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Monitoring rising temperatures

The operator of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is carefully monitoring the situation at the Number 4 spent fuel pool, where the water temperature is rising despite increased injections of cooling water.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says it will inject 210 tons of water into the pool on Monday, after finding on Sunday evening that the temperature in the pool had risen to 81 degrees Celsius.

The utility firm had earlier limited the amount of water being injected into the pool to 70 tons a day, saying the weight of the water could weaken the reactor building, which was already damaged in last month's hydrogen explosion.

On Friday, TEPCO found that the pool's temperature had reached 91 degrees, so it began injecting 2 to 3 times the amount of water.

TEPCO says the pool's water temperature dropped to 66 degrees on Saturday after water was injected, but started to rise again, to 81 degrees.

The operator says the water level in the pool was 2.5 meters lower than normal after 165 tons of water were injected on Sunday. It is carefully monitoring the water level and temperature to avoid further troubles.

The Number 4 spent fuel pool stores 1,535 fuel rods, the most at the nuclear complex.

Monday, April 25, 2011 12:04 +0900 (JST)

@elainekirk : i love pics without explanation. is it a cd reader ?
I am hoping it is a floor plan of #2

Elaine, what is that a picture of, looks interesting

@Nancy Lol, so true. But, I can't take odds on that bet because I would never know when and if it happened, who knows, maybe it already did.

@Nancy Btw. I looked on a map of the plant and that 'no-go' symbol on the survey map is behind/on the admin bldg. On the north side of it is where they were measuring high rad rates, until they stopped reading there and only did the south side.

Can I assume evryone has noticed how present the glow dot and glow line is on teppycam's last frame? The bluishness is pretty prononced...

@marie rich yep, the glow is back. It was gone last "night" when the pools were supposedly cool.

@Nancy There's no structure of any note there. If it was debris field, why not mark all of them, or at least all the high ones. I have an idea but no way to prove it.

@Nancy. Ok I may be wrong, but the only way I can make sense of those Cryptome pics is to think the dates they give may be mudled & that something large & round landed on the roof onf #4, broke up & themn parts fell in. Re the Tenzing post - as I understand it the guy was saying that the pipes were a guide to where the top of the reactor should be - between floors - & it was missing. I don't know enough about the layout to know if this is correct .

My pulled out of my heiney prediction for #4 is it will continue to exponentially lose water. At some point they won't be able to keep a level on the water and it will catch fire or the little support left will give way and the pool will lose part of a wall or break loose from the side of the containment bulb it connects to and fall apart. 3 is another story, it has been glowing almost every night but we are also reasonably sure there is unused MOX in the pool. 3 was not glowing last night when they had the temp down, it is glowing again now that the temp is up. I noticed they won't put SFP temps in the daily plant stats but will quote them to the media when convenient.

I toured this site while it was underconstuction in the 80's. www.wipp.energy.gov "Trans-uranium"=Plutonium from warheads. I am for this type of containment, since so far, nobody has come up with a better solution. Unless it would be not make the stuff in the first place, but that's too easy.

@UKVal If you look from above views that are more square on you can see where the floor is gone, it is past the reactor well by quite a bit. The guy's claim about those pipes saying anything about between floors and the reactor are nonsense. It is easy to tell where the floors are/were below the work deck. That is a non issue. You can't see in much past the catwalks and pipes and those are along the outer walls of the building. Think of it as someone taking an angled slice out of the corner of the building. If you look at multiple angles of the top and that corner and also compare it to the known blueprints and also what we can see of #4 he is up in arms about nothing.

@marie rich I don't see how anyone could work on site in pitch black, though. I hope everyone isn't going home when it gets dark. Not trying to be contradictory, it just seems like lights on the ground reflecting off of the buildings would give you a similar effect. Doesn't mean there isn't fission going on, too, but I have to believe the site isn't pitch black at night.

@Jim Carver They hubby asked me why they don't put a reactor like Fuku completely underground? Seems to make sense from a few angles. I'm sure there is a whole set of drawbacks I didn't think of.

I love the way TEPCO was being "gentle" with the SFP 4 earlier. They describe it as 70 tons a day, but what they were actually doing was on alternate days pouring in anywhere from 140 to 200 tons. Also, higher injection quantity didn't just start Friday. Per NISA's daily reports, for the period of Wed through Sunday they put in 745 tons, the first 240 of them on Wed and Thurs.

@Nancy No reason why it couldn't be done. Just cost, bloody cost.

@jay They have used a spot light down in the water by the docks on multiple nights. It is very distinct, puts off a reflection and is quite yellow like a light bulb, not the blueish light we see by the reactors. The round blue spot seems to be at the top of 3 and is that ethereal haze. So we have had at least something for comparison