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Japanese Nuclear power plants after quake

90K views 698 replies 57 participants last post by  DK PHILLIPS In Memoriam 
#1 ·
I didn't want to take over the other thread, but after this morning's earthquake near Japan and the Tsunami, a number of their nuclear power plants shut down. Among these was the Fukushima reactor, which was moderated successfully (e.g. stopped power production). The Fuel is hot due to internal radiation heating and needs water to cool it, but the backup generators are remote and were rendered useless by the Tsunami. After running on battery for up to 8 hours, the plant would boil off the water used to moderate the fuel and result in a steam explosion. The fuel would likely catch on fire and spread massive amounts of Radiation downwind. This has obviously not yet happened and will hopefully be avoided.

It "seems" like the Japanese Government has this under control, but the fact that external radiation levels near the reactor are higher than normal indicates some minor leaks already. If this goes, the Western U.S. and later the eastern U.S. would undoubtable suffer some fallout eventually.

So, who here has Potassium Iodide (KI) and radiation gear? I know I, for one, verified where I put mine and verified that background levels here on the East Coast are boringly normal!


"Citing the Tokyo Electric Power Co., Japan's Kyodo News Agency said that radioactive substances may have seeped out of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo. Earlier, the agency had reported that authorities may purposefully release radioactive vapor to alleviate pressure at the power plant.

Radiation levels measured at a monitoring post near the plant's main gate are more than eight times above normal, Japan's nuclear safety agency said, according to Kyodo.....

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/11/japan.nuclear/

"
 
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#66 · (Edited)
Okay.. I found some hard date on the GE BWR Mk1 reactor design

http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/gemk1reactorsinus.pdf

NRC assessment is a 90% likehood of containment failure in an accident, and recomended discontinuation of this design , There are 23 of this design in the USA. here is some additional design info http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/bwrfact.htm

And this is a cronological record of a Nuclear Accident At a GE BWR Mk1 .. gives you a good picture of what the crews are going thru in Japan and how the nuclear power industry works... http://www.ccnr.org/browns_ferry.html#ma
 
#67 ·
Apparently they have evacuated the remaining crew from the reactors as being to hot for humans... apparently the reactors are just being left on their own to do their own thing.. burn-up, melt down, breech containment, whatever.

At this rate we are going to actually make it all the way to worst case... this is unbelieveable.. I hope somebody has a replacement crew handy... this is SHTF Black Swan
 
#69 ·
"The plant operator described No. 3 as the "priority." No more information was available, but that reactor is the only one at Daiichi which uses plutonium in its fuel mix.

According to U.S. government research, plutonium is very toxic to humans and once absorbed in the bloodstream can linger for years in bone marrow or liver and can lead to cancer."

This ain't good. This is the first mention I have read about plutonium in the rods.
Bad Juju.
 
#70 ·
I haven't heard anything more today about the last 50 crewmen being evacuated from the plant. Are they still keeping all personnel away? You can be sure that some of these men will give their lives in the effort to avert the worst case scenario; a truly heroic act.
 
#72 ·
They were pulled out for about an hour during a lethally high radiation spike then the 50 plus 30 more were sent back in.

God Bless them and keep them. Amen
 
#71 ·
Nassau yeah... I have mentioned the plutonium fuel in a couple threads in # 49 above .. Actually it is MOX fuel and combination of Plutonium and Uranium. It makes the reactor run a bit hotter, and probably more importantly plutonium is much more sensitive to the total mass of plutonium in the immediate area than Urainium is. That is to say that plutonium will heat up due to increase radioactivity at much greater distances apart than unranium... they use this fact to make batteries used on some satellites.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator... anyway using MOX fuel means if you have the rods spaced to get heat from uranium, you are about 3 times as close as you need to be using plutonium. In radiological terms all distances are measured in half thickness.. just like half life.. except here we measure the thickness of something as the distance in the material it takes to block half the radiation.. that thickness will stop 1/2 the radiation in that distance, and then in that same distance again 1/2 of the radiation that made thru the first distance will be stopped in the second distance and so on half of the radiation remaining will be stopped in that distance again.

