Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent?

Guest post by NNadir.



David Mabb, British, 2002.

(Cross posted from Daily Kos, along with an amusing poll and with references to diaries therein. Link to the Kos Diary.)

A news item in the June 2, 2011 issue of Nature, (page 10) which may be the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, reports that 2010 carbon emissions have reached a new record level, 30.9 billion metric tons per year, roughly 1,000 tons per second after the world's miraculous "economic recovery."

Um, um, um...

The World Health Organization reports that 2 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution, which is about one person every 15 seconds, with almost all of this pollution resulting from dangerous fossil fuel and "renewable" biomass burning.

In other news:

Approximately 3,700 workers at the Fukushima nuclear complex have been exposed to radiation since the recent 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami that struck March 11. Of these, 3514 have had medical examinations in which their exposure limits were recorded. Of these, 124 of the workers have exposures exceeding 100 mSv, which is the normal regulatory lifetime load for nuclear workers, although Japan raised the level for this event to 250 mSv. Of these 124 workers who exceeded 100 mSv, 107 had exposures between 100 and 200 mSv, 8 had exposures of 200-250 mSv, and 9 had doses exceeding 250 mSv.

A list of radiation exposures from the 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tidal wave.

According to the Radiation Health Physics Society, which consists of, um, health physicists, the most aggressive diagnostic medical procedure there is involving radiation (other than radiation treatment for cancer which often can, and does induce radiation sickness) is a Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, (PTCA) which results in radiation exposures of up to 57 mSv. Radiation Health Physics Society: Common exposures to radiation from medical procedures.

One of the major causes of needing a PTCA is, um, eating cows.

The somewhat familiar effects of radiation sickness are generally observed at 1,000 mSv exposures received over a short interval, and the symptoms include alopecia, nausea, vomiting and severe depression of the immune system (the latter being similar in many ways to full blown AIDS.) The chances are overwhelming that if you have ever encountered someone with radiation sickness - and I certainly have - it was as a result of that person being treated with radiation for cancer.

Of course, anyone receiving successful radiation treatment to treat cancer will face a continual risk of getting a new cancer, but the probability of getting such a cancer is not 100% - not even close - or else radiation treatments for cancer would not be attempted since they would be, by definition, futile.

But let's not talk about medical procedures but say something more about Japan.

The Japanese utility Chubu recently asked for help buying what will ultimately be $31 Billion (US) worth of dangerous fossil fuel to replace its other nuclear plants that have been shut by fear, ignorance, and superstition. All the waste from all those burned dangerous fossil fuels will be dumped into earth's atmosphere, almost certainly killing many thousands of people from air pollution.

Chubu receives emergency loan.

We can estimate how much dangerous fossil fuel waste will be dumped into earth's atmosphere by (with extreme generosity and self delusion) that all of this $31 billion dollars will represent dangerous natural gas, although, in fact, it won't, by looking at dangerous natural gas prices.

Natural gas prices have recently run about $631 per metric ton in Asia.

This suggests about 180 million tons of dangerous natural gas waste dumping for Chubai alone, although the time period is not specified. (Chubai may need this loan for a period of years.)

For the observed record, in April of 2011, Japanese imports of dangerous natural gas rose by 1.25 million metric tons in April of 2011 to 6.65 million metric tons per month. If we assume that this gas was mostly methane and correct for the molecular weight of carbon dioxide (as I did above) relative to methane, we see that the increase for dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping in Japan to shut it's nuclear plants amounts to a whopping 45 million tons for Japan, resulting in a total of around 230 million metric tons just for natural gas annually.

In the last several, in this space, a person argued that the Japanese engineers who built the Fukushima nuclear power plant were "incompetant" because - according to the author of these remarks - they didn't know what he knew about seismology, and built a nuclear power plant near a fault line. The claimant actually had the nerve to say that there are many fine Japanese seismologists, and that these seismologists should have been able to prevent the building of the nuclear plants by "incompetant" nuclear engineers. Also, the author said, since there was evidence that a tsunami had inundated the area within the last millenium, this should have convinced everyone not to build a nuclear plant there, although no mention was made of building any other thing.

Really? Incompetent? Compared to whom?

Predictably, the writer making this judgement about Japanese nuclear engineers had no comment whatsoever about the fact that Japanese built cities near fault lines and in fact, a country near fault lines.

How come no similar remark is attached to fine Japanese seismologists preventing the construction of, um, buildings, or things like the Fujinama dam, or in fact, Japan itself?

How come the author of this precious remark didn't claim that Japanese architects are "incompetent?"

After all, does not the same criteria apply to anything built in the path of a potential tsunami that applies to nuclear plant? Actually the nuclear plant did better than all of the other stuff, since the other stuff killed 25,000 people instantly whereas the nuclear plant - and in saying this, I am only referring to the kinds of deaths that anti-nukes find so damned sexy, radiation deaths - has thus far killed no one, although, as listed above, a many as 3,700 people have a higher risk than you or I of getting a radiation related cancer at some point in their lives, although said risk is nowhere near 100%.

