Japan Fears Nuclear Reactor Is Leaking Contaminated Water
Radiation measuring 1,000 millisieverts per hour was detected in water in an overflow tunnel outside the plant’s Reactor No. 2, Japan’s nuclear regulator said at a news conference. The maximum dose allowed for workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts in a year.
Thank you shift for all of the links. I am plagiarizing many of the articles to help with my “Effect of Irradiation on Meiosis and Genetics” paper. Fuck yeaaaaaaah.
wow that is def one of the first times you can say shift was really useful to someones life…good luck on the paper buddy
Record-High Levels of Radiation Found in Sea Near Crippled Nuclear Reactor
By Go Onomitsu and Sachiko Sakamaki -Record-high readings of contaminated sea water were found yesterday near the crippled Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said, while workers grappled with ways to reduce toxic radiation at the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.
Radioactive iodine in seawater near the Fukushima plant rose to 3,355 times the legal limit yesterday afternoon from 2,572 times earlier in the day, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the agency, told reporters today.
About 600 workers at the plant have eliminated the threat of total meltdown by injecting and streaming water into and on damaged reactors for the past two weeks. Engineers have connected the complex’s six units with the power grid and seek to repair or replace cooling systems damaged in the disaster. The work has been hampered by discoveries of hazardous radioactive water in and near the reactors.
“Specialists are considering various possibilities and means to contain the nuclear power plant situation and minimize the radiation impact on surrounding areas and to people’s health,” Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a news conference today. “We haven’t reached a conclusion as to what kind of means are possible or effective.”
Among the proposals under consideration, Japan may use a special cloth to cover three reactors at the damaged Dai-Ichi nuclear plant to curb the spread of toxic radiation in the air.
Reactor ShroudThe three reactors all lost their roofs following explosions and fires in the days following the March 11 magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami, which knocked out power and backup systems used to cool nuclear fuel.
Crews are also considering pumping radioactive water in the reactor buildings to a tanker for safe storage. The U.S. has transported robots impervious to radiation and their operators to the plant at Japan’s request, Peter Lyons, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Energy Department, told a congressional panel yesterday.
Fukushima plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it can’t rule out the possibility that water may have flowed into the sea from underground trenches outside the reactor buildings.
Work to drain radioactive water from the basement of the No. 1 reactor turbine building was halted because a storage tank is full, Kazuyo Yamanaka, a manager at the power utility, said today. Tokyo Electric plans to move the contaminated water into a condenser within the same building.
Water HazardsThe level of contaminated water in the basement of the No. 1 reactor turbine building has been reduced by half to 20 centimeters (7.9 inches), Nishiyama said.
Water in a tunnel outside the No. 2 reactor emitted radiation exceeding 1 sievert an hour, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said. Exposure to that dose for 30 minutes would trigger nausea, and four hours exposure might lead to death within two months, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Workers can’t work near water with radiation levels exceeding 1 sievert per hour, at least not within a few meters,” said Hironobu Unesaki, a professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute. “They may need to remotely remove water or rotate workers for very short periods of time.”
Higher readings inside and outside the No. 2 unit indicate that a partial meltdown of fuel rods is “pretty much without a doubt,” Edano, the government spokesman, said yesterday. “This is a grave situation.”
The leakage of plutonium is another sign of damaged fuel, Nishiyama said.
French ConnectionFrance, which relies on nuclear power for 80 percent of its electricity, said it sent five experts in radioactive contaminant removal to Japan this week to aid Tokyo Electric. Anne Lavergeon, president of Areva SA (CEI), the world’s biggest builder of reactors, is scheduled to meet with Japanese government officials and Tepco executives in Tokyo today. Areva had provided uranium-plutonium fuel to the plant. French President Nicolas Sarkozy will visit Tokyo on Thursday to meet with Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
Tokyo Electric said Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 71, will take charge of the nuclear crisis after President Masataka Shimizu, 66, was admitted to hospital for high blood pressure.
There is no danger of contamination outside the 20- kilometer (12-mile) exclusion zone imposed around the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, Kan said.
Cleanup probably will take at least five years because of the time needed for radioactivity to diminish so experts can assess the damage, Akira Tokuhiro, a professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at the University of Idaho, said in an interview. That assessment will determine whether the reactors should be entombed or dismantled to eliminate any further radiation risk, he said.
The number of dead and missing from the earthquake and tsunami had reached 27,593 as of 10 a.m., Japan’s National Police Agency said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Go Onomitsu in Tokyo at gonomitsu@bloomberg.net; Sachiko Sakamaki in Tokyo at ssakamaki1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Patrick Chu at pachu@bloomberg.net
“France, which relies on nuclear power for 80 percent of its electricity, said it sent five experts in radioactive contaminant removal to Japan this week to aid Tokyo Electric. Anne Lavergeon, president of Areva SA (CEI), the world’s biggest builder of reactors, is scheduled to meet with Japanese government officials and Tepco executives in Tokyo today. Areva had provided uranium-plutonium fuel to the plant. French President Nicolas Sarkozy will visit Tokyo on Thursday to meet with Prime Minister Naoto Kan.”
Yaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy…, good job France.
:wierd
the thing that really shocks me on this one is the engineers working on the issue are getting fed worse then somebody in a mexican prison. 2 meals a day consisting of crackers,rice and a type of protein. Lack of protective equipment for the workers and add a few hrs sleep a day.
Radioactive water from Japanese nuclear plant dumped into sea
The operator of the crippled Fukushima complex begins releasing 11,500 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific to make room in storage tanks for even more highly contaminated water. The government says the release does not pose an immediate threat to humans.
