US: spent fuel pool never went dry in Japan quake
US: spent fuel pool never went dry in Japan quake
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Water used to cool radioactive waste at the stricken nuclear complex in Japan did not dry up, as earlier feared, U.S. regulators said Wednesday in a reversal of a claim that pitted U.S. officials against Japan in the days after that country's nuclear disaster.
U.S. officials, most notably Nuclear Regulatory Chairman Gregory Jaczko, had warned that all the water was gone from one of the spent fuel pools at Japan's troubled nuclear plant, which would have raised the possibility of widespread nuclear fallout. Loss of cooling water in the reactor core could have exposed highly radioactive spent fuel rods, increasing the threat of a complete fuel meltdown and a catastrophic release of radiation.
Japanese officials had denied the pool was dry and reported that the plant's condition was stable.
On Wednesday, U.S. officials said newly obtained video shows that the spent fuel pool at Unit 4 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex probably did not go dry, as Jaczko had insisted in March.
Bill Borchardt, the NRC's executive director for operations, said U.S. officials welcomed the video evidence as "good news" and one indication that the meltdown at the Fukushima plant's Unit 4 reactor "may not have been as serious as was believed."
U.S. officials never have fully explained why Jaczko made the claim but said it was based on information from NRC staff and other experts who went to Japan after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Jaczko did not mention the spent fuel pool during a commission meeting Wednesday at NRC headquarters in suburban Washington. He would not comment afterward.
Jaczko, 40, has been under fire in recent days, as the NRC's inspector general released a report indicating that he repeatedly misled fellow commissioners about his efforts to stop work on a disputed dump for high-level radioactive waste. Inspector General Hubert T. Bell said Jaczko manipulated the panel's four other commissioners by selectively withholding information on a crucial safety review of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada. Jaczko's actions allowed him to shut down the review last year without a vote of the full commission.
Bell told the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee that Jaczko's conduct was not criminal but added, "It's not an upfront way to do business."
Several agency scientists and a former NRC chairman also have questioned Jaczko's actions, and at least two Republican lawmakers have demanded that he resign.
A spokesman for the NRC said Wednesday that the belief that the spent fuel pool may have gone dry played a role in Jaczko's controversial decision to recommend that U.S. citizens stay at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from the crippled Japanese plant. The Japanese authorities had ordered evacuations of people within about 12 miles (19 kilometers) of the plant.
NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said Jaczko and other U.S. officials made the recommendation based on the best information available at the time.
"The NRC felt and continues to feel that the 50-mile recommendation was appropriate," he said.
Meanwhile, Charles Miller, a senior NRC executive who is leading a 90-day safety review of U.S. nuclear plants, told commissioners that current safety rules do not adequately weigh the risk of a single event that could knock out power from the grid and from emergency generators, as the quake and tsunami did in Japan. Safety experts until now have focused on the risk of losing electricity from the grid or from emergency sources, but not both.
NRC officials have said they are studying whether the nation's 104 nuclear reactors can cope with such a "station blackout," which could go on for days.
Commissioner George Apostolakis questioned why current rules assume that electricity would be restored within four or eight hours. "Why do we still assume things that are now, in retrospect, unrealistic?" he asked.
Jaczko said the Japan disaster had caused everyone involved in nuclear power, from industry to regulators, to rethink their assumptions.
"I think deep-down there was a belief that you would never see an event like this, that just simply we had done everything to basically take this type of event completely off the table. And obviously, we haven't," Jaczko said.
A final report from the task force is due in mid-July.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110616p2g00m0dm013000c.html
Day of the Long Knives
The day of the Long Knives.
The Long Knives attacked Nuclear Regulatory Chairman Gregory Jaczko. Jaczko proposed a wider evacuation for Americans than Japan adopted for Japanese children.
This evacuation proposal continues to appear prudent. Japan recently increased their official estimate of radioactive releases, for the 1st week, to double their previous total Fukushima releases. Non-governmental radiation assessments continue to indicate higher radiation data than Japan official figures. And there are troubling reports of Japanese children exhibiting the classic medical signs and symptoms of Acute Radiation Sickness (syndrome).
While some of the political attacks on Chairman Jaczko occurred under cover of darkness, the phrase "Night of the Long Knives" was already taken.
Water level low and of Concern
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“The Japanese themselves have indicated that the level of water in that pond is low and is of concern.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/17/press-briefing-pre...
Home • Briefing Room • Press Briefings
The White House - Office of the Press Secretary - For Immediate Release March 17, 2011
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Greg Jaczko and Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman, 3/17/2011
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room 12:58 P.M. EDT
MR. CARNEY: Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. A lot of green out there -- appreciate that, as a Carney.
MR. CARNEY: Chuck.