If a single structure is rebuilt in the path of the 2011 tsunami, even one structure of any kind, say a solar PV plant containing oodles of chemicals known to be toxic (in some cases highly toxic), will the builder of said structure be declared "incompetent?"

In 1923, the city of Tokyo was struck by an earthquake which killed roughly between 100,000 and 150,000 people in a matter of about 10 minutes. Almost all of these people were killed as a result of falling buildings - no nuclear power plants were involved since, um, the world class scientists who first built nuclear plants, men like Nobel Laureates Wigner, Seaborg, Fermi, Bethe, etc, were very early in their careers and were, in some cases, um, children. Incredibly, the 1923 Tokyo earthquake produced no internet fetishes about banning, um, buildings. In fact, Tokyo was rebuilt, only to be completely destroyed by dangerous fossil fuels diverted to weapons purposes some 22 years later.

Even more incredibly, the city was rebuilt again and even more incredibly, there were no calls among the Japanese (or anyone else) for phasing out dangerous fossil fuels because they not only could be used to destroy entire cities, but are used to destroy entire cities as the observed destruction of scores of cities in the last 70 years or so has repeatedly demonstrated.

Yet because two cities were destroyed in a period of less than a week more than 5 decades ago by nuclear weapons, everyone wants to talk about the possibility of nuclear war to the exclusion of the day-to-day reality of dangerous fossil fuel war, even though nuclear wars are no longer observed and dangerous fossil fuel wars powered by dangerous fossil fuel weapons are almost continuously observed.

Huh?

Wasn't it just a few years back that one of cities in one of the oldest civilizations on earth was mostly destroyed - including artifacts almost 5,000 years old - in a dangerous fossil fuel war using dangerous fossil fuel weapons to effect such destruction?

Am I kidding?

Even though some asshole will pipe in to suggest that my remarks are something called "snark", they are no such thing, but merely represent a statement of an irrefutable observation: The criteria applied to nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy is vastly superior to all of its alternatives - is arbitrary inasmuch as it is applied to nothing else.

Let's leave Japan behind for a minute, and talk about the scale of energy disasters.

The largest energy disaster of all time - if one chooses, as many internet fetishists do, to ignore the disaster of air pollution and climate change because they are not the result of accidents or natural disasters but are rather associated with the normal operations of dangerous renewable biomass plants and dangerous fossil fuel plants - was the renewable energy disaster at Banqiao in China in 1975. It is actually impossible to know how many people were killed by this event, but it numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The Wikipedia reference gives a figure of 170,000, many other sources give much higher numbers. According to this same reference, 11,000,000 people were rendered homeless by this event. It was, thus, in these terms, the equivalent rendering 1/3 of the population of Canada homeless in a few hours.

The event involved the serial failure of Chinese dams in a typhoon, despite the internet fetish that so called "renewable energy" is, um, fabulous and without risk.

Heckuva job "renewable" energy industry, heckuva job.

A similar disaster in the United States in 1983 was prevented when the Army Corps of Engineers ran out to a local hardware store to buy plywood to shore up the Glen Canyon dam spillways. Had they not done so, the entire Colorado River system, through the Grand Canyon and most likely including the Hoover dam might have been destroyed. I wrote about this little appreciated fact in a diary in this space.

A Tale of Two Centimeters: The Near Collapse of the Colorado River Dam System in 1983.

How come the intellectual lightweights in that luddite (and still somehow oppressively bourgeois) hellhole Greenpeace aren't publishing all kinds of speculative science fiction like scare stories about the Colorado River system, or worse, Three Gorges, even though they have spent more than 40 years doing exactly that about nuclear energy?

The failure of the Three Gorges dam would probably kill more than 1,000 times (or more) as many people as died at Banqiao, possibly as many people as died in all of World War II, which is not to say that this will happen, but is also not to say that such a failure is impossible. About 400 million people live downstream of Three Gorges, which produces as much electricity as roughly 20 large nuclear plants.

Why no scare stories? Is it because "renewable" - although dams are hardly really sustainable energy if you look carefully at what they do - is spelled with an "R" and nuclear is spelled with an "N?"

However the majority of attention paid to the recent events at Sendai - in the orgy of fear, ignorance, and superstition - surrounds the nuclear plants, and none whatsoever is paid to any of the other events, including the collapse of a dam that killed 8 people in seconds and swept away 1,100 homes.

Now - I'm not saying this will happen but clearly it is hardly impossible - if the Three Gorges Dam collapses - or any of the dams on the Colorado River system collapse, will a blogger pipe in here to inform us that the builders of the dam(s) were "incompetent?"

