| Tuesday, March
15, 2011 The Ides of
March
Stefan T. Possony born in Vienna March 15, 1915
The press proclaims the end of the nuclear energy program:
end of new construction is automatic, and the "struggle" will be over how
soon all the existing nuclear plants can be closed.
This will be an economic and ecological disaster of enormous
dimension; and it is being proclaimed before we have any idea of the actual
damage from the nuclear component of the Japanese disaster. Whatever that is
or ever will be, it is not likely that it will approach what the media is
making it.
We don't have a lot of information from the actual scene. I
do have this:
Trying to make sense of Fukushima
Dear Jerry,
I've been trying to make some sense of what's going
on at Fukushima to figure out what the realistic risks are and I wanted to
ask for the help of you and the other readers.
According to the IAEA's web site (
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/
news/tsunamiupdate01.html ) the spent fuel storage pond at Unit 4 was
on fire, releasing radioactivity into the air but has now been
extinguished. I'm at a loss as to how a pool catches on fire. Could that
much hydrogen be formed and be bubbling up? I thought that would require
high temperatures and the storage pool shouldn't be anywhere near those
levels. From what I have been able to piece together, each of the reactors
had its own storage pond. I would have expected storage pond to be on the
ground somewhere, but apparently at Fukushima, these ponds are located on
top of the containment building, within the metal superstructure that has
been blown off of two of the reactors.
I was fairly confident of the actual containment of
the core itself once I figured out that what had blown off was basically
just a cover for the machinery. However, now this information about the
spent fuel pools is alarming me. I've found a number of articles that
claim that if the water levels in the pools drop and the spent fuel is
uncovered there is a high probability it will catch on fire and once that
happens, it's just like Chernobyl.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
robert-alvarez/meltdowns-japan-earthquake_b_835121.html
Any informed opinions out there? I'm out of my
depth. The analysis seems plausible but I don't understand the materials
well enough to know if it really is or isn't.
Apparently this "feature" is straight from GE so I
have to pardon Japanese engineering for this. The Vermont Yankee plant is
said to be identical in design to the Fukushima reactors. My understanding
of nuclear power plant design was that these cooling pools were originally
only meant to be used to short term cooling until the rods had decayed
enough to not be so radioactive and they could be safely moved to the
permanent repository or be reprocessed so as usual it's engineering that
is not being used for its intended purpose and coming back to bite us.
Didn't the US promise Japan that we'd take the spent fuel and put it in
our repository so they didn't need to build there only repository.
Dry cask storage is in use in multiple places as
well. The diagrams seem to show bundles of fuel rods in close proximity,
so I'm at a loss as to why they're safe in a dry cask, but will catch on
fire if exposed to the air in a cooling pool. Is it simply a matter of how
long they've been out of service? If there's a mix of old fuel rod bundles
and "fresh" fuel rod bundles in a pool and the "fresh" ones catch on fire,
would the fire spread to the old ones? Since they're in an open pool, is
it feasible to just run a fire hose up there and keep the pool filled?
There must be reasons why this isn't happening.
Tokyo remains calm but there is a lot of
uncertainty. One of our workers is evacuating with her kids to a southern
island to be with her in-laws. I thought I had more gas in the car (I only
drive the thing once a week usually) than I did so I wound up looking for
gas this afternoon. All of the gas stations in the neighborhood were
closed being out of gas. Oh my way back, one of the stations had just had
a delivery and so they opened up. I wound up in a line of 10-15 cars and
was allowed to buy 20 liters of gas. Everyone was polite and there was no
honking of horns or fighting breaking out. We had rice scheduled to be
delivered next week, but were short so we wound up queuing at the
neighborhood rice store (we usually buy at the supermarket but they were
out - the rice shop is like going to the butchers). He'd had a truck come
in shortly before and we were in line with about 20 people to buy a 5 kilo
sack of rice. Again, everyone was polite, stayed in line and were served
by the owner who was making change out of a pile of cash stuck under a
paperweight.
Rolling blackouts were announced but people cut
consumption enough to make them unnecessary, at least in our areas of
Tokyo. The trains are running, but without a schedule. I made it over to
Ginza yesterday in a reasonable amount of time. I wanted to get a spare
battery for my MacBook Pro. As it turns out, the Apple Store was closed
(I'd called ahead but got an error message so I figured the phones were
still flakey). The department stores were still open and I ducked into one
to use the restroom. The first floor is all cosmetics and perfumes and all
of the stations were open and the staff were ready to serve customers.
If you do have to go through a disaster there are
definitely worse people to do it with than the Japanese.
Regards,
Dave Smith
Tokyo
Japan will recover. The world will learn much from this
disaster, as the 1923 Tokyo 8.3 earthquake brought about enormous changes in
skyscraper designs. Frank Lloyd Wright's design of the Imperial Hotel kept
it from collapsing, but it had enough structural damage to require a
redesign.
