Radiation at Fukushima nuclear plant at unimaginable levels

originally posted by: DBCowboy
Sad, scary, and not a peep in the media.

Why?

My theory is this was planned. Put a poorly designed non inherently safe reactor near the ocean and major fault line and the engineers would have to KNOW as a scientific process that a EQ is going to happen, and if huge then a likely 100% chance of disaster if it does. Now what type of soil by the ocean? Not likely to be heavy clays. In sandy soils, water runs through like a sieve.

If you make a list of things the so called elite who think they know what is best for people want, what would you get when compared to what has transpired? Things that make suggestions like the murals at Denver Airport or the oft poo pooed Guidestones, suggest something sinister must happen or their dream dies.

originally posted by: roadgravel
Interesting video on the Demystifying / Fukushima menu link at Fairewinds link.

It wasn't if but when does it happen to a Mark I containment.

Here are the US units in play:

The following 23 U.S. plants have GE boiling-water reactors (GE models 2, 3 or 4) with the same Mark I containment design used at Fukushima, according to the NRC online database:

Browns Ferry 1, Athens, Ala., operating license since 1973, reactor type GE 4
Browns Ferry 2, Athens, Ala., 1974, GE 4
Browns Ferry 3, Athens, Ala., 1976, GE 4
Brunswick 1, Southport, N.C, 1976, GE 4.
Brunswick 2, Southport, N.C., 1974, GE 4.
Cooper, Brownville, Neb., 1974, GE 4.
Dresden 2, Morris, Ill., 1970, GE 3.
Dresden 3, Morris, Ill., 1971, GE 3.
Duane Arnold, Palo, Iowa, 1974, GE 4.
Fermi 2, Monroe, Mich., 1985, GE 4.
FitzPatrick, Scriba, N.Y., 1974, GE 4.
Hatch 1, Baxley, Ga., 1974, GE 4.
Hatch 2, Baxley, Ga., 1978, GE 4.
Hope Creek, Hancock's Bridge, N.J. 1986, GE 4.
Monticello, Monticello, Minn., 1970, GE 3.
Nine Mile Point 1, Scriba, N.Y., 1969, GE 2.
Oyster Creek, Forked River, N.J., 1969, GE 2.
Peach Bottom 2, Delta, Pa., 1973, GE 4.
Peach Bottom 3, Delta, Pa., 1974, GE 4.
Pilgrim, Plymouth, Mass., 1972, GE 3.
Quad Cities 1, Cordova, Ill., 1972, GE 3.
Quad Cities 2, Moline, Ill., 1972, GE 3.
Vermont Yankee, Vernon, Vt., 1972, GE 4.

You get it... Yes or no, does this suggest to any of you that it is intentional to build unsafe ones? And the people paying for these to be built, they go ahead and Double down fibonacci style on building them as newer safer designs could have been employed they didn't change the design for safety.

originally posted by: crappiekat
a reply to: roadgravel

Jeez stuff like this scares the crap out of me.

I can't help but think what this will mean for my children and my children's children.

This has got to effecting marine life in the pacific.

Now if you eat a fish with radioactivity or live near there then hell yea be afraid. It is not anything like that were you live as it is for that robot, bottom line.. I wouldn't want to buy land there but the Earth does absorb better than our flimsy human flesh so stay away is the best way to be safe. Robots can die instead. I do feel sad for the people who lived there before. If they stayed too long they will either be dead or would've had to move away before they did die.

a reply to: Justoneman

As an engineer, I'd think that it would be designed using "best practices" to anticipate this and have design elements involved to assume a melt down.

a reply to: DBCowboy

The problem really stems from not anticipating a tsunami quite as large as the one which occurred. The generators got inundated. After that it became a case of successive failures.

a reply to: LogicalGraphittiwell you see we have this thing called msm and they were ordered be this guy named barry to stop talking about it because he wasn't about to piss off his jap buddies by getting the world upset about there mess jap gov hates to let people now they screwed up it is shameful to them. therefore the msm started talking about important stuff like kardashians and why miley trippin and da like. mean while radiation has been seeping into worlds oceans last summer me and my friends went swimming in atlantic during memorial day weekend we were only in the water about 20 minutes for the next month all of us were very sick like they worst flu vomiting aches and pains one of my girlfriend was sick from it till almost august we went to doctors and they could not find what was making us sick maybe it was water how long will water carry radiation and i thought radition could be stopped by barrier of water?