If everyone exposed to radiation listed above, all 3,700, died from the radiation exposure listed at Fukushima - they won't, but let's play "fetish pretend" - it would not represent even one day's worth of dangerous fossil fuel and "renewable" biomass related air pollution deaths, again, from normal operations.

Not one freaking day.

Thus is anyone who operates any dangerous fossil fuel plant anywhere "incompetent, given that the risk of such a plant killing someone is precisely 100%?

There are many aspects of the stupidity, fear, superstition and ignorance surrounding the selective attention paid to nuclear energy's performance and the criteria, and every single one of them exists in complete - and completely ignorant - isolation from its alternatives. For instance, it is widely claimed - mostly by people who can't think - that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, must assure everyone, including abysmally stupid people who have zero familiarity with the contents of science books, that it's so called "wastes" must never injure anyone, anywhere at any time over the next billion years. And so people continue to burn dangerous fossil fuels, producing waste, that cannot be contained for the next ten minutes, and actually kill about 5,000 people a day, every day.

And now we have a new criteria:

Nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy and nothing else must be risk free in a major earthquake and tsunami.

The Fukushima nuclear plants were designed and built beginning in the 1960's and came on line in the 1970's, and operated for decades largely without incident. Dumb people like to lay around day after day after day pretending that wind and solar toys and junk were a realistic alternative to these plants, but when doing this, they're completely full of shit, and were especially full of shit in the 1960's and 1970's, not that they're much less full of shit now.

Suppose the supposedly "incompetant" engineers had built coal plants instead of nuclear plants instead?

The result would have been many tens of thousands of premature deaths, although there would be no fetishists burning lots and lots and lots of electricity to caterwaul about this point.

How do I know?

Because except in the abstract, nobody cares about the fact that many times people have chosen to build coal plants rather than nuclear plants - the Germans are particularly adept at this - killing people outright during normal operations, and few whimpers - never mind hysterics - result.

I showed in this awful space some years back that the external costs for a single large coal plant - just one - represents about 16 billion dollars in external costs, many of these costs represented as health costs for treating the victims of the normal operations of coal plants.

A Calculation: How Many Trillions of Dollars of Environmental Damage Will IGCC Coal Cost?

Nothing else, and I do mean nothing, need meet the criteria that public assumes nuclear plants must meet to have the full oblivious support of humanity, not buildings, not bridges, not cars, not dams. This has become a fetish of vast proportions even though it is not the nuclear plants struck by a tsunami in Japan that will kill people in large numbers, but rather the superstition, fear and ignorance of people commenting on the nuclear plants.

No similar fetishes were created about, um, coastal cities (and the buildings in them), after the tsunami in 2004 which killed about 225,000 people. There was no movement to ban, um, Indonesia. Maybe if there were a fucking nuclear plant involved, someone would remember this event from 7 years ago, but as it is, the world couldn't care less. The world continues to build along coasts and more incredibly is now working over time to raise sea levels at an ever faster rate.

One of the biggest fans of raising sea levels in response to a tsunami - not that they have had or will have any experience of tsunamis - is the august nation of Germany, which shut its nuclear plants after Fukushima, burning natural gas and coal while issuing tiresome oblivious horseshit promises about so called "renewable energy," which after more than a decade of such horseshit, never produced even 10% of German energy, never mind as much energy as nuclear energy produced there until shut by fear, ignorance and superstition.

Now, if you ask me, an argument could be made, and maybe should be made that the entire German nation is incompetent, since they have converted a very remote possibility of energy risk - from an earthquake and tsunami no less, in a country that has experienced neither - into an absolute certainty of premature loss of life.

If one looks, one will discover that recent events surrounding German lettuce actually killed more people than Fukushima's nuclear plants have killed, and German dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping, now expected to rise by 100's of millions of metric tons will kill far more people than even the toxic lettuce.

Now we have people running around saying that the response of the TEPCO engineers and workers after the tsunami struck was incompetent.

Really?

Compared to what?

Contained within the confines of the Fukushima plant were operating reactors. Also there were reactors in which all of the used fuel, maybe decades worth of such fuel, although Japan correctly has reprocessed at least some of its fuel. TEPCO engineers addressed a situation in which much - if not most, if not all - of its equipment was destroyed. As was the case with everything else in the country, they had to manage a situation in the presence of a completely destroyed infrastructure. Moreover some of the reactors were built using technology developed nearly half a century ago.

As was the case with every single other bit of infrastructure in the path of the earthquake and tsunami, the events exceeded the design parameters.

Now, the TEPCO engineers did not succeed in making the impact of the extreme damage to their plant zero. Neither in fact did any other industry. Refineries exploded, after all, bridges collapsed or were swept away, semi-conductor plants were destroyed. It is very unlikely that any industry in the highly industrialized nation of Japan was able to prevent injury or the risk of injury to the public from their plants to be zero in an earthquake and tsunami.

