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People have dropped the idiot ball, yes? The special Google map's interesting , I've been able to locate were one lot of footage was filmed. A place I ID'd before hand with the preexisting data, but this is some time afterwards - no water, just debris.
Well with logistics I think the JSDF took awhile to see what assets in the region they still had functional, we've had on the news down here footage of fighter planes embedded into buildings.
As for the the off-site offices for the nuke plants in question, I can believe the possibility that Logan's put forward. As I've seen footage of an entire town wiped out, bar the hospital.
Then there's also the reported fact that the phone system had very limited functionality, wired & mobile. So people were lucky to have a line out. No wonder things have glitched.
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Why are roads and rails the end-all-be-all? Well, they invented heavy-lift helicopters for a reason, didn't they? And you can't honestly say that all the heavy-lift helos in Japan got wiped out. Even if that were the case they could always ask to borrow a few of the USN's MH-53's - they would gladly oblige.
And if the organizational headquarters had been wiped out then I would think we would have heard about it by now, no matter how much the Japanese like to sweep things under the rug. As far as I can tell, those organizational headquarters are in-or-around Tokyo.
More than anything else, I think that you're right that there is some kind of organizational choke-point going on. Someone or something is keeping people from doing their jobs. If it does turn out that this was all because of someone's over-inflated ego I am gonna be pissed.
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One of the things that's probably really not helping is that the way Japanese companies handle disaster response is different from elsewhere. They aren't talking about what went wrong, other than that something HAS gone wrong, because they do not want to misspeak and report incorrect information. We will not find out what happened to the backup power systems for quite some time, more likely than not.
Everything we've heard so far, though, points towards there simply not being enough juice to help run the coolant system. There could have been some kind of catastrophic failure of the diesel backups. We simply don't know.
Fortunately, so long as they can keep the systems cool, everything will be cool in about 8 more days as far as the reactors go. Just like Three Mile Island, this is a problem related to decay heat. (As opposed to Chernobyl's pile having gone critical.) When you shut a reactor down like this, the chain reaction stops immediately, but there are still neutrons bouncing around due to the natural effects of radioactive decay, and the whole mess is still generating heat. First stage waste products of fission don't like to hang around in the normal universe for long and fairly quickly off themselves.
It takes about ten days for the decay to settle down to levels where you don't have to pump coolant around and through the vessel to keep it from melting the contents.
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03-13-2011, 04:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-19-2018, 02:39 PM by Bob Schroeck.)
Satellite photos of the Sendai region, before and during the tsunami
Given how far inland the water got, I'm not surprised that infrastructure is missing. (And can a heavy-lift helicopter land on terrain that waterlogged?)
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blackaeronaut Wrote:dark seraph Wrote:Also Berk is right, some of the other stuff thats happend is a bigger worry than the reactors, like that city that vanished off the map. When a city vanishes off the map, there isn't much you can do except to look for survivors. The city is already gone and if what's been said about Japan sinking is true, then there's absolutely nothing that can be done to fix that anytime soon.
Right now there are reactors that are threatening to blow their stacks - one has even partially melted down. This is not an issue that goes away if you ignore it (in fact, it only gets worse if you do). The worst can be mitigated, or even outright avoided, but only if you start throwing the right sort of resources at the issue. Portable industrial generators or pumps would have done wonders after the first eight hours. The instant the word got out that the cooling system failed, someone, anyone, should have done something. I know that there are companies in Japan that lease these things out - that would have been a huge boon to their advertising campaign: "The generator that saved Fukushima can be yours!"
Honestly, there is something wrong here. Had something similar happened off the coast of California you can bet that FEMA would be all over it like flies on shit. But apparently, despite all the preparedness and drills they have, they are lacking in something that resembles FEMA. Don't be too sure. IIRC, standard protocol is that the states have to request help from FEMA first. From there, it should take 72 hours for FEMA to respond. And if the request process gets fouled up for whatever reason you care to name, the response time gets longer. That's why when you're planning for an emergency, plan for at least 3 days of emergency supplies. Though I think 5-7 days is more appropriate.
