Water leaks found at Onagawa plant after quake: Tohoku

Since we have several mentions of the Higashidori power plant, I will also post vital information about this facility as well.
Higashidori NPP Link

How many reactors are at Higashidori??

-It appears only 1 active. However another one is halfway through construction (??) and another 1 is planned for the semi-distant future, while another just began construction this recent January. (Planned completion in 2017 and 2019 respectively).

Who operates this plant?

- TEPCO and Tohoku Power Co both run 2 reactors each.

Do we have much information about this facility?

-No. But I did find this tidbit.

Tepco began construction of its Higashidori-1 unit on January 25, 2011, after approval by METI.

So reactor 3 (TEPCO block 1) just started construction a few months ago. Reactor 4 (TEPCO block 2) apparently has not even began construction phase yet. (?)

What types of reactors are we looking at here?

-Higashidori 1 (Tohoku block 1) is a BWR.
All other 3 reactors are planned ABWR (Advanced BWR)

I will post another quote just to give what other information I have at hand currently.

Construction of Tohoku Electric's Higashidori Unit-1 began in November 2000 and was completed in December 2005. The design was based on Tohoku Electric's Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant Unit-3, with improvements to the reactor vessel to allow for greater ease in inspection and maintenance. A separate building, apart from the containment structure, is dedicated specifically for the heat exchanger system based on seawater to provide primary coolant for the reactor.

reply to post by muzzleflash


Funny facts my WOOT! WOOT! ...

I've seen people lose their jobs for less incompetence on much less important jobs...

I think we would be scared to find WHO provided the materials... seeing how things were done from the start...

Can this info be found?

reply to post by NowanKenubi


Thank you Nowan. I am glad that you care a lot about this.
I care a lot about it too.

Nothing else really matters to me you know why? Because I love my children more than anything. They are everything to me.

So Japan's nuclear reactors are everything to me too. They must be controlled. Or they will be controlling us, and that's not gonna be acceptable.

I will continue to add more information to this thread as I come across it. This information must be spread and I will not allow it to go unnoticed.

Originally posted by NowanKenubi
reply to post by muzzleflash

 

Funny facts my WOOT! WOOT! ...

I've seen people lose their jobs for less incompetence on much less important jobs...

I think we would be scared to find WHO provided the materials... seeing how things were done from the start...

Can this info be found?

The reactors were built by Toshiba.
Possibly the same design as the Fukushima lot (General Electric BWR). (??)

I don't know anything else but will keep digging.

reply to post by muzzleflash

Nothing else really matters to me you know why? Because I love my children more than anything. They are everything to me.

It is the exact same thing here. Sleep has been reduced a bit in the last weeks as I try and keep an eye on it. I really appreciate your help!

In the meantime I wanted to also add a little bit of information about Tohoku Electric Power Company, just so people get an idea of who these folks are.
Tohoku EPCo Wiki

Tohoku Electric Power is the fourth-largest electric utility in Japan in terms of revenue, behind TEPCO, KEPCO and Chubu Electric Power.

This is where I made an early mistake. Since Tohoku and Tokyo both start with a T, and the rest of the power company name is "Electric Power Company", I confused Tohoku EPCO with Tokyo EPCO. Simple mistake. I realize the difference now. They are separate companies.

servicing 7.6 million individual & corporate customers in 6 prefectures in Tōhoku region plus Niigata Prefecture. It provides electricity at 100 V, 50 Hz, though some area use 60 Hz.

Hmm, 22k employees as of 2008.
Founded 1955.
Shareholders include banks and insurance corporations.

Here is something of interest.

In order to make up for the loss of electricity from the damaged reactor plant, Tohoku announced it would restart a mothballed natural gas power plant. The liquefied natural gas and oil-fired No. 1 unit at the Higashi Niigata plant in Niigata prefecture has a 350-megawatt capacity and could be in operation by early June 2011.

They are firing up some mothballed natural gas plants to make up for the electricity shortfalls. However this won't come online till this summer. Things are looking pretty grim.

Here is Tohoku EPCO's official website link.

This is strange... Look here at the site of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

www.iaea.org...

They list the plants and the state they are in. Notice that they say;

Tokai Daini nuclear power plant remains in cold shutdown since the 11 March earthquake. No abnormality has been observed.

Yet, they do not talk about Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear generating station in the world...
It was damaged in 2007 after a quake of 6.6. They upgraded it, and it reopened in 2009. A fire than broke out.

But no news about it now... I saw a link through Yahoo! that said it was leaking, but when I clicked on it, Yahoo! was unable to find it...

en.wikipedia.org...