Nevertheless the TEPCO engineers were able, within a matter of weeks, to address a situation never before encountered anywhere, easily exceeding any rational design parameters, assess the situation and stabilize it so that the ultimate loss to either the environment, or to human life measures as not even a blip compared to a single day's normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel facilities around the world.

In the last four months, these engineers have built one of the world's largest ion exchange systems, built robots to investigate facilities remotely, moved huge pumps and equipment through a ravaged landscape - destroyed by a, um, natural disaster, dealt with a stupid and hostile media consisting largely of people who have never opened a science book in their pathetic lives. They stabilized the so called "waste" products that represented billions of person years out energy output. The plant has a capacity for water treatment and cesium removal of 1200 m³ (317,000 gallons) per day. The recovered water is reused for cooling the damaged cores. The total volume of water available for such reuse is around 110,000 cubic meters. Thus the engineers at TEPCO, working under difficult circumstances were able to construct a closed system that effectively will extract and concentrate the extracted leachates into easily managed small containers. (If so desired, the properties of these resins allow the collection of pure radiocesium.)

Now, as it happens, I have been around lots of projects involve industrial scale use of functionalized resins - not nuclear applications unhappily - that are similar to the ion exchange resins used at Fukushima - and rapidly scaling them, as been done there, is hardly simple, although it must be said that these resins are now commercially available on relatively large scales. For instance, one can buy 250 gallon drums of a product called "SuperLig® 644" which is a proprietary resin that has high selectivity for the absorption of cesium from aqueous solutions in the presence of potassium and sodium, a situation that is observed in waste tanks at the Hanford nuclear weapons processing facility near Richland Washington.

(cf. Adu-Wusu et al, Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Vol. 267, No.2 (2006) 381–388)

In actuality TEPCO is using two technologies, the American technology, as well as a technology utilized by France at its reprocessing plants for decontaminating cesium from water.

Even though these types of products are commercially available, it is no small feat to build a plant to utilize them on a large scale, to build connections, pumps, columns, filters, supports, etc on such a scale as to be able to process thousands of cubic meters of water, especially in an area that is largely inaccessible.

Yet the TEPCO engineers have done precisely this and the ion exchange plant is operating. Moreover they did in in four months in a destroyed area, parts of which were radioactive.

I note that American engineers at Hanford are still only operating pilot plants doing this sort of thing, although they have had decades to address this problem in an area with intact infrastructure. (In fairness to the Americans, their research in this area is largely responsible for the commercial availability of such resins.)

Similarly, TEPCO engineers were able to quickly coat the ground surrounding the failed plants with a polymer that prevents the volatilization of dust. This also was a remarkable accomplishment, although probably less remarkable than the building of the ion exchange plant.

Finally, several engineers and workers risked their lives by entering the plant at various times, nine of the receiving very high doses of radiation. Of course, except for the fact that nuclear is spelled with an "N" and building is spelled with a "B" these people are not qualitatively different than the many thousands of Japanese who risked their lives to enter collapsed buildings, even if the duimbells at the New York Times have yet to announce the events associated with the Sendai earthquake as the "death of the construction industry."

While accomplishing these difficult unprecedented acts - some, as the numbers above suggest involved great personal danger - these TEPCO engineers had to endure the oppressive catcalls, insults, vituperation, suspicion, and fear of a largely illiterate and unhelpful international community, some of whom seemed to take a kind of twisted schadenfreud motivated not by concern for humanity, but rather to engage in a resounding chorus that was a paen to fear, ignorance, and superstition.

This suggests Theodore Roosevelt's famous and candidly contemptous remarks - I have quoted them before in other contexts - at the Sorbonne in 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat...

...Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are...

And what of the quality of the critics, those who refer to the engineers who built Fukushima and who stabilized it - so that only a very small loss of life, if any, will occur as the result of a vast, natural disaster that hit a plant that produced energy to power millions of homes for decades - as "incompetent"? Are the critics competent to discuss nuclear issues or are they simply talking about things they obviously know little about.

Now, I heard several claims here by persons who know nothing at all about nuclear reactor physics, the properties of nuclear fuels, criticality calculations or any of the like, that the profile of the released isotopes from the damaged nuclear fuels - chiefly the volatile and soluble elements cesium and iodine - suggested that said fuels were about to go "critical," that is that an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction was sustaining itself in the failed fuels. The argument involved certain kinds of pseudotechnical claims - technically they were garbage but might have sounded reasonable to anyone who was ignorant of the properties of nuclear fuels - surrounding the presence of the isotope I-131, which, having a very short half-life, eight days, is extremely radioactive. Now, for the record, I-131 did leak into the ocean, although the majority of that which did is now non-radioactive xenon-131 in the atmosphere. A spike in the release of iodine-131 that was observed some weeks after the tsunami was offered as "evidence" that the reactor materials were "critical."

