View 666 March 14 - 20, 2011 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Ides of March
Stefan T. Possony born in Vienna March 15, 1915
The press proclaims the end of the nuclear energy program: end of new construction is automatic, and the "struggle" will be over how soon all the existing nuclear plants can be closed.
This will be an economic and ecological disaster of enormous dimension; and it is being proclaimed before we have any idea of the actual damage from the nuclear component of the Japanese disaster. Whatever that is or ever will be, it is not likely that it will approach what the media is making it.
We don't have a lot of information from the actual scene. I do have this:
Trying to make sense of Fukushima
Dear Jerry,
I've been trying to make some sense of what's going on at Fukushima to figure out what the realistic risks are and I wanted to ask for the help of you and the other readers.
According to the IAEA's web site ( http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/
news/tsunamiupdate01.html ) the spent fuel storage pond at Unit 4 was on fire, releasing radioactivity into the air but has now been extinguished. I'm at a loss as to how a pool catches on fire. Could that much hydrogen be formed and be bubbling up? I thought that would require high temperatures and the storage pool shouldn't be anywhere near those levels. From what I have been able to piece together, each of the reactors had its own storage pond. I would have expected storage pond to be on the ground somewhere, but apparently at Fukushima, these ponds are located on top of the containment building, within the metal superstructure that has been blown off of two of the reactors.I was fairly confident of the actual containment of the core itself once I figured out that what had blown off was basically just a cover for the machinery. However, now this information about the spent fuel pools is alarming me. I've found a number of articles that claim that if the water levels in the pools drop and the spent fuel is uncovered there is a high probability it will catch on fire and once that happens, it's just like Chernobyl.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
robert-alvarez/meltdowns-japan-earthquake_b_835121.htmlAny informed opinions out there? I'm out of my depth. The analysis seems plausible but I don't understand the materials well enough to know if it really is or isn't.
Apparently this "feature" is straight from GE so I have to pardon Japanese engineering for this. The Vermont Yankee plant is said to be identical in design to the Fukushima reactors. My understanding of nuclear power plant design was that these cooling pools were originally only meant to be used to short term cooling until the rods had decayed enough to not be so radioactive and they could be safely moved to the permanent repository or be reprocessed so as usual it's engineering that is not being used for its intended purpose and coming back to bite us. Didn't the US promise Japan that we'd take the spent fuel and put it in our repository so they didn't need to build there only repository.
Dry cask storage is in use in multiple places as well. The diagrams seem to show bundles of fuel rods in close proximity, so I'm at a loss as to why they're safe in a dry cask, but will catch on fire if exposed to the air in a cooling pool. Is it simply a matter of how long they've been out of service? If there's a mix of old fuel rod bundles and "fresh" fuel rod bundles in a pool and the "fresh" ones catch on fire, would the fire spread to the old ones? Since they're in an open pool, is it feasible to just run a fire hose up there and keep the pool filled? There must be reasons why this isn't happening.
Tokyo remains calm but there is a lot of uncertainty. One of our workers is evacuating with her kids to a southern island to be with her in-laws. I thought I had more gas in the car (I only drive the thing once a week usually) than I did so I wound up looking for gas this afternoon. All of the gas stations in the neighborhood were closed being out of gas. Oh my way back, one of the stations had just had a delivery and so they opened up. I wound up in a line of 10-15 cars and was allowed to buy 20 liters of gas. Everyone was polite and there was no honking of horns or fighting breaking out. We had rice scheduled to be delivered next week, but were short so we wound up queuing at the neighborhood rice store (we usually buy at the supermarket but they were out - the rice shop is like going to the butchers). He'd had a truck come in shortly before and we were in line with about 20 people to buy a 5 kilo sack of rice. Again, everyone was polite, stayed in line and were served by the owner who was making change out of a pile of cash stuck under a paperweight.
Rolling blackouts were announced but people cut consumption enough to make them unnecessary, at least in our areas of Tokyo. The trains are running, but without a schedule. I made it over to Ginza yesterday in a reasonable amount of time. I wanted to get a spare battery for my MacBook Pro. As it turns out, the Apple Store was closed (I'd called ahead but got an error message so I figured the phones were still flakey). The department stores were still open and I ducked into one to use the restroom. The first floor is all cosmetics and perfumes and all of the stations were open and the staff were ready to serve customers.
If you do have to go through a disaster there are definitely worse people to do it with than the Japanese.
Regards,
Dave Smith
Tokyo
Japan will recover. The world will learn much from this disaster, as the 1923 Tokyo 8.3 earthquake brought about enormous changes in skyscraper designs. Frank Lloyd Wright's design of the Imperial Hotel kept it from collapsing, but it had enough structural damage to require a redesign.
