I will not say anything, I will not judge. I won’t even remotely add to this.
I will just let you all figure out what the heck is going on.
So I found this “little” article. I read through it (still have no idea why) and while doing so my brain hurt.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of any of this. Strangely, it doesn’t cite any Japanese sources. I also love how they use only data from some US government organization rather than actual local data. I mean, we all know the US government is so trustworthy with what it says, yes, absolutely. By the way, that’s the same US government that has been running guns into Mexico, arming Mexican drug cartels in the Fast & Furious operation, which caused and is still causing death and destruction in Mexico and the people responsible for this op are still running around free, in their respective positions. Anyway… I’ll leave it to you.
But if you think this is bad, I found something even worse. Good old anti-Semitic and openly “racist” EUTimes.net came out with this a couple of days ago.
My brain hurts. I need a break.
Edit: If you’re wondering where I found this… I was reading a local, formerly islamo-critical blog. Over the past maybe year or so they’ve shed their islamo-critical approach and have now turned into a, what I call, patriotic socialist, openly anti-Semitic (the EUSSR is the Jews’ fault, in case you’re wondering) pamphlet spewing the same old tale of the “eeeeeeeeeeevil Jooooos” ™ and the “yellow peril” as fact. Needless to say they’re no longer in my bookmarks. Good riddance!
World's Only Rational Man 
Yes, I’ve been getting messages hitting the same note (from a list of EMF people who are generally wildly panicking about everything). I don’t know what to think. Obviously there is massive hysteria here, but what actually is the story when you factor that out? And who do you turn to get the real scoop? Not the Japanese gov. and not Tepco (neither have been erhem, models of accuracy, timeliness, or transparentcy, to say the least). This has not been in the news noticeably, which could be a good sign, or a bad sign? ….
The latest mailing I got linked to a more calm but still alarming piece from Asahi (respectable news daily, center leftish):
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201205100051
The problem with this whole dynamic is that one can focus on addressing the wildly exaggerated railings of chicken littles, then, in the process of discounting them, underplay what might really is some serious bad sh*t–albeit an order of magnitude or so less bad than the chicken littles are claiming. It happened with the melt down. It could be happening with this.
Yep. And that’s about it, it’s a scenario. It’s the worst case scenario. Everything has a worst case scenario.
When I was still a paramedic in my hometown, we too had a worst case scenario. We actually had several. One was a tunnel fire in the long highway tunnel that have nearby. Tanker truck goes up in flames with dozens of other cars in the tunnel. Such a case actually happened in Austria. Another was circling around the steel mill, which has pretty large oil tanks. One needs to be prepared for such cases. We had an accident with the furnace once. Molten steel somehow washed over several workers.
Though selling them as fact, as most of those “media outlets” are doing it, is bordering a crime in my opinion. It’s like being in a place that is packed with people and then starting to scream fire. All it does is cause more harm than good.
Agreed, Tepco and the government weren’t doing a good job, they F-d up really bad, but when I then look at the “predictions” from Mitsuhei Murata… Oh dear. The guy’s a lawyer and spent his whole career in the diplomatic service. He has no training in this field, yet he screams loudest. The guy makes Homer Simpson look like a total rad expert.
I’m personally sick and tired of the armies of untrained and unskilled lunatics screaming about the issue. They completely drown out the specialists and take over everything. Doesn’t even matter what issue. It’s always like that. The voices of reason, the specialists, the people with the data, the experts, nobody listens to them.
You know, I don’t even think the whole glass is half empty/full comparison flies anymore. I think we’re at a point where one group says the glass is half full, and the other screams that we’re out of water and the glass is broken.
There are people working day and night in Fukushima. They have the data. They know what they’re doing. They will do the right thing. If I can’t trust the experts on site, why should I trust anybody else?
And if not, well… then I’ll be the only person trying to get into the country. I rather die with the people I love than sitting thousands of miles away on my butt doing nothing.
That said… I find the whole notion of even thinking of evacuating Tokyo ridiculous. It’s not possible to evacuate this city, just like it’s impossible to evacuate New York. Even doing the same with Vienna is insane. How do you move 35 million people, or even “just” 1.5 million? There would be utter chaos, the entire system would collapse. There is no way police and military could maintain order. You know, the thought of evacuating a metropolis like Tokyo is more frightening to me than the idea of a possible, maybe, one day, nuclear death cloud like the fear-mongers describe it, because I know how hard it can be directing even a few hundred people, and get them to go where you want them to go. And just imagining this times a few thousand… Dear gods… That would really be the apocalypse.
I agree, I want to hear the experts, but where are they? There used to be a whole pack of them here, for instance, and they would sift through these kind of reports in short order. Worme can’t do everything, and anyway, he’s too busy getting p*ssed off at race-baiters.
Ok, I was thinking about Murata’s scenario.
So let’s say the vessel cracks open and all the glowing stuff spills out into the reactor building. And then what? Correct me if I’m wrong but… wouldn’t the reactor’s innards just sit around in the building not going anywhere? What we had in Chernobyl was the whole thing lacking a containment vessel, then exploding, twice, and then burning away vaporizing parts of the reactor core and spilling other parts happily over the yard in front of the building.
If this reactor pops open… So what? It’s going to sit there. The material isn’t going to be magically vaporized and propelled into the atmosphere so that it can be spread by wind and rain as massive fallout. It’s just going to sit there.. Put a couple of layers of containment over it, done. Let it sit there and glow happily to itself. Of course, for the imminent surrounding areas it would suck, but I don’t see how the actual fallout could be worse than Chernobyl when there’s nothing to fly around in the winds.