Here is one such statement, written in a hysterical diary on May 1, 2011, roughly 51 days after the tsunami struck:

However, inside of the silt fence near Reactor Unit 2 both the absolute levels of Iodine-131 and the ratios of iodine to cesium increase unexpectedly at April 15 and April 25. Less dilution with uncontaminated water could cause the absolute level of Iodine-131 to increase, but it would not likely increase the isotope ratio of iodine to cesium. I can think of actions by TEPCO that could produce that unexpected result, but I think they would have reported such actions because it would have made their data look less concerning. The simplest explanation for these data is that reactor 2 went critical on April 15 and April 25.

The bold is mine. The um, "simplest explanation?" Sigh...

With some regret, here is the reference:

New Fukushima Data: Evidence of Instability & Uncontrolled Criticality

Now, if one actually knew anything at all about nuclear science one would immediately recognize that this is hardly the simplest explanation; it is in fact a tortured explanation at best and pure nonsense at worst.

The evocation of some specious argument about cesium isotopes suggests, perhaps, the latter.

First off, the chemistry of melted uranium/plutonium oxide fuels has been extensively studied around the world. It is very complex, owing to the fact that many hundreds of species are present, things like cesium molybdenates, cesium iodocadminates, molybdouranates, free iodine, cesium iodide (gas, liquid and solid), cesium oxides, even things like cesium metal. To anyone who has studied these things, or is familiar with such studies, it is somewhat unsurprising that only a tiny fraction of the iodine actually escaped, although it must be said that iodine does tend to migrate toward the cooler surfaces of fuels under normal conditions, that is when the fuels are under water. The relative concentration of any species changes the position of the equilibrium of the entire system.

The accumulation of radioisotopes - including fission products - can be estimated closely by use of various types of simulation programs: The technical details surrounding these techniques are beyond the scope of a blog post. Using these types of calculations, TEPCO engineers estimated that the nuclear fuels at the time of the accident contained 81 exabequerels of I-131. An exabequerel is 10¹⁸ nuclear decays (represented as atoms) per second. Of this, from the same link NISA, the Japanese equivalent of the US NRC, estimates that 130 petabequerels were released to the atmosphere. A petabequerel is 10¹⁵ nuclear decays (represented as atoms) per second. Thus less than 2/10ths of a percent of the total radioiodine-131 were released from the reactor.

(I noted here in a recent diary, these amounts of radioactivity are trivial when compared with the natural radioactivity of the ocean from the presence of potassium alone: How Radioactive Is the Ocean?)

It was thus represented here in this awful space that a momentary increase in the concentration of I-131 in the waters around the reactor was an indication that the reactor must be critical and undergoing uncontrolled fission reactors, because, as the author of the ridiculous claim stated in a kind of scientific malapropism, the half-life of I-131 is 8 days and therefore any increase in the concentration of I-131 in the waters around Fukushima must represent freshly formed I-131 from ongoing nuclear fission in either the used fuel storage ponds or in the melted, failed reactors.

This is pure nonsense.

The scientific malapropism may have derived between the difference in meaning between the more common word "half-life" and lifetime. The radioactive decay law, which should be familiar to any high school physics student is

N_t = N₀e^-kt

where N_t is the amount of material present at a given time t, and N₀ is the amount present initially, in this case, at the time of the earthquake and tsunami. k is a constant determined by dividing the natural logarithm of the number 2 by the half-life, in this case, 8 days, giving a decay constant (days^-1) for I-131 of 0.086.

It follows from this equation that it took 74 days, until May 23, for the total amount of I-131 present to equal the amount released earlier, and further that slightly more than 0.1% of the released iodine had already decayed into non-radioactive Xenon-131.

Moreover, the amount released was not released instanteously, but took place of a period of a few weeks. On April 15, the earliest date evoked by the critical criticality claimant, the inventory of I-131 in the entire reactor system was still just shy of 1 exabequerel, almost 8 times the amount released during the entire accident, and was, as the iodine in the sea had been rapidly decaying, roughly 160 times as large as the remaining released iodine. Let's assume that 100 petabequerels had leached by March 18, a week after the accident. It follows from the decay law given above, that about 1.2% of it was still present, and thus a simple explanation, involving no extreme statements whatsoever like the criticality statement, would be that I-131 concentrations might have increased simply via a change in the release rate from the large inventory still available.

But that would not have been as sexy as the nonsense statement that an uncontrolled fission reaction was going on, would it?

Nevertheless it is very clear that changes in the extraction efficiency and/or rate - maybe owing to structural changes in the fuel, changes in fuel temperatures, and changes to the structural components of the failed reactor could easily be evoked to account for momentary increases in the apparent concentrations of I-131 in seawater near the reactor. It is very easy in this context to understand momentary increases in the levels of I-131 (and increases in other isotopes which were even more spectacularly misinterpreted in the caterwauling here).

