Information Blackouts and lies

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2011-11-04 07:34

Berkeley Radiological Air and Water Monitoring Forum

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TEPCO has only made the situation worse by presenting the Japanese and global public with obfuscations instead of a clear-eyed accounting.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushima/0

Energy / Nuclear - COVER

24 Hours at Fukushima (Excerpts)

A blow-by-blow account of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl

By Eliza Strickland / November 2011 This is part of the IEEE Spectrum special report: Fukushima and the Future of Nuclear Power.

The interlocked and cascading chain of mishaps seems to be a textbook validation of the "normal accidents" hypothesis developed by Charles Perrow after Three Mile Island. Perrow, a Yale University sociologist, identified the nuclear power plant as the canonical tightly coupled system, in which the occasional catastrophic failure is inevitable.

The world's three major nuclear accidents had very different causes, but they have one important thing in common: In each case, the company or government agency in charge withheld critical information from the public. And in the absence of information, the panicked public began to associate all nuclear power with horror and radiation nightmares. The owner of the Fukushima plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), has only made the situation worse by presenting the Japanese and global public with obfuscations instead of a clear-eyed accounting.

TEPCO has steadfastly refused to make workers available for interviews and is barely answering questions about the accident. By piecing together as best we can the story of what happened during the first 24 hours, when reactor 1 was spiraling toward catastrophe, we hope to facilitate the process of learning-by-disaster.

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Jumper cables and car batteries

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2011-11-04 07:55.

"The gages were wrong"

LESSON 1 Emergency generators should be installed at high elevations or in watertight chambers.

In the plant's parking lots, workers raised car hoods, grabbed the batteries, and lugged them back to the control rooms. They found cables in storage rooms and studied diagrams. If they could connect the batteries to the instrument panels, they could at least determine the water levels in the pressure vessels.

LESSON 2 If a cooling system is intended to operate without power, make sure all of its parts can be manipulated without power.

But without power to remotely operate the vent system's valves, it wouldn't be a simple task. And whether the workers knew it or not, time was of the essence. Hydrogen gas hissed through the breaches and drifted up to the top of the building. Hour by hour, the gas collected there until it formed a layer of pure combustible menace.

LESSON 4 Install independent and secure battery systems to power crucial instruments during emergencies.

At around 9 p.m., operators finally plugged the car batteries they'd collected into the instrument panels and got a vital piece of information—the water level in reactor 1. The information seemed reassuring. The gauge registered a water level of 550 millimeters above the top of the fuel assembly, which, while far below normal safety standards, was enough to assure the operators that no fuel had melted yet.

But TEPCO's later analysis found that the gauges were wrong.

The cost of Fukushima

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2011-11-04 10:42.

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12 dead towns …

LESSON 5 Ensure that catalytic hydrogen recombiners (power-free devices that turn dangerous hydrogen gas back into steam) are positioned at the tops of reactor buildings where gas would most likely collect.

The rare catastrophes advance the science of nuclear power but also destroy lives and render entire towns uninhabitable. So far, the cost of Fukushima is a dozen dead towns ringing the broken power station, more than 80 000 refugees, and a traumatized Japan.