT HERE:
Power companies in europe have and maintain a fleet of helicopters, and they have wharehouse over wharehouse of power generator ready to be send anywhere on short notice.

1- The choppers are needed on a daily basis for high capacity powerline maintenance. Because they usually are in place innaccessible by truck (or in preserved natural parks forbidden to humans in french case) AND you would have to be insane to maintain them from the ground triggering the biggest lighting bolt seen in history of bad decision. I'm pretty sure japan is subject to the same laws of physics and have few choppers ready.

2- Massive grid damage by storm is a common occurence, even in europe, for which repair crew availability might be stretched. Usually, in these case, the power company first deploy a backup generator as close to the customers as possible, then proceed with grid repairs. In Europe there are cross companies mutual help ties, if one country suffer massive power troubles, technicians and equipments from neighboring countries are send to help on the spot (this procedure don't require more than a few faxes -how many and where to send the teams/hardware- to get done)

One last thing aboot the impossibility to carry the mobile generator in a damaged zone. They could bring the wrong king of power generator. Therefore, had the proper model been available it could have been deployed the same way.

[Coligny]

Also remember that tepco is the power company that can have a big part of Tokyo in the dark in summer heat when a random crane moved by boat snag few overhead wires. There's cheap design... and there's deffective by design... we are at best inbetween...

[cstaylor]

Here you ignore my whole reasonning aboot the threshold of damage sustainable (plant restart-able) / unsustainable but still manageable (plant written off but safety of the cooling system still warranted).

FGL always takes contrarian positions, so there's no hope of changing his mind, even with evidence showing TEPCO's criminal negligence. If and when it ever sees the light of day, I suspect he'll be very quiet about his previously incorrect position.

I still think nuclear power is the best way to power Japan, but the management at TEPCO and the GOJ needs to go.

[Yokohammer]

I'm a little confused about this generator issue as well.

Were the backup generators at the Fukushima plant the only ones of their kind in the entire country? Even if helicopters are out of the question, since I can send a parcel by takyubin that will arrive anywhere in the country within 24 hours, I assume that appropriate generators, if they exist, could have been loaded onto trucks and offloaded at the site by day two, or at the latest day three, before much of the damage had occurred.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

[cstaylor]

Communications between the Fukushima plant and TEPCO HQ were disrupted in the first post-tsunami hours, which reduced the window they had to reestablish power before significant cooling loss began.

(This part is based on speculation from FGL)
Although the Americans got generators there quicker than either TEPCO or the Jietai, they weren't designed for Japanese use.

Considering TEPCO's previous mistakes and documented lack of critical thinking over safety, I'm not surprised that they wouldn't have backup generators available when they are needed most.

[Coligny]

I'm a little confused about this generator issue as well.

Were the backup generators at the Fukushima plant the only ones of their kind in the entire country? Even if helicopters are out of the question, since I can send a parcel by takyubin that will arrive anywhere in the country within 24 hours, I assume that appropriate generators, if they exist, could have been loaded onto trucks and offloaded at the site by day two, or at the latest day three, before much of the damage had occurred.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Some retard put the Kuroneko Yamato Takyubin phone number on a desk improperly protected that was damaged by the tsunami... (at one point, these kind of excuses will be the only one remaining to defend tepco)

[cstaylor]

(at one point, these kind of excuses will be the only one remaining to defend tepco)

... and delivered by their chief spokesman, FGL!

[Coligny]

as easy as it is to heap blame onto the japanese government, i have to say that i have a lot of respect for how well they've stood up under all the pressure. was at a 'prayers for japan' event today put on by the kenyan red cross, and the speech that the japanese ambassador gave was phenomenal, and very moving (his wife and kids are still in tokyo). he also reminded people to choose their news sources carefully in order to avoid all the panic reporting.

whether or not the 'man' is fucking up royally, the amount of calm they've been able to keep is pretty impressive. i keep thinking about what could have happened if everyone had panicked when the quake hit in shinagawa station and there had been stampedes.

/end of late night rambling

WTF lady ? If now you judge governement by their ability not to shit themselves in front of cameras, our standard have gone so low that we've gone below the earth core and started resurfacing on the other side of the planet... (and also you certainly don't like Shinzo Abe much... bowel movement and all...)

[Coligny]

... and delivered by their chief spokesman, FGL!

I think it's not time for this. We can go back to naked mud wrestling later(*), but for now let stay a bit sharper...




(*) yeah, even with goats if some really insist...

[Mike Oxlong]

WTF lady ? If now you judge governement by their ability not to shit themselves in front of cameras, our standard have gone so low that we've gone below the earth core and started resurfacing on the other side of the planet... (and also you certainly don't like Shinzo Abe much... bowel movement and all...)

[omae mona]

How much money are we tax payers extending to TEPCO again? It's no mere "drop in the bucket".

I don't know. How much are we extending? (it sounds like that is a rhetorical question and you already know the answer, but I have not read up on this).

The economic damage from the tsunami, outside of the power plant, is estimated at 250 billion dollars at this point.

