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No, Japan's Nuclear Reactors Are Not "Stable"
The Japanese government and Tepco claim that the nuclear reactors are "stable" and that radiation releases have subsided to low levels.
But world renowned physicist Michio Kaku - who studied under atom bomb developer Edward Teller - told Democracy Now today:
Tokyo Electric has been in denial, trying to downplay the full impact of this nuclear accident. However, there’s a formula, a mathematical formula, by which you can determine what level this accident is. This accident has already released something on the order of 50,000 trillion becquerels of radiation. You do the math. That puts it right smack in the middle of a level 7 nuclear accident. Still, less than Chernobyl. However, radiation is continuing to leak out of the reactors. The situation is not stable at all. So, you’re looking at basically a ticking time bomb. It appears stable, but the slightest disturbance—a secondary earthquake, a pipe break, evacuation of the crew at Fukushima—could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.
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When the utility says that things are stable, it’s only stable in the sense that you’re dangling from a cliff hanging by your fingernails. And as the time goes by, each fingernail starts to crack. That’s the situation now.
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TEPCO is like the little Dutch boy. All of a sudden we have cracks in the dike. You put a finger here, you put a finger there. And all of a sudden, new leaks start to occur, and they’re overwhelmed.
I suggest that they be removed from leadership entirely and be put as consultants. An international team of top physicists and engineers should take over
I suggested the same thing with regards to BP during the Gulf oil spill.
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The Chinese will invade Japan for humanitarian reasons. Check and Mate, Odumbo
Indeed, US is f'd already, but if china takes Japan US might as well gets used to being slaves.
"if china takes Japan"
What? It would be like someone stealing my land that I had completely polluted and turned into an EPA "brown site". Don't throw me in the brier patch!
Khaaaaaaannnnnn!!!!
You all just don't get it.
goldman sucks is buying all the jap reactors; and will then slice them up & sell them to their clients.
The feral reserve will provide all the fiat paper to goldman at no charge.
The taxpayer will "insure" the "investment".
After the reactors have been "sliced" they will be much safer...
Dikes: don't ask don't tell
I thought an INES scale 7 was just that, an INES scale 7. But apparently it is being subdivided by the media into A) as bad as Chernobyl B) not as bad as Chernobyl. And further subdivided into a)at the beginning b)in the middle c)at the end of scale 7. Someone inform the International Nuclear Event Scale people please.
It's kind of like comparing the Kobe Earthquake to Hurricane Katrina,
They are both awful just in different ways.
That's why the MSM compares to it. No one we personally know were exposed to it. It is like comparing to a previous unknown.
"it is different this time" as a stick save approach is probably more suited to this contaminating clusterfuck, than to financial markets.
"joe, you be coughing alot. maybe you should have that bloody nose looked at." And the system will grind on and on, stepping over the fraud, the dead as if it were expected.
This reminds me of the epilogue to John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up":
"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
- Milton, "Lycidas" "
The reason TEPCO is still in charge is because it gives the government a scapegoat, which serves as spearcatcher until its utility is ended.
The cleanup will take decades, about 30 years by Hitachis estimate. Hopefully emissions will end sooner, thanks to gradual decay of the more active radio nucleotides.
The decision to go to INES 7 and its Chernobyl analogies was to prepare the situation for this summer, when the winds blow inland from Fukushima, which will certainly still be steaming then.
If this radioactive scrapheap burps, Japan may loose a good part of its main island for some centuries.
Mr Kan is playing a loosing hand very well. Unfortunately, keeping order on the 'Titanic' may not be the most useful strategy.
There is in fact nothing anyone can do to fix this mess sooner without tremendous human sacrifice. The place needs an army of "liquidators", who throw their lives at ending this disaster.
Otherwise, Japan will remain in peril.
> this summer, when the winds blow inland from Fukushima,
Possibly the most important, and depressing, comment I've seen on this whole situation. I Googled it to check, and what I found said it was true.
Which makes me think the Japanese government really should be moving heaven and earth to get this thing sorted asap. A real national effort. No expense spared. Because once the wind changes direction they are really screwed.
Monsoon season starts June 1. Anything that goes up will land on Japan.
"The place needs an army of "liquidators", who throw their lives at ending this disaster."
Absolutely right. And after watching The Battle For Chernobyl, I have great respect for the Russian liquidators although I don't know really how well they understood the risks. Nonetheless, they are all heros in my mind.
In any event, I thought I might propose a list of potential inductee liquidators (honorary):
1) Scientists, engineers, and construction people reponsible for design and construction of the Fukushima plant (GE included)
2) All Tepco management, in order of seniority, highest go first
3) Japanese nuclear engineers and operators
4) Public relations officers of the government. They can shovel up the random radioactive ejecta.
And of course, if any of you pro-nuke folk are so confident about the safety and shut-down status of the plant, then by all means, please get yourself out there and give them a hand!
5) All nuclear engineers and operators worldwide. We won't be needing them anymore.
:-) Thank you for that!
