The Japanese nuclear regulatory agency has raised the level of the Fukushima disaster to level 7, the same as the classification of the Chernobyl accident. The previous level was 5, and since the scale is logarithmic, this means that the Japanese think the accident is one hundred times worse than their previous assessment. (Of course, Fukushima didn’t get 100X worse overnight — this late reassessment is simply another example of the reluctance of either the Japanese or the nuclear regulatory-industrial complex, or both, to accept the obvious.)
Speaking of accepting the obvious, the Japanese government has finally decided to evacuate some towns outside even the 30 kilometer “shelter in place” radius. This evacuation order is selective, using radiation sampling data to evacuate areas that received more fallout from the plant.
In other news, the plant lost power and cooling for almost an hour after another aftershock yesterday. And, there were two more hydrogen explosions in the last couple of days. The worst happened at the #3 unit yesterday and injured 11 workers. The Japanese media now calls the workers at Fukushima the “Fukushima 700”.
The BBC has a short, readable overview of the past month at Fukushima for those who aren’t following this obsessively.
MTiffany
The IAEA Safety Glossary – Terminology Used in Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection 2007 Edition has a somewhat different definition of the International Nuclear Event Scale than that provided by Wikipedia.
www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1290_web.pdf (pages 95-96)
BR
The most amazing thing about this to me is that it’s been a month and it’s still in horrible shape. I think we and the media aren’t used to disasters that keep going for that long, so the media coverage has pretty much dropped to zero.
anon
@BR:
So basically, no one in the media learned a thing from the on-going disaster at BP’s Deepwater Horizon site.
Not one thing more than anyone learned from the lead-up to the Iraq war.
Kirk Spencer
@BR: Actually, most disasters and their aftermaths can go on for a long time. The media, however, is built on and contributes to the ADHD “that’s so 30 minutes ago” attitude that permeates our culture.
BR
@anon:
Yeah. The difficulty with the oil in the gulf is after it stopped spewing, it sank (from what I understand anyway), so it’s hard for anyone to cover it when they don’t know where it is and what it’s doing (well except killing baby dolphins).
Cat Lady
@BR:
I don’t read Japanese, but I wonder if their media wants Kan to wear emopants and are blaming him for not fixing it already. Do they have politicians who are asking for an apology for TEPCO? My sense is that the American media and politicians are uniquely stupid and lazy.
Cermet
This is no Chernobyl – while it is far, far worse than Three-mile Island there is no comparison to the scale of Chernobyl; that was a core that was fully exposed to the air and on fire for some weeks. Yes, they have a highly limited core exposure but it is still fully contained (fuel elements – not radioactive gas or cooling water as run off.) Vast areas will not become a radioactive waste land like in the Ukraine.
The workers and the conditions/safety issues – if half I read is true, this is criminal murder by the power company and should be condemned by everyone as a gross violation of human health and the Japanese should be ashamed that they are doing this to such brave people. Utter shame. Profit trumpets human welfare every time – sick.
magurakurin
Believe me, the media has not stopped covering the disaster in Japan. It is daily and constant. Those of us in Japan have a lot more to worry about that those of you back in the States, so it makes sense that the coverage is going to be more here than there. And as fucked up as it is, you guys aren’t going to be affected by this, which kind of does make it someone elses problem. However, I do hope against hope that the entire world takes a lesson and from this and begins to create an energy roadmap that leads to the end of nuclear power.
But the US media still sucks dog balls
Uloborus
Sigh. Listen, guys, do you remember how we found out about Chernobyl? You know, because the Soviet Union refused to tell anybody about it? We found out because radiation levels spiked all over Eastern and Northern Europe, a thousand miles away from the accident. Like, immediately. The current situation involves increases just enough high enough that the government is clearing the whole area as a precaution.
I highly recommend mitnse.com/ for anyone who wants to hear from actual nuclear scientists who are following this process closely. Among other things, you learn that hydrogen explosions are expected and not disastrous, although you certainly don’t want them. You also learn that this kind of thing really does take months. Your odds of shutting down the reactor itself are quite low. What you want to do is keep it cool to avoid meltdown, because the containment shell holds in the radiation and nuclear decay means that after awhile the whole thing shuts itself down. The current situation is that just enough radioactive contaminants have escaped – and there’s no reason to think they’re the ‘stick around forever’ contaminants – that the site itself is not a place you’d want to be.
That said, the site itself is not a place you’d want to be, and the Fukushima 700 are fucking heroes who know they’re most likely giving their lives for the rest of Japan. I could not respect them more.
Regular Reader
The INES isn’t logarithmic, at least not by any evidence I’ve seen – Wikipedia only says it is “intended to be logarithmic,” which is like the proverbial “a little bit pregnant.” You’re either logarithmic or you’re not, and since the INES is not measured quantifiably (according to the link at the top of the comments), it most certainly cannot be.
