Japan Earthquake

Japan Earthquake | Page 1705

@Peter Melzer There's a pointer or two to Kan's grassroots involvement in this PDF document entitled 'Who is Naoto Kan?' [ japaninstitute.anu.edu.au ], including a mention of a group he organised called the Citizen's Association:
"The Citizen’s Association stood for ‘clean elections’ and refused to use either big organisations such as labour unions or business enterprises or ‘unaccounted money’ and took an ‘anti-money politics’ stance."
by es 6/20/2011 7:07:23 PM

@es , aha, an anti-corruption politician!
by Peter Melzer 6/20/2011 7:09:35 PM

@Peter Melzer Seems so, yes. Big qestion is: has power corrupted him?
by es 6/20/2011 7:13:10 PM

@dean, Peter Melzer, es - in this longish article mr Van Wolferen sheds light on Kan and the established structures (he upset politics and media but it only lasted a few months)
www.karelvanwolferen.com
by nls 6/20/2011 7:17:57 PM

@es , in that NYT article I linked below the authors state that his problem early-on in the crisis was that he did not trust his government tools, because he felt that the top career administrators were his enemies. So he did not rely on them, and the people he relied on knew too little about the machinery. The early radiation alert system Speedy, for example, was unbeknownst to them and hence was not consulted. Naivete hampered a rapid understanding of and response to the crisis.
by Peter Melzer 6/20/2011 7:21:25 PM

@nls Thanks for that article and yes, I don't imagine an anti-corruption stance will have won him many friends in politics!
@Peter Such a major communication breakdown certainly suggests something's seriously rotten but I wouldn't say Kan was naive to be wary of a system he's been fighting against for so long.
by es 6/20/2011 7:47:25 PM

Subtle way to lie in that about the Strontium.
"Representing the first time the substance has been detected at the crippled plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported on Sunday that seawater and groundwater samples taken near the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan have tested positive for radioactive strontium. And according to a recent report in The Japan Times, levels of strontium detected were up to 240 times over the legal limit, indicating a serious environmental and health threat."

Isn't that amazing. It's just like the plutonium: as soon as they announce they are going to start testing for it, there it is. I sense another round of deep regret coming.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 7:53:27 PM

@nls, interesting find; @es , this may help explain why the government does not reveal a determined strategy of confronting the radiation hazards yet.

by Peter Melzer 6/20/2011 7:56:57 PM

@es I'd say, if anything, he may have muted his distrust of TEPCO a little too much, or he'd have been on them from the first. They've proven over and over that he was right not to trust them.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 7:59:28 PM

Again, that's directed at TEPCORP, not the workers there who were trying their hardest, and would undoubtedly have rather had good information flowing both ways so they weren't working quite so much in the dark.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 8:01:51 PM

@Peter Yes, coupled with the unprecedented scale of the disaster...
@radioguy Yes, and I suspect he guessed voicing his concerns loudly so early on wouldn't help get him reliable information any quicker.
by es 6/20/2011 8:05:44 PM

Man, do you have to read between the lines on TEPCO stuff. In that online.wsj.com article that was posted below about the water filtration system failure:

"About five hours after launching Thursday night, the system stopped early Friday after alarmingly high levels of radiation were detected in its upstream section.

However, a close inspection over the weekend found no major flaws, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday.

While it was initially feared that the system might have been clogged with sludge, resulting in an accumulation of radioactive material, "the high levels of radiation were due to the radioactivity of the water the system was treating," Tepco spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said."

So they had calculated it would take a month for the ion exchange to max out the filter. That's the level they thought they were dealing with, which they already called "highly radioactive". But it only took 5 hours to overload the resin beds.