Q Mr. Secretary, in your opening statement, you said that the aerial footage confirmed the chairman’s recommendations. And what the chairman had testified to you yesterday was that he thought that there was no more water in the pool, essentially, there was no more cooling mechanism. Is that what you’re finding in this footage?
DEPUTY SECRETARY PONEMAN: Those are two different things. Just to be clear, what we sent out were these pods, and these pods measure deposition of radioactive materials on the ground. And so what our -- what I said was that our preliminary indications -- because the data is being analyzed, it’s being shared with the Japanese so they can analyze it, too -- suggest that the prudential measure that the chairman recommended in terms of the 50-mile radius for evacuation is consistent with what we’re finding. It’s not related to --
Q So you don’t have evidence yet of whether this pool -- because he had testified yesterday that you would fear that there was no more water in this fourth -- in the spent fuel pond. Is that correct?
DEPUTY SECRETARY PONEMAN: If I could just say -- I think I can answer the question. The Japanese themselves have indicated that the level of water in that pond is low and is of concern. And there have been -- we certainly saw the chairman’s testimony yesterday, and we’re getting whatever data we can on the situation at that pool. It doesn’t change what we -- what is important, and that’s the Japanese, as they have themselves indicated, need to get more cooling water into that pool. So anything that can be done in that direction, whether it’s from water cannons or water drops, that’s going to be something they’re focused on, and of course, we would do whatever we could to help them.
…
Q And picking up on Chuck’s question, a Japanese official today said he did not know if that cooling pool has been emptied. Is it still your assessment that that cooling pond with the spent fuel rods is now empty?
CHAIRMAN JACZKO: Well, everything -- when we made the determination the other day, everything indicated that that was the case. And I think as has been said, there’s a lot of conflicting information around this. But the bottom line is, is that there clearly appears to be a challenge keeping that spent fuel filled with sufficient water. So it is a very dynamic situation. And again, our efforts are really focused here on helping the Japanese deal with what is a very tragic and difficult situation, and we’ll continue to provide recommendations and expertise where we can to help.
Q Will the NRC release the data to the public that it’s using?
CHAIRMAN JACZKO: We did release the data.
Sorting the lies
.
TEPCO has been less than forthcoming throughout this disaster.
The Reactor 4 building was destroyed, along with buildings 1, 2 & 3 in a series of energetic detonations. Some of these explosions catapulted tons of highly radioactive fallout to about flight level 50. It appears plausible that the explosion splashed some of the water out of the Spent Fuel Pool.
Building 4 is visibly listing and reportedly in danger of falling. The Spent Fuel Pool would be HIGHLY unlikely to survive the collapse of building 4.
The prospect, of more than 100 tons of HOT nuclear fuel bouncing down the Fukushima shoreline, is not pretty. The inhabitability of Japan, the Marianas, and the North American Pacific coastline, would be considerably degraded.
It appears premature to conclude that Mr. Jaczko has overreacted. To date Jaczko appears to be the only US official who has reacted at all.
Sick Japanese Kids?
:(
I have no basis upon which to determine the validity of these serious allegations or the accuracy of the translation.
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/06/radiation-in-japan-nosebleed-diarrhea...
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Radiation in Japan: Nosebleed, Diarrhea, Lack of Energy in Children in Koriyama City, Fukushima
Once a malicious "baseless rumor" on the net, now it is written up in a regional newspaper with readership in Tokyo and Kanto area.
Tokyo Shinbun (paper edition only, 6/16/2011) reports that many children in Koriyama City in Fukushima Prefecture, 50 kilometers from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, are suffering inexplicable nosebleed, diarrhea, and lack of energy since the nuke plant accident.
(The photo of the page from this blog site, in Japanese.)
http://c3plamo.slyip.com/blog/archives/2011/06/post_2102.html
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The Source?
.
Below, please find one account/link of the contemporary concerns with the Reactor-4 Spent Fuel pond. Reactor-4 was/is reportedly empty of fuel. Reactor-4 building is rather obviously 'toast'. There has been much speculation on the source of the blast.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-wrapup-2...
By Ralph Vartabedian, Barbara Demick and Laura King, Los Angeles Times
March 18, 2011, 1:50 a.m.
Reporting from Los Angeles, Kesennuma and Tokyo— U.S. government nuclear experts believe a spent fuel pool at Japan's crippled Fukushima reactor complex has a breach in the wall or floor, a situation that creates a major obstacle to refilling the pool with cooling water and keeping dangerous levels of radiation from escaping.
That assessment by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials is based on the sequence of events since the earthquake and information provided by key American contractors who were in the plant at the time, said government officials familiar with the evaluation. It was compelling evidence, they said, that the wall of the No. 4 reactor pool has a significant hole or crack.