I think that the inaction we're seeing relating to cumulative problems could indicate a problematic bigger picture.

Fukushima, Flint MI, North Dakota Oil spill, oceanic pollution, overfishing, rainforest devastation, the pipelines, infrastructure entropy and everything else going on just aren't getting the attention they should be.

And I don't think they care.

We've known on this site that Fukushima has been an ongoing hazard for years now. This really isn't that new to us.

I think on a larger scale, the fact that these tragedies are piling up but not being properly addressed could mean that those in power are fully aware of the implications, or the hugeness of these problems and that it's become a non-thing to them due to either future global plans or maybe there's some in the know that are aware of a much larger issue that makes addressing these problems pointless.

Just a thought.

They said 530 sieverts inside reactor ( around fuel ? ) but not a single mention about radiation outside or in the ground where the river flows. So the radiation in the water is probably absolutely minimal.

a reply to: DBCowboy

This WAS from the media. Take your conspiracy hat off for a second

This is very troublesome, why don't they shut it down like they did in chernobyl, or is it to late for that?

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: Justoneman

As an engineer, I'd think that it would be designed using "best practices" to anticipate this and have design elements involved to assume a melt down.

But they didn't design it that way. Sad reality is money was more important than the safety of the Japanese people.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: DBCowboy

The problem really stems from not anticipating a tsunami quite as large as the one which occurred. The generators got inundated. After that it became a case of successive failures.

Yea cause Tsunamis never happen at the beach .sarc/.. Sounds pretty obvious they ignored it as opposed to not anticipating it IMHO. We are talking about an island situated over the 'ring of fire' EQ/Volcano zone. Cali has one near the ocean.

en.wikipedia.org...

Foolish, or sinister won't matter when a big one hits that site.

There were plenty of people saying the disaster would be this bad and worse back when it first happened, and that Tepco was covering up the severity of the situation. Those people were labeled "conspiracy theorists."

a reply to: DBCowboy

In France they built a water reservoir system that could cool the cores by gravitational coolant flow without having to bring in powered emergency backup cooling devices.

Contracting the cyclical maintenance for wear items in a nuclear plant is big business, however surely the core safety would have been over engineered to account for a tsunami of that size?

Of course I will be wrong and Japan will become dependent on natural gas (because its cheap now).

originally posted by: neutronflux
a reply to: intrptr

I understand what you are getting at, but can you be honest and present the concentration in a core of uranium or plutonium vs fuel Rods.

For some reason your reply didn't appear in my in box.

I don't understand the question...

a reply to: neutronflux

You raise some valid points which I did briefly consider when composing my initial & follow up posts..

I would suggest that the principal boring operation would have to be carried out a short distance away from the meltdown mass of irradiating material, and there would by necessity be a means by which material melted by the plasma as the shaft is carved out is re-hardened, cracked & channelled back up the bore shaft - but I don't think it would represent a particularly tricky engineering problem if we were putting enough money & effort into devising the solutions.

As I say, the re-hardening of melted material, then cracking it into pebble-sized lumps & ferrying it back up the shaft to be deposited some distance from the bore hole on the earth's surface, would be a fairly straightforward matter. I say it would be fairly straightforward purely because if we are using magnetic fields to dynamically apply a 'plasma torch' to the crustal material, we can ensure that there is a particular shaping of the bore hole which would allow for a [hardening/ cracking/ removal by elevator] technology to be carried out at the side of & in the wake of the actual plasma boring device as it traverses ever lower into the crust.

Further, I wonder whether we could use nanotechnology to craft a 'plug' to restrain the upflow of mantle material at the end of the tunnelling operation, which could be held in place by shaped magnetic fields, giving time for the plasma torch apparatus, and associated re-hardening apparatus, to be withdrawn back up the shaft, ready for a rolling plant machinery operation in which the meltdown material could be scooped up & contained, before being deposited along with its 'containment chamber' down into the shaft.