Control rods stop neutrons.. Plutonium heating is from nuclear decay, something that happens in the plutonium nucleus without the aid of outside neutrons, However the ammount of plutonium present.. even if seperated several feet will increase that nuclear decay and generate more heat the more plutonium there is. You have to put the rods close enough together to get the urainium to interact... which as I said is at least 3 times, could be conciderably more, closer than necesary for the plutonium to interact and generate conciderable heat from decay. All the control rods do to that process is the same as steel or lead rods ( can't use lead because it melting point is too low..reactors can generate a couple several thousand degrees farenheit lead melts under 700 degrees) but folks have a mental image of lead stoping radiation so it is easier to explain 1 inch of lead will stop as much as about as 3 inches of steel or 9 inches of concrete http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/Radiography/Physics/HalfValueLayer.htm

So, at rest, the MOX fueled reactor is much hotter.

Plutonium nasty stuff aside from having the high activity at the elemental level as I have mentioned .. living things see plutonium as if it was phosphorus, a needed mineral in the body or plant for growth.. in humans it collects in the bones and liver, where the most phosphorus in needed.. but it does more than that .. green plants need phosphorus to grow it is some commonly deficent in most soils almost all commercial fertilizers , the middle number in that 10-20-10 rating on a fertlizer bag. This means if plutonium is in or on the soil , plants are going to gobble it up and make a spinach leaf or a lettuce leaf or whatever with it, alfalfa maybe.. the plant concentrates the plutonium. the cow eats the plant, the cow concentrates all the plutonium in all the plants the cow eats, and we eat he cow concentrating the plutonium in our own bodies.. you can't get rid of it, as it is part of you bones and liver,it is in at the molecular level, not on the body.. women can remove some of the plutonium from their bodies, actually it is kind of automatic.. when they breast feed.. milk is high in phosphorus.

Anyway you get it in you and make it part of you and the radiation just works it's little magic at the celluar level making cancer an extremely high probability.. also there is practically no plutonium in nature, used to be, millions of years ago, but it has almost completely decayed now,, all the plutonium we have now is man made in reactors.. because it is so rare/virtually nonexistant , nothing has ever really evolved in an enviroment with plutonium. So it is also a universal poison to every type of living thing which also makes it carcinogenic. Just nasty stuff.. in an explosion plutonium turns to a fine power and then the dust will burst into flame.. it is a green sparkly flame.. very weird looking.. but the ash from that flame is just as radioactive and even easier for the body or plant to absorb and very very finely powdered.
 
#74 ·
Thanks Ranger again... hey if you have the time, take a hard look at the info in post #66 on this thread... I promise you, it will change everything about the way you look at this crisis .. the last link is to a very long article.. it is worth the read but the shockers are in the first two links.
 
#75 ·
More Bad News This Ain't Good

NRC: No water in spent fuel pool of Japan plant
1 hour ago

WASHINGTON — The chief of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday that all the water is gone from one of the spent fuel pools at Japan's most troubled nuclear plant, but Japanese officials denied it.

If NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko is correct, this would mean there's nothing to stop the fuel rods from getting hotter and ultimately melting down. The outer shell of the rods could also ignite with enough force to propel the radioactive fuel inside over a wide area.

Jaczko did not say Wednesday how the information was obtained, but the NRC and U.S. Department of Energy both have experts on site at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex of six reactors. He said the spent fuel pool of the complex's Unit 4 reactor has lost water.

Jaczko said officials believe radiation levels are extremely high, and that could affect workers' ability to stop temperatures from escalating.

Japan's nuclear safety agency and Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the complex, deny water is gone from the pool. Utility spokesman Hajime Motojuku said the "condition is stable" at Unit 4
 
#76 ·
Sad Report From NightLine

Just watched an ABC News NightLine segment about the aftermath of a Japanese community that was devastated by the tsunami and the radiation fallout. It was sad to see.

A community of 70,000 reduced to less than 100.

Some of the residents that are in temporary evacuation shelters nearby, are without a lot of basic needs . . . the reason being is that no one wants to transport the relief supplies into the contaminated region. But, some people that have available transportation are going outside the contaminated area to pickup some goods, such as foodstuffs, and bringing them back to the shelters.

Others that have left the region are now living in cardboard boxes at a sporting arena.

Because of the double-whammy the community was hit with, people that leave the affected region don't expect to EVER return again.