Agree with the comment about the army of liquidators as well. Surely the "evacuation of the crew" - or more likely them succumbing to the radiation through excessive exposure is only a matter of time? Even if the fukushima 50 is the fukushima 300 how long will they last having an annual exposure in 30 mins of work....even if they were prepared to work to the death? Manpower is the bottleneck here, and they're either going to run out of willing employees or get so little done with the few workers they do have doing 3 minute shifts.
I know they have drafted in firefighters nationwide to work on this. Perhaps they are rotating them in as well. However, at the moment this seems to be on a volunteer basis. "Volunteer" might be a strong word as I know a few members of the service and not one person declined the duty - they see it as their duty to protect the public.
Really an army of robots, expertly run by samurai willing to donate their lives.
Per The Yomiuri Shimbun
On April 4, Toshiba made a proposal on decommissioning to TEPCO, jointly with four U.S. companies, including its subsidiary Westinghouse Electric Co. Under that plan, the decommissioning work would be completed in about 10 years at the earliest.
Specifically, the work of cooling the interior of the overheated reactors and removing debris would be done in the next six months, while the following five years would be spent on removing fuel rods from the reactor and spent fuel rods from a storage pool. In the final five years, the buildings housing the reactors and other equipment would be dismantled, along with the reactors themselves, while the contaminated ground would undergo soil improvement and the whole lot would be left vacant.
Per Bloomberg
Damaged reactors at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant may take three decades to decommission and cost operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said.
Smack in the middle of a level 7? Where does 8 start?
Also, apparently, if a black swan fucks another black swan bad things happen?
You don't say.
No, I'm not a fan of nuclear. No, I don't think this is going to end well. No, I don't have any situational updates to add to the conversation, but by dog I'm sick of reading uninformative copy written because people think that by publishing opinions about Fukushima to the right audience and predicting an appropriately bad/good outcome that punters will read it and cover the author with plaudits even though the article is weak on content and high on supposition.
</rant>
It is not going to end well, maybe, cause it is bad and may never end.
It is the new "stable".
You are going the have to deal with reading between the lines, because the blackout, has begun. Same old story, same old song and dance. But the more obvious it is, the more trivial it becomes.
This may have been the "new Stable" for some time now.
Here is a EPA page you can go to that still has the historical graphs of the 'Gross Beta Air Monitoring Data' from all the cities they have balloons in. HARD COPY THEM BEFORE THEY ARE GONE.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/rert/radnet-data-map.html
Click on some of the western states balloons like Billings, MT, Las Vegas, NV, Rich-land, WA, Rapid City, SD, Bakersfield, CA, Grand Jct, CO, Salt Lake City, UT. If you look at the pattern of a bunch of them, starting from the west, you will notice that just before the Japan quake there were huge spikes in the days prior to the horrible Event on the 11th.
Again...look at the pattern on these graphs that shows spikes before the Mar 11th quake that is marked by a black line on the Gross Beta Air Monitoring Data graphs and especially Billings, Mt and Rich-land, WA. The question is, why were there spikes that were even higher then what is coming in now and WHY was no one told? Where did all that come from? Was there a radiation release before the quake and what could have caused that? What was in it? Last, why did the pres go south PDQ after all this happened?
Please check this out and share it if you choose to. Everyone is all concerned about what has seemingly become the new norm now, when it appears that we have been getting hit with some thing from some where for some time.
Thanks again for your great works all.
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I just took a look and you're right, there are HUGE spikes in the days prior to the 11th. This is quite troubling... anyone here have an idea (however far-fetched) what this means??
Far fetched? I can do that.
The tectonic plate that is crushing Japan is the same one that is retreating from the Western US.
So just before the eathquake that moved Japan's coast by 8 feet and shifted the axis of the earth altering the length of the day, some areas around the rest of the plate moved/cracked/vented releasing small amounts of radioactive geological, err, stuff.
You may have just discovered the next avenue of exploration in terms of earthquake prediction.
There. Far fetched and uninformed. All boxes ticked.
Didn't we have some sort of solar flare(cause) around that time?
Everything is going to be all right.
Goldman is putting together a team to figure out how to profit from this tragedy.
Obama has his own team made up of enlightened Hollywood stars and key intelectuals from his cabinet. After this evenings entertainment they will begin deliberations and produce a report next year.
What is everyone so worried about, the $355 million in cuts versus the $38 billion promised?
Remember, it is all on the level.
As we speak Goldman is planning to sell "tragedy in a can" where everyone can purchase a little piece of someone's misery. A contest for naming it is underway currently. Charts and graphs to follow. Sure to be a huge hit.
Doesn't the Red Cross already have a prime chunk of that market?
Obama - the "Nuclear Renaissance Man", WOW. The doctor uses the term "Faustian Bargain" - someone who sells his soul to the devil for unlimited power. We should have a national debate about nuclear energy because the government must insure all these nuclear reactors. We, the taxpayers, are the ones who will ultimately have to pay the price for any accident -- in more ways than one.
No national debate is needed or appropriate. Those kinds of "debates" are always pre-scripted by the predators-that-be to rationalize what they want.
What is needed is to require nuclear power plants and other endeavors that potentially cause massive damage to purchase private insurance that covers at least 1000% of the worst possible worst case scenario. Why 1000% and not 100%? Because if the 100% was fully honest, the cost of 1000% would be identical, that's why (because "it literally couldn't happen").
