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Nuclear Plant Operator: Water in Pool Storing Spent Nuclear Fuel Rods May Be Boiling, an Ominous Sign for Release of Radioactivity
Kyodo News reports:
A nuclear crisis at the quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant deepened Tuesday as fresh explosions occurred at the site and its operator said water in a pool storing spent nuclear fuel rods may be boiling, an ominous sign for the release of high-level radioactive materials from the fuel.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the water level in the pool storing the spent fuel rods at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant's No. 4 reactor may have dropped, exposing the rods.
The firm said it has not yet confirmed the current water level or water temperature in the pool and will try to pour water into the facility from Wednesday through holes that were created following an explosion earlier Tuesday in the walls of the building that houses the reactor.
Unless the spent fuel rods are cooled down, they could be damaged and emit radioactive substances.
***
The utility said it could not deny the possibility that the early morning explosion was caused by hydrogen generated by a chemical reaction involving the exposed spent nuclear fuel and vapor.
But it's not just reactor number 4. Kyodo News notes:
Edano said water temperatures in the pools at the No. 5 and No. 6 reactors at the Fukushima plant have been rising as well.
***
The agency said among the three, the situation is the severest at the No. 4 reactor because all the fuel rods are stored in the pool due to the change of the reactor's shroud. At the No. 5 and No. 6 reactors, up to one-third of the rods are being kept in the pools. The more fuel rods that are kept in a pool, the more radioactive substances could be emitted.
To see why this is such an ominous development, let me provide some background.
The Washington Post notes:
At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.
“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.
People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.
Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.
NPR provides the following graphic, showing the spent fuel pools at the top of the reactors:
Please compare the location of the spent fuel pools (near the roofline) in the NPR graphic with the following photograph:
In some of the reactors - especially those to the right of the photo - the area in which the spent fuel pools are located appears to be severely damaged.
Nuclear expert Frank N. von Hippel explained on MSNBC that heat would release all radioactivity in the spent fuel rods, so that we could get a "worst case scenario" even if we never have a Chernobyl-like meltdown:
(starting 10 minutes into video).
The Christian Science Monitor writes:
A particular feature of the 40-year old General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor model – such as the six reactors at the Fukushima site – is that each reactor has a separate spent-fuel pool. These sit near the top of each reactor and adjacent to it, so that cranes can remove spent fuel from the reactor and deposit it in a swimming-pool-like concrete structure near the top of the reactor vessel, inside each reactor building.
If the hydrogen explosions damaged those pools – or systems needed to keep them cool – they could become a big problem. Keeping spent-fuel pools cool is critical and could potentially be an even more severe problem than a reactor meltdown, some experts say. If water drains out, the spent fuel could produce a fire that would release vast amounts of radioactivity, nuclear experts and anti-nuclear activists warn.
"There should be much more attention paid to the spent-fuel pools," says Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the anti-nuclear power Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "If there's a complete loss of containment [and thus the water inside], it can catch fire. There's a huge amount of radioactivity inside – far more than is inside the reactors. The damaged reactors are less likely to spread the same vast amounts of radiation that Chernobyl did, but a spent-fuel pool fire could very well produce damage similar to or even greater than Chernobyl."
But another scientist said while the spent-fuel pools have capacity for high volumes of radioactive material, the amount of fuel currently in the spent-fuel pool might be less than widely believed, based on data he has seen showing only about as much spent fuel in the vulnerable pool as contained in the reactor.
The Nation notes:
If the spent rods start to burn, huge amounts of radioactive material would be released into the atmosphere and would disperse across the Northern Hemisphere.
Unlike the reactors, spent fuel pools are not—repeat not—housed in any sort of hardened or sealed containment structures. Rather, the fuel rods are packed tightly together in pools of water that are often several stories above ground.
“With damaged [fuel rod] pools, we are talking about things that were never considered a credible threat,” said Alvarez.
Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action Kyoto, met Fukushima plant and government officials in August 2010. “At the plant they seemed to dismiss our concerns about spent fuel pools,” said Mioko Smith. “At the prefecture, they were very worried but had no plan for how to deal with it.”
Remarkably, that is the norm—both in Japan and in the United States. Spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not equipped with backup water-circulation systems or backup generators for the water-circulation system they do have.
The exact same design flaw is in place at Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant of the same GE design as the Fukushima reactors. At Fukushima each reactor has between 60 and 83 tons of spent fuel rods stored next to them. Vermont Yankee has a staggering 690 tons of spent fuel rods on site.
Nuclear safety activists in the United States have long known of these problems and have sought repeatedly to have them addressed. At least get backup generators for the pools, they implored. But at every turn the industry has pushed back, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consistently ruled in favor of plant owners over local communities.