No word about it... This must not be good if they don't even say "It's good!"...

Aside from Wiki, all I can find on it is from the quake of 2007, and the fire of 2009...?


NOTE!!! It was shut down, apparently... But I still have a bit to read... Where do you store the fuel rods of the biggest Nuclear generator?


DOUBLE NOTE!!! Finally it appears it has not been shut down...

Where is everyone? I would have figured that there would be more response to this. Hmm.

I guess no one wants to think about it anymore. I don't blame them. It is the biggest freaking headache ever known pretty much. I can see why people don't want to think about it or talk about it or anything. I honestly assume most folks are out having a drink or trying to watch tv or something relaxing.

Sadly, if we cannot solve our newfound nuclear woes, there is a possibility that "relaxing and chilling" stuff is gonna come to a quick end. I would love to relax. But I have to see some sort of improvement first. Yes I am on the edge but hey I live life on the edge already, it's my natural habitat.

About not being able to turn off the fuel rods, I found some information that supports this.

Cooling is needed to remove decay heat from the reactor core even when a plant has been shut down.[137] Nuclear fuel releases a small quantity of heat under all conditions, but the chain reaction when a reactor is operating creates short lived decay products which continue to release heat despite shutdown.[138]

So there really isn't any such thing as "Shut down" it's a really misleading terminology. It's more like "cooled down temporarily".

Immediately after shutdown, this decay heat amounts to approximately 6% of full thermal heat production of the reactor.[137] The decay heat in the reactor core decreases over several days before reaching cold shutdown levels.[139] Nuclear fuel rods that have reached cold shutdown temperatures typically require another several years of water cooling in a spent fuel pool before decay heat production reduces to the point that they can be safely transferred to dry storage casks.

You gotta be kidding me!!

Once it reaches "Cold Shut down" temp, it requires ANOTHER SEVERAL YEARS of cooling in a SFP before they can even transport the dam things?? The more I learn about this stuff, the Worse it sounds! It's like every little nook and cranny of information about nuclear technology is HORRIFIC.

How can this be? How could they have lied about this technology for this long? How did they downplay all of the accidents up until now? It's amazing. It's bewildering.

But it appears to be everyday life for Earth eh? Lies and misdirection from Govt and Corps.
This system of BS is totally unsustainable. The reasons why are becoming more and more obvious as each day passes....

reply to post by NowanKenubi


Wow thank you for the information, you kind of blew me away there.

I had never even heard of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant until your post.

Holy moly there is 7 reactors there!

Also look at the Events section of that wiki you linked.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa appears to be extremely problem-plagued over the years.

Barrels of waste tipping over and losing their lids, leaks in all kinds of places over many various episodes, fires, the list goes on.

Is there any good news at all? I can't find much of anything "positive"....

reply to post by muzzleflash


And they remain totally silent on it.

Dare I say it?... Is this the end?...

Originally posted by NowanKenubi
reply to post by muzzleflash

 

And they remain totally silent on it.

Dare I say it?... Is this the end?...

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I can't promise you next week.

The rate things are going now, I am just looking for little tiny good things to focus on.

Japan should come out and tell us something. Anything.
Tell us that at least ONE of their power plants is OK.
Doh but we wouldn't believe them would we??

reply to post by muzzleflash


The kids bumping, and yelling and crying... It all sounds so nice now!

You know, of all the people on Earth, I never would have thought they would be so lax with nuclear regulations after what they went through at the end of WWII.

Can you imagine the kind of professionalism that is manifested in Western society's nuclear station?...

Ok so to just clear up a couple of things, this plant had a fire on March 13th 2 days after the EQ and Tsunami.

When originally announced elsewhere about the issues after the latest 7.x EQ the statement seemed to say 'spilled' and implied that the spent fuel pools had been shaken/tipped so hard that some coolant liquid had slopped OVER THE SIDE of the pools. Now Im no seismologist but having seen pics of those pools, that was a massive amount of movement which really cant have been good.

What I haven't seen anywhere is an update that says cooling was restored to the plant in March. And we all know where that leads.

The reactors are shut down and after a few weeks the spent fuel rods are moved to the pools on the side of each reactor where they can stay FOR UPTO 10 years. However the Japs have a cunning plan and after a few years they move the oldest rods in each pool to a common pool. Current ATS estimates elsewhere put 1700 tons of fuel rods onsite at Fukushima so there could be the same at this one. In comparison Chernobyl threw roughly 6 tons of its fuel over the northern hemisphere with 60% of it nearby.
The pools have to be cooled constantly and the rods are separated enough that re-criticality (self sustaining nuclear reaction) cannot happen. But what happens when you shake one of those pools so hard that water falls out the side?