The Bhopal disaster in 1984 is estimated to have killed
about 15,000 people. It did not end the chemical industry. Aut0mobiles kill
above 30,000 people a year in the United States.
Wealthy civilizations have costs. They are small compared to
the grinding costs of poverty. Low productivity produces poverty. High
energy costs lower productivity. Before we call for any drastic reduction in
energy production, it would be well to see what the maximum disaster costs
might be, and what can be done to mitigate or prevent such in future. That
does not appear to be the advice the media is giving us.
An observation by one physicist correspondent:
Skimming the news, I found a report (I've misplaced
the URL and don't have any more time to chase it this morning) that
background radiation at Tokyo has increased by a factor of 23.
Over the course of a year, that's still in the realm
of industrial exposure limits, and the exposure will probably be
significantly less than a year.
I also note that Germany has shut down the seven
older of their seventeen plants in response. I guess they're afraid of
tsunamis over their design limit.
At this point, I have to say intermediate between
TMI and Chernobyl. By the time this is over, a few hundred thousand
civilians might get doses of between a month's and a year's industrial
exposure. That is significantly less than the risk attendant to not having
the electricity.
My advice is, Don't Panic. Do know where your towel and your
cup are.
=================
The Nikkei is falling. The effect on the US economy will be
large. Panic will make it larger. There is already a call for more US
stimulus spending (thus adding to the deficit). This fallout scares me a lot
more than the physical fallout from the Japanese nuclear plants.
========== And while we are contemplating
costs of industrialization, and what actions we can take to mitigate those
costs, we might think about unwanted consequences of best intentions:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/
moslive/article-1350811/
In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-
green-wind-power-experiment-
Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
============
For as many details as are likely to be known, presented in
a rational manner, see http://mitnse.com/ .
The Worst Case for Fukushima
Daiichi
I begin with this
Rising Sunburn
Dear Jerry:
You asked for numbers on radiation leakage levels on
the East coast of Honshu At the stricken Daiichi plant, 400 millisieverts
an hour has been reported and confirmed.
By comparison, global fallout radiation peaked
around 1963 at 0.15 millisieverts a year
As 400 milliseiverts x 24 hours = one very dead
spectator, get ready for billions and billions rhetoric from such as floor
their diesel engines to flee the sight of a lit cigar. At last account,
one spent fuel pond had commenced boiling.
This is not a good sign.
As the heat is largely from long lived fission
products and eventually the surrounding concrete will suffer. The prospect
of Wigner energy release isn't pretty either.
-- Russell Seitz
Fellow of the Department of Physics
The problem here is that Russell has left a great deal as
exercises for the reader, and thus the conclusions here are not obvious
without a bit of work. To begin with, the global fallout radiation is for
the entire world, or about 500 million square kilometers. The radiation
plume of 400 milliseiverts is from a small area of certainly no more than
100 square meters. If we assume that the Fukushima Daiichi reactors
collectively manage a plume the size of a square kilometer, then to get
comparable numbers we need to multiply the 400/hour by (24 x 365) to get a
year's worth. Assume uniform distribution and divide by 500 million. That
comes out to .007 milliseiverts / year. (For purposes of this analysis a
seivert is equivalent to 100 rad. A rad is "roentgen equivalent dose" is
equivalent to a rem or "roentgen equivalent man", and the various
distinctions among units don't matter for the gross estimates we are doing,
although I resent enormously the invention of a new unit that differs from
the old by orders of magnitude.
A chest X-ray is a dosage of about 0.1 mSv.) I know of no scenario
in which the Japanese reactors could sustain an emission rate of 400
milliseiverts per hour for a week, much less for a year, nor how there could
they generate radioactive fallout uniformly over a square kilometer.
Playing with the numbers and possible scenarios comes up
with this analogy. In 1961 the Russians tested a 50 megaton hydrogen weapon.
The fireball touched the ground and vaporized a great deal of dirt. The
resulting fallout spread across the earth and contributed to that 0.15
milliseiverts mentioned above. If you work at worst case scenarios, you can
come up with ways for each of the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi to
contribute about one Tsar Bomba equivalent to global fallout.
Assume that each event triggers the next reactor.
The scenarios assumed are each highly unlikely, but
they are worst case assumptions, so that in the scenario you get the maximum
amount of superheated gumk from each event. Understand that there is no
nuclear explosion here. The melting fuel rods are producing enough heat
to make superheated steam under high pressure. That converts stuff inside
the reactor into oxides that instantly dissolve. The reactor then blows in a
manner that sprays the solution into the atmosphere. Not being superheated
any longer, the oxides precipitate, and not as tiny little crystals but as
fluff and flakes that are carried away by the winds, rise into the
stratosphere, and are distributed by the jet stream throughout the northern
hemisphere and later into the southern.