On hitting the plug the nano-shield could be turned off, with secondary magnetic fields/ nanotech swarm applying downward kinetic pressure just above the level of the original 'plug', which would force the 'meltdown barrel' into the mantle below. This secondary swarm would then become a second, temporary plug, to ensure that the radioactive material in its barrel is subsumed into the flow of the mantle instead of being forced straight back up the shaft by the pressure rising from the mantle.

Once the given time period guaranteeing the destruction & dispersion of irradiating material has completed, the nano swarm would be deactivated, and the mantle material would begin to flow back up the shaft, safely non-radioactive. It would be allowed to overflow & contain the failed reactor site on the surface, and as a more or less natural matter (perhaps assisted with water bomb flyovers), the natural 'hill/ mountain' formed by the hardening of the mantle material, would safely contain the dangerously radioactive nuclear facility beneath a large mass of newly formed rock. We therefore have a situation in which far less radioactive contamination is affecting the groundwater/ underground rivers, thereby reducing the overall contamination of the oceans & surrounding land/ water supplies.

I honestly think this is probably going to have to be our solution to properly containing nuclear disasters - but it's probably at least fifty years off from where we are now. Still, if we can eventually deal with places like Chernobyl and Fukushima in such a manner, it would significantly reduce the overall long-term risk to the biosphere, and could even represent a method of safely decommissioning failing nuclear plants once the new wave of energy production technologies rolls in, offering enough cheap energy to make such mega-engineering projects viable in the first place.

a reply to: Cauliflower

Contracting the cyclical maintenance for wear items in a nuclear plant is big business, however surely the core safety would have been over engineered to account for a tsunami of that size?

The dynamics of Tsunamis were not as well understood back when the plants were built. Neither did they expect an earthquake that large. Both events were not considered in a double whammy event like occurred in 2011.

The worst case natural disaster for a nuclear plant on the beach. It was thought that even if power was interrupted to the cooling pumps during operation or after a SCRAM (sudden shutdown of a plant in operation) that power would be restored before the combined generators fuel and back up batteries could deplete (about three days).

It was further thought, the fuel for the back up generators could be replenished by delivery in tanker trucks indefinitely.

In the case of Fukushima, the back up generators were inundated by the tsunami, they were the closest thing to the beach, and the back up batteries were only designed to last a day. The cores were hot from operation and since cooling water had ceased circulating, they began to heat up, boiling their coolant water away, exposing the cores within 24 hours.

This is a domino effect, defeating safety systems redundancy in a one two punch from a heavy earthquake and a powerful Tsunami that climbed the wall and inundated the grounds, flooding the back up generators in the process.

The resulting fires and explosions form the reactors themselves further destroyed the sites infrastructure resulting in massive radiation release, kinda like frosting on the whole disaster cake...

a reply to: intrptr

Please research the uranium enrichment required for a nuclear weapon vs how much uranium dispersed over the length of a fuel rod.

The fission products in a fuel rod, their half lives, and radioactive decay is what makes a fuel rod dangerous. And that is after going critical.

A power plant will only make a radioactive steam explosion from a power excursion that makes more steam than the system can handle. Unless steam interacts with bare, hot cladding of a fuel rod to make hydrogen that may cause a hydrogen explosion.

It's not the uranium that makes power plants dangerous. It's the amount and concentration of fission products after going critical.

Side note, older fuel rods can build up fission products that are more likely to capture neutrons than the uranium. These fission products can actually poison the nuclear reaction needed to maintain the fission process.

a reply to: Cauliflower

But if system cannot maintain its pool of cooling water because of leaks from structural cracking from an earthquake..........

a reply to: loam

It's becoming very clear that things at Fukushima are *far* worse than most people realized.

What's also becoming clear is that things are *far* worse than those who are supposedly "in the know" (read: TEPCO senior mgmt) realize too.

It may already be too late to try and slow, let alone halt the damage being done. This is a disaster that will seriously negatively affect at least half the world before too long.

In other words, it's not the beginning of the end.

It's the end of the beginning.

And if that doesn't scare people and nations enough to try and do something - TEPCO and Japan be damned - we're in for a very bad time in the near future.

As to how bad it will be, no one really knows...