Japan Tsunami

[Texsox]

Thank you sir. So they were using sea water because it was plentiful?

[Balta1701]

Thank you sir. So they were using sea water because it was plentiful?

Because after the tsunami it was all they had. They were pumping in every bit of water they can find, because "dry rods" are worse than "salt-crusted wet rods". Dry rods are going to be pumping out radiation into the air.

[southsider2k5]

UK sources are reporting that 5 of the 50 nuclear workers who stayed behind at the plant have died, and another 15 may have received lethal radiation doses.

 

I'm surprised any of them are still alive to be honest.

[Balta1701]

I'm surprised any of them are still alive to be honest.

Radiation is not a fast killer. It is a slow, painful, godawful killer.

[Texsox]

We owe them an unrepayable debt.

[southsider2k5]

Radiation is not a fast killer. It is a slow, painful, godawful killer.

 

Not in the levels these guys are getting. They are pretty much at ground zero of a nuclear bomb.

[Balta1701]

Not in the levels these guys are getting. They are pretty much at ground zero of a nuclear bomb.

Actually, that's not the levels they're getting. Ground zero of a nuclear bomb is like hanging out close to the remnants of the Chernobyl fuel pile.

 

These guys are getting lethal doses, but "immediately lethal" is several orders of magnitude higher.

[Milkman delivers]

UK sources are reporting that 5 of the 50 nuclear workers who stayed behind at the plant have died, and another 15 may have received lethal radiation doses.

 

That's an incredible display of heroism. I hope and assume their families will be well taken care of, and they should also receive the highest possible civilian honors in Japan.

[Texsox]

^^

True heroism IMHO is having a choice, these guys presumably could have gotten out of town, but stayed.

[StrangeSox]

The difference is not the boiling point, it is what happens in the event of evaporation. If you evaporate fresh water, you're left with only small amounts of deposits. If you evaporate ocean water, you're left with substantial deposits of salt.

 

If you're pumping salt water into a reactor around fuel rods, and that water is evaporating, that deposits the salt on the fuel rods. The fuel rod design is such that they're supposed to get really hot in the middle but have reduced temperature at the edges where they release that heat into the water. A diffusion gradient is set up in temperature. However, if you wrap the fuel rod in salt, you create another barrier to effective heat removal into the water. The salt acts as an insulation layer, causing the temperature in the fuel rod to go up as heat removal becomes less efficient. If heat removal becomes less efficient, this can cause the rods to reach their solidus (melting point), at which point the rod integrity will fail, you have a meltdown, and potential release of the material from the rods.

 

Furthermore, salt in water is an electrolyte, it's corrosive. If you're pumping salt water through metal pipes, that dramatically enhances the corrosion of those pipes and can cause additional spillage.

 

This post is 100% correct.

[Balta1701]

The Guardian is now running with a statement saying that one of the reactor cores has completely melted down and flowed out of its containment vessel.

 

[Steve9347]

The difference is not the boiling point, it is what happens in the event of evaporation. If you evaporate fresh water, you're left with only small amounts of deposits. If you evaporate ocean water, you're left with substantial deposits of salt.

 

If you're pumping salt water into a reactor around fuel rods, and that water is evaporating, that deposits the salt on the fuel rods. The fuel rod design is such that they're supposed to get really hot in the middle but have reduced temperature at the edges where they release that heat into the water. A diffusion gradient is set up in temperature. However, if you wrap the fuel rod in salt, you create another barrier to effective heat removal into the water. The salt acts as an insulation layer, causing the temperature in the fuel rod to go up as heat removal becomes less efficient. If heat removal becomes less efficient, this can cause the rods to reach their solidus (melting point), at which point the rod integrity will fail, you have a meltdown, and potential release of the material from the rods.

 

Furthermore, salt in water is an electrolyte, it's corrosive. If you're pumping salt water through metal pipes, that dramatically enhances the corrosion of those pipes and can cause additional spillage.

Balta. I am impressed. You know your s***.

[StrangeSox]

The Guardian is now running with a statement saying that one of the reactor cores has completely melted down and flowed out of its containment vessel.

 

Sloppy wording, should be reactor vessel. Everything is still inside the containment building.

[Balta1701]

Sloppy wording, should be reactor vessel. Everything is still inside the containment building.

