Radiation levels of up to 530 Sieverts per hour were detected inside an inactive Reactor 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex damaged during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami catastrophe, Japanese media reported on Thursday citing the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
A hole of no less than one square meter in size has also been discovered beneath the reactor's pressure vessel, TEPCO said. According to researchers, the apparent opening in the metal grating of one of three reactors that had melted down in 2011, is believed to be have been caused by melted nuclear fuel that fell through the vessel.
The iron scaffolding has a melting point of 1500 degrees, TEPCO said, explaining that there is a possibility the fuel debris has fallen onto it and burnt the hole. Such fuel debris have been discovered on equipment at the bottom of the pressure vessel just above the hole, it added.
The latest findings were released after a recent camera probe inside the reactor, TEPCO said. Using a remote-controlled camera fitted on a long pipe, scientists managed to get images of hard-to-reach places where residual nuclear material remained. The substance there is so toxic that even specially-made robots designed to probe the underwater depths beneath the power plant have previously crumbled and shut down.
well apparently that's a shit ton of radiation, but what's the significance?
Nicholas Cox
It's a shit ton of radiation.
Ryder Long
Join us as Fairewinds’ Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen highlights the many problems facing Japan as he takes you on a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site by combining satellite video, animated graphics and photos to create a comprehensive and easy to follow video tour. archive.is/diKEU
Dial M for Meltdown
youtube.com/watch?v=ZAszZG6GRY8
Jonathan Davis
General Electric Knew Its Reactor Design Was Unsafe … So Why Isn’t GE Getting Any Heat for Fukushima?
Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing — the Mark 1 — was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.
Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday’s earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.
“The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant,” Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. “The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release.” archive.is/y7yII
News station dont report on this at all
Deadly radiation estimated inside reactor vessel News NHK WORLD English4
youtube.com/watch?v=2OG-Q_HmR3Y
Bentley Gray
On Thursday, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the investor-owned utility that operates the Fukushima reactors, reported that it detected a radiation level of 530 sieverts per hour in the containment vessel of reactor 2 at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Even a brief exposure to 530 sieverts of radiation would kill a person.
Back in 2011, there were readings in the dry well holes outside the plant of 100 Sv/hr.
The amount of radioactivity is not increasing, it's just that they finally got a reading right over the hole.
At Chernobyl, they had a reading of over 300 Sv/hr in the control room. The reading at the bottom of the containment vessel would have been impossible to measure–would have burnt out any detection meter available.
Blake Morris
Great! This is a wonderful opportunity for the free market to produce very cheap housing for good obedient proles
Jack Taylor
Are reactors usually this unsafe? I don't know much about nuclear energy.
Carter Scott
So the news is actually good news, meaning that radiation intensity lessened enough for us to measure it?
Carson Sanchez
I 'member hearing about the 'coriums' back in 2012. Seems the reports were true after all.
So what happens when half a ton of of radioactive lava gets to the earth's crust?
John Diaz
No Nuclear power is one of the safest (and cleanest) means of producing energy we have Chernobyl was a horrible designed reactor run by morons, which caused the meltdown But it ran without major problems (except a fire destroying some turbines) after the meltdown until they shut it down in 2000 Chernobyl was quite bad, about 3000 people died from long term damage and 51 from radiation poisioning In Austria (got quite a bit of the radiation because of rain) for example everyone was worried about the radiation killing us all But actually the dose received over a year, after the meltdown was only about 1/4 of a head CT scan And Fukushima was also known to be unsafe and it was hit by a massive earthquake and a huge tsunami So far no one died and most likely it wont have any major effects on any of the workers and the civillians in the area
The nuclear scaremonering is financed by the coal and oil industry
Benjamin Sullivan
This is naive because you have to consider geography….in some places, it is by far the least safe form of energy known to man, in others..it's less so.
Building a nuclear reactor along the geographic zone known as the "ring of fire", IE most of the Pacific, is one of the dumbest possible ideas anyone has ever fucking had in the history of man. Building a source of energy that requires precise work 24/7 in fucking earthquake hell is a recipe for all kinds of inevitable disaster. It isn't a reason of "if" an earthquake occurs on a catastrophic scale, but when.
When you take into consideration earthquakes are an inevitability, and worse, one large enough to crack open all the safety procedures of a reactor are an inevitability, no matter how strong they are.
The answer is just build them on the fucking Atlantic.
Christopher Morgan
I'm more concerned about the fact that nuclear energy is non-renewable. We have ~ 100 years of uranium supply (another 100 years if you include nuclear weapons) and thorium (of which the could be plenty since nobody cares about exploring the Th-reserves) usage is excellent because of hard gamma rays emitted when used in a reactor. Wikipedia can say more about the Th-issue.
