Japan: more information on the nuclear situation

[starlady]

I was going to shut up, but I've heard enough anecdotal accounts of people Stateside having hugely wrong ideas about the level of risk from radiation that I have a few notes. This information is accurate as of 12:30 Wednesday, California time. It's a bit unclear in places, but this reflects the unclear information that the government and Tokyo Electric are announcing. ETA: The New York Times has a good graphic putting radiation levels through Wednesday in perspective. /eta

I watched Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano's latest press conference at about 11:30 Wednesday Japan time. As well as imploring people not to try to stockpile fuel, he confirmed that radiation levels inside the Fukushima One plant were recorded at 1000 miliSievert/hr (mSieverts) as of early Wednesday morning Japan time--inside the plant radiation later decreased to between 600-800 mSieverts, but that's still too high to work safely (1000 mSieverts/hr is the threshold for radiation sickness). His current best guess was that the white smoke observed in the vicinity was venting from somewhere in the No. 3 system and the radiation spike was related to this--this probably represents a rupture of No. 3's primary containment vessel. The plant workers were withdrawn secondary to these increased radiation levels.

As of 4:30 Thursday morning, the No. 3 reactor and the No. 4 fuel pool are no longer being cooled; it's assumed that the white smoke observed from No. 3 is the remaining coolant (i.e. water) in the fuel pool boiling away. Meanwhile, the fuel pools at Nos. 5 and 6 are no longer being cooled, and the temperature in them is rising.

At midnight Thursday (00:00) levels at the plant gate were at 10.85 mSieverts, but decreased by 03:30 to about 3.5 mSieverts. At 25 km away, the max radiation observed Thursday so far was 80 µSieverts/hr; at 20 km away, the edge of the mandatory evacuation zone, it was 330 µSieverts/hr. Flying from Tokyo to New York carries a guaranteed exposure of 190 µSieverts; normal background radiation varies, but is about 2.4 microSieverts worldwide. Note thanks to owlectomy there's a difference between mSieverts/hr and mSieverts (like that between speed and distance), and I'm assuming that all the reported numbers here are per hour rather than absolute readings, but it's not clear to me from the coverage.

As of right now the government says that the people who need to be worried about radiation exposure are either in the Fukushima One plant or within the 20km mandatory evacuation zone which was announced at 11:00 Tuesday Japan time--the NHK was reporting on Wednesday that about 650 people in the zone could not evacuate, though thousands have already fled. At the Wednesday morning press conference, Edano confirmed that officials are not extending the mandatory evacuation zone at this time: within 20-30km away, people are still being told to either evacuate or to stay inside, not use the AC, cover their face and hair if they go outside and wash them when they come back in, and abandon any laundry they have on the line. I would certainly take official assurances with a grain of salt if I lived in that zone; the U.S. government has told its citizens to evacuate within 50 miles, and military personnel have been told not to go within 50 miles of the plant absent specific orders to the contrary. The situation remains exceedingly serious. The 50 workers who remained at the plant are true heroes (it's not clear whether they sheltered on or off-site).

The No. 4 fuel pool was reported to be burning on Wednesday morning; it's not clear whether it's the same fire that was there on Tuesday, which was reported to have been extinguished, or whether it's still burning now--photos suggest not. Another serious problem is No. 2, whose primary containment vessel was probably breached on Tuesday and whose roof is still intact, which would prevent the last-ditch option of dumping in coolant (i.e. water) by helicopter--No. 2 was also apparently venting smoke or steam according to photos. The other serious problem is that the coolant in the Nos. 5 and 6 fuel pools will boil away completely by sometime late Thursday or early Friday. Tokyo Electric officials are advising against optimism.

As of approximately 13:00 Wednesday Japan time, the NHK was reporting that the JSDF has begun preparations to attempt to deliver coolant via helicopter, but there's no word on whether or when that will actually take place. As of 4:30 Thursday morning, NHK is now reporting that the national police are going to use fire trucks, which can only operate at a distance of 50m.

The thing to remember is that the situation in Japan is three disasters unfolding in the same general area: the earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear crisis. By far the most widely damaging one was the tsunami, and they were reporting heavy snowfall in Minamisanriku and across many of the devastated towns on Wednesday, which will not help the survivors. Aftershocks are continuing throughout the affected area as well.

That said, Japan is a long country with multiple active fault systems, and in a case of "it never rains but it pours," early Wednesday morning Japan time a 6.4 earthquake struck eastern Shizuoka prefecture, centered near the city of Fujinomiya. This is an apparently unrelated fault than that which broke last Friday, and it's another strain on a country that is dealing with a lot. The 6.0 earthquake that struck Chiba at 12:52 Wednesday Japan time is probably related, on the other hand.

The IAEA's website is down due to heavy traffic, but iaea.org remains the single best source in English on the reactors specifically.