If they've detected plutonium in the soil outside the building, then some of that plutonium has been mobilized from inside the containment "building" to outside of the building.

 

The bulk of the mass is certainly still in the building, but there is a pathway for direct exiting of plutonium into the environment.

[southsider2k5]

What an amazing story. In the US we'd be filing lawsuits and rioting over things. In Japan, people are pretty much volunteering to die for the good of the country.

 

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/04/wo...ar-old-20110704

 

Japanese retirees volunteer to work in stricken nuclear plant

COLUMN ONE

A pair of 72-year-old scientists, saying they have much to be grateful for and little to lose, have formed the Skilled Veterans Corps, enlisting volunteers willing to venture into the radioactive Fukushima Daiichi plant. Officials have accepted their offer.

 

Yasuteru Yamada, 72, is a co-founder of the Skilled Veterans Corps. Dismissing concerns, Yamada says hell be dead from something else long before any radiation-caused cancer can kill him.

 

Yasuteru Yamada, 72, is a co-founder of the Skilled Veterans Corps. Dismissing… (For The Times, Tom Miyagawa Coulton)

July 04, 2011|By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times

 

They were two old friends catching up over coffee, retirees swapping stories and gasping at the unfolding nuclear nightmare at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

 

But instead of merely throwing their hands up over the disaster that shook the plant in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Nobuhiro Shiotani and Yasuteru Yamada, both 72-year-old scientists, decided they could do something to help.

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They devised a plan that some have called heroic, others misguided and suicidal. They would enlist a small army of researchers and other skilled workers to come out of retirement to venture inside the radioactive plant and use their expertise to help stabilize its stricken reactors.

 

In early April, Yamada got on the phone to former colleagues and long-lost contacts. He wrote letters and emails, and joined Twitter to get the word out to 2,500 people. At last count, 400 men and women have signed up for the Skilled Veterans Corps: former electrical engineers, forklift operators, high-altitude and heavy construction workers, military special forces members, two cooks and even a singer who wants to help.

 

The youngest is 60, the oldest 78.

 

Many call the volunteers crazy, dismissing them as a Suicide Corps — an over-the-hill gang with a death wish. Others say that the effort should be left up to those who allowed the problem to occur — the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as Tepco. The group of skilled veterans, however, insists this is no pie-in-the-sky dream, but a plan based on real science, if not a bit of grim math.

 

They ask, why risk the health of the younger generation to perform such work in a perilous radioactive environment? Cells reproduce more slowly in the bodies of older people, they reason, so any cancer caused by absorbed radioactivity would take much longer to form.

 

Yamada says he'll be dead from something else long before any radiation-caused cancer can kill him.

 

"Young workers who may reproduce a younger generation and are themselves more susceptible to the effects of radiation should not be engaged in such work," said the retired environmental engineer and consultant. "This job is a call for senior citizens like me."

 

Volunteer Kazuko Sasaki, 69, said that when she and her husband told their son of their decision to join up, he just shook his head and said, "It's your life."

 

Friends have questioned her decision. "They say I have absolutely no idea what it's like to get cancer. It's a horrible ordeal. And I tell them that I could get cancer anyway, even if I didn't go."

 

Yamada and Shiotani, a retired physicist and chemist, felt personally responsible for the catastrophe at the Fukushima plant.

 

Even though neither had ever been to Fukushima, it was their generation that had applied its know-how to build the facility in the late 1960s and 1970s. They had also benefited greatly from the nuclear power it generated — which provided the heat and light necessary for their laboratory work, warming the bottles they fed to their children. Many people their age, they say, remain strong advocates for the future of nuclear power in Japan.

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"This nuclear reactor was the brainchild of our generation," Shiotani said. "And we feel it's our job to clean up the mess."

 

The pair started a website for the Skilled Veterans Corps, which lays out its reasoning. Our generation, "in particular those of us who hailed the slogan that 'Nuclear Power is Safe,' should be the first to join," it says. "This is our duty to the next generation and the one thereafter."

 

Yamada and Shiotani have met with government and Tepco officials, who have given preliminary approval to enter the facility, which is off-limits to the public, to help design a replacement for the reactor cooling system that was knocked out by the tsunami. No date for entering the plant has yet been set.