Nuclear power could be a great transition to fully renewable, but we cannot win lots of time with it.
Colton James
The reactor case was designed to mitigate radiation, and if the radioactive core "leaves" the case, radion reaching outside increases.
It's pollution that cannot be contained easily.
Jordan Sullivan
ahh the irony of trying to use nuclear power to stave off coal etc just to cause massive environmental disaster and fucking up the oceans
Ian Gray
Fusion could be cool, or, if we want to go a little farther out, The Kugelblitz generator.
The former is in development and buying 100 years could be enough for it to become functioning. The latter is something that we really shouldn't use on planets but that could become useful in the space age. It's basically a tiny black hole that converts matter directly into energy, at it's worst it's a battery that explodes when used up but if you find a good way of feeding it random particles at the same rate as it spews out hawkin radiation, you have a trash to power converter. Only issue is that it mustn't come into contact with large amounts of matter because it's, well, a fucking black hole, so having a single failure with one of those around could end up with the earth getting eaten.
Jordan Parker
I get that but there was already a shit-ton of heavily irradiated water got out. Just wondering what may happen to the molten cores. Guess this can be our demonstration.
This said, I still think nuclear must be part of moving away from coal.
Nolan Phillips
wtf i love capitalism now
Angel Martin
Having nuclear power in a seismically active country like Japan was a mistake.
But Germany? Australia? Eastern US? Go for it I say.
Nicholas Cooper
If they can build skyscrapers which can survive those earthquakes, there's no reason why they can't build nuclear reactors of the same strength. It isn't a technology problem. We have the technology. It's a problem of cost-cutting and capitalism's fundamental inability to plan for the future.
Ian Ramirez
That is what happens when you let capitalists run critical infrastructure for profit.
Jackson Fisher
In the long term, nuclear fission will get less intense so it wouldn't melt the soil under it and stops somewhere on it's track down to the earth's core.
If it reaches the lava down there (very unlikely without help from humans :D ), nothing will happen. Earth's core gets its heat from nuclear fission anyways. Lava is also radioactive to a certain extent. Radon is a radioactive gas that leaks out from the soil after earthquakes (it causes radioactive air pollution). Radon's source is a nuclear process in the Earth. Wikipedia is smarter than me.
Elijah Clark
This is the long, LONG term but yeah I guess. I wonder if it will leave a borehole?
Jayden Gray
How could this happen? Capitalism is the most efficient economic system possible!
Ryan Morgan
Iirc Fukushima is sitting right on top of the aquifer that feeds Tokyo.
So if things get too out of hand one of the most populous cities on the planet might become entirely uninhabitable.
Cameron Anderson
...
Matthew Miller
That's the thing
they don't under the worst possible magnitude like Fukushima
And they're two entirely different methods of construction since those towers are built to move around. You cannot build a nuclear reactor with the same degree of freedom, you just can't. It is containment, not construction.
Building upon areas known for severe Earthquakes of any kind, is not a good idea, and not worth the risk
Nature will destroy all of your plans.
Liam Thomas
First of all, Fukushima failed due to inundation of the cooling system by water from a tsunami. The containment vessel wasn't cracked by the force of the earthquake. It was cracked by pressure building up from overheating nuclear fuel.
Yes you can. Hell, you can put a nuclear reactor on a submarine if you want. If anything it's much, much harder to make a skyscraper earthquake-proof than a nuclear reactor because the skyscraper is inherently unstable. A nuclear reactor can be a flat structure with components able to move independently, connected by flexible pipes. The main danger is either a tsunami or subsidence, and both of those can be prevented through proper structural engineering. Fukushima was badly designed from the very start, and looks even more primitive compared to modern designs (eg. molten salt reactors).
Tyler Collins
"Corium (and also highly irradiated uranium fuel) has an interesting property: spontaneous dust generation" - wikipedia
This means that even the weakest wind or water flow can carry the pollution created by it. These particles can be carried away by water flows in soil, but: the main piece of corium is over than 1000°C so only the particles it leaves can get away AND most water evaporates intantly at the temperature, creating radioactive steam. Also consider that corium melts the soil so corium and soil will eventually mix and it means less fission and less temperature. This means that the corium stops shortly and you get a hot, metallic, huge rock at the bottom of a hole.
There might be simulations about it, but you should ask physicists who specialise in magnetohydrodynamics AND nuclear physics, nuclear energy, reactor physics. I'm just a BSc student. Maybe you can find one on a forum with physics as its main topic.