I really have to admire their resolve and restraint going through the calamity they are experiencing.

In an unrelated aspect of the Japan calamity, it turns out the country operates on two different electrical grids, so the sharing of electricity from one region to another is not easy to do.

I was listening to an NPR report earlier today where the electricity shortage in Japan was discussed. And that while the western region of Japan has excess electricity capacity, it cannot be shared with the eastern part of the country that has electrical shortages. The western part of Japan has an electricity rate of 50 cycles while the eastern part of the country has a 60 cycle grid.

Supposedly this arrangement was agreed upon in Japan since it gave the utility companies a monopoly in the electric supply business.
 
#80 ·
Just watched an ABC News NightLine segment about the aftermath of a Japanese community that was devastated by the tsunami and the radiation fallout. It was sad to see.

A community of 70,000 reduced to less than 100.

Some of the residents that are in temporary evacuation shelters nearby, are without a lot of basic needs . . . the reason being is that no one wants to transport the relief supplies into the contaminated region. But, some people that have available transportation are going outside the contaminated area to pickup some goods, such as foodstuffs, and bringing them back to the shelters.

Others that have left the region are now living in cardboard boxes at a sporting arena.

Because of the double-whammy the community was hit with, people that leave the affected region don't expect to EVER return again.

I really have to admire their resolve and restraint going through the calamity they are experiencing.

In an unrelated aspect of the Japan calamity, it turns out the country operates on two different electrical grids, so the sharing of electricity from one region to another is not easy to do.

I was listening to an NPR report earlier today where the electricity shortage in Japan was discussed. And that while the western region of Japan has excess electricity capacity, it cannot be shared with the eastern part of the country that has electrical shortages. The western part of Japan has an electricity rate of 50 cycles while the eastern part of the country has a 60 cycle grid.

Supposedly this arrangement was agreed upon in Japan since it gave the utility companies a monopoly in the electric supply business.
Looks like they are going to have to rethink this policy...
 
#77 ·
Japan reactor nuclear core may have breached

Japan reactor nuclear core may have breached
TOKYO – Japanese nuclear safety officials said Friday that they suspect that the reactor core at one unit of the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant may have breached, raising the possibility of more severe contamination to the environment.

"It is possible that somewhere at the reactor may have been damaged," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the nuclear safety agency. But he added that "our data suggest the reactor retains certain containment functions," implying that the damage may have occurred in Unit 3's reactor core but that it was limited.

Officials say the damage could instead have happened in other equipment, including piping or the spent fuel pool.

Operators have been struggling to keep cool water around radioactive fuel rods in the reactor's core after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami cut off power supply to the plant and its cooling system.

Damage could have been done to the core when a March 14 hydrogen explosion blew apart Unit 3's outer containment building.

This reactor, perhaps the most troubled at the six-unit site, holds 170 tons of radioactive fuel in its core. Previous radioactive emissions have come from intentional efforts to vent small amounts of steam through valves to prevent the core from bursting. However, releases from a breach could allow uncontrolled quantities of radioactive contaminants to escape into the surrounding ground or air.

Operators stopped work Friday at units 1 through 3 to check on radiation levels
 
#78 ·
So far the Japanese reactors have released approximately 20% of the iodine and 60% of the cesium of Chernobyl .. Iodine and Cesium can only be produced by the fission of nuclear fuel and can only enter the enviroment if both the zircaloy fuel rod clading and the reactor containment are breeched.
 
#81 ·
Not exactly. While Cs and I are fission byproducts, the core does not need to be "breeched" for these to be released. If the fuel cladding is damaged then those products can/will make it into the water that cools the core. That water, in turn, was then in some amounts vented to atmosphere in efforts to releive pressure in the reactor vessel.
 
#83 ·
Don't wish to be arguementative... but how is venting the containment not a breech?
As I stated in an earlier post, nuclear power is all about the key words and tricky phrases. Venting steam to relieve pressure is a protective and controlled action, not a breach of containment. If you think about physics and thermodynamics for a minute, if pressure is going up, it means that the system is closed, hence pressure builds as opposed to water spraying all over the place. If the reactor vessel was cracked then there would be no way pressure could build up (like a pressure cooker with a hole in it).