 

In the coming weeks, the volunteers plan their first meeting to map out a strategy, and Yamada and Shiotani are continuing to talk with government and company officials about when they might go inside.

 

Government and Tepco officials did not respond to interview requests. At this point, officials are trying to enter the stricken reactors amid a hot radioactive environment to assess how to replace the plant's cooling system.

 

Yamada says he's nobody's hero, just someone trying to preserve youth in a country where roughly one-quarter of the population is 60 and older, making Japan one of the oldest societies in the world.

 

Supporters say group members are perfecting the art of growing old fearlessly. Shiotani explained the venture in an email to his graduate advisor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied material sciences in the 1960s.

 

His mentor responded with applause. "I told him that it was a tremendous thing he's doing, showing such loyalty to his nation in a time of need," said professor emeritus Theodore Rowland.

[southsider2k5]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/20-milli...%2C810045719873

 

Some 5 to 20 million tons of debris--furniture, fishing boats, refrigerators--sucked into the Pacific Ocean in the ake of Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami are moving rapidly across the Pacific. Researchers from the University of Hawaii tracking the wreckage estimate it could approach the U.S. West Coast in the next three years, the UK Daily Mail reports.

 

"We have a rough estimate of 5 to 20 million tons of debris coming from Japan," University of Hawaii researcher Jan Hafner told Hawaii's ABC affiliate KITV, the Daily Mail wrote Monday.

 

Crew members from the Russian training ship the STS Pallada "spotted the debris 2,000 miles from Japan," last month after passing the Midway islands, the Mail wrote. Among its contents: "pieces of furniture, some appliances, anything that can float,"--including a 20-foot Fukushima fishing vessel the Russian crew salvaged, Hafner told KITV, according to the paper.

 

Crew on Russian ship STS Pallada spotted the debris almost 2,000 miles from Japan, including a fishing boat from …

 

Researchers say up to 20 mn tons of debris from Japan's March 11 tsunami could reach U.S. West Coast in three years. …

 

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan on March 11 has left some 20,000 people dead or missing.

[southsider2k5]

Amazing work by Google with before and after shots.

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/...sc=fb&cc=fp

[Kyyle23]

Amazing work by Google with before and after shots.

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/...sc=fb&cc=fp

 

Every once in a while Mother Earth will tell us all who is really in charge

[Balta1701]

On Vancouver Island, B.C., The Sun newspaper reported that wreckage from Japan began appearing this month. "In or around Dec. 5th the first item or two of some consequence was found," Tofino Mayor Perry Schmunk told the newspaper. "Some lumber came ashore that had Japanese export stamps on it."

 

Two weeks ago, CNN affiliate KIRO in Seattle showed video footage of what it said was debris from the March 11 tsunami - at least 10 Japanese buoys - on the Washington coast. “That’s about as good as the evidence gets for first arrivals,” retired oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer told KIRO.

 

More reports of mundane Japanese items - such as bottles and toothbrushes - popping up along North American shores are beginning to emerge.

 

But that’s just the beginning, experts say.

 

,....

The recent findings have not come without debate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has denied that the debris can be definitively traced back to the tsunami. "Fingerprinting it back is challenging," NOAA's Peter Jackson told CBS News.

 

But scattered news reports along the Pacific coast paint a different picture: A man found seven white Styrofoam floats shaped like 55-gallon drums in late September, Alaskan news station KTVA reported recently. The man sent photos of the floats to Ebbesmeyer, who said they were linked with oyster farms in Japan.

 

Hawaiian researchers are preparing studies that may allow more precise forecasts of the debris field spawned from the March 11 tsunami.

 

Tsunami debris in Hawaii at 2013? Maybe sooner

 

While the significance of the floating mass has yet to be fully understood by scientists, there is concern about what hazardous materials are out there.

 

Radioactivity will be of minimal concern despite the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant – “The debris is not that radioactive,” Kaku said - but the worst-case scenario could mean large boats and unmanageable clots of trash ramming into sensitive areas such as coral reefs or blocking navigation routes into Hawaii and along the U.S. West Coast.

 

"The first problem is hazardous materials, then we have toxic chemicals and also human body parts, sad to say," Kaku said Thursday. "Realize that over 3,700 Japanese are still unaccounted for and are expected to have been washed into the Pacific Ocean."

CNN