Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake, bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

A fire in Nebraska's Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant briefly knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods, ProPublica reports.

The fire occurred on June 7th, and knocked out cooling for approximately 90 minutes. After 88 hours, the cooling pool would boil dry and highly radioactive materials would be exposed.

On June 6th, the Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) issued a directive banning aircraft from entering the airspace within a two-mile radius of the plant.

"No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM," referring to the "notice to airmen," effective immediately.

Since last week, the plant has been under a "notification of unusual event" classification, becausing of the rising Missouri River. That is the lowest level of emergency alert.

The OPPD claims the FAA closed airspace over the plant because of the Missouri River flooding. But the FAA ban specifically lists the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant as the location for the flight ban.

The plant is adjacent to the now-flooding river, about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, and has been closed since April for refueling.

WOWT, the local NBC affiliate, reports on its website:

"The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Facility is an island right now but it is one that authorities say is going to stay dry. They say they have a number of redundant features to protect the facility from flood waters that include the aqua dam, earthen berms and sandbags."

OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson told Business Insider that the nuclear plant is in a "stable situation." He said the Missouri River is currently at 1005.6" above sea level, and that no radioactive fuel had yet been released or was expected to be released in the future.

Asked about the FAA flight ban, Hanson it was due to high power lines and "security reasons that we can't reveal." He said the flight ban remains in effect.

Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake, environmental death watch, FUBAR, nuclear power

Officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) are apologizing in advance for the fact that the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant is not ready for the high winds and heavy rain of Typhoon Songda, a massive storm that could make landfall in Japan as early as Monday.

The BBC quotes a TEPCO official as saying, "We have made utmost efforts, but we have not completed covering the damaged reactor buildings. We apologize for the lack of significant measures against wind and rain."

Buildings housing the plant's nuclear reactors are still standing open in the wake of crippling hydrogen explosions that followed Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The approaching storm could scatter highly radioactive materials into the air and sea. Plant operators are currently spreading "anti-scattering agents" around the buildings housing reactors one and four.

Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake, nuclear power, We Are So Screwed

The Japanese government's nuclear safety agency has decided to raise the crisis level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident from 5 to 7, the worst on the international scale.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency made the decision on Monday. It says the damaged facilities have been releasing a massive amount of radioactive substances, which are posing a threat to human health and the environment over a wide area.

The agency used the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, or INES, to gauge the level. The scale was designed by an international group of experts to indicate the significance of nuclear events with ratings of 0 to 7.

On March 18th, one week after the massive quake, the agency declared the Fukushima trouble a level 5 incident, the same as the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979.

Level 7 has formerly only been applied to the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union in 1986 when hundreds of thousands of terabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 were released into the air. One terabecquerel is one trillion becquerels.

Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake, FUBAR, nuclear power, We Are So Screwed

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency admitted that the disaster was a level 5, which is classified as a crisis causing 'several radiation deaths' by the UN International Atomic Energy.

Officials said the rating was raised after they realised the full extent of the radiation leaking from the plant. They also said that 3 per cent of the fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima plant had been severely damaged, suggesting those reactor cores have partially melted down.

After Tokyo Electric Power Company Managing Director Akio Komiri cried as he left a conference to brief journalists on the situation at Fukushima, a senior Japanese minister also admitted that the country was overwhelmed by the scale of the tsunami and nuclear crisis.

He said officials should have admitted earlier how serious the radiation leaks were.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said: 'The unprecedented scale of the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, frankly speaking, were among many things that happened that had not been anticipated under our disaster management contingency plans.

'In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster.'

Nuclear experts have been saying for days that Japan was underplaying the crisis' severity.

It is now officially on a par with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Only the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 has topped the scale.

Deputy director general of the NISA, Hideohiko Nishiyama, also admitted that they do not know if the reactors are coming under control.

[snip]

Meanwhile, workers at the devastated power station are continuing their desperate battle to prevent a complete meltdown which some fear could be as bad as Chernobyl.

The latest pictures show a whole wall missing from the building housing reactor number four. Inside, a green crane normally used to move spent fuel rods into the storage pool can be seen. Underneath the crane, but not seen in the picture, is the 45ft-deep spent fuel storage pool which has boiled dry.

Officials at Fukushima are rapidly running out of options to halt the crisis. Military trucks are spraying the reactors for a second days with tons of water arcing over the facility.

Engineers are trying to get the coolant pumping systems knocked out by the tsunami working again after laying a new power line from the main grid.

And they today admitted that burying reactors under sand and concrete - the solution adopted in Chernobyl - may be the only option to stop a catastrophic radiation release.

It was the first time the facility operator had acknowledged burying the sprawling 40-year-old complex was possible, a sign that piecemeal actions such as dumping water from military helicopters or scrambling to restart cooling pumps may not work.

'It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first,' an official from the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, told a news conference.

But some experts warned that even the concrete solution was not without risks.

'It's just not that easy,' Murray Jennex, a professor at San Diego State University in California, said when asked about the so-called Chernobyl option for dealing with damaged reactors, named after the Ukrainian nuclear plant that exploded in 1986.

The risk of thyroid cancer among people who were exposed as children to the nuclear fallout at Chernobyl has not declined nearly 25 years after the disaster, said a study released on Thursday in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health-led study examined more than 12,500 people who were under 18 at the time of the Chernobyl accident on April 26, 1986, and who lived near the accident site in one of three parts of Ukraine.

Each person's thyroid radioactivity levels were measured within two months of the accident, and they were screened for thyroid cancer four times, beginning as early as 12 years after the disaster and continuing for 10 years.

Sixty-five of those in the study were diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

When researchers examined the cancer risk in relation to how much exposure to radioactive iodine-131 (I-131) each person received, they found a two-fold increase for each additional gray, an international unit of absorbed radiation.

“The researchers found no evidence, during the study time period, to indicate that the increased cancer risk to those who lived in the area at the time of the accident is decreasing over time,” said the study.

Overall, the “clear dose-response relationship, in which higher absorption of radiation from I-131 led to an increased risk for thyroid cancer... has not seemed to diminish over time,” it said.

Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake, environmental death watch, nuclear power

Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake

Labels: 2011 Japan earthquake, natural disasters, nuclear power, personal musings