The worst case fallout from Fukushima Daiichi is six Tsar
Bombas. Russell is quick to add "Of course one Tsar Bomba can ruin your
whole day." In fact, though, that depends on where you are and where Tsar
Bomba is. On October 30, 1961 I had a rather pleasant day. And be certain to
understand that we are not talking about a 50 megaton explosion: only the
fallout equivalent. You can't make a nuclear explosion, or even a chemical
"dirty bomb" out of Fukushima Daiichi. (Note)
============
A stock tip for what it's worth: apparently there will be
noticeable and possibly significant releases of radioactivity from Fukushima
Daiichi. The winds are from the west. A lot of tuna are caught east of
Japan. As Russell Seitz puts it, "Would you like to eat the top of the food
chain caught downwind of Fukushima Daiichi?" The inference is that tuna will
become more rare, and thus tuna futures will go up. I haven't looked at the
commodity market to see if the market has already figured that out. Indeed,
I haven't even figured out how to get current tuna futures quotes. Use this
information at your own risk, and don't blame me if you lose your shirt.
==============
I am reliably informed that the reactor crews at Fukushima
removed the fuel rods from reactors 4, 5, and 6. The rods were put into a
storage pool. There has been an incident at number 4, and the water
temperature which ought to be about 40 C has doubled. It is not yet boiling.
Removing the rods from the reactor makes the "Tsar Bomba" scenario
impossible; the worst case is now 3 Tsar Bomba fallout equivalents. Note
that we speak of fallout equivalents, not of a nuclear explosion.
The following numbers are from a very reliable source:
Radiation levels at the plant
perimeter reached about 120 milliseiverts/hour at peak and then fell to
below 10. Levels in the plant itself reached 400 at peak. Peak levels in
Tokyo were 0.801 micro Sv/h, which is detectable but not important even if
that were constant for a full year.
The 400 peak in the plant was serious. The 120 peak at the
periphery would have been very serious if it had been maintained for many
hours, but it was a short peak. The 10 at present (1600 hours Tuesday) is
enough that no one should remain at the plant periphery lest they exceed the
safe dosage levels, but someone wandering there and being warned away (hard
to believe anyone would do that) would come to no harm. The "evacuation" of
the plant is normal since the biggest problem here will be workers exceeding
their badge limits: if they are not doing a critical job they ought to be
sent off site. There could be more spikes at the periphery. Reporters ought
to avoid going down to the plant fence for a look.
===========
And we sailed in the lowlands,
lowlands, low...
Much of the media attention to the damage in Japan seems
focused on the nuclear events, and not many have noticed that there were
some drastic earth shifts involved. Not only did the Japanese islands get
moved horizontally by a matter of feet, but there were vertical shifts as
well. If you watch the tsunami footage closely you will see that in places
the tsunami bores suddenly seem to be running downhill. Some of the coastal
plain seems to have shifted to below sea level. It's impossible to know how
much without more satellite observations -- GPS among them -- but there
could be tens of square miles of former rice paddies now below sea level.
That number could be as large as hundreds of square miles. When you see
standing water where there were formerly roads and houses, you are likely
looking a land which has fallen lower and is now below sea level.
I have a mental picture of Japan with its own Zuider Zee
(about 50 by 100 km) which formed in 1287. The industrious Dutch have been
pumping the water out and reclaiming the land ever since. Dikes and
windmills and time. I can see Japan having to do much the same thing.
=================
I am told that I am off in my calculations above, but off in
the correct direction, which is to say the levels are too large. That's
unfortunate in that I don't like to be wrong, but it also emphasizes my
point, which is that the absolute worst case has no more global effect than
did an event that many weren't even aware of, and which didn't have any
great global effect.
The important lesson from Japan is that we took obsolete
reactors with old designs and safety features, and subjected them to a 9.0
quake and a very large tsunami, and the damage to the planet is an
unfortunate but hardly decisive event. It is now time to stop worrying about
this mess until things settle and we can see precisely what we have learned,
and factor that into the next generation designs. Note that almost
everywhere in the world we are building reactors with much better design and
far better safety features than those being destroyed now. Concentration on
how awful is the nuclear mess takes our attention off the economic and human
disasters from the earthquake and tsunami.
I make no doubt that someone will send me a corrected
paragraph.
There is an excellent explication on units at the MIT site
http://mitnse.com/ about halfway down the
series of essays and topics.
==============
Typical media:
Contradictory press.
"These are figures that potentially affect health.
There is no mistake about that."
<http://www.foxnews.com/world/
2011/03/15/japanese-nuclear-panic-
rises-agency-says-radiation-leaking-
atmosphere/>
"The level has come down to the level to cause no
harm to human health, according to the report I have received."