Besides, the story that this post is based on states “[T]he agency said the volume of radiation from Fukushima is one-tenth that at Chernobyl.” So a more accurate headline would be “One-tenth as bad as Chernobyl!“
Uloborus
@Regular Reader:
And that’s radiation on the site. Chernobyl spread that radiation over hundreds of miles, not ‘We’ve found some spots within 30 miles that are getting 1.6 microsieverts per hour’. About 30 times what you’re getting sitting in a room without a TV on. Not something you want to be in for years, but Chernobyl? Don’t even make that comparison.
MattF
The history of major incidents at nuclear reactors repeats itself with a kind of eerie precision, again and again. Kinda makes you think that there are systemic problems there, in both management and engineering.
mistermix
@Regular Reader: I plead guilty to using an overly provocative headline.
handsmile
Yesterday morning (Monday) the BBC World News broadcast, in its first extended segment on Fukushima in two weeks, featured two nuclear “experts” who smugly assured viewers that the situation at the reactor site had stabilized and safety conditions were improving. One, a nuclear physicist from the powerhouse University of Sussex (iirc), actually chucked in response to the news reader’s question about dangers from radiation, “these levels are insignificant to human health” [paraphrase].
While watching I loudly commented to my patient wife that it was remarkable that the BBC had chosen to present its viewers only with two individuals whose opinions were in such stark contrast to international consensus that the Fukushima crisis remained volatile, with health consequences increasingly regarded with alarm.
Let me suggest that the BBC may not be the most reliable source of news and analysis on Fukushima. For even non-obsessive readers, I would recommend AllThingsNuclear.org (Union of Concerned Scientists website), NHK.or.jp (NHK World English-Japan Broadcasting Corporation), MIT.edu.newsoffice (MIT website) or Guardian.co.uk (The Guardian newspaper) for more authoritative reports.
magurakurin
@MattF:
I can’t say from any sort of real knowledge by my guess is the problems stem in management or the business end and not the engineering. I’m guessing that if a nuclear power company told the engineers that they want a plant that can withstand a magnitude 20 earthquake and the following tsunami, the engineers could come back with a plan to do just that. But there is no power company in the world that would accept it because the cost would be too high.
I’m sort of willing to at least listen to the argument that nuclear power might be able to be done safely. But…there is no way in hell I believe that any company that is in the nuclear power business to turn a profit can actually do it with complete safety. Nuclear power can probably only be run safely by some sort of quasi-military organization with intense regulation and discipline and as such would cost so much to safe guard it that it isn’t worth the price. Something like the nuclear weapons program. If the Pentagon had to show a profit a lot of those nuke weapons systems would have already blown up by mistake. Human society simply hasn’t reached a level of political and social maturity to be able use nuclear power safely.
Pour the money into solar, wind and tide research instead. But I’m sure that won’t happen…sigh.
Mandramas
@magurakurin: Nuclear enerdy also needs for a cheap delivery options, that currently available, but after oil peak… The other choice is to create a vast world spanning energy grid, and locate the nuclear plants on uranium mines, but it is also unfeasible. Hydroelectric is so far the most green and feasible energy generation method.
Punchy
This is what the morgue will call them in 6 months, too.
PeakVT
Vast areas will not become a radioactive waste land like in the Ukraine.
Only because there is no land downwind.
The Japanese are lucky that this happened on the leeward side of Honshu.
James Aach
Textbooks will be written just on how the Japanese handled the media relations of this extraordinary mess.
FYI:
I’ve worked in the US nuclear industry over twenty years. One perspective that’s absent in the media is an insider’s take on how a nuclear power plant really operates day to day. It’s a far different world, both good and bad, from what people normally perceive. It is not The Simpsons and not Star Trek. Current media conversations sometimes remind me of casual drivers discussing with great confidence what it’s like to compete in the Daytona 500.
My book “Rad Decision: A Novel of Nuclear Power” provides a needed portrait of the industrial nuclear power world. It also happens to culminate in an accident very similar to the Japanese tragedy. (Same reactor type, same initial problem – a station blackout with scram.) Rad Decision is currently available free online at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com . (No adverts, nobody makes money off this site.) Reader reviews are in the homepage comments – there are plenty of them. There is also a paperback version available and a PDF download. Chernobyl is also discussed in detail.
Rad Decision shouldn’t convince any reader that nuclear is perfectly safe or horribly unsafe. Instead it provides the reader with some background and perspective so they can make more informed judgements. Unfortunately, my media presence consists of this little-known book and website, so I’m not an acknowledged “expert”. Sorry about that. I just happen to do the nuclear stuff for a living.
magurakurin
@PeakVT:
Yeah, well it’ll be pretty consistently the windward side of Honshu in a few more weeks and even more so in a few months. Typhoons aren’t generated in the Sea of Japan. The Northwest winds that have been blowing things out to sea are a winter weather pattern.