One may expect of course, that paniced hysterics of the types that engage in continuous nuclear fear mongering - I compare it to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, where the theater in question is this planet and where the audience consists of some 7 billion people - are probably in no position to apply Occam's razor to questions of subjects they know almost nothing about, nuclear science, but, um, still...

And I repeat, in case anyone missed it, the yelling of "nuclear fire" WILL kill people, since nuclear power plants have been irrationally shut and replaced by dangerous fossil fuel plants which have a 100% probability of killing people even when they operate normally.

Similar arguments apply, by the way, to the hysteria surrounding the used nuclear fuel pools near the reactors. They have been inspected, and despite much panic - some whipped up by illiterate news reporters - they remain largely intact. They did not go critical, and they did not release vast amounts of radioactivity. This should be evidence for the robustness of used nuclear fuel storage, although predictably prehaps, the world will interpret this differently, mostly because humanity is proving itself to be too stupid to live.

I might add that these so called "waste" products would not even be there, were it not for fear ignorance and superstition surrounding the word "nuclear." They would have been recycled (using relatively primitive technology - more sophisticated technology would have been developed in a rational world. (I personally have come up with a fantastic way to recycle hot nuclear fuels, but I'm keeping it to myself right now.)

Nuclear energy need not be perfect, it need not be without risk - even for 40 year old technology - in a massive earthquake and tsunami to be vastly superior to all of the stuff that internet anti-nuke fetishists don't care about.

It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

The decision to close nuclear plants around the world - mostly in bourgeois countries - is, and there's no polite way to put this, is murder, since people will be killed by the use of replacement dangerous fossil fuel plants and irrevocable and irreversible damage will be done to the planetary ecosystem.

It is not the damaged nuclear plants that will kill hundreds of thousands of people in the next few years, but rather it is the superstition, fear and ignorance connected to the hysteria connected to the nuclear plants that will kill people, not because nuclear plants operate, but because don't operate, because they are shut by said superstition, fear, and ignorance.

I hate to say this, but humanity deserves what it's going to get.

Have a nice evening and an nice day tomorrow.

Lessons from Dai-ichi

Last Saturday, I began to form the opinion that one or more of the Dai-ichi reactor cores had experienced a partial melt down. I was by no means sure of this view because it assumed that the explosion had been a hydrogen explosion. My study of reports concerning the Three Mile Island accident had led me to speculate, that if the explosion had been a hydrogen explosion, the most likely source of the hydrogen was a chemical reaction between coolant water, and overheated core materials. I assumed that some core water might have boiled off, uncovered, uncovering the upper part of the core, which then overheated to the extent that it would begin to melt.

When Japanese technicians injected water into the reactor, it came in contact with the partially melted core, and a chemical reaction between Zirconium in the reactor fuel cladding and the oxygen in water molecules, had released hydrogen in the core. The Japanese technicians had vented the hydrogen from the core, and it vented along with hot steam, and then exploded when it recombined with oxygen in the air. This assumption indicated that the Dai-ichi crisis was at least as bad as Three Mile Island, if not worse. The Japanese, given my speculation, would have sacrificed parts of the reactor building, in order to protect the steel containment vessel from rupture caused by excessive gas pressure.

The reality of at least a partial core meltdown in Dai-ichi 1, 2, and 3 could explained by the release of radioactive gases from fuel pellets. When the core was subsequently vented, the release of the radioactive fission product gasses would explain why many spikes of radiation during the Dai-ichi event have occurred. The radioactive gasses, likely to be encountered during a core meltdown are not very dangerous in practice. They are noble gases, very radioactive but chemically inactive. They are dispersed by natural process in air, and very quickly become so diluted, that they pose no danger to human beings. Since noble gases do not form chemical bonds, they do not linger in the human body, thus do not pose health risks. When scientist looked at the human health consequences of the Three Mile Island accident, the realized that the radiation level of air down wind from Three Mile Island was simply not high enough to cause cancer and other radiation related illnesses.

In addition to radioactive gases, some easily vaporized radioisotopes were released by the Three Mile Island accident. Of these Iodine-131 is the most dangerous. Unlike the noble gases, Iodine-131 does form chemical bonds, is solid rather than gaseous at ordinary temperatures, and likely to enter the human body from the food chain. Iodine-131 forms volatile chemical compounds, that vaporize at high temperatures. Iodine-131 does stick around, but only for a short while. It has a half life of a little more than 8 days. Thus if people can be kept out of contact with Iodine-131 for a couple of months it ceases to be dangerous. In addition potassium iodine tablets offer some protection against iodine-131 forming chemical bonds with body tissues.

