ScribbleLive

@Nancy I was thinking more of the remote construction equipment. But it certainly won't be easy.

The should be able to drill down to an access tunnel, or more likely there's an existing shaft.

Not sure if edano was describing corium, or tepco

Uhhm.... SAY WHAT??.....hope this is new
Release of radioactive water made at request of U.S.: Cabinet adviser
Kyodo

SEOUL — Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata, who serves as a special adviser to the Cabinet, claimed in a recent lecture given in Seoul that the dumping of low-level radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean followed a "strong request" from the United States, a person who attended the lecture said Wednesday.

News photo
Oriza Hirata

The release of the water from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant last month generated anxiety about the possible spread of radioactive contamination from the seaside power station.

The Japanese government had apparently given its permission for the release of the water after receiving a report from plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Hirata's remarks, made Tuesday, that the release was not carried out based on Tokyo's independent judgment but rather on a request from Washington is likely to ignite a debate.

South Korea and other neighboring countries have protested the lack of prior notification of the discharge.

Hirata's lecture in Seoul was titled "Earthquakes and the Revitalization of Japan." In response to a question at the venue, he called Japan's failure to give advance notification a communication error.

While acknowledging that the release of the water caused concern in South Korea, he said the thousands of tons of water were not highly radioactive.

@Edano, yeah true, like the imaging methods used in diagnostic nuclear medicine. It is possible to enhance localization with collimators mounted in front of crystal scintillation detectors and triangulate the source from outside the building.

@Nancy Yeah, but GE, Areva, and others who should know what they're doing are there as well, so I think it's more of a FUBAR scenario.

@Peter Melzer : yes triangulation of corium with its very special characteristics should be possible.

@Peter Melzer : lol "impact-friendly" :)

@Edano, re triangulation, one could move such a detector on a circle around the building and pin down the source inside. This totally feasible. Reconstruction algorithms for the origin of the gamma-rays are well known in tomography.

@Edano, I used to be in another life, development and testing of diagnostic radiopharmaceuticals.

@Nancy you back yet ?

Radioactive material dispersal prediction system proves useless
www.japantoday.com
"Data from the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or SPEEDI, were released only twice in the first six weeks after March 11, when the massive earthquake and tsunami crippled the nuclear plant in northeastern Japan.

In sharp contrast, some overseas research institutes made their own estimates public, although with the proviso that as the amount of radioactive materials spewed from the plant was unknown, the actual diffusive concentrations could be different.
The commission thought a massive amount of radioactive materials was emitted when the power plant’s No. 2 reactor’s container vessel was damaged March 15 by a hydrogen explosion. It then estimated the following day the amount of released radioactive materials based on the meteorological data on the day of the explosion. But this information was not made public immediately.
Although an exact diffusion prediction could not be made, the system calculated an accurate trend—to some extent—for the spread of radioactive materials by carrying out an estimate based on hypothetical conditions, according to the commission."

@Rob, Edano, I finally figured out what that picture was of the workers on top of a sqyare platform they were building next to the tower. It is a cover to go over the SFP area, so they can then work on pulling the debris out of the reactor area without having something drop on the rods and damage them.

@Angie TEPCO is hot, dense and radioactive as usual! :-) Discussing locating the corium so they quit playing marco polo with their employees in the reactor buildings. #6 has 6ft of water in the turbine building and would lose cooling if it leaks into the reactor.

@Angie contaminated ground water, at the part that is far away from the other reactors and up higher.

@Nancy, what they are not saying is the quake may have cracked something at #5 & 6 ??

@Nancy, nope can't see the crane on full screen, got to get a better monitor, it's an old one, don't really use it for graphics, just business stuff.

@Nancy - Meretisa sent you an email.

Radiation tests lacking / Nuclear plant workers unsure of internal exposure levels
www.yomiuri.co.jp
"My measured value [of radioactive exposure] exceeded the standard value by a double-digit factor. That's never happened before," said a plant worker in his 20s, recalling the time he saw the results of a test he took outside Fukushima Prefecture in early May.
The man, an employee of a company that works with TEPCO, installed power cables near a reactor building at the plant for a month beginning at the end of March.
The test is conducted by a device called a "whole-body counter."

While a normal internal radiation level would range from several hundred cpm to 1,000 cpm, he was told his level was 30,000 cpm."

@Reed So how exponentially bad is 30k cpm. That sounds really high.