Reporting from Tokyo—
By Julie Makinen and Kenji Hall, Los Angeles Times
April 4, 2011, 7:43 a.m.The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant began releasing about 11,500 tons of radioactive water into the sea Monday evening so that it could make room in storage tanks for even more severely contaminated water.
Some 10,000 tons of the water being released into the ocean was being taken from a communal storage facility near the No. 4 reactor. Another 1,500 tons was being released from the vicinity of the No. 5 and 6 reactors — which have been less troubled than reactors Nos. 1 through 4. The amount of water being released is equivalent to more than four Olympic-size swimming pools.
Although the water being released had levels of radioactive iodine 131 more than 100 times the legal limit allowed for sea discharge, the government approved the release as an “emergency” measure so that water with 100,000 times more radiation than the water found in a normally functioning reactor can be removed from the basement of the turbine building at reactor No. 2 and stored somewhere on the site.
Even as the government asserted that the release of the radioactive water into the sea would not pose an immediate threat to humans, health ministry official Taku Ohara said the ministry was considering drawing up radioactivity food-safety standards for fish after high radiation levels were detected in a sand lance, a bottom-feeding fish, caught off the coast of Ibaraki prefecture.
Nuclear experts have assumed that radioactive iodine, which has a brief half-life, would become diluted in the ocean and decay too quickly to be detected in fish, but Monday’s finding has raised doubts about that, said Ohara.
contiune reading…Japan clears discharge of some radioactive water into sea
I can’t believe I used to fap with those; no wonder my dick is darker than the rest of my skin.
U.S. Sees New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html
United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission…
…The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to 1 mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two of the units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed.
Oh boy.
They just bulldozed it over?
What exactly stops radiation from well radiating through?
how worse is this than when we dropped hiroshima and so on ? does this mean were gonna have more mongoloids runnin around from there ?
The plant radiation is not worse… :rofl
Yet. 
reading that makes you feel good & sad all at the same time. helluva guy right there.
Yes, power to him.
Just got hit wit ha 7.4 quake, tsunami alert issued.
Oh that can’t be good.
Saw this coming but anyway:
Japan ups Fukushima nuke crisis severity to 7, same as Chernobyl
TOKYO, April 12, Kyodo
Japan on Tuesday raised the severity level of the ongoing emergency at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from level 5 to the maximum 7 on an international scale, recognizing that the tsunami-caused accident matches the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe in 1986 at Chernobyl.
The government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency upgraded its provisional evaluation based on an estimate that radioactive materials far exceeding the criteria for level 7 have so far been released into the external environment, but added that the release from the Fukushima plant is about 10 percent of that from the former Soviet nuclear plant.
The nuclear regulatory agency under the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan, a government panel, said that between 370,000 and 630,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials have been emitted into the air from the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors of the plant.
Level 7 accidents on the International Nuclear Event Scale correspond to the release into the external environment of radioactive materials equal to more than tens of thousands of terabecquerels of radioactive iodine 131. One terabecquerel equals 1 trillion becquerels.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano emphasized that the raising of the severity level does not mean the situation at the Fukushima plant is ‘‘worsening.’’
The top government spokesman said the latest assessment is simply based on data which are more accurate than the time it made its previous assessments.
The plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. offered an apology to the public for being still unable to stop the radiation leakage, pointing to the possibility that the total emission of radioactive substances could eventually surpass that of the Chernobyl incident.
A considerable amount of radioactive materials emitted is believed to originate from the plant’s No. 2 reactor, whose containment vessel’s pressure suppression chamber was damaged by an explosion on March 15, said Kenkichi Hirose, a Cabinet Office adviser serving for the safety commission, at a news conference.
‘‘Our estimates suggest the amount of radioactive materials released into the air sharply rose on March 15 and 16 after abnormalities were detected at the No. 2 reactor,’’ Hirose said. ‘‘The cumulative amount of leaked radiation has been gradually on the rise, but we believe the current emission level is significantly low.’’
The safety commission said it estimates the release has come down to under 1 terabecquerel per hour.
Japan believes the Fukushima crisis, triggered by the devastating March 11 earthquake and ensuing tsunami, is different from the Chernobyl accident in many ways, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the nuclear agency.
As examples, Nishiyama said no one in Fukushima has died from acute diseases caused by exposure to massive amounts of radiation, compared with about 30 in the accident that happened in the former Soviet Union, and that the reactors themselves did not explode as in Chernobyl.
‘‘Even though some amount of radiation keeps leaking from reactors and their containment vessels, they are not totally destroyed and are functioning,’’ Nishiyama said.
Hirose ruled out the possibility that the evacuation zone set by the government within 20 kilometers from the plant will be reviewed following the upgrading of the severity level.
Nishiyama said it took about a month to raise the severity level of the Fukushima contingency due to a delay in securing reliable monitoring data. On March 18, the agency had provisionally set the level at 5, the same as the Three Mile Island accident in the United States in 1979.
The provisional judgment will be finalized after examinations by a government panel of nuclear experts, Nishiyama said, adding that the government will further bolster radiation monitoring to collect data.
The INES only reflects radiation emitted into the air, and Japan needs to independently assess the severity of the incident by also monitoring contamination levels in the sea and soil, he said.
Earlier, the safety commission released a preliminary calculation for the cumulative amount of radiation, saying it has exceeded the yearly limit of 1 millisievert in areas extending more than 60 km northwest of the plant and about 40 km south-southwest of the plant.
Within the 20-km exclusion zone, the amount varied from under 1 millisievert to 100 millisieverts or more, and in the 20-30 km ring where residents are asked to stay indoors it came to nearly 50 millisieverts.
==Kyodo