Probably what will safe Japan more is the Kuroshio Ocean Current, The Black Current. It’ll we help to carry the poisoned water far out to sea.
Robert Vickery
Better check that link to Unit #3 hydrogen explosion – the article linked shows a 3/14/11 date
Uloborus
@magurakurin:
A magnitude 20 earthquake would pulverize the Earth. That’s not hyperbole, that’s ‘100,000,000,000 times as bad as this Earthquake’.
Instead we have a reactor that survived the 4th largest earthquake in recorded history AND a tsunami and they’re still debating whether the reactor itself can be saved and reused. I don’t know about you, but I’M impressed by that level of engineering.
@PeakVT:
…uh, no. That’s almost as different from the facts as a magnitude 20 earthquake. Not only is the Chernobyl radioactive steam cloud not physically possible in this instance because the reactor is built differently, we’re past that part of the process.
@handsmile:
I’m following the MIT website. I linked to it above. They say the BBC scientists were exactly correct, although they say it with a great deal more detail that discusses the nuances and the challenges that have been overcome and remain.
red plaid
It seems that Europe has warned vulnerable groups to avoid milk, fresh cheese, and leafy vegetables. The article also states that US radiation levels are 8-10 higher. Anyone see any similar warnings from the US?
euractiv.com/en/health/radiation-risks-fukushima-longer-negligible-news-503947
PeakVT
@Uloborus: they’re still debating whether the reactor itself can be saved and reused.
Bullshit. First, there are six reactors, not one. Only two of the six reactors have the possibility of ever being operated again. An inspection of the two won’t be done until the other reactors are fully under control and the site decontaminated, so we won’t know one way or another for months. And it still might not be economic to operate 5 and 6 because of damage to the BOP.
Not only is the Chernobyl radioactive steam cloud not physically possible in this instance because the reactor is built differently
There has been plenty of radioactive steam released, and a lot of it has been from the spent fuel pools, which means the type of reactor is beside the point.
we’re past that part of the process.
Dog damn is it stupid to say for certain where we are in this process. Nobody knows. Nobody has foresight. And certainly nobody posting here knows what the condition of the reactors is.
mclaren
Once again, Cermet and Uloboros provide voices of reason amid the hysteria.
The combination earthquake/tsunami that hit Fukushima was absurdly large. As in, once every 100 years large. As in: pulverize San Francisco down to rubble where there isn’t one brick left on top of another large.
And yet…the containment vessel survived. It didn’t bust open, the core material didn’t burn through the bottom of the reactor’s concrete plate and hit a deep aquifer and then send a gigantic radiation plume up into the stratosphere. None of that “China Syndrome” stuff happened.
What happened is that the pressure built up in the reactor vessel and steam had to be vented to relieve it, so some Iodine-131 and Cesium-137 got released along with the steam and undoubtedly some Strontium-90. (“Some” means probably in the range of micrograms.) Those are serious concerns…but they’re nothing remotely close to Chernobyl.
This event proves without a doubt that nuclear reactors as designed today are safe. It also proves that TEPCO screwed up in several important ways.
[1] They left the fuel rods in pods near the plant. Bad idea. In future, all plants need to move the spent fuel rods out of the cooling ponds. We have a solution in place for this: vitrify the material in the fuel rods (encase it in glass) and dump the vitrified nuclear waste in geologically stable salt mines. If that had been done, the workers at Fukushima wouldn’t have died AFAICT. All the radiation exposure to the workers seems to have come from the cooling ponds, NOT from exposure to radiation from the core, because the core was never exposed. Ever.
[3] Don’t put the electrical generators in the basement of the reactor building, where they can get flooded (or buried).
[4] It might be a good idea to think about putting some industrial-grade diesel generators ON SITE at nuclear reactors with plenty of diesel fuel in shock-protected tanks JUST IN CASE. If you happen to build a reactor in, you know, the “ring of fire” right on a major earthquake fault in that part of Asia…
Prediction: the total number of casualties from this disaster will be limited to the workers, and those will be caused by the spent fuel rods. We’re not going to see tens of thousands of ordinary Japanese dropping dead of radiation poisoning. Not gonna happen.
salacious crumb
as far as the Japanese govt being evasive about whats really going on with the nuclear reactor situation…i suppose the outside world shouldnt be surprised anymore….The more I think of it, its exactly the same arrogant behavior they displayed when trying to bribe members of UN Whaling Commission (or whatever the name of that anti whaling body was) to get them to vote against the whaling ban so that they could continue to please their countrys fishing lobby and thus encourage rapacious destruction of whales. Im not saying the Japanese people deserved this misfortune in any way, but it may go some way in explaining why they seem just as clueless to the plight of the whales, when their own govt is evasive about their actions
Cermet
@mclaren: Good points.