I do see your interpretation of data, and given that, they are having trouble keeping the zoomies inside the reactor compartment, which is a problem, but it is a problem solved once cooling is restored

I myself do not like the BWR design in general. I prefer the PWR reactors, they just seem inherantly safer to me.
 
#84 · (Edited)
In my humble opinion the primary design failure or flaw is needing backup systems to safely shut down a reactor in the first place. Safe and shut down should be the default state with positive input needed to generate power... doesn't have to be any more complex than control rods .. perhaps 4 segments each with one quarter of the fuel rods and control rods held apart outside critical distances by default and only pushed together by input to generate power... and for shut down the control rods decend into place as the pile disassembles into 4 seperate subpiles by a static pressure system that must be overcome by input energy to generate power..

To have a fixed array of fuel in a critical configuration dependant on control rods to reduce criticality is akin to madness.. it is only because of that design feature you even have a heat of decay issue after shut down in the first place and it constricts the quanity of cooling agent around and between the fuel rods. You could air cool a sub critical subpile if you wanted.
 
#87 ·
In my humble opinion the primary design failure or flaw is needing backup systems to safely shut down a reactor in the first place. Safe and shut down should be the default state with positive input needed to generate power... doesn't have to be any more complex than control rods .. perhaps 4 segments each with one quarter of the fuel rods and control rods held apart outside critical distances by default and only pushed together by input to generate power... and for shut down the control rods decend into place as the pile disassembles into 4 seperate subpiles by a static pressure system that must be overcome by input energy to generate power..

To have a fixed array of fuel in a critical configuration dependant on control rods to reduce criticality is akin to madness.. it is only because of that design feature you even have a heat of decay issue after shut down in the first place and it constricts the quanity of cooling agent around and between the fuel rods. You could air cool a sub critical subpile if you wanted.

It is late and I am tired. but all reactors have safety shut down modes that SCRAM the reactor. I am certain that when the earth started shaking, all four of those reactors SCRAMed and shut down. SCRAM is a feature incorporated in every reactor design now in use and was present on many of the very first reactors. Now the idea of spreading fuel rods apart will only make the reactors less efficient and require more exotic fuels than U-235. The thing that many people are not realizing here is that even with control rods SCRAMed and fully inserted, there is still a MASSIVE amount of residual heat present just by virtue of the fact of all that metal has been heated up to that high of a temperature. Once that residual heat is removed and the reactor is cooled down, it takes very little cooling capability to remove heat buildup caused by nuclear decay.

As for backup systems for SCRAMing a reactor, I cannot go into classfied design but hell you can't get more foolproof than the methods of SCRAM that the industry has been using since the 50's. Electricity is required to keep a reactor critical. Once electricity goes bye bye the reactor SCRAMs and there is no more power. Reactors, by design, cannot fission with control rods fully inserted. The fission byproducts the Japanese are having to deal with now is due to fuel that was burned BEFORE this event occurred and all the radiation they are having to deal with is due to DECAY of fuel and of fission byproduct.

It is also a myth that control rods are the controlling factor of reactor power. Again, I am not a liberty to explain, but you have to trust me on that.

As for the backup systems you speak of, I am pretty certain that the failed systems that folks are speaking of are NOT reactor shut down systems but rather methods of cooling. As I stated earlier there are a hundred ways that a reactor can shut itself down and most of that is not mechanical but rather controlled by computer. If the plant makes too much power, it shuts down. If it gets too hot, it shuts down. If it loses control power, it shuts down. If it loses coolant flow, it shuts down. These are just the basic shutdowns to maintain reactor safety. The problems that the NRC had with this plant are not with the core and such but rather they were probably more concerned with the ability to cool the core. Three Mile Island's issue was never that they shouldnt shut down the reactor but rather they had inadvertantly secured cooling to the core and it took them a while to figure out what they had done. When they restarted cooling... well everyone here knows what happens when cold water hits hot metal...
 
#86 · (Edited)
It has been bad, probably still worse than we are being told about now from almost the begining.. the signs were there as I have been pointing out. The problem was pretty much obvious the minute that it became apparent the operators did not have the werewithal to full shut down and safe the cores in a standard manner with standard procedures using standard back ups and failsafes... everything that has happened flows from that critical instant. Once you cannot control the core you have to assume a complete worse case will eventualy happen due to the now obvious difficulty of the regaining control of a core under increasing more complex and unforetold circumstances. Once the impossibility of the logistics of cooling the core adequately by any means became obvious due the earthquake and tsunami, and emergency response teams could not effective respond with any existing plan worse case became the likely outcome.