The Bhopal disaster in 1984 is estimated to have killed about 15,000 people. It did not end the chemical industry. Aut0mobiles kill above 30,000 people a year in the United States.
Wealthy civilizations have costs. They are small compared to the grinding costs of poverty. Low productivity produces poverty. High energy costs lower productivity. Before we call for any drastic reduction in energy production, it would be well to see what the maximum disaster costs might be, and what can be done to mitigate or prevent such in future. That does not appear to be the advice the media is giving us.
An observation by one physicist correspondent:
Skimming the news, I found a report (I've misplaced the URL and don't have any more time to chase it this morning) that background radiation at Tokyo has increased by a factor of 23.
Over the course of a year, that's still in the realm of industrial exposure limits, and the exposure will probably be significantly less than a year.
I also note that Germany has shut down the seven older of their seventeen plants in response. I guess they're afraid of tsunamis over their design limit.
At this point, I have to say intermediate between TMI and Chernobyl. By the time this is over, a few hundred thousand civilians might get doses of between a month's and a year's industrial exposure. That is significantly less than the risk attendant to not having the electricity.
My advice is, Don't Panic. Do know where your towel and your cup are.
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The Nikkei is falling. The effect on the US economy will be large. Panic will make it larger. There is already a call for more US stimulus spending (thus adding to the deficit). This fallout scares me a lot more than the physical fallout from the Japanese nuclear plants.
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And while we are contemplating costs of industrialization, and what actions we can take to mitigate those costs, we might think about unwanted consequences of best intentions:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/
moslive/article-1350811/
In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-
green-wind-power-experiment-
Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
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For as many details as are likely to be known, presented in a rational manner, see http://mitnse.com/ .
The Worst Case for Fukushima Daiichi
I begin with this
Rising Sunburn
Dear Jerry:
You asked for numbers on radiation leakage levels on the East coast of Honshu At the stricken Daiichi plant, 400 millisieverts an hour has been reported and confirmed.
By comparison, global fallout radiation peaked around 1963 at 0.15 millisieverts a year
As 400 milliseiverts x 24 hours = one very dead spectator, get ready for billions and billions rhetoric from such as floor their diesel engines to flee the sight of a lit cigar. At last account, one spent fuel pond had commenced boiling.
This is not a good sign.
As the heat is largely from long lived fission products and eventually the surrounding concrete will suffer. The prospect of Wigner energy release isn't pretty either.
-- Russell Seitz
Fellow of the Department of Physics
The problem here is that Russell has left a great deal as exercises for the reader, and thus the conclusions here are not obvious without a bit of work. To begin with, the global fallout radiation is for the entire world, or about 500 million square kilometers. The radiation plume of 400 milliseiverts is from a small area of certainly no more than 100 square meters. If we assume that the Fukushima Daiichi reactors collectively manage a plume the size of a square kilometer, then to get comparable numbers we need to multiply the 400/hour by (24 x 365) to get a year's worth. Assume uniform distribution and divide by 500 million. That comes out to .007 milliseiverts / year. (For purposes of this analysis a seivert is equivalent to 100 rad. A rad is "roentgen equivalent dose" is equivalent to a rem or "roentgen equivalent man", and the various distinctions among units don't matter for the gross estimates we are doing, although I resent enormously the invention of a new unit that differs from the old by orders of magnitude. A chest X-ray is a dosage of about 0.1 mSv.) I know of no scenario in which the Japanese reactors could sustain an emission rate of 400 milliseiverts per hour for a week, much less for a year, nor how there could they generate radioactive fallout uniformly over a square kilometer.
Playing with the numbers and possible scenarios comes up with this analogy. In 1961 the Russians tested a 50 megaton hydrogen weapon. The fireball touched the ground and vaporized a great deal of dirt. The resulting fallout spread across the earth and contributed to that 0.15 milliseiverts mentioned above. If you work at worst case scenarios, you can come up with ways for each of the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi to contribute about one Tsar Bomba equivalent to global fallout.
Assume that each event triggers the next reactor.
The scenarios assumed are each highly unlikely, but they are worst case assumptions, so that in the scenario you get the maximum amount of superheated gumk from each event. Understand that there is no nuclear explosion here. The melting fuel rods are producing enough heat to make superheated steam under high pressure. That converts stuff inside the reactor into oxides that instantly dissolve. The reactor then blows in a manner that sprays the solution into the atmosphere. Not being superheated any longer, the oxides precipitate, and not as tiny little crystals but as fluff and flakes that are carried away by the winds, rise into the stratosphere, and are distributed by the jet stream throughout the northern hemisphere and later into the southern.
