Explosion reported at Fukushima #2

Uh. Your reports says that the inner containment vessel had been breached. That's why their is an outer containment vessel.

Yes, the situation is serious, but really, you are over sensationalizing it.

There are three containments in this design, an inner steel core containment and a water filled containment and a reinforced concrete containment.

The officials in Japan are reluctant to speculate which of the three may have burst as their own instrument data is conflicting. But the report I was listening to was saying that it seemed probable that the inner core containment, the most important one, was breached.

All I can do is look for info and try to determine what seems most credible.
 
I'm listening to NHK WORLD TV on USTREAM: Official NHK WORLD TV live on USTREAM. NHK WORLD TV is an English language 24-hour international news and information channel. New...

I *think* they just said #4 is not functional, and does not contain fuel rods.

But the fire is obviously still a problem. I wouldn't want to fight a fire 100 feet from a melting reactor. :eek:

The Commissioner said in his press conference that they were pumping water into #2, but the water level never rose, so they knew they had a leak.

He focused on evacuating, which seems a very bad sign, but could just be the logical process.
 
9000sv is 100% fatality. There is no possible survival at that level of exposure. Everything will die, including the dirt (and that sounds funny, but it isn't a joke. It would be infertile for 20,000 years).

That all depends on the half life of the radioactive material.

I wish somebody authoritative would begin breaking down the chemistry of these reactions so we could know what elements are potentially gonna be leaking from these plants and how they will spread.

Iodine 131 is no real prob if you have iodine pills and are not over exposed. But it decays in a week. Cesium 137 is already leaking and has a half life of 30 years. What more is brewing in these reactors?
 
The Commissioner said in his press conference that they were pumping water into #2, but the water level never rose, so they knew they had a leak.

If this is true I dunno if there is anything more they can do to address reactor #2. Let it melt down and stay away from it.

At Chernobyl the majority of the folks who helped build the containment dome did so with suits that could not resist the radiation, most of them died later even tho they worked in shifts of a few hours.

Do we have suits capable of keeping workers completely safe in high radiation areas?
 
Right now, not even the people at the plant know what is happening. The only thing they have to go on is whether the water is staying in the reactors. In one case, according to the news, #2, they are pumping water in, but the level is not rising.

Now, according to the news, they are telling anyone within 20 kilometers to get out, and those within 30 kilometers to stay indoors. One of the reactors has a MOX core, which contains plutonium, much more dangerous in an uncontained meltdown than the pure uranium cores.
 
9000sv is 100% fatality. There is no possible survival at that level of exposure. Everything will die, including the dirt (and that sounds funny, but it isn't a joke. It would be infertile for 20,000 years).

That all depends on the half life of the radioactive material.

I wish somebody authoritative would begin breaking down the chemistry of these reactions so we could know what elements are potentially gonna be leaking from these plants and how they will spread.

Iodine 131 is no real prob if you have iodine pills and are not over exposed. But it decays in a week. Cesium 137 is already leaking and has a half life of 30 years. What more is brewing in these reactors?

I think it was plutonium? They were quoting the half lifes on NHK....Cesium was 34 years, I think, and something (plutonium?) was 24,000 years.

Seems the #4 reactor is storing spent fuel rods. Fire was started by a hydrogen explosion.
 
The Commissioner said in his press conference that they were pumping water into #2, but the water level never rose, so they knew they had a leak.

If this is true I dunno if there is anything more they can do to address reactor #2. Let it melt down and stay away from it.

At Chernobyl the majority of the folks who helped build the containment dome did so with suits that could not resist the radiation, most of them died later even tho they worked in shifts of a few hours.

Do we have suits capable of keeping workers completely safe in high radiation areas?

No. In fact, an official has already stated that if the worse happens, and they have to use the same techniques that they used at Chernobyl, the first responders will die.

I haven't heard what is happening at the other site that was having problems.
 
I think it is also important to remember that the media will always reach for the worst situation and make uninformed statements at the same time.

The Japanese governments last statement was that the situation is "not stable"..which doesn't mean a giant radioactive plume will engulf the whole island.
If the outer containment is compromised, OK that is bad, and could be a major problem for years to come...but as I am learning about this...it seems even that will not be a real "holocaust" type of fallout.
A GIANT problem, devastating to the whole area as it just lost it's source of power, and a facility that will be uninhabitable for generations...but if I hear right hear...very, very small chance of a Chernobyl level disaster.

I had live feed on from Japanese news and they were saying that the inner containment vessel is breached and leaking. But they don't know if it is leaking liquid or gas. It all depends on where the leak is. If it is leaking liquid then there is no way to cool the fuel. Game over.

They had diagrams provided by the officials and were reporting that radiation had spiked to over 9000microseiverts. I also read that pressure within one of the containments is falling on it's own, no idea what containment that is.