Yes, I want those “couple of layers of containment”!
My impression of the bad case scenario would be that a lot of stuff would get up, and around, and follow wind patterns. If the patterns are like they have been thus far, I think you’d see a lot of stuff blowing out to sea a little bit, then south and back inland, across Chiba, and into Tokyo and Yokohama. (I cannot judge what kind of danger it would actually be.)
You know, no. 1, 2 and 3 are not in super great shape now. But I get the (highly unscientific) hit that the potential for #4 is greater. I’m asking Mrs. Xpat if she’s seeing anything about #4 and she says not really, suggesting that they don’t really want to think about it (which would be very Japanese).
I’m not claiming any knowledge here, but I sure would like some reliable description and analysis of the situation. Maybe I’ll start looking around the old sites of yore, like the MIT site.
The latest IAEA update:
Click to access statusreport270412.pdf
(It says at the top that they get all their information from the gov. and Tepco, basically. You can get accurate information from them, but if it’s anything really bad the information will be weeks, months, or maybe a year late.)
Fukushima fell of the radar at the MIT nuclear site.
I will tentatively conclude that there are no outside experts on the ground at Fukushima, and no nuclear people (that I know of) analysing the information that’s coming out. Does that mean that it’s all more or less under control and that’s why the nuke people are not looking at it, or does it mean they just dropped the ball or got bored but it’s still serious or getting worse without them being aware of it?
*My first note above “Obviously there is massive hysteria here” could be misleading. I meant hysteria in the article I was sent from this EMF group from their list. I didn’t mean “massive hysteria here” as in the country. This is not in the news. (I don’t want to be on that email list, but don’t want to hurt the feelings of the guy who put me on it by saying take me off it.)
Click on the March 2012 issue here for a pdf of the “Roadmap” article:
http://www.new.ans.org/pubs/magazines/nn/
Kind of informative (with some little info on #4), but not really an analysis of the current situation as such, just a summary of Tepco. But I learned it will all be wrapped up in 30-40 years! (What a relief! I thought it was going to be at least 50!)
Yeah, but in order to get into the wind it needs a propellant to get up there. The open core could just sit there and nothing would happen as long as it wouldn’t burst from too much pressure inside. The core can crack open, stuff would fall down (damn you gravity!) and that’d be it from my understanding. Of course, if you set it on fire or blow it up…
My non-nuclear comparison would be HIV positive blood. If it drops on the floor, nobody cares, it will get properly dealt with. Nothing to be worried about. If it’s not an arterial bleeding, it will just flow, drop and that’s it. If it’s an arterial bleeding, oh whoopy… talk about spray and getting very nervous.
Hope you’re right.
So the elevated readings from before (March, 2011, the few days when Tokyo had very elevated readings) were pretty much entirely due to the hydrogen blow-out? That’s useful for looking at it.
I still wouldn’t mind getting some nuke experts back on the case here, though. Info’s coming solely from Tepco and the Japanese gov. and I’m sorry, but I don’t trust them–even if they’re not necessarily bad guys, they’re at the very least incompetent.
To clarify my thought processes (such as they are) my image of potential were based on this vague image of “hot air rises.” I saw little radiation thingees in my mind’s eye rising into the air, like if you left a burner on on the range, and somehow getting caught up and carried away in the wind like so many little Mary Poppinziz with their umbrellas open. But at least you make me realize that I don’t really know how stuff gets up there.
But if nothing gets up and out without a push of some sort, why is containment needed? Wouldn’t containment exacerbate the threat by creating another pressure problem?
I’m pretty sure Mr W can do this a lot better than me. But my basic understanding is, you don’t just need hot air for this. You need some initial burst to really disperse this material. Those fuel rods aren’t made of paper, they’re pretty solid. Hot air by itself wouldn’t be sufficient from my understanding. It needs to go kaboom, but I fail to see how it could.
It’s like some chemical accidents I was at. If a tanker truck with a dangerous chemical would have an accident, well, if it’d just fall over and spill its stuff, not so much of a big deal. The chemical can be dealt with easily. If it ends up catching fire however… bad, very bad. Then you have not only the fuel cooking off, but also whatever chemicals were in the truck. That can mean full hazard gear to just fight the fire and probably telling people in the vicinity to stay indoors and keeping their windows shut.
There were such issues after the quake in one oil refinery. Everybody overlooked that one.
Btw, even if it would be 10 times as bad as Chernobyl… it would really just suck in the close vicinity. And even there the changes wouldn’t be statistically important. Remember, Chernbobyl had 600,000 “liquidators” who were really in the thick of it, with a lot of exposure. Some 5,000 of them died over four years after the incident. That’s not even 0.25% per year. That’s not statistically relevant. So a liquidator, basically, had a 1.25% chance to die every year, while a “normal” person would have a 1% chance. I’m basing this off actual death statistics which tell us that every year, in industrialized countries, roughly 1% of the population dies. 1% or 1.25%… that’s not much.
Here’s something from WSJ:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/05/21/fukushima-daiichis-unit-4-spent-fuel-pool-safe-or-not/
It’s an old thread we got here, but here’s a new and fairly detailed report from the WSJ on #4:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/05/27/fukushima-daiichis-unit-4-spent-fuel-pool-up-close/?mod=google_news_blog
Hey, good link inside the above article, too:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304065704577426032193869586.html
WSJ runs a pretty good blog on Japan:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/