Japan is doing as well or even better right now than say Haiti (or us) to the disaster response.
@ Berk: TMI was bad enough. It's a 5 on the 7 nuclear incident scale that the IAEC uses. Reactor fuel partially melted but contained. On one reactor .Chernobyl was a 7. Release of radioactive materials into the environment. I don't envy these guys on the ground. You're trying to contain a potential runaway reaction in one reactor the aftermath of a major earthquake, trying to move men and materials over a badly damaged transportation infrastructure and with major continuing aftershocks of at least 6.4 that has the potential of knocking the safety systems of the other 2 reactors. Which just happened yesterday. And you're trying to contain three reactors now. Now you're looking a 3 TMI incidents....if you're fortunate. Which is why I broke out the worry beads yesterday. And the reason why I cracked that joke about the engineer and the stewardess. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
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03-13-2011, 04:46 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-19-2018, 02:39 PM by Bob Schroeck.)
ordnance11 Wrote:And you're trying to contain three reactors now. That was yesterday. They're trying to contain six reactors now. And there's a possible fatality at the site (a person trapped in a ruined crane operating console).
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Okay...where's the phone with the direct line to the Big Guy..if not at least the Goddess Wish Agency? I'd better break out the pray rug as well.
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Ugh, this just keeps getting worse!
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I disagree. Its not getting worse... we're just beginning to get better INFORMED about how bad it really IS.
As to the issue of heavy lift, BA... the issue there is that there just arnt THAT many HL capable helos period. And to carry that sort of load you take a hit on range and speed, normally heavy gear is moved by ground because its just not feasable to move it any other way.
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You sir, are a true veteran.
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This incident has given me more impetus to finish preparing my emergency survival kit in case something happens. Got to admit that we in Puerto Rico live in a state of complacency with regards to natural disasters, considering that we are vulnerable to both hurricanes and earthquakes.
I was a victim of such complacency myself, until Haiti, then I realized how bad it could get.
I've been slowly assembling something like this : http://artofmanliness.com...evacuation-survival-kit/
Except for the gun...since I don't trust myself with one.
If you can give me any suggestions beyond what that article covers, be glad to read it.
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
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The Red Cross and FEMA has an emergency preparedness pamphlet in print. Goggle it.
I'd go for a 7 day supply of emergency food and water. You can either use MRE's or dried stuff. A camp stove with fuel plus cooking utensils. A water purification supply kit. The one with the pump system would do. Batteries for your electronics. A solar charging system for your ipods, cellphones, etc.or even better, a portable emergency generator if you can swing it. For cash..at 100 bucks in small bills and change should do it. Because the ATM's will not be working. I'd looked at his requirements and it's not a bad list..if your talking end of the world.
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2nd reactor (3#) facing meltdown
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/.../world_news-asiapacific/
This is starting to look like a slow moving train wreck.
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I'm gonna borrow something someone wiser than me said in another forum, to keep the nuclear plant situation in perspective: Quote:Even if everything went to crap, and the pumping systems all failed and the power went out permanently and everyone on site was killed by a mysterious virus and Great Cthulhu rose out of the Pacific to drive everyone at TEPCO mad, the absolute worst thing that could happen at the Fukushima site is that the last of the water boils off the core, the decay heat causes it to melt, and it ends up melting through the bottom of the containment vessel into the concrete that was placed below just for this sort of problem.
This would require a huge cleanup job and cost billions of dollars, but the effect on the surrounding area would be minimal. You might have a couple of kilometers which were slightly more radioactive than usual for a while; the rest of Japan would be unaffected. It would be a catastrophe, but not nearly as bad as other ones which barely make the news when they happen.
