Extremely High Levels of Radiation Detected at Japan's Fukushima Plant

[Kennah]

Source: Epoch Times

Officials say they've detected the highest levels of radiation at Japans Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant since it was damaged in a massive earthquake six years ago.

The Japan Times, citing the Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. (TEPCO), said that the radiation level in the containment vessel of Reactor 2 at Fukushima hit a maximum of 530 sieverts per hour. The radiation read was taken near the entrance to an area near the pressure vessel, which contains the reactor's core.

A person could die from a brief exposure to 530 sieverts of radiation, experts say.

Officials believe that escaped melted fuel might be the cause for the spike in radiation.

Read more: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2219230-extremely-high-levels-of-radiation-detected-at-japans-fukushima-plant/

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Forget Trump. Fukushima might be the end of civilization.

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

1. That's still inside the reactor.

Not saying this isn't a serious problem, but it doesn't YET pose a threat to the world outside.

[Brother Buzz]

9. Ummm

that chart did not actually track or measure radioactive discharge emanating from Fukushima in 2013, or any other aspect of the Fukushima disaster. It was a plot created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) immediately after the Tohoku earthquake in March 2011 showing the wave height of the tsunami that followed. It had (and has) nothing to do with the flow or spread of radioactive seepage from Fukushima.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp

[mahina]

10. Thank you. That drives me bananas.

Sorry, got to go, Godzilla's at the door.

I keed.

So far all is fine here in the middle of the allegedly zapped zone.

[Crash2Parties]

7. IIR #2 was the one that had the explosion; there is no more "inside" the reactor.

It was badly breached and is one of the two that they can't do much about.

[Yo_Mama]

11. Yeah, it's inside, just not inside the reactor pressure vessel. There are layers of containment.

The first layer is the coating of the fuel rods. If they get too hot (which they did), that gets breached as the rods deform and basically melt. The second layer is the Reactor Pressure Vessel. Well, we've known since the incident occurred that this one breached. They heard a loud bang, and pressure dropped. They knew at the time that the vessel was breached.

This was an attempt to look at conditions in side the third layer of containment - the containment vessel.

This news shows you are right. You can't make a robot to do much at those levels of radiation. I don't think they can even get pictures of the fuel.

[HassleCat]

2. They're not sure where the fuel went.

They assume it melted through the pressure vessel, and is lying on the floor of the reactor compartment. But they're not sure. Robotic cameras fail due to beat and radiation, so they have no pictures.

[bluecoat_fan]

5. 1 mter hole melted into a walkway below

I wonder what could have melted the hole?

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/02/melted-fuel-emitting-deadly-radiation-inside-fukushima-daiichi-plant-nikkei.html

[cstanleytech]

15. Any chance it could have been caused by some of the boric acid they injected?

[Rex]

18. Boric acid is pretty weak, but the walkways structural integrity might already be compromised.

I think the fear is that they cannot get a robot or remote in to see what is going on.

[alittlelark]

6. Horrifying for all life in The Pacific....

[Yo_Mama]

14. Oh, geeze, this is not the case. Here are actual radiation readings at the plant!

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/index-e.html

Radiation levels aren't rising! What happened is that they inserted instrumentation into the vessel where they hadn't been before (since the accident), and they got a surprise.

Here's a chart so you can interpret those readings yourself (it is the microsieverts):
http://www.gavinshoebridge.com/news/basic-guide-to-radiation-levels-in-%C2%B5svh-and-msvh/

In contrast to those levels, the 530 sieverts estimated inside the containment vessel is extreme, but there is no evidence that anything has changed, nor is the Pacific life being exposed to that radiation.

Believe me, there wouldn't be anyone at the plant observing anything if radiation could be measured in multiple sieverts per hour at the plant. And if you look at the first link, you'll see that radiation levels drop off rapidly from south of the main building to the main gate.

One microsievert is equivalent to 0.000001 sieverts.

[Yo_Mama]

8. This is not a spike in radiation! This is the first time they've been in there to measure it.

They knew there was severe damage to Reactor Two, but they had hoped that most of the fuel was still in the reactor vessel. Well, it's not. A signficant amount of it is in the containment vessel, or I suppose it is possible that some is in the basement.

The significance of this is not that conditions have suddenly worsened at the plant. It is that their plans as to how to begin to deal with this won't work. The robot they were going to send in would only be able to function for a short time if it is exposed to levels of radiation akin to what they measured.

The big hole melted in the grating (1 meter = more than a yard) means it is likely that quite a bit of the melted fuel went through the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel and is now in the containment structure, somewhere.

Those containment structures had feet upon feet of concrete, so it's not as if it was just going to plop through there.

The theory in design was that if the reactor vessel was breached, the melted fuel would drip down and spread out on the concrete subflooring. And it appears that happened to a very significant degree. How much it is spread out and whether it is amalgamated with the concrete is a very big question.

Here is a much better article explaining the matter:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/243904-fukushimas-reactor-2-far-radioactive-previously-realized-no-sign-containment-breach

One thing I want to note at this point is these findings are being misreported across the internet as evidence Fukushima’s radiation output is “spiking” or “soaring.” This is not the case. The radiation levels within Reactor #2’s containment vessel have been largely unknown for years, due to the difficulty of getting proper readings from remote equipment in the first place. The entire reason Tepco used muon tomography to examine the interior of both Reactor #1 and Reactor #2 was because they didn’t have another means of identifying where fuel was inside the reactors. The 73 sievert metric is mentioned in reports dating back to 2012 — I’m not sure when or how Tepco measured it, but implying this is a sudden leap in radiation output is simply inaccurate.

