ScribbleLive

Hi all! @Lilly I lived in Tokyo in the early 80's and remember well driving from the countryside watching houses go up in a day or 2...quick and cheap. It always amazed me!

scrap that nancy I will try again

@Lilly I believe that. The homes where we lived in Tokyo were much higher quality. It seemed like the larger planned communities were thrown up in a week and tended to be in the suburbs.

@Lilly So true. I was shocked by the fan approach to heating in Japan. It's incredibly drying as well. My parents and I tended to avoid that room because it was unbearable. Luckily that was a temporary living arrangement outside Yokota Air Base...we moved into Tokyo after 3 months and had radiators in that house...I remember them calling it a more 'western' home.

They must have watered #4, it's doing the steam dance

@lillymunster , I recall the gasket between the primary containment and the yellow cap believed to be the culprit where the hydrogen escaped.

TEPCO opens doors at No.2 reactor

Tokyo Electric Power Company says it has opened the doors and begun ventilation at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The restoration work inside the No. 2 reactor has been hampered by humidity of almost 100 percent due to steam from the containment vessel and spent-fuel storage pool.

TEPCO opened the doors halfway at 8:51 PM on Sunday. It plans to fully open them at 4 AM on Monday if there are no problems.

The utility has been using an air purification device for more than a week to reduce the radioactive concentration inside the building.

The firm calculated that the level of background radiation around the plant after opening the doors would be 0.0014 microsieverts per hour. The annualized figure would be far below the permissible limit of one millisievert a year.

A TEPCO official told reporters on Sunday that the planned door-opening will have almost no impact on the nearby environment.

TEPCO says it has explained the plan to Fukushima Prefecture and 13 local municipalities. It says that when the doors are fully open, it will begin checking radiation levels and adjusting meters inside the building.

Monday, June 20, 2011 00:03 +0900 (JST)
www3.nhk.or.jp

@lillymunster : it should be equivalent to the energy it produces. so if we know how many watts a rod makes and compare it to chernobyl, we should be able to estimate the radiation.

@lillymunster , the rpv must have cracked open for sure to release the hydrogen into the primary containment, but then this gasket was supposed to have lifted. Those professors presenting at the CNIC event knew about this. What I thought was interesting in the post from the physics forum was the idea that the thrust of the first explosion was partially guided downwards into the lower building and out of the refueling bay (according to design) and also sideways (perhaps through the canal) into the sfp.

"To explain this for a series of fuel pellets being used with a rim temperature of 200 °C (typical for a BWR) with different diameters and power densities of 250 MW·m−3 have been modeled using the above equation. Note that these fuel pellets are rather large; it is normal to use oxide pellets which are about 10 mm in diameter." en.wikipedia.org

@Edano , the quest for the source term is another sticky point. I saw in the NRC guidelines that operators must report estimates for the radioactive inventory of the plant before they wish to start up a reactor. If the required protocol in Japan is similar, NISA and tepco have got that information. Thunder was trying so hard to reconstruct this with some computer simulation package. There were too many unknowns.

@Peter Melzer : there sure are lots of unknowns. but i would like to have a slight idea, a TBq number.

6 days to west coast

Uhmm, sorry what i meant to ponder is if the winds come from the ocean this stron, if it takes less time

Japan Strains to Fix a Reactor Damaged Before Quake
Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle.

The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.

Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.

The plant, a $12 billion project, has a history of safety lapses. It was shuttered for 14 years after a devastating fire in 1995, one of Japan’s most serious nuclear accidents before this year’s crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Prefecture and city officials found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster. A top manager at the plant recently committed suicide, on the day that Japan’s atomic energy agency announced that efforts to recover the device would cost almost $21.9 million. And, like several other reactors, Monju lies on an active fault.

More: www.nytimes.com