No existing reactor design can end up safe without the full function of existing standard or back up systems to shut it down to a safe status. No existing reactor containment can contain an out of control reactor. Only to the extent you can impose some fraction of human control do you stand any chance of averting a worse case scenario. and no other outcome can be assumed until full control is re-established. They are talking entombment.. if they have to go there then that hulking monster will have to sit there under constant tending as a caged monster for all of imagineable eternity. Sarcophagus built over sarcophagus as each sarcophagus crumbles from time, 170 tons of uranium and plutonium fuel decaying in terms of tens of thousands of years .
 
#88 ·
Ammo,

I myself do not wish to be arguementive, but what are the basis of your statements? What knowledge or experience?

The idea of an "out of control" reactor is a holywood myth!!! When a reactor goes critical it simply means that it is producing enough neutrons to SUSTAIN (emphasis on sustain) a nuclear chain reaction. By sustain one does not mean that power builds until the damn thing blows up but rather it is at a steady state. Enter then the words supercritical and subcritical which probably need no explaination.

No existing reactor design can end up safe without the full function of existing standard or back up systems to shut it down to a safe status. No existing reactor containment can contain an out of control reactor. Only to the extent you can impose some fraction of human control do you stand any chance of averting a worse case scenario.
All the plants I am aware of in the western world are all of such a design that if every human of the face of the earth were to disappear the reactor plants would actually shut themselves down for varied reasons, all of which are based on physics, not computer or human controls. I so very much wish I were not bound by law not to tell you why that is but needless to say that is the way it is.
 
#89 · (Edited)
Me US Army Special Weapons been on or ran Alpha Teams, Salvage Apraisal teams, full on NAIC teams, one other team I can't remember the name of :).. Trained at Sandia later taught at Redstone .. worked about half dozen incidents and accidents.. been up to my eyeballs @ about 200,000 cpm airborne alpha numerious times .. got my right arm beta burned pulling something important out of the fire so to speak... hey what can I say Savannah screwed one up. I can make an/pdr 54, 60, 27's sing...

You?

Max , look the reactors scramed.. yeah.. but that didn't make them safe.. you got fission products all the way to Sweden, the reactors are out of control and on at least three of them ever getting control is still in doubt.. TESCO is the one that brought up emtombment not me.. look at the logistical problem and they are getting ready to try and drain the sea water.. some very very hot sea water .. if you have warped and compromised rods what are the odds they can cool it.. ain't good and yeah I know about cavitation and feedback loops and heat of decay and how the age of the rods affects cooling times... and we are somewhat past the point where things should still be this hot.

I don't think you quite grasp what I was saying about my idea for a split core but thats beside the point.

Max I handled sub critical ammounts of U 235 and pure as you can make it in my own little gloved hands inspected and cleaned and polished it, spalling and all, for several years.. I know the storage issues back and forth and the consequences of seperation distances.

As I have admited before reactors.. we got briefings.. one training op in 16 years. we were back up to back up mostly for area monitoring we operated under DOE for DOE issues and USArmy for Army issues.

You can say what you want about the inherent safety, but thats not what is apparent in the field right now.. I've seen DU burn baby burn and I know what the clean up is like ... you can say what you want about how it is supposed to go.. but that is not how it is going. Fukshima is not following the game plan.. you've got product in quanity already in the enviroment .. you aren't addressing the spent rods outside of containment and the complication they present... and lets not forget.. Japan doesn't really have any place to put the clean up right now.. just like US reactors don't.. low level sure high level good luck charlie. I've seen the mess 1 teeny tiny weapon can make .. you are playing with 170 tons at fukshima a couple of orders of magnitude more than I have ever had to sweep up. and I know how many folks and barrels that took.. I'm old school just like the GE BWR MK1's we come from the same era.. there may be new walk aways in the wings but there hasn't been one that has acted like a walk away when the SHTF yet. Sometimes it doesn't all melt neatly somtimes air gets to it .. they are having trouble getting water.. you think they got enough purple K or metal X on hand to handle a problem? I don't see it.. given what has shown up as fast as it has where it has they are going to have to shrink wrap a couple towns and bury them.