As a footnote, the yen has apparently hit a nearly sixteen-year high against the dollar Wednesday morning, New York time. Meanwhile, the confirmed death toll from the tsunami and earthquake has risen to 4377.

Comments

[nijibug]

Thanks for keeping updated.

[starlady]

You're welcome; I've updated it with some corrections.

[rodo]

And the latest news is that the workers have to leave due to radiation of 1 Sievert. And that people suspected that the containment vessel of No. 3 was breached too. At least that's on Spiegel Online.

It's not just people stateside, though. People think about stockpiling iodine tablets in Germany and even my mother can hardly stop talking about Czernobyl (which is still causing problems here). I think she started cleaning like crazy to keep sane.

Fuck, I wish I could help somehow.

[starlady]

Hmm, that might have been in the Tokyo Electric press conference--I didn't realize it was happening immediately because I'm switching between tabs. That said, they're not reporting any of that on NHK as of right this second, but one of the horribly, gotta-laugh-or-you'll-cry things about watching the coverage is how many times the NHK people comment that it's difficult to understand just what's going on from the Tepco information. ETA: No, they just reconfirmed that the workers left for an hour, no word on when/whether they'll come back. /eta

I will say this in comments: my own personal reading on the situation is that things are slowly lurching out of control. I'm impressed and amazed that Tepco have managed to keep things together this long, in some ways.

I know exactly how you feel, I think.

[rodo]

I tried paying attention to the press conferences, but it's really difficult if all you see are people who clearly have no clue themselves but who try to assure people that everything is fine. Not reassuring at all, even if things might not be bad at all.

My mother and I agree with the "slowly lurching out of control" bit and my mother thinks that's the most painful part. With Czernobyl they didn't have a clue until there was an actualfax radioactive cloud over Sweden.

[starlady]

Yeah, I just read the Wikipedia article on Chernobyl last night, and it is utterly horrifying.

If the radiation levels somehow decrease enough to let the workers get back in safely, there's a definite possibility that they could pull things out. Unfortunately by Thursday midday Japan time the fuel pools at Nos. 5 and 6 are going to start being a problem too; that's probably the upper limit on the timeframe.

[owlectomy]

Edano misspoke; the actual level was 1 milliSievert/hr.

(BTW, there is a difference between Sieverts, total, and Sieverts over a certain period of time -- like the difference between distance and speed.)

[rodo]

Phew, good to hear. I just started assuming that every number that was not specified was per hour.

[starlady]

Thanks for the correction. I rewatched and corrected the post accordingly. I can understand why the NHK people are never completely clear on things, either.

[thistleingrey]

Thanks for this. I've been peeking occasionally at NHK World (in English), and I do at least have a sense of the geography, but there isn't much useful info in English. (And I have been trying to avoid bumping into the plentiful non-useful "info" in English. arrgh.)

[starlady]

CNN is ridiculous in particular.

I've updated the post with some corrections. (You're welcome.)

[snarp]

(And I have been trying to avoid bumping into the plentiful non-useful "info" in English. arrgh.)

I've enforced an official No Goddamn English Television News On The Nuclear Situation Policy in the house. (I'm sick and I'm the one who speaks Japanese! I am allowed to do this!) When there's something that looks like actual information on there, it seems like it inevitably turns out to be a mistake or half of one twenty minutes later. I'm not even counting the "commentators" - the sounds that the humidifier makes are a more edifying experience. It's so inane.

[starlady]

Inane and sensationalizing--my advisor referred to the Fleet Street tradition in reference to the British coverage, but it's pretty much pan-English. I turned CNN off after 10 minutes and have no plans to turn it back on.

[facetofcathy]

Thank you for this. Al Jazeera has an understandable (due to the lack of nuclear power in the region) slightly alarmist tone to its reporting on the nuclear situation, so I've been reading the Guardian for that part of the story.

[starlady]

Everything here is a combination of NHK analysis with government and Tepco press conferences. None of it's very clear; the government is getting its information from Tepco and they're not being forthcoming or transparent. The NHK actually broke the story of the smoke/steam from No. 3.

[glass_icarus]

Thanks for the information; I hope you don't mind if I signal-boost?

[starlady]

Not at all. It looks like the situation is still substantially the same, except maybe a little worse.

[mercredigirl]

Thank you for this information. Signal-boosting.

[starlady]

You're welcome, though it's not completely current by now.

[bell]

Thank you for this update. I tried a few sources of news in English and scurried away quickly because it seemed to be all useless disaster porn. This feels like solid information and I appreciate that.

[starlady]

You're welcome. If you don't mind the real-time aspect, someone in Japan named Katz is translating all the news and press conferences here: http://www.ustwrap.info/multi/nhk-gtv::nhk-world-tv::yokosonews

And yes, the English-language news coverage has been pretty bad. I usually stick with the New York Times, but even they can get pretty hyped up.