Three other potentially dangerous radioisotope are in danger of escaping a reactor core during a reactor accident. They are:

Sr-90
Cs-137
Cs-134

We ar talking about some very nasty stuff here, the stuff that keeps people out of the Chernobyl exclusion zones for nearly 25 years. Fortunately not much of these undesirables escaped during the Three Mile Island accident, so the good citizens of Pennsylvania were able to return to their homes. The difference between TMI and Chernobyl was that inChernobyl the core exploded, destroying all containment, and then caught on fire, and quickly began discharging copious amounts of volatile fission products

What the Japanese tecnicians appear to be doing at Dai-ichi is struggling to prevent the sort of fire that would release large amounts of volatile fission products. There has bee some release. How do we know this? Because when an NBC news man came back from Dai-ichi, he had radioactive material on his shoes. Not a lot, but too much to be tracking around.

The same story suggests that maybe not a lot of volatile fission products have escaped yet, just enough to be picked up on the shoes, by newspeople walking on soil that has been lightly dusted with radio-iodine and other nasties., but not at a level yet to be really dangerous.

It is now fairly clear that that some level of meltdown has happened, but that we are not yet at the China Syndrome by any means, but yesterday Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said,

We believe that secondary containment has been destroyed and there is no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe that radiation levels are extremely high which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.

Is not clear that all of the water in the spent fuel pool is gone, but Jaczko's fears may not be entirely unjustified.

The New York Times has quoted a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Yoshitaka Nagayama, as saying,

Because we have been unable to go the scene, we cannot confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4.

If the Japanese don't know, how can Jaczko? The answer might be computer accident simulation. I don't know if such a simulation exists, but if Jaczko was not being irresponsible, he needed to be able to point to some back up to his assessment.

There are still dangers here, the crisis is my no means over, but the decay of fission products is already begin to slow down, and with it both the radiation and the heat that that decay produces. While it is too soon to imagine that the crisis is over, the fact that the first week of the crisis has passed is a signal that the hope that a disaster will be prevented is fully justified. We cannot be sure that the worst is over, but the odds are beginning to move in that direction.

Nuclear power will survive the events in Dai-ichi. This accident will be studied for some time to come for lessons about nuclear safety. The first lesson, and this is obvious, is to assume that the worst earthquake or tsunami ever recorded for an area is possible again, and build accordingly. The Dai-ichi reactor complex was not designed to withstand a 10 meter plus tsunami, while it probably should have been built to withstand at least a 10 meter tsunami. Earlem College Geologist Wesley Nutter found evidence in 2009 that 10 meter (or even higher) waves had repeatedly pounded the coast of northern Japan over the last 3000 years. The geological record suggests that the tsunami of 2011 was a once in every 500 year event. For most people, once in every 500 years is never. Americans have built the cities of Memphis and St. Louis in a zone in which evidence suggests episodes of multiple great earthquakes - up to magnitude 8 - occure every five hundred years or so. Should people live, let alone build reactors in such a dangerous area? Should people live, let alone build reactors in Japan, California, or anywhere eles along the 24,000 mile Pacific ring of fire?

The second lesson has to do with reactor design. Some new reactors, most particularly the the Westinghouse AP-1000, and the GE ESBWR feature gravity powered emgency water tanks above the reactor core. In the future, reactors designs may be subject to the Dai-ichi test. Could the reactor design survive the Dai-ichi event without core melt down. In the case of the AP-1000 the answer is possibly yes, while in the case of the ESBWR he answer is very likely yes. The ESBWR design sets the new bar for reactor safety, and that bar his high.

A third lesson is that the Dai-ichi demonstrated an impressive seismic performance. They survive an earthquake of a far greater magnitude than they were designed too. No doubt this seismic performance will be the subject of further research.

A fourth lesson is that reactor safety design, should include a method of mitigating any China syndrome incident, in the event of a emergency coolant failure. Devices such as steam explosion proof core catchers will be researched,and perhaps modifications to existing reactor designs considered.

A fifth set of lessons, as of yet largely undefined, will come about as the result of studying what actually happened inside the cores of Dai-ichi reactors.

Finally, I would argue, that the day of the Light Water Reactor is drawing to a close. Several Generation IV reactor technologies would have survived the Dai-ichi incident without a serious incident. These include Pebble Bed Modular Reactors, and Molten Salt Reactors. In the case of Molten Salt Reactor Technology, the safety technology appears to be consistent with lowering nuclear costs. The PBMR can be shudown without core melting, while if a MSR begins to overheat, a plug will automatically melt and the reactor core will drain into a series of tanks that uses a well understood simple and natural technology, the chimny effect, to keep the fuel cool.

I have, in Nuclear Green, repeatedly pointed to the issue of nuclear safety, and the need to develop radical high safety nuclear technology. It is not that reactors are unsafe, but rather that safer reactors are possible without increasing nuclear costs, and we ought to build the safest reactors possible, within our financial limits. Not only are safer reactors possible, but they will be superior to Light Water Reactors in many other respects, including the long term sustainability of their fuel sources, and their scalability. If the Dai-ichi crisis fails to teach us the importance of moving forward on the implementation of a more advanced and safer nuclear technology, it would be a tragedy.