After 9/11 the issue of spent fuel rods again had momentary traction. Numerous citizen groups petitioned and pressured the NRC for enhanced protections of the pools. But the NRC deemed “the possibility of a terrorist attack...speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action.” So nothing was done—not even the provision of backup water-circulation systems or emergency power-generation systems.
Similarly, Pro Publica points out:
The plants of that design also store highly radioactive spent fuel in pools outside the protective containment structure that surrounds the reactor itself.
Opponents of nuclear power have warned for years that if these pools drain, either by accident or terrorist attack, it could lead to a fire and a catastrophic release of radiation.
***
The nuclear industry says fears about the storage pools at U.S. plants are overblown because the pools are protected and, even if fuel is exposed to the air, the chance of a fire is incredibly small. And with limited information being released about conditions at Fukushima, the status of spent fuel pools is uncertain.
***
At Fukushima, these tanks are attached to the outside of the reactor’s containment structure. The pools are deep – typically the fuel lies under 25 feet of water. Although the concrete-and-steel containment is designed to trap radiation leaks, there is no such protection for pools outside.
***
Many plants have been operating for 20 years and have tons of used fuel in cooling pools.
The concern is that if the water in the pools ever drops too low, the zirconium cladding that holds the radioactive fuel pellets would begin to heat up and eventually burn. And if it did, the smoke from the fire could carry radiation away from the plant because the pool is outside the containment.
“People should be very concerned because the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has acknowledged that spent fuel pools that are not located inside the containment have the potential to cause catastrophic accidents,” said Diane Curran, a lawyer who has represented environmental groups and governments in challenges to fuel storage plans.
“These are not high-probability accidents,” Curran said, “but we have seen how low-probability accidents can happen.”
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress asked the National Academies to study the vulnerability of spent fuel to a terrorist attack.
The resulting 2005 report, “Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage ,” concluded that “an attack which partially or completely drains a plant's spent fuel pool might be capable of starting a high-temperature fire that could release large quantities of radioactive material into the environment.”
The report found that the vulnerability of the spent fuel to fire depends on how old it is and how it is stored. As the fuel ages, it cools, so it becomes less susceptible to a fire.
“The industry standard is that fuel that is older than five years can be dry-stored,” said Kevin Crowley, director of the nuclear and radiation board for the National Research Council, part of National Academies.
The report recommended that the nuclear industry take steps to decrease the vulnerability of the storage pools to fire. Some of those steps are classified, Crowley said. But he said others, like making sure there were fire hoses or spray systems above the pools, were pretty simple.
***
The nuclear industry disagreed with the national academy about the vulnerability of the spent fuel to a fire.
»
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Kyodo reports that the US military is to fly an unmanned plane over Fukushima, equipped with infrared sensors, to give an aerial view of what is going on.
Barrrrryyyy, Barrryyyy, Barrryyyy com eout and playyyyyyy
GW...thanks again for wading through the BS and propaganda to expose the facts.
Too many if's involved in this situation.
The underlying message here is that TPTB have already decided, both in Japan and the US, that the liklihood of an 'incident' is so low that it isn't worth the incremental cost to our profitability to protect your lives - any or all of them. However, do keep paying your taxes - or else.
Remember the "Cheney Doctrine?" The idea was that even a tiny threat to American hegemony was too risky, and therefore should be quashed with the full shock and awe of our invincible military power. But when it comes to protecting the profitability of large multinational business activities that place the public at risk, we take the opposite approach. We look only at the unlikely mathematical odds of the hazards, never at their apocalyptic consequences. "It would be a disaster, but it'll probably never happen, so let's not worry about it."
As I recall, at the moment the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the big shots from Halliburton and BP were celebrating the successful completion of the well.
+ 1
Why is it the more I get a grasp of this disaster the more I understand my time in life is just wasted paying attention to all this?
Sure I get the inclination to find $ and play along as to increase the little reserves I do have but then realize this game we here are watching is just a manifest destiny.
I am addicted to this site unfortunately. Learning is inspiration and this is the best school going.
Not to say it is anything like the opiates of the scumsuckingslime that have motivated this open analysis enterprise but none the less - where focus goes energy flows.
How's it feel to you?
The waves are big but my back hurts - maybe I am just upset at this and blaming...
Ramble on
I'll tell you why, art, not that it's never been said before, but can you handle it?
Art...you have clearly lost your fucking mind. I use tin foil to channel in positive energy and I only let the voices in my head speak one at a time. I get tired of all that crosstalk and gibberish. So welcome to the dark side. Mu hu ha ha ha
Why dosn't the US just bomb the reactors back to the stone age ?