Connor Bell
Australia is also another option because it exists in the centre of a tectonic plate.
Joseph Butler
tl;dr Corium* hits water underneath power plant. Water and corium evaporates in the air. Air currents blow plutonium** and uranium all over the world.
*Corium (Corium, also called fuel containing material (FCM) or lava-like fuel containing material (LFCM), is a lava-like mixture of portions of a nuclear reactor core, formed during a nuclear meltdown, the most severe class of a nuclear reactor accident.)
**Mixed oxide fuel, commonly referred to as MOX fuel, is nuclear fuel that contains more than one oxide of fissile material, usually consisting of plutonium blended with natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, or depleted uranium. MOX fuel is an alternative to the low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel used in the light water reactors that predominate nuclear power generation. For example, a mixture of 7% plutonium and 93% natural uranium reacts similarly, although not identically, to LEU fuel.
Joshua Cook
Told you about thorium dog!!
Xavier Garcia
It was stuxnet.
John Jones
Revenge for the Rape of Nanjing.
Jace Flores
Which is why we need to have Thorium Reactors ASAP Also I still am a fan of Nuclear Power
Landon Rogers
Reactors are explicitly built on shock absorbers to move around during an earthquake. You don't know what you're talking about.
Landon Brooks
oh boy, it's even worse than i thought
Mason Brown
Interestingly it's not the uranium or plutonium that's dangerous, but the products of fission. Before you but it into the reactor, you could even touch the fuel.
The most radioactive components of corium have short half-lifes ( 300 years or less ). Another piece of information: water needs an incredibly high amount of heat to boil. It cools the corium down quickly. It should also be mentioned that at the start, water would even "just" boil, but it will become its components, hydrogen and oxygen, which can produce an explosion some time later. This is the type of explosion which has blown up Chernobyl and Fukushima. Eventually, there won't be more explosions ( maybe one or two ) but this process is which creates holes on the reactor case ( weakens its structure ).
If the corium is cooled down enought that it doesn't instantly boil water, then nearly no dust leaves the place. Slow evaporation means to turbulent flows that could transport dust. All of it remains in the water body. The one reason for why it's much better with Fukushima than it was with Chernobyl.
Kevin Hernandez
This might help explain Japan recently seeking to remilitarize. Eek.
Lincoln Mitchell
There was a probability of that. It was never officially confirmed. On the other hand, meltdown was also denied at first.
Fukushima has scada operating system that is vulnerable to stuxnet. There was multiple instances of stuxnet found in nuclear power plants.
Speaking at the Canberra Press Club 2013 in Australia, Kasperksy recounted a story from “the Stuxnet time” when a friend of his working in an unnamed nuclear power plant reported that the plant’s computers were “badly infected by Stuxnet”.
Operation Olympic Games was a covert and still unacknowledged campaign of sabotage by means of cyber disruption, directed at Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States and likely Israel. As reported, it is one of the first known uses of offensive cyber weapons.[1] Started under the administration of George W. Bush in 2006, Olympic Games was accelerated under President Obama, who heeded Bush’s advice to continue cyber attacks on Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz.[1] Bush believed that the strategy was the only way to prevent an Israeli conventional strike on Iranian nuclear facilities archive.is/JmTaD
Stuxnet, a computer virus designed to attack servers isolated from the Internet, such as at power plants, has been confirmed on 63 personal computers in Japan since July,archive.is/ksa0S
But there is just not enough infomation. Scada is operating system in fukushima and stuxnet was in use as early as 2007. Also, stuxnet was found in the wild. There is no official conformation it was stuxnet that caused event in fukushima power plant. But, we know for a fact that TEPCO and japan government are liars.
Also, there is a problem with forensics…control room in fukushima in deadly from all the radiation around.
Jace Rodriguez
That's hella dangerous. Those pins are now live and exposed. This is why the pins on the male should be half plastic and the female should have a covering hood. You know, just like the clitoris does.
Christian Stewart
Ching chong, motherfucker
Jordan Mitchell
They should fucking nuke the power plant or something to get rid of it tbh
Aiden Scott
Fukushima did survive an earthquake and it was a plant designed in the 70s with cut corners. It would have been completely safe had the generators not been in the basement and put where they properly should have been.
Jack King
we /fallout/ now
Luke Peterson
it would still have been safe had the porkies and their corrupt engineers requested government assistance to keep the generators running or install new ones.
anyway, there are more than enough reasons against nuclear power regardless of who was responsible for fukushima.
Justin Long
like what? providing cleanest source of electricity might not destroy earth fast enough?