And, of course, the government must have ZERO to do with the insurance, and the insurers must have more than enough assets to pay the full amount of the insurance. That would fix this mess... not that fully independent analyses of the designs should not also be performed before they are built.
Of course none of this will be done, because the governments and large corporations are simply fictions. They are "predators DBA government" and "predators DBA corporations". Period. It is long past time to eliminate all governments and corporations... and other fictions too.
Not only won't Wall Street insure reactors, they mostly won't finance them either.
An electric utility in Misssouri is trying to pull a screw-job on it's rate payers and voters by lobbying the state legislature [now with more Reps.] to recind a long time successful ballot initiative that protects the public from being forced to fund plant construction.
Missouri voters took a pre-emptive step to protect themsleves from with a No Consturction Work in Progress law.
http://www.movotesconservation.org/cwip.aspx
If your state doesn't have a No CWIP law, this may be a good time to get a ballot initiative going to block forced public funding of nuclear power plants...and hope the party of "business interests" in your state is too disorganized and stupid to fight it successfully.
Check here to see if it is possible in your state--
http://www.ballot.org/pages/initiative_process
Haven't seen much out of the apologist shills lately telling us, dismissively, how our concerns are overblown, how nothing bad could have happened because all 4 reactors were in cold shutdown.
To external appearances, they have seemed stunningly slow to respond and inept once they did. Maybe I am misperceiving this, though, and there never was anything useful to do besides prevaricate about the extent of the disaster.
The shilling has died down a bit. It may be because every time they make a comparison to chest X-rays, a dozen people immediately point out that this is an invalid comparison, as external and internal emitters cannot be compared in this way. They are losing credibility with every false comparison and every empty claim of safety.
Also, I'm noticing on a number of different blogs that many more people are now aware of the Price Anderson Act and taxpayer backing of nuclear accidents, hence raising obvious and persistent questions about the laughably faulty risk assessments of nuclear utilities. I think nukesters have taken the lie-low approach and are waiting for the dust to settle. At least in Washington, it is well-known how to override the will of the people through bribery (lobbying), so why even bother making the case to the people? Especially when they see they are clearly losing the battle of ideas.
To clarify, that sentence should really be:
To external appearances, the Japanese have seemed stunningly slow to respond and inept once they did.
I am betting the Japanese people would prefer reading papyrus by the light of oil-dipped rushes than building another nuke plant.
I am betting the Japanese people would prefer to set old people on fire and use them to heat their homes before
building another Nuke Plant.
No, that would be the rational reaction.
The actual human reaction when you have sunk that much time, effort, money, and credibility into something, is to go deeper, and "double down" on your failed bet. That's why people get addicted to massively-multiplayer games and fundamentalist religions. They're completely retarded, but the sacrifices they require make you buy into them all the more.
yeah the shills stopped saying "Containment isn't breached".
The shills have stopped writing anything period. The reactors are awaiting concrete but the smug nuclear energy apologists have been buried in tons of their own happyspeak bullshit already.
Spent fuel pool at Fukushima reactor 4 has become open air reactor as spent fuel rods are admitted to be damaged and undergoing nuclear fission since March 13th:
http://saposjoint.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=2657&p=31780#p31780
Thanks I linked you here too
http://oahutrading.blogspot.com/p/japan-nuclear-information.html
Tepco claims the fuel rods in #4 are covered in water but damaged and still very hot. Radiation above the water is above normal.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/13_35.html?play
There's plenty going on here to keep an eye on without the sensationalist BS. Take it somewhere else Ivars.
"Some of the spent nuclear fuel rods stored in the No. 4 reactor building of the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi power plant were confirmed to be damaged, but most of them are believed to be in sound condition, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday.
The firm known as TEPCO said its analysis of a 400-milliliter water sample taken Tuesday from the No. 4 unit’s spent nuclear fuel pool revealed the damage to some fuel rods in such a pool for the first time, as it detected higher-than-usual levels of radioactive iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137."
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/85259.html
I junked you for being a fool.
That is certainly your prerogative. I took exception to the assertion that reactor 4's SFP has become an "open air reactor" and that fission has been ongoing since the 13th. There has been no "admission" by anyone except Sapo/Ivars that I can tell and independent observations don't support such an assertion.
The situation is quite serious enough as it is without ego inspired yellow journalism hyping and sensationalizing reality in order to draw clicks to a worthless blog where someone holds long conversations with themselves.
It's amazing just how much information I get, days or weeks ahead of the MSM, reading the posts here at ZH. If someone is having long conversations with themselves then I am very interested in listening to them. Perhaps your attitude about this blog would change if A) you weren't a troll or B) you used the information gathered here to guide your own research on the issues posted.
ROFL ... rock on dude :). I've got enough technical background to recognize histrionics and enough dedication to the concept of truth to discard hysterical rants as a source of viable information :).
junking you on general principle...
Given the current situation (classification of a level 7 event) would you believe that this is mass hysteria or an actual nuclear event worthy of local, regional, continental, global recognition..?
When they say stable maybe they mean full of horse shit.
Funny!