The worst case fallout from Fukushima Daiichi is six Tsar Bombas. Russell is quick to add "Of course one Tsar Bomba can ruin your whole day." In fact, though, that depends on where you are and where Tsar Bomba is. On October 30, 1961 I had a rather pleasant day. And be certain to understand that we are not talking about a 50 megaton explosion: only the fallout equivalent. You can't make a nuclear explosion, or even a chemical "dirty bomb" out of Fukushima Daiichi. (Note)
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A stock tip for what it's worth: apparently there will be noticeable and possibly significant releases of radioactivity from Fukushima Daiichi. The winds are from the west. A lot of tuna are caught east of Japan. As Russell Seitz puts it, "Would you like to eat the top of the food chain caught downwind of Fukushima Daiichi?" The inference is that tuna will become more rare, and thus tuna futures will go up. I haven't looked at the commodity market to see if the market has already figured that out. Indeed, I haven't even figured out how to get current tuna futures quotes. Use this information at your own risk, and don't blame me if you lose your shirt.
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I am reliably informed that the reactor crews at Fukushima removed the fuel rods from reactors 4, 5, and 6. The rods were put into a storage pool. There has been an incident at number 4, and the water temperature which ought to be about 40 C has doubled. It is not yet boiling. Removing the rods from the reactor makes the "Tsar Bomba" scenario impossible; the worst case is now 3 Tsar Bomba fallout equivalents. Note that we speak of fallout equivalents, not of a nuclear explosion.
The following numbers are from a very reliable source:
Radiation levels at the plant perimeter reached about 120 milliseiverts/hour at peak and then fell to below 10. Levels in the plant itself reached 400 at peak. Peak levels in Tokyo were 0.801 micro Sv/h, which is detectable but not important even if that were constant for a full year.
The 400 peak in the plant was serious. The 120 peak at the periphery would have been very serious if it had been maintained for many hours, but it was a short peak. The 10 at present (1600 hours Tuesday) is enough that no one should remain at the plant periphery lest they exceed the safe dosage levels, but someone wandering there and being warned away (hard to believe anyone would do that) would come to no harm. The "evacuation" of the plant is normal since the biggest problem here will be workers exceeding their badge limits: if they are not doing a critical job they ought to be sent off site. There could be more spikes at the periphery. Reporters ought to avoid going down to the plant fence for a look.
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And we sailed in the lowlands, lowlands, low...
Much of the media attention to the damage in Japan seems focused on the nuclear events, and not many have noticed that there were some drastic earth shifts involved. Not only did the Japanese islands get moved horizontally by a matter of feet, but there were vertical shifts as well. If you watch the tsunami footage closely you will see that in places the tsunami bores suddenly seem to be running downhill. Some of the coastal plain seems to have shifted to below sea level. It's impossible to know how much without more satellite observations -- GPS among them -- but there could be tens of square miles of former rice paddies now below sea level. That number could be as large as hundreds of square miles. When you see standing water where there were formerly roads and houses, you are likely looking a land which has fallen lower and is now below sea level.
I have a mental picture of Japan with its own Zuider Zee (about 50 by 100 km) which formed in 1287. The industrious Dutch have been pumping the water out and reclaiming the land ever since. Dikes and windmills and time. I can see Japan having to do much the same thing.
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I am told that I am off in my calculations above, but off in the correct direction, which is to say the levels are too large. That's unfortunate in that I don't like to be wrong, but it also emphasizes my point, which is that the absolute worst case has no more global effect than did an event that many weren't even aware of, and which didn't have any great global effect.
The important lesson from Japan is that we took obsolete reactors with old designs and safety features, and subjected them to a 9.0 quake and a very large tsunami, and the damage to the planet is an unfortunate but hardly decisive event. It is now time to stop worrying about this mess until things settle and we can see precisely what we have learned, and factor that into the next generation designs. Note that almost everywhere in the world we are building reactors with much better design and far better safety features than those being destroyed now. Concentration on how awful is the nuclear mess takes our attention off the economic and human disasters from the earthquake and tsunami.
I make no doubt that someone will send me a corrected paragraph.
There is an excellent explication on units at the MIT sitehttp://mitnse.com/ about halfway down the series of essays and topics.
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Typical media:
Contradictory press.
"These are figures that potentially affect health. There is no mistake about that."
<http://www.foxnews.com/world/
2011/03/15/japanese-nuclear-panic-
rises-agency-says-radiation-leaking-
atmosphere/>"The level has come down to the level to cause no harm to human health, according to the report I have received."