Exactly what is the game plan for 6 reactors at once? You ever see one... I've never seen one.

Oh and I have seen how those guys are using the scintillation probes looking for alpha and I know the intracacies of health monitoring and they are holding way to far off to get solid readings, moving too fast, and some of them have shower caps over the probe face for alpha .. I have never seen folks trying so hard not to find something.. saw the same thing monitoring after Chernobyl poltical, social, and economic techniques for rad detection and monitoring what the hell does physics have to do with it?

You are telling me what is supposed to happen... my training is to deal with what has happened..assumptions that things will go as planed gets folks killed. Nothing has gone as planed yet, nothing has worked as designed, .. yeah yeah earthquake tsunami I don't care about the why it happened .. just what happened and how to assess it and how best to make it all go away.

Given the current situation in progress .. if you think some of the things I said made your head hurt... imagine how my head feels when you say the crew could have just walked away and these reactors would have in time been just fine.. okay you didn't say these reactors.. but you did say any reactor any design it is just the way they are built walk away it will be okay .. thats a school solution not real life. You say it isn't a reactor problem the reactors scramed it's a cooling problem. It systems problem unfortunately the cooling system is hooked up to the reactors that need cooling and thats not cool in so many ways when the cooling system doesn't work. You are making so many fine distinction you are starting to sound like Ready Killowatt containment isn't breeched if you deliberately vent fission products into the atmosphere... good to know we won't count those then .. You can't say with any authority what the reactor status is, just what it should be, nobody can yet.. but anybody can see it ain't what it should be. And what was vented, or more correctly, what was supposed to be vented in a situation where emergency venting was designed to be used wasn't what got vented.. in fact what got vented wasn't supposed to come out of a scramed reactor in safe mode at all.
And just out of curiosity where in the scraming of a reactor in a safe condition does enough hydrogen come from outside the reactor to blow a couple buildings apart? Water outside containment and unconfined gets hot enough to dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen? How long you got to leave a vent open to put an explosive mixture big enough to blow a building apart into a building that big? Is that SOP? part of the plan? an anticipated event? You get that kind of heat in a reactor that is scramed and safe? Really?
 
#90 · (Edited)
Yeah.
But there is a world of difference between enlisted forlorn hope fodder with some superficial classes out of looseleaf binders and grad-student professional engineer officers. I'm just saying, as the down-home, superficial, blue-collar commentary has been fairly obvious to some. Much kinda silly speculation. And alarmist.

They may know alot more than most about brooms, dirt and and bending over with a dustpan but the guy, or gal, sweeping the floors didn't design, build, or even know how to run the home.

Alden
 
#91 · (Edited)
CESIUM 137 isn't bone seekers like (strontium 90, yttrium 90, uranium, plutonium cesium 137 barium 137 cerium 144, odyminum 144, carbon 14 un fissioned uranium plutonium)....its distributed thought out the body half-life-(rate of radioactive decay) is about 30 years biological is short., about the same as strontium 90 but it travels in the body as calcium going to the attracted to , bones seeking destroying blood making properties. comes into the body mainly in milk (beta-emitter) 25% in meats. the air we breath and of coarse soil taken up by plant life.
strontium 90 is trapped in the site where the decay takes place.
radioactivity travels in air or water tables depending were the accident or bomb was released.
its average stay in the body 17 days. for this reason the cesium fallout is less important as far as causing cancer is concern.
but on the other hand the distribution thought out the body and its penetrating radiation gamma rays making it dangerous to the genes and mainly to heredity.
it resembles potassium chemically travels in the body with potassium.
we can divide fallout in to three categories local, tropospheric, and stratospheric...the heaviest practicals falling from the steam first over a few miles or windy days few hindered miles..
the largest material particles will wash down by rain or snow parts will stay up in the troposphere and part will rise up stratosphere. depending on the latitude or seasons displaced into the world average of released by modern man releasing months, years later.

in short the ability of some radioisotopes to masquerade as their close cousins strontium 90 calcium, radioactive iodine natural iodine, cesium 137 as potassium thus absorbed, captured into the body. thyroid gland, bones, concentrating the elements to a specific point or single organ.
theory has it by adding calcium to the soil, or you the uptake of radioactive sames are decreased about half.? and adding it to feed for meat and eggs. but milk has smaller contritions of strontium 90 that in leafy vegetables.
the longer it takes to ex pail the more damage and the bone from the interior to its constant moving outward layers.
permissible limits...sure...mutations, cancers,genetic disruptions during the formations of free radicals....
more later radioactive Bacon eggs and milk is whats for breakfast um um good!
 