Unlike the reactor itself, the spent fuel pool does not have its own containment vessel, and any radioactive particles and gases can more easily spew into the environment if the uranium fuel begins to burn. In addition, the pool, which contains 130 tons of uranium fuel, is housed in a building that Japanese authorities say appears to have been damaged by fire or explosions.
Most experts concluded
"most experts concluded that the spent fuel pool had somehow lost water"
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-wrapup-2...
Japanese public statements, however, did not describe the No. 4 reactor as the most urgent task confronting emergency workers. "Cooling the No. 3 reactor is still our top priority," Edano said in a briefing on national television.
But outside nuclear experts say the spent fuel pool may be the most serious long-term problem.
Nuclear fuel in the No. 4 reactor was moved to the spent fuel pool in December 2010, while the unit was being serviced, and that fuel remains highly radioactive. When a fire or explosion — officials aren't sure which — left a hole in the secondary containment building this week, most experts concluded that the spent fuel pool had somehow lost water, exposing the fuel rods.
An exposed fuel rod can interact with air and steam, allowing the zirconium cladding to oxidize and produce highly flammable hydrogen gas.
It's not clear how the rods became exposed to air in the first place. Scientists say the cooling water may have sloshed out of the pool during the earthquake, boiled away because of built-up heat or leaked from a crack in the pool.
Nuclear plant experts interviewed by The Times on Thursday said it was unlikely that the quake could have caused a significant amount of water in the 45-foot-deep pool to slosh out and drain away, exposing the 15-foot rods. They also doubted that heat from the fuel rods could boil away that much water in just a few days, especially because steam was not seen coming from the reactor building.
Instead, U.S. officials believe that the pool's wall was cracked either by the intense shaking of the earthquake or by a large piece of equipment falling into it.
Employees of a consortium of General Electric and Hitachi were in the reactor building at the time of the quake, according to company and government sources. The GE employees have returned home, though some Hitachi employees are continuing to offer assistance to Tokyo Electric.
Nuclear experts say they can't be positive that a breach has occurred without looking at the pool, but the area around the pool is so radioactive that a close inspection still isn't possible.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, said this week that his agency believed the spent fuel pool was empty, triggering alarms and a rebuttal by Japanese authorities. His spokesman, Scott Burnell, said Jaczko's statements were "based on a variety of sources that represented the best available information."
Test
Test
Partially, mostly but not TOTALLY dry?
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Nobody knows how dry I am (Irving Berlin)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/business/energy-environment/16nrc.html...
Nuclear safety rules in the United States do not adequately weigh the risk that a single event would knock out electricity from both the grid and from emergency generators, as an earthquake and tsunami recently did at a nuclear plant in Japan, officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.
Charlie Miller, the chairman of the task force, said that studies by safety experts in the United States had analyzed the risk of losing electricity from the grid or from on-site emergency generators, but not both at the same time.
One of the commissioners, George E. Apostolakis, pointed out that existing safety analyses also assume that electricity will be restored within four or eight hours after a power cutoff, but that blackouts on the grid often last far longer. “Why do we still assume things that are now, in retrospect, unrealistic?” he asked.
Mr. R. William Borchardt, the commission’s executive director for operations, told the commissioners “It’s unlikely that the pool ever went completely dry”. Mr. Borchardt also said that in Units 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima, “The cores, to some degree, are ex-vessel,” meaning that the uranium fuel had melted and leaked out of the reactor vessels.
http://wn.com/How_Dry_I_Am
Ex vessel?
U say what does ex vessel mean well Pg 23".important ex vessel phenomena" will educate ,if u care to know .wish I read this report three months ago yes it's disturbing how bad this is really is.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1327_web.pdf
Ex Vessel is bad
Ex Vessel means the highly radioactive nuclear fuel has spilled out of the bottle.
The Uranium and Plutonium fuel is either on the floor, in the air, groundwater or pouring into the Pacific Ocean.
Military euphamisms
:(
If memory serves ... on or about March 15, 2011, (give or take an international date line)...
The US Seventh Fleet, which was positioned about 100 miles (160 km) off the coast of Japan said it had moved its ships and aircraft further away after its instruments detected "low-level radiation".
According to a report from the Associatied Press, "the fleet said" the dose of radiation was around the equivalent of one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation in the environment.
:(
Complex Environment
I don't know if the accusations about Jaczko misleading fellow commissioners are true or not. If others on the commission are after him, it doesn't look good.
I do think it's a very cheap shot at him for his recommendation of the 50 mile evacuation radius for US citizens in Japan. From what we've seen in the MEXT/US DOE deposition maps around Fukushima (link below), it was the right recommendation. Even without the #4 SFP going dry. I wonder if crossing the Japanese government and making the situation look worse than some would like has anything to do with them going after him. I hope they don't force a statement that 50 miles was too much.
http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2011/05/10...