<http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/
asiapcf/03/15/japan.nuclear.reactors/?hpt=T1>--- Roland Dobbins
As I go to bed, most of the plant workers have exceeded their annual badge limits and are being sent home. There will be a circulation of atomjacks over the next few weeks as these heroes continue to make sure that the amount of radiation emitted is minimized. It is clear from the numbers which I finally got that what is being emitted is fission products, not actinide oxides. The inventory is not going up the flu. The scenario for that to happen requires that the reactors be intact, and temperatures of live steam in the order of 500 C; that will dissolve a lot of stuff, and as water dissociates you get a pretty corrosive situation. The solution to this is to keep pumping in water. Boric acid is also pumped in to further damp out reactions. The reactors are well below critical reaction rate but there can be some interaction, so absorbing neutrons helps the cooling process. Cooling out will take time, and should be monitored, but it doesn't take the large crew of normal operations to do that, so of course as many workers as possible are being sent home. The main injuries, now that the quake and tsunami are over, will be exceeding dosage limits. The remedy is to be sent home. That is happening but of course since they will need workers over time they send home all that aren't immediately needed.
I am getting weary of the breathless panic in the media including Fox News. For some it's ignorance. For others it's simply trying to keep the story going. But the truth here is that the situation is not good because it is not going away fast, and given the tsunami devastation around the power plant -- including the houses of a number of the plant workers, I would wager -- evacuation is difficult. Plant periphery emissions have been high at peak but haven't been sustained. They will probably spike again. There may be some exposure of people off site, but so far to the best I can get from the numbers, no one off site has received any dosage that would have caused them to be sent home if they worked in the plants.
That ain't good, but it isn't being run over by a freight train, and since most of those people live in a devastated flood plain they have a lot more to worry about than radiation exposure. The situation isn't good, and there will be some more setbacks simply because it is so hard to get into there now, but neither the world nor the Japanese people are in any great danger. Godzilla isn't going to rise up out of the Godzilla Springs resort...
Don't panic. But it never hurts to know where your towel and cup are.
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I'm going to bed. The mushroom cloud watch continues. Meanwhile it is snowing in the devastation areas. Japanese fire, police and military are trying get people food and water and shelter. We should all wish them well. God bless them.
Tomorrow we will have a look at Libya where things are happening. I repeat what I posted yesterday:
Peak levels in Tokyo were 0.801 micro Sv/h, which is detectable but not important even if that were constant for a full year.
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A note on the Tsar Bomba calculation. I originally had a mistaken conversion, because they didn't have Sieverts as units when I last studied this stuff.
Here is the original text:
The problem here is that Russell has left a great deal as exercises for the reader, and thus the conclusions here are not obvious without a bit of work. To begin with, the global fallout radiation is for the entire world, or about 500 million square kilometers. The radiation plume of 400 milliseiverts is from a small area of certainly no more than 100 square meters. If we assume that the Fukushima Daiichi reactors collectively manage a plume the size of a square kilometer, then to get comparable numbers we need to multiply the 400/hour by (24 x 365) to get a year's worth. Assume uniform distribution and divide by 500 million. That comes out to .007 milliseiverts / year. (For purposes of this analysis a seivert is equivalent to a rad. A rad is "roentgen equivalent dose" is equivalent to a rem or "roentgen equivalent man", and the various distinctions among units don't matter for the gross estimates we are doing. A chest X-ray is a dosage of about 15 milliseiverts.) I know of no scenario in which the Japanese reactors could sustain an emission rate of 400 milliseiverts per hour for a week, much less for a year, nor how there could they generate radioactive fallout uniformly over a square kilometer.
(Note that I probably did some numbers wrong but in ways that overestimate the radiation levels so that does not change the conclusions.)
Here is the correct conversion:
1 Sv = 100 rads
Jerry - Read your post regarding the report of a 400 mSv/hr radiation measurement at the Fukushima plant (got there via Instapundit). Thought you should know of errors. ! Sv is equal to 100 rads (not 1 rad). Also, a typical effective dose for a two view (AP and LAT) chest x-ray is 0.1 mSv (not 15 mSv). See for example: http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/safety/index.cfm?pg=sfty_xray
Thought you should know.
I am an Associate Professor of Medicine and Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I teach diagnostic x-ray imaging physics in the Medical Physics graduate program here.
Regards,
Michael S. Van Lysel, Ph.D.
A chest x-ray is 100 microsieverts. The conversions drive me nuts because some are reported in micro and some in milli and -- ah, to heck with it.
There is an excellent explication on units at the MIT sitehttp://mitnse.com/ about halfway down the series of essays and topics.
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