Nuclear Safety and the Fukushima Dai-ichi Explosion

The explosion at the Japanese Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, will undoubtedly and other events that are still unfolding will no doubt lead to further debates about nuclear safety. We know that the explosion was probably a hydrogen explosion inside the containment building rather than a nuclear explosion inside the reactor core. The core vessel appears to still be intact. What we know is that the cooling systems of two reactors in the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant failed and that heat began to build up un their cores, along with pressure inside the air tight containment structure. In the event of an emergency reactor shutdown, electricity from back-up electrical sources operates the emergency cooling system, but the earthquake appears to have damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi back-up electrical sources. The pressure inside the containment structure probably was the result of the venting of radioactive gases as well as other volatile fission products and hydrogen from the reactor core. The fission products would have been released following the rupturing of uranium fuel pellets inside the reactor core. Hydrogen can be produced by a high temperature chemical process involving the disassociation of hydrogen and oxygen in coolant water and steam, that would in close proximity to the overheated nuclear fuel pellets inside the core.

The air tight containment structure is designed to prevent the escape of volatile fission products and radioactive gasses in the event of a nuclear accident. The airtight barrier also contains any hydrogen gas released from the nuclear core, as well as steam. It appears that air leaked into the containment structure, and an explosive oxygen-hydrogen reaction was triggered destroying the outer containment building. (Update: I would now back off from the assessment that a hydrogen explosion occurred.) The inner steel containment vessel remains in tact, at least for now.

While the explosion of the containment building was impressive, it pales to insignificance compared to the disaster that has fallen on Japan due to the magnitude 8.9 earthquake, and subsequent tsunami. So far there have been no deaths or injuries associated with the reactor accident, and no one is known to have received a high level radiation exposure. (Update: We now have reports of up to 4 injuries to plant workers.) The Radioactive gasses are quickly dissipated as the mix with air in he atmosphere, and pose little threat to people. Volatile fission products tend to precipitate out of air as they cool, and much of them will fall within a few hundred yards of their source reactor. Reportedly radioactive materials released by the Fukushima Dai-ichi blast are currently blowing out to sea, but there is no reason to assume that this will continue to be te case.

As I have indicated the Fukushima Dai-ichi explosion and other possible further events at the nuclear plant are relatively minor events compared to the enormous property damage and loss of life in Japan. Much of the Japanese energy structure has been subject to catastrophic failure, Natural gas pipelines have ruptured, and escaping gas has caught on fire, triggering fires in homes and other buildings. Oil and oil product tanks have ruptured and been set on fire. Many power lines are down, and the damage to hydroelectric dams has yet to be assessed. No one has any idea yet of the extent of the loss of life and property damage, but the dead are likely to number in the tens of thousands, and property damage could run into the trillion dollar range.

Could this accident been avoided? The answer is "probably yes," with the best recent reactor designs, the AP-1000 and the ESBWR, and certainly yes with advanced Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) technology. With the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) the safety issues in the even of a large scale earthquake are less clear.

The AP-1000 and the ESBWR rely on passive emergency cooling features, that simply rely on the laws of nature rather than outside power sources. Had the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors been AP-1000, or ESBWRs, they would have survived the Earthquake event intact with no emergency cooling failure.

In the case of molten salt technology, for example the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, as core temperature rises above operational range, a solid salt plug in a reactor core drainage system will automatically melt and the core fluid will automatically drain into passively cooled tanks. Thus the entire MSR/LFTR emergency shutdown and coolant system is dependent on the unfailing laws of nature.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi accident, as it now stands has set a new standard for thinking about nuclear safety. It is clear that some new nuclear plant designs could have successfully withstood the 8.9 magnitude earthquake, other reactors, similar to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plants would be less likely to do so. Safety standards should undoubtedly be reevaluated, and the consequences of the fission product escape from the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor carefully and rationally assessed.

UPDATE: News sources are now reporting that up to 4 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant workers have been injured.

UPDATE 2: The Nature of the explosion is now open to question, as far as I am concerned.

Update 3: CBS News reports:

Eleven reactors shut down automatically when the earthquake hit. And with most of those, the cooling has been reasonably straightforward, because there's been a power supply to the plant, either from the grid, or from the backup generators. But with the first two units of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, the generators cut in and ran for about an hour and then stopped. And we understand the reason they were stopped is because they were overwhelmed by the tsunami. And that precipitated the crisis, really, and then the challenge of keeping the reactor cool, because they then have to default to their battery power. And as far as I understand it, that may not have been sufficient to do everything that was fully required."

We still hack, as far as I am concerned a satisfactory account of how the explosion occurred, although CBS news continues to describe it as a hydrogen explosion.