Japanese Meltdown
 

The CNN coverage of the Japanese nuclear plant is insane. They're calling sea-water pumping a "hail mary pass". Nonsense: plants are built for that option if they want to scram the reactor entirely. They're pumping seawater into the core (along with Boron, which absorbs radioactive emissions) is a "do all" tactic that cools the core as well as rendering the core unusable in the future (seawater corrodes the interior walls).

All this means is Japan has written-off a 40 year old reactor that had a minor rod meltdown and they don't want to risk more than that. Its called BEING RESPONSIBLE.

Jesus, the news can't even get BASIC MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE RIGHT.

(Also - Did anyone see the anchor on CNN yell Bill Nye off the air for trying to explain it wasn't that bad?)

We watched a bit of the American news channels over in Turkey, I can't believe you guys put up with that crap. As it happens, my brother is now the primary anchor for the BBC in Japan so I'm being kept fairly up to date...

To be honest, I'm half expecting a giant dinosaur to emerge from the sea and start ravaging Tokyo at this point. I don't think this is going to end up in a massive mushroom cloud and there'll probably be nothing dramatic happen at all with regards to the reactor. Whilst the Japs have been a bit backward in coming forward about their nuclear issues in the past, the number of nuclear experts from around the world rushing to help out is ridiculous. I think the main long term issue after the clean up from the tsunami will turn out to be the insurance companies across Europe getting fucked and everyone's insurance premiums going up as a result.

People are despicably ignorant over science and economy related matters. The folk are panicking like crazy over here too. The pharmacies ran out of iodine pills, even though the fallout won't even come to this general direction. I guess the lemmings are still a bit jumpy because Černobyl hit us a little, well over 25 years ago.

But, it looks like there's two other reactor cores, and also another nukular plant under announced threat. I guess they'll encase it all in carbonite and start again with better technology.

O, I donno. Making the commitment to pump seawater and render a billion-dollar facility nonfunctional does give off a hint of desperation.

And the Hail Mary Pass thing isn't CNN's words. Blame Robert Alvarez of the Institute of Public Studies.

P.S. I am interested in seeing this Bill Nye fellow getting shouted at by a CNN anchor. Link?

YouTube Video

Remarkable. For the first time ever Don Lemon doesn't seem to be the biggest douche on CNN. While them cutting off Nye's science explanation at the end is pretty bad it isn't nearly as asinine as when they cut him off at the 4 minute mark to flash a QUAKE TSUNAMI DISASTER graphic and report that they still have nothing new to say.

Since when is turbine pronounced "Turban"?

Also, it's weird how CNN pick science experts who don't seem to know much about science. Our news seems to be a lot more fact and a loss less conjecture, or at least that's how it comes across. Maybe the BBC are just better at hiding when they don't understand things?

lol, what.

Pumping sea-water and boron into a 40 year old reactor core is the physicist's version of "Cash For Clunkers". The building was errected a decade before Three Mile Island, it probably SHOULD be shut down by this point.


Thats true - Nye is a Mechanical Engineer by degree.

Similarly (or perhaps not, I'm just being an asshole here) I knew enough about nuclear reactors and how they work to go on television and say the exact same things Bill Nye did. That shouldn't reflect badly on Nye (he's a figurehead for intelligence/science/etc now. Or something?) but it should reflect badly on CNN for bringing him on, perhaps.

That said - CNN can eat a fat helping of bologna dick after their treatment of this situation.

Ummm, FUCK.

New reactor fire as Japan works to contain threat - Yahoo! News

I'm really not very clever about the science of this all, but how many roentgens are they testing at? I don't see any figures anywhere. They mention a rise in radiation, but uh, that's not really very specific, I guess.

I thought the roentgen was effectively the thing to measure to determine just how lethal the atmosphere is. (200 mR is apparently average per day exposure for humans, 500 R in a 5 hour span being a lethal dose for a human, I guess?)

Where's RR when you need him.

Usually they give out numbers in another unit than Röntgen, radiation dosage per time unit. Normal everyday background radiation (from the earth itself) is under 0,5 uSv/h (microsieverts in hour). The conversion to Röntgen units is trivial (basically multiply with a constant).

In this event, the baseline for radiation right next to the plant is about 1000 times that, 600 uSv/h, and with sudden peaks up to 400 000 uSv/h. The baseline measured at the power plant requires protection against it.

To give some relativity to this, a lethal dose is a sudden burst of 6 000 000 uSv (not during an hour, much less). A CT scan, one of the biggest medical X-ray radiation dosages, measures up to about 18 000 uSv.

It's so embarrassing to watch. It's like they put out a casting call for ambitious physicists willing to exclusively discuss imaginary worst case scenarios.