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Is that for one reactor or six? Believe me Berk, I'm not going into "Chicken Little" mode here. But any construction engineer at GE worth his salt would tell you this sort of scenario was not what they had in mind when they designed those reactors in the 70's. Anymore than we would had imagined someone doing a kamikaze attack on buildings here in the U.S using hijacked jetliners in the 70's. Now, you state the concrete pad below the containment vessel should hold it the mess. I'd agree with you..where not for the fact that the entire region been with with a 8.9 quake, followed up by numerous aftershocks, one of which is 6.4. What impact would that have on 40 year old plus concrete (that may or may not had been in good condition when the earthquake hit)? Is there any surety that the integrity of the pad will hold once the mess gets dropped? And that's for 1 reactor....and all 6?
Anyone over there had done x-ray scans of the floor to make sure of the integrity?
Then you have the human element in this crisis. Typically, in this sort of crisis, you have multiple options at the onset. The longer the wait, the number of options diminishes. I would not be surprised if there were suboptimal responses to this crisis at the beginning that won't have major ramifications a few days from now.
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worse. I'll breathe a sigh of relief if it passes with out a major catastrophe, but it does happens I wouldn't be surprised by it.
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The big thing to understand here is that the Japanese are not playing around. The instant they decided they were either going to have to ruin the reactor or use heroic measures to salvage it, they dumped sea water into the system.
Sea water ends the thing right then and there.
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They may have to do that for all 6....let's hope the utility company is prepared to do that. And that they did it in time.
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Sea water is basically the end of the party for free neutrons. It just makes the reactor a big lump of modern art that glows in the dark on the inside afterwards.
I imagine someone did a cost/benefit analysis of it and decided it would be cheaper to build a new plant than even risk the possibility of the reactor vessel being slagged.
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Another explosion at Fukushima blowing another reactor building up with what looks like smoke or steam rising from what might be the containment structure. Another Earthquake, followed by another inbound 5M tsunami in the next few minutes. When did God let Roland Emmerich run things?
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Well, here's hoping the containment held..because if it didn't...they must had been venting steam. Why they didn't have a stack system to pull the steam high up I have no idea. And hope to God, there weren't any casualties from this.
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It was a big blast. Looked like something popped it's top and just blew straight up in a dirty grey mushroom cloud. Throwing heft chunks of debris up in the air over a hundred meters at least. The wreckage is still steaming happily, puffing white gas. It looks like the containment structure is still there, but there's a fair bit of debris on top of it.
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They'll probably pump sea water and boric acid into this one too now, they are taking absolutely no chances. These facades getting popped off like this is because of the hydrogen building inside. They're venting steam to get pressure off the core, but they have to evacuate hydrogen gas with it. This hydrogen would normally be burned off safely since it's in such small quantities. But when you're in a high tension situation like this one, lots of hydrogen gets produced with nowhere to go.
It should take a hell of a lot more than that to really breech the reactor vessel and containment.
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I'd be willing to bet that the next time we hear anything, it will be that those reactors are fused junk from the seawater pumping, and that they've spiked em all just to be shure.
However, of much more concern to me, I fear this will be used to further vilify and pretty much completely kill off what little support nuclear power plants still had here and abroad
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Star Ranger4 Wrote:However, of much more concern to me, I fear this will be used to further vilify and pretty much completely kill off what little support nuclear power plants still had here and abroad Well, that's all ready happening. Down here our 'green party', The Australian Greens' leadership have used the situation in Japan for a reason why they won't support a local nuke reactor - amongst a lot of things they won't support or wish to inflict upon us.
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Despite the fact that they're pumping salt water into these reactors, the situation is still alarming IMHO. While they are expected, I don't think the explosions should be brushed aside so casually.
And if the worst case scenario does take place (God forbid!) what of the fallout? I know it would get blown out to sea so the Japanese would not have to worry about it too much... But will those radioactive isotopes all decay before they reach Alaska, Canada, and the rest of the US?
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