I guess the theory would be that in the stone age there were no reactors?
Well, there's one in earth's core, and another one in the sun, and...
Oh hey, maybe we can bomb them back to the Oort cloud? Or the Ordovician? Back to the big bang?
Because they have not strapped all the fucking assholes like you to the bomb to make sure the idea works
But the time to get started on that project is now!
ABC News: Nuclear Crisis: Rising Radiation Levels Halt Work at Fukushima Plant
Dr. Michio Kaku, a credible scientist:
Einstein = theory of relativity
Kaku = string theory
.
I think we now know that the super strong zirconium shell doesn't matter. The spent fuel rods, aka the real problem, are not inside the zirconium shell.
Dr. Michio Kaku from the series The Universe:
http://www.tv.com/the-universe/parallel-universes/episode/1236985/trivia...
I am feeding a Stegosaurus as I type this.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Bablylon is glowing.....
"Babylon is glowing..."
27 Signs That The Nuclear Crisis In Japan Is Much Worse Than Either The Mainstream Media Or The Japanese Government Have Been Telling Us...
http://seenoevilspeaknoevilhearnoevil.blogspot.com/
WTF isn't this 2 days old news?
The MORE ominus sign is that after2 days now of reports of low water/rising temps/temp evacs due to high rads/possible fires/ the GW report is.....it may be boiling...
Presentation is on point as usual though..
Slow day?
had no idea there were so many nuclear experts in the world, we're even exhuming american revolutionary war heros to get their 2cents on the situation
Not Revolutiony War Hero, he's the King of Cut and Paste!
Expect some totally useless Guest Blog from Charles Hugh Smith next.
GW, you always do agreat job digging in decifering the situation.
Used fuel rods, TAKING DECADES TO COOL?
Disaster, lying in wait, baby, like a kick in the nuts, when your not looking.
"Cutting and Pasting" coupled with a referance to the source is called: "Citing." This is a good thing and is actually the preferred way of conveying accurate, verifyable information amoung academic and scientific circles because anyone who doubts the source can actually look it up and verify the information.
Why don't you tell us why each of Geo's citations is incorrect - and please include your sources...
why don't you dazzle us with your insight then
I wouldn't waste people's time masquerading "insight" on a disaster of the magnitude with a cut and paste job.
All this does is lower signal to noise ratio.
Original content is becoming ever more sparse on this site.
You dazzle us instead.
Edit--
Picked up a twitter that CNN reports evacuations around Plant #2 now.
Why 'waste' your own time responding then.
Didn't we discuss this matter once before already?
Geroge your post has just sent the markets into freefall, no wait...
Take a deep breath everyone.
I repeat...
The international community is responding superbly. Everyone is concerned. (BTW, the BBC has the calmest, most balanced and authoritative coverage.) When a crisis occurs, whether it is a personal, family, national or international situation, it is vital to work out what is important and what is urgent. When these things are confused and not clearly delineated confusion reigns and mistakes are made. The disaster relief teams of certain Western Nations have a whole system of prioritising when such events arise. But some situations push the limits of all involved. The problem here is that the earthquake was a one in twenty year event, which because of its location and resulting tsunami has exceeded the engineering thresholds of the forty year old GE Plant. Even with the remarkable convergence of factors, the nuclear issue is nothing like Chernobyl, e.g. No graphite explosions. The Government of France has advised their citizens to leave and the French are some of the best in the nuclear game, but I think they are just throwing caution to the wind, excuse the terrible pun. The radiation issue raises super loud alarm bells in people’s minds but the amounts required before poisoning occurs are of an exponentially higher magnitude than the current measurements.
The main problem is the supply of food, clothing, water and fuel. Japan doesn’t need cash, they need help with internal distribution. The Nikkei bounced yesterday as I thought it would (I don't post my financial advice here)but the economy will face real problems. Their current fiscal discipline is so tight that they don’t have much wiggle room. The idiot dark greenies in various countries, e.g. Germany, are screaming for the shutdown of the nuclear industry worldwide which would be ridiculous. (See my previous comments re. the potential benefits of nuclear power.) The dignity, calm and grace of the Japanese people is remarkable. I really do like the Japanese. So in summary things are critical but human ingenuity, perseverance and courage will prevail. It is hard to believe in incredible times like these that the universe is stable, ordered, benevolent and expansive. We are being tested.
What can we do as individuals ?
Prayer, vigilance and right action. The universe is held together by the threads of goodwill.
G-d bless Japan !
Graphite? That's what makes this "less than" Chernobyl?
Japan has 20X's the raw uranium that could meltdown.
My God - it could be much worse - graphite or not.
The graphite thing is a big nuke industry chill out red herring.
yeah for the good will stuff however