<http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/
asiapcf/03/15/japan.nuclear.reactors/?hpt=T1>
--- Roland Dobbins
As I go to bed, most of the plant workers have exceeded
their annual badge limits and are being sent home. There will be a
circulation of atomjacks over the next few weeks as these heroes continue to
make sure that the amount of radiation emitted is minimized. It is clear
from the numbers which I finally got that what is being emitted is fission
products, not actinide oxides. The inventory is not going up the flu. The
scenario for that to happen requires that the reactors be intact, and
temperatures of live steam in the order of 500 C; that will dissolve a lot
of stuff, and as water dissociates you get a pretty corrosive situation. The
solution to this is to keep pumping in water. Boric acid is also pumped in
to further damp out reactions. The reactors are well below critical reaction
rate but there can be some interaction, so absorbing neutrons helps the
cooling process. Cooling out will take time, and should be monitored, but it
doesn't take the large crew of normal operations to do that, so of course as
many workers as possible are being sent home. The main injuries, now that
the quake and tsunami are over, will be exceeding dosage limits. The remedy
is to be sent home. That is happening but of course since they will need
workers over time they send home all that aren't immediately needed.
I am getting weary of the breathless panic in the media
including Fox News. For some it's ignorance. For others it's simply trying
to keep the story going. But the truth here is that the situation is not
good because it is not going away fast, and given the tsunami devastation
around the power plant -- including the houses of a number of the plant
workers, I would wager -- evacuation is difficult. Plant periphery emissions
have been high at peak but haven't been sustained. They will probably spike
again. There may be some exposure of people off site, but so far to the best
I can get from the numbers, no one off site has received any dosage that
would have caused them to be sent home if they worked in the plants.
That ain't good, but it isn't being run over by a freight
train, and since most of those people live in a devastated flood plain they
have a lot more to worry about than radiation exposure. The situation isn't
good, and there will be some more setbacks simply because it is so hard to
get into there now, but neither the world nor the Japanese people are in any
great danger. Godzilla isn't going to rise up out of the Godzilla Springs
resort...
Don't panic. But it never hurts to know where your towel and
cup are.
==========
I'm going to bed. The mushroom cloud watch continues.
Meanwhile it is snowing in the devastation areas. Japanese fire, police and
military are trying get people food and water and shelter. We should all
wish them well. God bless them.
Tomorrow we will have a look at Libya where things are
happening. I repeat what I posted yesterday:
Peak levels in Tokyo were 0.801
micro Sv/h, which is detectable but not important even if
that were constant for a full year.
===================
A note on the Tsar
Bomba calculation. I originally had a mistaken conversion, because they
didn't have Sieverts as units when I last studied this stuff.
Here is the original text:
The problem here is that Russell has left a great deal as exercises for
the reader, and thus the conclusions here are not obvious without a bit of
work. To begin with, the global fallout radiation is for the entire world,
or about 500 million square kilometers. The radiation plume of 400
milliseiverts is from a small area of certainly no more than 100 square
meters. If we assume that the Fukushima Daiichi reactors collectively
manage a plume the size of a square kilometer, then to get comparable
numbers we need to multiply the 400/hour by (24 x 365) to get a year's
worth. Assume uniform distribution and divide by 500 million. That comes
out to .007 milliseiverts / year. (For purposes of this analysis a seivert
is equivalent to a rad. A rad is "roentgen equivalent dose" is equivalent
to a rem or "roentgen equivalent man", and the various distinctions among
units don't matter for the gross estimates we are doing. A chest X-ray is
a dosage of about 15 milliseiverts.) I know of no scenario in which the
Japanese reactors could sustain an emission rate of 400 milliseiverts per
hour for a week, much less for a year, nor how there could they generate
radioactive fallout uniformly over a square kilometer.
(Note that I probably did some numbers wrong but in ways that
overestimate the radiation levels so that does not change the
conclusions.)
Here is the correct conversion:
1 Sv = 100 rads
Jerry - Read your post regarding the report of a 400
mSv/hr radiation measurement at the Fukushima plant (got there via
Instapundit). Thought you should know of errors. ! Sv is equal to 100 rads
(not 1 rad). Also, a typical effective dose for a two view (AP and LAT)
chest x-ray is 0.1 mSv (not 15 mSv). See for example:
http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/safety/index.cfm?pg=sfty_xray
Thought you should know.
I am an Associate Professor of
Medicine and Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I
teach diagnostic x-ray imaging physics in the Medical Physics graduate
program here.
Regards,
Michael S. Van Lysel, Ph.D.
A chest x-ray is 100 microsieverts. The conversions drive me
nuts because some are reported in micro and some in milli and -- ah, to heck
with it.
There is an excellent explication on units at the MIT site
http://mitnse.com/ about halfway down the
series of essays and topics.
==================
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