Given that the MSM doesn't even report on Fukushima anymore it is easy to see how other plants lower down the disaster scale would never get a mention. I mean for weeks we were given the impression all the rods at Fukushima where in the pools and being cooled by refilling with the fire hoses etc. THEN it comes out the 2nd explosion actually scattered fuel rod elements upto a MILE from the plant AND one of the pools HAD NO SIDE so the water was simply flowing out again (where it filled the complex from the bottom and leaked into the sea)

What happened in the media regarding this deception and radical shift in emergency status? Nada, zip, zilch NOT A FEAKIN' MENTION. Or in passing as if its no biggie, said in reassuring tones that give no idea of how serious this could become/ already is.

Now nuclear companies all over the world must be looking and thinking "You know what? even if we have an accident, lie about it, and completely mismanage the disaster. MSM will stop reporting in a month. So we can make more money by buying up public shares when our stocks dip (using the cover story that we need to protect out stock price) and sell them back a couple of months later when it all blows over."

Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find MONEY CANNOT BE EATEN.
~ Cree Prophecy

reply to post by UltraMind


It's like they thought, or maybe were even told, that radiation was good?

1700 tons, you say? That is sick...

Do you happen to have a few links? I would like to know more about the cooling capacities of the reactors, thanks.

This just all info that I gathered from the more stable/rational/well informed posts on this forum since the Tsunami. I have tried to present info that seems reasonable to me (for a given value of reasonable lol)

It would be tough to provide links without re-reading a few hundred pages.

I'd like to think it would be in the spirit of ATS to say to you - Defy ignorance, go find out for yourself.

reply to post by UltraMind


There is a new, multi-spectral poly-dimensioned engine research right here on ATS. I think it can read your mind to make the search...

Seriously, if it is here, it will be rather easy to find with the new search engine... It's getting late. Thanks for sharing your info which is pertinent, BTW!

reply to post by UltraMind


Thank you for that rant UltraMind.

You make me feel better and like I'm not crazy.

Then, I feel worse, because I wish I was crazy....

Have you guys heard of "Central Storage"? Do any of you know anything about it?

Here at this link to the Fukushima stuff on Wiki, at this link, there is a little box shaped chart below that shows the numbers of "fuel assemblies" assumed to be within each reactor unit.

Then on the side of the reactors, it says "Central Storage", and they have like 6000+ fuel assemblies in this "storage"???

I have never heard anything about this at all.

What is "Central Storage" and does anyone know Where it is located?

And if SFP's can go bad easily, can't this "Central Storage" go really bad too?
I am just curious about this and it's starting to kinda bug me...

Each reactor has a SFP on the side of the top. Fuel is put there to chill until it goes to a longer term storage Common Pool (off to one side of the Fukushima site). It spends the 10 years there and then moves onto dry cask storage. At every stage it needs to be cooled until dry cask.

This:
en.wikipedia.org...

pretty much gives you all the basics.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said off-site power was lost at some other nuclear facilities in the country after Thursday evening’s quake, and that emergency power supply was operating.


Onagawa Leak Info

It just keeps getting worse, but it seems to me that not many people are paying attention. I found this update, see the link below.

Situation Update No. 1 On 09.04.2011 at 03:44 GMT+2 In Japan, as a result of yesterday’s earthquake, officials said a second nuclear facility has experienced radiation leaks. At the Onagawa plant in Miyagi prefecture, radioactive water spilled out of spent fuel pools. Reuters, quoting a Tohoku Electric Power spokesperson, reports that radiation levels rose slightly inside the plant but no increases were measured outside. Japan was hit by a 7.1 magnitude quake yesterday. So far, three people are reported dead and dozens injured. At the Fukushima plant workers were evacuated but Tokyo Electronic Power Company initially said there was no further damage to the facility and today the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that no changes in radiation readings have been observed. Denis Flory, is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s head of Nuclear safety: “Our estimation of the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Plant remains very serious, although there are early signs of recovery in some functions, such as electrical power and instrumentation.” But technicians are still struggling to reduce the temperature of the damaged reactors and are continuing to dump radioactive water into the sea to make room for more radioactive water from the basement of the number 2 reactor. Technicians are also injecting non-flammable nitrogen into the Number 1 reactor containment shell to counter a hydrogen buildup. Hydrogen explosions days after the March earthquake damaged the reactor buildings and caused radiation leaks.

hisz.rsoe.hu... 0225-JPN