Radiation levels outside the plant have been stable. So this is no sort of new dire circumstance. Paradoxically, although this sucks from the perspective of working within the containment, it is proof that the containment vessel has the fuel in it!

There were also issues about using sea water for improvised cooling - corrosion could be a real factor, and the big hole could partly be from a combination of stresses (acute heating from fuel contact plus draining sea water).

But what is known is that the plan for access with the robot is largely doomed to fail. It just wouldn't function for long enough to do much. Maybe they can send it in and get more info, but they are not going to get much done that's useful.

I think their plans will have to be revised.

[groundloop]

13. Thanks for the information.

[The_Voice_of_Reason]

12. But the NRC

would have us believe that all of America's aged and decrepit reactors are safe....NOT

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

16. America's reactors weren't built in places that get a lot of tidal waves.

Those aged reactors (which haven't been upgraded because of the same regulations that have stopped America from building new ones since 3MI) have plenty of their own problems, but comparing them to what happened at Fukushima is apples to mikans.

[Stonepounder]

20. Well, they DID build one right on top of a major earthquake fault.

And never forget Three Mile Island.

[dbackjon]

23. Yes, lets not forget TMI

Everything that could go wrong at TMI, and yet there was almost no radiation released.

14 Microsieverts. You get more than double that from a chest X-ray.

And if you live in Denver, you are exposed to 800 more microsieverts a year than if you lived at sea level.

[The_Voice_of_Reason]

25. Actually....

I live in the peak fatality zone for Indian Point...

Twice in last five years Manhattan has dodged a Cat 2 Hurricane...if Manhattan takes a direct hit from a Cat 2 Hurricane, the tital surge up the Hudson River would flood in the unstable spent fuel storage pools, and like flood the reactors...that is not speculation, that is fact. In short, we would have a very similar situation to Fukushima.

[tblue37]

17. Just last night I was saying something close to your last sentence.

I was telling my friend that just because we don't hear about it any more, that doesn't mean that Fukushima isn't continuing to irretrievably poison everything.

[Nitram]

24. Fukushima isn't poisoning "everything."

It's a serious problem for Fukushima, particularly near the plant. I visited the ruins of my wife's ancestral home in Fukushima last September, several miles from the nuclear plant. The background radiation was very, very low - around 1.5 milliSievert/hr.

[The_Voice_of_Reason]

26. Just in the news this week...

They are seeing highest radiation spikes since the accident at Fukushima...they suspected it is because of escaping melted fuel rods.

[hunter]

19. Trump and Pence might be the end of this civilization.

The radioactive mess at Fukushima isn't going anywhere. It will just sit there, becoming cooler and less radioactive as the years go by.

Fossil fuel use, on the other hand, is still increasing. It doesn't look as if anything is going to slow that down except rising seas and bad weather.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

The largest industrial projects in the world today will be extracting natural gas. Humans have gotten really good at that. Gas "reserves" are measured in decades, even up to a century. Easily enough to end civilization as we know it.

I expect we'll be seeing climate change refugees within the United States before too long.

It's nothing new in earth's history. Populations of innovative species grow exponentially and then these populations crash. Exponential growth never ends well.

We're not the first species to experience this, and we won't be the last. A hundred thousand years from now our world civilization is a peculiar layer in the geologic record.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that we are killing off so many other species with our pointless "productivity" and population growth.

[dembotoz]

21. To your point climate change refugees in this country before too long....

I am in Wisconsin nearing retirement age and folks my age babble about moving to Florida..Or Arizona..
I see both as places to move from not to..Why move to Florida when Florida is moving to you...If you were a betting person...Who do you think will get fucked first in this countries climate roulette?

[Nitram]

22. The end of civilization? Henny Penny, please can the hyperbole.

[pangaia]

27. The stuff has spread throughout the Pacific ocean...

[Brother Buzz]

29. That's what so cool about radioactive isotopes....

Minuscule trace amounts are easily read...and marine scientists have been able to capitalizing.


Stanford scientist uses Fukushima radiation to reveal swimming secrets of Pacific bluefin tuna

Trace radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster is showing up in Pacific bluefin tuna. By measuring that radiation, scientists are gaining valuable insight about the fish's early migratory habits.

Stanford Report, March 4, 2013

Last May, scientists reported that 15 Pacific bluefin tuna caught in California in the months after the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011 contained trace amounts of radiation. It was the first evidence of migrating animals transporting radioactive materials across the ocean, and the researchers suggested it could provide a means for tracking the fish's annual migrations.

Now, nearly two years after the plant discharged radioactive materials into the ocean, follow-up research led by a biology PhD candidate at Stanford finds that young Pacific bluefin tuna are still arriving in California carrying two of Fukushima's signature radioisotopes, cesium-134 and cesium-137.

The work supports the idea that the Fukushima radioisotopes can be used to reliably determine the previously unknown trans-oceanic movements of juvenile Pacific bluefin tuna. This information could be used to prevent tuna from being overfished.

Pacific bluefin tuna are born several miles off the shores of Japan and surrounding countries. They spend their first year foraging in those waters, and then either remain in the western Pacific or migrate eastward to California. Although the movements of adult tuna have been revealed through electronic tagging programs, electronic tagging of juvenile bluefin in Japan has been difficult, and so certain details of this early-life migration remain unknown.

<more>

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/bluefin-tuna-secrets-030413.html

[pangaia]

30. Nothing like a little radioactive chu-toro to make your day.

[Brother Buzz]

31. The upside is....

Only rich fat cats can afford to it it on a regular basis. If you get my meaning, and catch my drift.

[lunasun]

28. Epoch times Falun Gong