The worst case scenario seems to be widespread contamination of heavier elements with longer half lives than iodine. On an island the size of Japan, one nuclear bomb wide, with 120 million people, well they would be in a world of hurt.

9000sv is 100% fatality. There is no possible survival at that level of exposure. Everything will die, including the dirt (and that sounds funny, but it isn't a joke. It would be infertile for 20,000 years).

Mini,
I think that's in microsieverts; if so, that's around 1 msievert, i.e. .001 sievert. If I recall correctly LD50 is 6-8 sievert total (1 sievert =100 Rads). I would assume that reported level is 9000 microsievert/hr. ONe can work in that safely enough, monitoring cumulative exposure. 9000 sievert sounds almost impossibly hot for this sort of thing; i'd bet it's in micro sieverts or milli sieverts per hour.

Edit: anyone got an update on the radiation level at reactor #2?
 
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I had live feed on from Japanese news and they were saying that the inner containment vessel is breached and leaking. But they don't know if it is leaking liquid or gas. It all depends on where the leak is. If it is leaking liquid then there is no way to cool the fuel. Game over.

They had diagrams provided by the officials and were reporting that radiation had spiked to over 9000microseiverts. I also read that pressure within one of the containments is falling on it's own, no idea what containment that is.

The worst case scenario seems to be widespread contamination of heavier elements with longer half lives than iodine. On an island the size of Japan, one nuclear bomb wide, with 120 million people, well they would be in a world of hurt.

9000sv is 100% fatality. There is no possible survival at that level of exposure. Everything will die, including the dirt (and that sounds funny, but it isn't a joke. It would be infertile for 20,000 years).

Mini,
I think that's in microsieverts; if so, that's around 1 msievert, i.e. .001 sievert. If I recall correctly LD50 is 6-8 sievert total (1 sievert =100 Rads). I would assume that reported level is 9000 microsievert/hr. ONe can work in that safely enough, monitoring cumulative exposure. 9000 sievert sounds almost impossibly hot for this sort of thing; i'd bet it's in micro sieverts or milli sieverts per hour.

Well, I hope its microsv....they were saying that 400 millisievert would render a man sterile. Might be worth it if I were younger :)

I was looking on wiki (I know, but I wasn't writing a thesis or anything) about rad poisoning. There is a fairly basic chart there that describes exposure rates and expected symptoms and mortality rates. If Terral's fallout maps are correct, and the wiki-nerd was responsible, Californians are going to have headaches, nausea, and the squirts, but they aren't going to die :)
 
Skeptic,
Thanks, that makes more sense. Still not a good situation; if they do have a primary core breach, they're going to have to give up on that #2 reactor before too long. How bad it gets beyond that really depends on how much of what gets vented.
 
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This just out about 20 minutes ago.

SOMA, Japan – Dangerous levels of radiation leaking from a crippled nuclear plant forced Japan to order 140,000 people to seal themselves indoors Tuesday after an explosion and a fire dramatically escalated the crisis spawned by a deadly tsunami.

In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation had spread from the four stricken reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant along Japan's northeastern coast. The region was shattered by Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that is believed to have killed more than 10,000 people, plunged millions into misery and pummeled the world's third-largest economy.

Japanese officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the reactor fire was in a fuel storage pond — an area where used nuclear fuel is kept cool — and that "radioactivity is being released directly into the atmosphere." Long after the fire was extinguished, a Japanese official said the pool might still be boiling, though the reported levels of radiation had dropped dramatically by the end of the day.

That reactor, Unit 4, had been shut down before the quake for maintenance.

If the water boils, it could evaporate, exposing the rods. The fuel rods are encased in safety containers meant to prevent them from resuming nuclear reactions, nuclear officials said. But they acknowledged that there could have been damage to the containers. They also confirmed that the walls of the storage pool building were damaged.

Experts noted that much of the leaking radiation was apparently in steam from boiling water. It had not been emitted directly by fuel rods, which would be far more virulent, they said.

"It's not good, but I don't think it's a disaster," said Steve Crossley, an Australia-based radiation physicist.

Even the highest detected rates were not automatically harmful for brief periods, he said.

"If you were to spend a significant amount of time — in the order of hours — that could be significant," Crossley said.

Less clear were the results of the blast in Unit 2, near a suppression pool, which removes heat under a reactor vessel, said plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. The nuclear core was not damaged but the bottom of the surrounding container may have been, said Shigekazu Omukai, a spokesman for Japan's nuclear safety agency.

Though Kan and other officials urged calm, Tuesday's developments fueled a growing panic in Japan and around the world amid widespread uncertainty over what would happen next. In the worst case scenario, one or more of the reactor cores would completely melt down, a disaster that could spew large amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

Radiation level soars after Japan nuke plant fire - Yahoo! News
 

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