#92 ·
"Tests on Friday showed iodine 131 levels in seawater 30 km (19 miles) from the coastal nuclear complex had spiked 1,250 times higher than normal, but it was not considered a threat to marine life or food safety, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.

"Ocean currents will disperse radiation particles and so it will be very diluted by the time it gets consumed by fish and seaweed," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a senior agency official. "

"Iodine-129 has a half-life of 15.7 million years; iodine-131 has a half-life of about 8 days. Both emit beta particles upon radioactive decay." ( From EPA. )

I was wondering where all that contaminated seawater was going to go. I should have known. I know. I know. Don't worry, be happy.
 
#119 ·
I was wondering where all that contaminated seawater was going to go. I should have known. I know. I know. Don't worry, be happy.
Into 1.5 Billion Suare Kilometers of seawater, that's where it'll go.

People will cry that someone's lab equipment capable of sensing the fart from a gnat's a$$ picked up radiation traces .0001% above background in The North Sea off Scottland next year................................
 
#95 ·
Have you ever noticed that the Japanese news reports are full of quantifiers such as "Minor, moderate, slight, a little, just a pinch, an eensy beensy amount, etc"

They either still do not know what is going on in the reactors (possible, due to damaged sensors) or are lying their butts off (probable). If it happened in America, would our news media be any different?
 
#96 ·
tearfully

say 10 times quickly... "genetic damage".....quickly... when you see next your children's, grandchildren faces,
now for the next 30+ years......or longer if you are Japanese.......
would that be minor, slightly, hardly or ........tearfully!:cry:

we die from lack of knowledge........we live with our mistakes!
 
#97 · (Edited)
Actually this morning the descriptors for the radiation levels are more like 10 Million times normal or 1000 Rem per hour ( in US Units) which means you max out the new higher "safety limits" in 90 seconds...

Other current "terms of art" are the reactor isn't leaking, it is just the pipes going in and coming out of the reactor vessel that leak. Which is like saying " The fuel tank on you car is fine and does not leak, it is safe to drive, it is just the fuel line to the engine that is spraying fuel all over the underside of your car"... The containment makes it safe , with no mention of the just as dangerious spent rods stored outside the containment unless something like fukushima happens and then oops, well .. we got no place to store them safe because nobody can convince the public they know how to store something for longer than humans have been human in a safe and reliable way.. so it's the publics fault not the industries... so we just go ahead make more fuel rods and store then at the reactor site in a way that is defintely not safe for just a 1000 years.. talk about this generation screwing over the grandkids on the budget ... yeah it is bad to do it on the budget.. but not with radioactive waste.. profits you know, it pays to lie and at these prices any expert can be bought, or their career ruined of they don't play the game, or marginalized if they persist.

It is Billions upon billions of dollars and folks jobs.. as long as they keep the industry alive and kick the can down the road so hopefully folks will not be able to prove they got cancer from it 10 years later, or when their children are born deformed it can't be legaly proven under the requirements for proof the nuclear industry write themselves or pay corrupt people to write for them they don't much care what happens to people.. keep the profits, skip a safety check, deny the liablity and lie to all the stupid people..
Concider the "secrecy" some claim surounding how reactors work.... secret from who .. the iranians? the russians? the chinese? the countries that support terrorism? nope.. they all already have reactors of their own , and if the don't there is no law or ban that can stop them from buying a reactor if they want one. .. so there is nothing secret about how reactors work between countries, or power companies... just between reactor manifacturers and the people that live where they want to build them .. can't have them dumb people with their silly fears block profits eeerr I meant progess. And concider if you will, the basic sanity of keeping a safety improvement or " safer" design secret from other countries or compeating manifactuerers.. it only makes sense if you would rather have a compeitive edge on selling your "safer" reactors, rather than a safe industry.
 
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