How much is agricultural output in the potentially contaminated 20km range around the power plant worth? It can't even be 1 billion dollars annually, can it? Other losses will consist of the effort to clean up the area (I don't know.. maybe another billion bucks?) and the cost of rebuilding the power plants (probably into the double digit billions).

So I am sticking with my belief that this is a drop in the bucket compared to the 250 billion dollars, until I hear otherwise. And I can't imagine how this would come close.

[cstaylor]

Here you go: $25 billion for the moment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12889641

That's a pretty big drop in the bucket!

[damn name]

I'm not a nuclear engineer, but my degree was in mechanical engineering with a nuclear "option." That option was 20 additional hours of study in materials science for reactor design and construction.

I never worked in the field, so I have no practical experience. The gap of knowledge between 20 hours of university courses and real-world experience is huge, so I would never consider myself an expert. You should not consider me one either. With that in mind, here's my non-expert view of many of the questions and comments in this thread.

I'll try to keep technical jargon to a minimum. I'm not writing a technical paper, so I don't have time to detail all the sources of information.

If you're technically inclined, the NISA site http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/ has daily reports on Fukushima. You can read the history of events and status of each reactor.

1. Am I worried about Fukushima? Yes. Getting this under control will be a grim task now that primary coolant is known to be leaking. Cooling water has to be circulated, but it's leaking as it's being circulated. You can't find and repair the leaks with that primary cooling water present. Chicken and egg. That water was never supposed to see the light of day

2. Did the facility survive the quake and tsunami unscathed, only to be brought down by the back-up generators failing later? No. Those initial reports look like they were wrong. Immediately after the quake and before the tsunami, the pressure in the containment vessel (called the PCV - Primary Containment Vessel - the concrete enclosure) of Reactor 1 increased while the pressure in the reactor vessel (the PRV - Primary Reactor Vessel - the steel enclosure of the core) decreased far more than would be expected as the reactor automatically shut down. It appears that there was an immediate breach of the #1 reactor vessel into the containment.

The operators tried to start the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) to the reactor, but it didn't work. The ECCS should uses the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). The UPS has batteries and a capacitor trip system. The capacitors are in a constant state of charge, so the voltage can be released instantly to open the valves of the ECCS and start the pumps, with the batteries powering the system later.

It appears that the cooling pipes or valves of #1 Reactor Pressure Vessel were damaged from the quake.

3. Where are these pipes and valves? The reactor pressure vessel doesn't look the simplified drawings on TV.

There are many ports in and out of the pressure vessel for normal and emergency cooling. They are located at different heights on the vessel depending on whether they are going in or out.

4. How about the other two reactors? The water inside all three reactors cannot be maintained above the top of the control rods. You'll see that from the data I link to above. That would indicate that the cooling system plumbing was damaged near the top. Some water may be leaking into the containment and/or some might be leaking further outside the containment, since that water travels a path to the turbine rooms and back again. If you remember, it was reported early on that the workers were having difficulty getting water into the vessel. There are many paths in, but some may have been leaking water as fast as they added water.

5. What about these steel reactor pressure vessels? Are they impossible to breach?

The bottom of this pressure vessel is also not a single, solid bowl shape. The reactor control rods of this model come up from the bottom of the vessel into the reactor through a system designed to be self sealing. A sealing resin is the weak link in this system. 350C is the temperature limit of the resin.

A few days after quake, the temperature of the bottom of #1 reactor pressure vessel was measured at 400C. It is very possible that the resin has been damaged, meaning the bottom of the pressure vessel has been compromised. I'll say this again, it is not a solid bowl of impenetrable steel as being portrayed. It is not the same as the TMI reactor vessel.

6. Is the fuel melting or did it melt? Perhaps.
Will it drop through the bottom of the pressure vessel? I don't know. No one knows the state of those control rod mechanism resins or the state of the fuel.

7. How will this be controlled? I don't know. The integrity of the internal cooling system seems in doubt at all three plants.

The most worrisome part to me is not knowing who is in charge at the site. Does anyone know? I think we're past the time when the best and most experienced people in the world for this type of emergency should have been on site and in command. The outcome of this will be tied directly to the creativity of the engineers and the leadership to coordinate and execute processes that have never been tried. This is all being done on the fly.

The most "level-headed" writers and experts, people in the nuclear business, have gone silent, except for a few who are saying things like this:

"The final results are worse than what I predicted. Even if you are deeply steeped into the science of the health effects of low level radiation and recognize the evidence showing that doses below a certain level have a very good chance of being hormetic, it is not good to "crap up" a large geographic area with a significant mass of fission product isotopes like Cs-137 that will give off strong gamma radiation for many years. (Cs-137 has a 30 year half life.) Though I hope that the Japanese government does not take the step of permanently evacuating large, lightly contaminated areas, there is little doubt that some formerly prosperous farms and fisheries will be out of business for a very long time.

What this event has taught me is that I need to retreat a bit." -- http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2011/03/shaken-flooded-stressed-by-power.html

Blaming anyone today doesn't fix anything at the plant today. And they're not even close to containing this yet.

[cstaylor]

Thank you for the informative post.