journal features

fukushima power plant in meltdown

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2011.03.16

It looks like reactor 2 at fukushima must now be in meltdown. Radiation levels outside the plant are fluctuating and sky-high.

What you need to read is all right here. This is not finger pointing, it's just a cold hard look at the observable facts.

Secondly, we've just learned from a discussion on NHK that while NHK cameras were able to point out smoke billowing from reactor four, TEPCO staff replied that they no longer had the ability to access the outside of that reactor. The responses from viewers, as they came in on the NHK website was simple: so who's going to fix this?

The answer is: no one. The plant is melting down, it's no longer possible for anyone to do anything about it, and it's time to get far away and hope for helpful winds. Elevated radiation levels have been found in Tokyo, against the prevailing wind.

Another excellent and lucid article puts it this way:

Another serious risk involves the more than 200 tons of spent nuclear fuel that is stored in pools adjacent to the reactors, Alvarez said. Those cooling pools depend on continually circulating water to keep the fuel rods from catching fire. Without power to circulate the water, it heats up and potentially boils away, leaving the fuel rods exposed to air.

An aerial image of the Fukushima plant shows the loss of high-capacity cranes needed to move equipment to service the reactor. The photo also appears to show that the spent fuel pool is steaming hot, which may indicate the water is boiling off, Alvarez said.

How did it get like this? A string of bad luck, bad assumptions, out-dated design, and of course human error:

Engineers had begun using fire hoses to pump seawater into the Unit 2 reactor — the third at the plant to receive the last-ditch treatment — after the emergency cooling system failed. Company officials said workers were not paying sufficient attention to the process, however, and let the pump stall, allowing the fuel rods to become partially exposed to the air.

If you'd like a more detailed view on the reactor designs at issue, see this technical description of what's involved. There is no tertiary containment at one of these plants, it's a very simple design that's long since been outdated (needless to say, there are dozens of these plants around the world).

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)