[bell]

Yeah, the NYTimes seems better than most English sources, if only for being less sensationalist (I can't remark on its accuracy...). I also quite liked The Japan Times.

[starlady]

Fwiw, I've noticed occasional small factual errors in the NYT, but nothing too serious. My reaction to their analysis articles is usually "Yeah, mostly, but you're exaggerating."

Oh, yeah, The Japan Times would be pretty good.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the update.

What I'd like to know -- but probably won't get a straight answer on for years, if ever -- is whether Tepco has done a good job of dealing with the situation. I have the impression from my reading that some of the emergency measures (e.g. pumping seawater into the reactor) are of a sort that renders it unusable afterward. If that's true, then it's possible those things weren't done as quickly as they maybe should have been, out of hope that the installation could be salvaged. But that kind of questioning and second-guessing is easy to do, and what seems obviously necessary after the fact might have seemed like an overreaction at the time. I don't know, but I wish I did.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I just edited the post thanks to rewatching; things are worse. To be honest, my own personal read on the situation is that it's slowly lurching out of control. If radiation levels somehow decrease enough for workers to get back in safely (the government has already increased the legal exposure limit to 250 mSieverts from 100), they could still pull it out, but there are no guarantees.

I read some coverage at some point saying they should have started the seawater pumping/feed and bleed on Nos. 1 & 3 early on Saturday and didn't because of fears of igniting Japan's anti-nuclear sentiments; I have no idea whether that's true, though it wouldn't surprise me. So much of the English-language coverage is rumor-mongering from off the record sources in the nuclear community, it's hard to know just what's what. It's my understanding that the seawater in particular is a measure that would render the reactor inoperable thereafter; I'm less sure whether the nuclear poisons like boric acid are reversible. The entire plant is probably a loss at this point, of course.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Shit, shit, shit. Evacuating the remaining workers is extra-bad news.

At this point, yes, the entire plant is almost certainly a loss. What will be unbearable is if they had reason to suspect that early on, and didn't embrace it when it might have prevented this state.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

After reading about TMI and Chernobyl, I feel reasonably confident in saying that whatever the hell they were thinking, it was probably path-dependent: because things had never gotten that bad before, it's hard to imagine that things can get so much radically worse, especially under stress. And on Saturday the main problem was "just" No. 1. Though these are to some extent excuses.

Unlike TMI and Chernobyl, this one seems to have been purely a design flaw (the position of the generators) amplified by outside circumstances, whereas TMI and Chernobyl both had situations far outside normal parameters by operator choice that were then compounded by operator error in concert with bad or catastrophic design flaws, of course.

On a related note, I find it highly disturbing that the faults in both this 9.0 and the 8.4(?) Sumatra earthquake in 2004 were not thought to be able to produce such strong temblors. Just like no one predicted that the tsunami in towns like Kesennuma and Minamisanriku would be amplified by the hills and reach 50 and 60 ft high, respectively. So in some respects this is a thing: people seem to have trouble imagining that things will get as bad as they actually can. Actually, in that respect, I've been thinking about Apollo 13 a lot recently.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

We went over both Chernobyl and TMI in a fair bit of detail during my high school physics class. The former in particular was not what I would call an accident; it happened because of an extended series of extremely bad decisions, starting with the design, continuing through the tests that led to the meltdown, and finishing with certain parts of the response.

Humans are definitely bad at fully imagining how bad stuff can get, at least in realistic scenarios. Fictional zombie apocalypses, sure, but not nature behaving in unexpected ways, all the confounding factors that can make the initial problem worse.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Mm, that's a good point about Chernobyl. I read the article and it was appalling--why they thought any of that was a good idea in the first place is incomprehensible, and then they kept doing the exact worst thing possible, all of this within a basically nonexistent culture of safety. I'm not sure what word to use instead, though. Disaster, obviously, but describing the actual process itself = ?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

"Orchestrated clusterfuck" might do.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Yeah, that exactly.

The JSDF has apparently begun preparing to dump water by helicopter. This is probably the last chance to save the situation.

[hisui-ryoshi.livejournal.com]

I wish I remembered more of my Japanese. I'm only catching bits and pieces so it's good to have a comprehensive update. It's also much easier for us to review from the outside.

I continue to wish all the workers well, and hope they are able to resolve this situation. Thanks for the update.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I've learned a lot of technical vocabulary; I have to keep a dictionary tab open to parse what I'm hearing. The old listening comprehension trick of listening at the beginning and at the end for the main verb is less effective when the stuff in between is crucial.

You're welcome.

[larryhammer]

The old listening comprehension trick of listening at the beginning and at the end for the main verb is less effective when the stuff in between is crucial.

Heh. There's a similar effect with scientific German.

---L.