jez9999 wrote:K, so it looks like the spent fuel pools in 5 and 6 are relatively stable. Reactors 1 and 3 are stable, 2 is stable but maybe leaking a bit of radioactive steam. Spent fuel pools in 3 and 4 are still pretty dangerous and I read about a leak in spent fuel pool 4, which if true means they'll have to keep putting loads of water in it until they fix it even if they get cooling started again.

If/when they get this stabilized, they need to get all that nuclear fuel out of there. The plant is a complete mess. If they have another earthquake and another tsunami, whilst the fuel is there, the consequences could be disastrous.

Darkchilde wrote:I think that this is their plan. They need to stabilize everything first, be certain that it is stable and afterwards remove the rods, and dismantle the plant.

I think that this is actually a when they will get it stabilized.

Just think - it's going to stop being news soon......

Fukushima nuclear accident: Saturday 19 March summary
Posted on 20 March 2011 by Barry Brook

Last Saturday the the crisis level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was rapidly on the rise. Hydrogen explosions, cracks in the wetwell torus and fires in a shutdown unit’s building — it seemed the sequence of new problems would never end. A week later, the situation remains troubling, but, over the last few days, it has not got any worse. Indeed, one could make a reasonable argument that it’s actually got better.

Yes, the IAEA has now formally listed the overall accident at an INES level 5 (see here for a description of the scales), up from the original estimate of 4. This is right and proper — but it doesn’t mean the situation has escalated further, as some have inferred. Here is a summary of the main site activities for today, followed by the latest JAIF and FEPC reports. You also might be interested in the following site map:

Another large cohort of 100 Tokyo fire fighters joined the spraying operation to cool down the reactors and keep the water in the spent fuel ponds. The ‘Hyper Rescue’ team have set up a special vehicle for firing a water cannon from 22 m high (in combination with a super pump truck), and today have been targeting the SNF pond in unit 3. About 60 tons of sea water successfully penetrated the building in the vicinity of the pool, at a flow rate of 3,000 litres per minute. Spraying with standard unmanned vehicles was also undertaken for 7 hours into other parts of the the unit 3 building (delivering more than 1,200 tons), to keep the general containment area cool. The temperature around the fuel rods is now reported by TEPCO (via NHK news) to be below 100C.

Conditions in unit 3 are stabilising but will need attention for many days to come. Promisingly, TEPCO has now connected AC cables to the unit 1 and 2 reactor buildings, with hopes that powered systems can be restored to these building by as early as tomorrow (including, it is hoped, the AC core cooling systems), once various safety and equipment condition checks are made.

Holes were made in the secondary containment buildings of Units 5 and 6 as a precautionary measure, to vent any hydrogen that might accumulate and so prevent explosions in these otherwise undamaged structures. The residual heat removal system for these units has now been brought back on line and these pools maintain a tolerable steady temperature of 60C. More here. These buildings were operating on a single emergency diesel generator, but now have a second electricity supply via the external AC power cable.

more

http://bravenewclimate.com/

Why I stay in Tokyo
僕が東京にとどまる理由

[This commentary contains footnotes and links that allow you to verify what I am saying.]

Thousands have left Tokyo recently in a panic about the perceived radiation threat. If you ask any one of them to precisely articulate what the threat consists of, they will be unable to do so. This is because they actually don’t know, and because in fact there is no threat justifying departure, at least not from radioactivity (*).They flee because they have somehow heard that there is a threat – from the media, their embassies, their relatives overseas, friends, etc. These sources of information, too, have never supplied a credible explanation for their advisories.

But they have managed to create a mass panic,

jez9999 wrote:Sounds like complete bollocks to me. If they are including old plants, maybe they have a point. If they're including plants built 1970 or later, I'm not aware of one single serious nuclear incident in UK or France during that time so I don't know where they get anything higher than 0% from.

jez9999 wrote:Huhne can go suck his cock. He's always been part of the willfully ignorant anti-nuclear lobby. He's only accepted it because the Tories forced him to. Of course he's gonna leap on this to try and cast doubt on the future of nuclear in the UK.

a) you base your estimate of the rate at which particular types of accident happen on the rate at which they have occured. If you do this, then removing Chernobyl, TMI etc. is pretty much cherry picking. We know that we have low rates of incidents and for that reason alone you have to include all of them.

Lears et al. note that 1:20,000 years is a good global estimate and give a probability of about 20% for a core meltdown in Europe within 25 years.

Huhne can go suck his cock. He's always been part of the willfully ignorant anti-nuclear lobby.

Jumbo wrote:

Huhne can go suck his cock. He's always been part of the willfully ignorant anti-nuclear lobby.

indeed.

He seemed to advocate coal if it included carbon capture. I may be wrong but doesn't carbon capture just reduce the CO2 release? In other words other things still get flung into the environment. That means they still emit many times the uranium and thorium waste that a nuclear plant normally does.