50 mile cost u your job/
Well I am sure i recall the pool 4 had fires twice so even if it wasn't empty I recall it had fires.must have been a partial uncovering.Yea the 50 mile radius made him very unpopular with the industry he didn't tow the line all is fine he barked danger now he will pay bye career .why well this being it has huge impact on us evacuation plans around nuke plants it is a game changer for our thinking in USA.
I suspect we are being feed a line of bs to i don't believe the japNese!jackzo had a reason to make his assessment in march yes he had intelligence and data to make this call of pool drying up .now with words like probably didn't I don't know it's crazy like u said the evacuation zone was the right call.
Are they wearing tennis shoes ?
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http://mdn.mainichi.jp/features/archive/news/2011/06/20110616p2g00m0fe10...
(Mainichi Japan) June 16, 2011
Japanese mothers, many with little previous political involvement, have taken to the streets and urged the government to step up measures to protect their children from radiation since the March 11 disaster that crippled a Fukushima nuclear power plant. Frustrated by what they see as insufficient information from the government, Japanese mothers have formed groups via Facebook, Twitter and blogs to share knowledge and data about radiation.
Many women say the government-set radiation dose limit for children at schools in Fukushima Prefecture, 20 millisieverts a year, is too high. Having seen the designated limit draw controversy among experts, mothers urge that the government lower the maximum level and ensure a safer environment for children.
A group of four women in Tokyo launched a multilingual website -- Moms to Save Children from Radiation -- posting messages from the mothers in Fukushima and those evacuated from there, as well as a statement calling for a lower exposure threshold for children in Japanese, English and Korean.
Messages on the Moms to Save Children from Radiation have triggered reactions not just in Japan but overseas. A couple in Malaysia -- Belgian Marc Huysmans, 51, and Malaysian Kow Yoon Ching, 54 -- reacted to accounts on the website. They are offering their home for any Japanese family with children in need, free of charge.
Yumiko Iijima, one of the founders of the website, said, "The idea of protecting children is universal." She said the group has received responses every day from around seven countries since the website's launch in early May.
They may be too late
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The Japanese mothers may already be too late
If these are credible reports
.
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4635
Nosebleed, Diarrhea, Lack of Energy in Children in Koriyama City, Fukushima
Signs and Symptoms of Acute Radiation Sickness
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How many flights from San Francisco to Washington DC would it take for Japanese children to manefest the signs and symptoms of Acute Radiation Sickness?
:(
The Koriama Lucky Dragons
The Koriama Lucky Dragons baseball team may not win many games this summer
Neutrons in flight
How many neutrons would it take to induce radiation in every trace element in each cell of a 50 pound child?
How many cross country flights would it take to 'catch' that many neutrons?
How fast, relativistically would these neutrons need to travel to 'heat up' the iron in human red blood cells?
Same question with respect to the calcium in human bones?
The radionuclides are suck
The radionuclides are suck in their poor bodies, burning away continuously at their precious genetic codes as evolved over billions of years. I have to turn away as the reality is too black to bear.
I couldn't help but read the
I couldn't help but read the above post in a Vincent Price voice in my head.
What exploded?
;)
What exploded in building 4?
Something detonated, and it was not an empty reactor!
;(
I read this post in a
I read this post in a Vincent Price voice in my head.
Blundering Liars
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“Newspapers and television shouldn’t say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s safe. You don’t need to run away,’ like Japan’s have.”
http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/life/tell-me-about-it/david-mcneill-whos-tell...
One of the more striking aspects of the local media coverage of Fukushima was the missing word -- “meltdown.” It seemed reasonable to speculate, from March 11-15, that this is precisely what happened. One reason was the repeated news of cesium dispersed in the atmosphere on March 12.
We might also cite the example of MOX fuel and plutonium, a substance so toxic “that a teaspoon-sized cube of it would suffice to kill 10 million people,” in Reactor 3 at Fukushima.
Newspaper and TV reports in Japan essentially banished the words from their reports. MOX is also used in the Hamaoka nuclear plant, which, until Prime Minister Naoto Kan ordered it shut last month was largely unknown to ordinary Japanese citizens.
Japanese magazines, however, have been the most critical, unrestrained and informed publications in the world since March. “Shukan Shincho” calls the TEPCO management ‘war criminals’. “Shukan Gendai” dubbed professor Sekimura and pro-nuclear scientists “tonchinkan” -- roughly, “blundering.”
Haruki Madarame is now widely called “Detarame” Haruki, meaning he’s a liar or a bullshitter. But shouldn’t newspapers and TV news, the public’s watchdog, be timely and up to date?
:(