IF A METEOR STRUCK THE PLANT...

I've actually found NHK World to be a pretty good news source. I always wind up seeing their interviews on other channels, and as long as you can tolerate the broken English they seem to offer a lot of actual in depth stories.

Keep in mind that a "reactor fire" can mean any number of parts within the facility. Cooling system, turbines or any other non-nuclear devices within the whole. The diesel generators that run the cooling system shutdown after the first hour they kicked in and the news reported it as COMPLETE MELTDOWN IMMENENT.

You have people in America and Germany buying iodine pills, for crissake.

I like how the Japanese government keeps raising the standard of radiation exposure. "Never mind that last week the level was X; you can actually withstand 5X!" I guess it gives the workers some imaginary since of comfort, but they're screwed.

[citation needed]

The Register's account seems pretty on the level: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03...ima_wednesday/

I heard they got the Mr. Reactor-san 2 connected back to the grid yesterday. That would mean they can again start pumping water into the used fuel rod container pools. That's the main concern of anyone involved right now.

The thing is, the used fuel rods are still "active" in the sense that they require intense cooling (at least 5 meters of water on top) so that there won't be any secondary reactions starting from the heat energy released. Even used, they still have a great heat capacity and will warm up again to the melting temperatures if not kept submerged in water. The thing is, if there's not enough water, they will warm up a bit which will start a secondary reaction: the oxidization reaction of the zirconium oxide (the outer layer of the fuel rod). Zirconium oxidizes and reduces the water into oxide ions and hydrogen gas. The gas will fill up the storage room and if there is enough heat from the rods still left after the oxidization, the hydrogen will ignite from the smallest electrical spark, and the whole building will explode.

Now, these storage buildings are usually built from steel-forced concrete, or even half-meter thick plain steel. That's not enough to withstand a hydrogen explosion of this scale, so the building will basically turn into the biggest shrapnel grenade ever, destroying everything within a few miles radius (not really anything would protect from it in the vicinity of the plant).

The fun fact is, ALL reactors in the whole world rely on the fact that the water keeps on cycling without stop. Inside the working reactors AND in the used fuel rod containers. The problem is that the water pumps are usually powered by the plant itself, and some backup generators just in case. Here, all the backup was destroyed in the earthquake and in the tsunami.

The "good" news is, this will not be another Černobyl. The radiation fallout will be quite minimal and limited to a small area around the power plants (the American evacuation zone of 80 kilometers is a bit excessive for that) whatever happens, because it's not the reactor core or the used fuel rods that will explode and burn for an extended time (if they don't get the water running on full force again), only its immediate physical surroundings due to the hydrogen.

In my opinion, in the worst case, the used fuel rods will overheat significantly (this is called meltdown) and sink into the concrete slab under it.

That's all I know from what is relevant to the "threat" over Japan. Too bad the engineers and physicists didn't really think the chemistry through when designing the nuclear plants used in the world today.

From a hydrogen explosion? That is absurd. It would take a nuclear explosion to achieve that kind of devastation. Also, I'm pretty sure this already happened and was the cause of the structure damage at reactor 4.

The danger from melting spent fuel rods is that radioactive material will escape into the air.

I don't even watch Univision but I happened to catch this on the tube when I went to talk to a client at his restaurant: This is a story (in Spanish news) about a Colombian woman who witnessed the tsunami wipe out a train that she was going to take but decided not to. It should be noted that Univision was interspersing the (completely irrelevant to the immediate story at hand) graphics of a "radioactive cloud" (that's not the actual graphics but it looked very similar to that) coming to America. Combine choppy Skype footage with ominous ingographics and people in the restaurant were seriously PANICKING; I even overheard one couple saying that they had to go confess and make their church donations before god came back to claim them. I would have said something but these Mexicans are just too ingrained in this fear to waste my breath on anymore. I just said, "We're doomed, man. I'm just gonna go pray to 'El Chapulin Colorado' for salvation and hope my soul is spared."

Basically, fear is big business in the Hispanic community and the news are just as greedy as every motherfucker on the planet to try to get their cut.

EDIT:
And, right on queue, the very next video is a detailed breakdown of how the "radioactive cloud nears California". I think it's funny that the one expert that they have in the report says that "fallout will be minimal" on the West Coast but, OH MAN WHAT A TITLE FRONT PAGE PLEASE.

I was actually watching some Spanish channel (not Telemundo or Univision, it's channel 24 here in LA), and they had pretty good coverage with this nuclear dude from San Onofre. Like, he was actually talking about modeling the wind flow, the levels we should expect, what the nuclear plant there was designed to withstand, and pretty much just a better interview than pretty much any other I've seen on any of the main networks.