Ralph
@Uloborus:
“Instead we have a reactor that survived the 4th largest earthquake in recorded history AND a tsunami …”
That is, if by survived you mean had an accident that is now being classified as a level 7 disaster, the worst possible classification.
jheartney
@Cermet:
OTOH Fukushima has about ten times as much fissile material involved, large amounts of which are stored in unshielded pools. The entire plant, including all four reactors, is badly contaminated and getting more so every day. Chernobyl’s worst emissions went on for less than two weeks; Fukushima has ongoing contamination that will go on indefinitely till they brick the place.
WRT run off, what do you call the radioactive water discharged into the ocean? Where do you suppose the highly radioactive water found in the surrounding trenches came from? What do you think happened to the tons of sea water dumped onto the cores from early on?
And it’s foolish to predict how much of Japan will be permanently contaminated. We won’t know that for some time.
@Uloborus:
There are spots within the exclusion zone, including some fairly distant form the plant, getting over 110 microsieverts per hour. Check out this video at about 11:30.
Robert Sneddon
@jheartney: The radiation levels in the plant itself are going down and have been doing so pretty consistently since just after the explosions and venting in mid-March. There are hotspots where debris, probably from the spent fuel pools landed but where the monitoring stations are still working (the tsunami wiped out most of them) the numbers keep going down.
Outside the plant there are also hotspots as well as areas of very low background and little detectable physical contamination — the area in and around Iiwate villiage about 30km NW of the plant has been reading about 50uSv/h for the past week whereas the town of Iwaki about 35km to the south of the plant is less than 1uSv/h and has been for several days.
mclaren
@jheartney:
These are all fair points. That said, you have to have realized that the radioactive water discharged into the ocean will so rapidly be diluted down to harmless levels as to present no danger to anyone.
Seawater already contains naturally occurring uranium. The parts per million is low, but by adding an adsorbent uranium can be economically extracted. I don’t see anyone screaming about the allegedly deadly dangers of going swimming with all that naturally occurring uranium in the water.
After dilution, the seawater around Fukushima will still be significantly less radioactive than the basement in your house, because of the radon gas in your basement.
lethargytartare
this thread makes me want to re-watch Westworld…
Bill Cole
BULLSHIT!
The INES scale isn’t even quantitative, much less “logarithmic.” It is a qualitative grading scale based on the scope of impact and nature of response. There’s a very good reason for that: nuclear accidents by their nature are complex multi-dimensional events that are impossible to reduce to a single quantitative metric that is in any way useful. What “Level 7” means is that the Fukushima site will be the center of a dangerously radioactive zone for an extended period, and that the environmental and human health effects are likely to extend beyond any easily-defined zone.
Oh, and FWIW: the line that only Chernobyl and now Fukushima merit an INES 7 rating is a bit of a dodge. The INES scale only applies to accidental events, so it doesn’t grade the impact of facilities like the Hanford Works, whose non-accidental releases would qualify as level 7 if they had not been done in secret by a weapons plant. And of course it also does not apply to the open-air weapons testing that went on for decades. For many people, and especially people in the US, the radiation dose from Fukushima will never come close to the cumulative dose from decades of reckless weapons production and testing. For younger people, the explosion in air travel and
idiotic ideas like whole-body CT scans for hypochondriacs may beat out everything else.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
Jeez, the nuclear apologists here are like Republicans with tax cuts. Japan could be glowing and they would say “this is clear proof that the problem is under control.”
But don’t worry, a little radiation is probably good for you and only 43 people died from Chernobyl! Better living through modern chemistry!
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
It is clear that Balloon Juice is lousy with BAU upper-10%ers who are content to let the world burn as long as they can get the latest iPhone (or Android if that’s your preference).
tavella
At this point, the “why, it survived a 9.0 earthquake, so all is flowers and roses” is a sure sign of a Nuclear Fanboy at work. It didn’t survive a 9.0; it was no more than a low seven where the plant is, with recorded ground motion barely above design basis (and it was seriously under-designed for its location.)
Calouste
@Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy:
No use arguing with the religious fanatics, i.e. mclaren and her sockpuppets.
Allan West
Thank you for your concern Mistermix, but those of us living in Tokyo feel that perhaps a more nuanced assessment will help keep the perceptions accurate. The Japanese government is known for caving into foreign pressure, and in this case, the desire to err on the side of safety is one more factor. Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl may be a bit alarmist. First of all, there is a huge amount of wiggle room in the definition of a grade 7 accident. “Major releases of radioactive material” could mean many things. In the case of Chernobyl, there was actual radioactive fuel and core material which had blasted out of the compound during the explosion. The major difference is that only irradiated steam and water have been released from the Fukushima plant. The pulverized core fuel dust that spread in the air over Chernobyl is certainly much more toxic than the steam and water which are dissipating in North Eastern Japan.