That's scary.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 8:08:21 PM

Oh, here's the specific culprit:
After the first five hours of operation, Tepco found that the cartridge for removing oil and technetium was absorbing radioactive material far more than initially projected, indicating the need to frequently change the cartridges. Tepco is now working to figure out how the process of removing radioactive material can be evened out among the six cartridges.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 8:12:03 PM

Ministers' Declaration Envisions Strengthened Nuclear Safety Regime www.iaea.org
by ElaineKirk 6/20/2011 8:13:30 PM

@radioguy Treating rad liqiud is a lot more like cooking, than it is science. There is trial and error. I'm not sure why they are stopping at 4 mSV/hr, I thought they were going to 40 mSv/hr and planning on 4mSv per changeout. The system is filtering radioactivity (in a big way), that is its purpose, filter and concentrate. This is not a system failure, prehaps it's a planning failure.
by RBeaner 6/20/2011 8:13:34 PM

@RBeaner Understood, so this was an important learning experience. Now they know: the first filter works great. When it fails, it just lets the overload through, right, like a home ion-exchange water filter? So maybe more of those, and change them out when, say, the 4th one starts to fail.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 8:17:08 PM

@RBeaner , that they cannot shield those filters better? You could put the first stage into something like a lead shed and change the filter container with a remote controlled vehicle once in a while.
by Peter Melzer 6/20/2011 8:18:52 PM

@Peter Melzer The "cesium bars" were supposed to get to 40 mSv/hr, such that changeout/replacement would consume a max of 4 man mSv. Lets go with that and filter the stuff. They aren't saying the system was plugged up or increased diff pressure. Sounds like it worked real well at Filtering and Concentrating the radioactivity.
by RBeaner 6/20/2011 8:27:08 PM

IAEA details for your reading pleasure api.viglink.com
by RBeaner 6/20/2011 8:29:06 PM

@All. You Tube has the live cam on Daiichi as "event has ended" is there another new link ?
by Salu 6/20/2011 8:44:08 PM

@All Does anybody have working TBS link?
by DT 6/20/2011 8:44:11 PM

TBS you tube channel has no live events currently. Wonder what happened? www.youtube.com
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 8:45:59 PM

@radioguy I am sure they were testing for stronium and plutonium (either TEPCO or NISA) when they start testing and are willing to tell everyone else they have started testing is another story. We need to find that universal corporate handbook too many of these big corps use and burn the damn thing. :-)
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 8:50:20 PM

www3.nhk.or.jp Tepco was surprised- again!! Tokyo Electric Power Company carried out tests using 3 types of absorption devices on Sunday and detected higher-than-expected radiation levels around the devices.

TEPCO engineers suspect that the density of radioactive substances in the contaminated water was greater than had been predicted
by marierich 6/20/2011 9:00:05 PM

between 75 and 80 percent of Japanese people are now in favor of scrapping all of Japan’s 54 reactors. www.csmonitor.com
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 9:03:08 PM

blogs.forbes.com It's been clear since 4/27 that Strontium has been released. A radioactive isotope of strontium has been detected in American milk for the first time since Japan’s nuclear disaster—in a sample from Hilo, Hawaii—the Environmental Protection Agency revealed yesterday.

“We have completed our first strontium milk sample analysis and found trace amounts of strontium-89 in a milk sample from Hilo, Hawaii,” EPA said in a statement emailed to me yesterday afternoon. “The level was approximately 27,000 times below the Derived Intervention Level set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”
by marierich 6/20/2011 9:05:48 PM

This web site says PET plastic is radiation resistant. Anyone have more materials experience or know from seeing this in use if this is true and to what extent? www.wclco.com
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 9:24:44 PM

my most valuable investment on Empire Avenue is Simply Info www.empireavenue.com it doesnt cost anything to trade on empire and you can sign in with fbook great fun and raises simplyinfo's profile too - Oh and I bought shares in our @angie too:)
by ElaineKirk edited by elainekirk 6/20/2011 9:27:12 PM

Guardian .. brits prepare for the end of days api.viglink.com
by RBeaner 6/20/2011 9:30:30 PM

www.guardian.co.uk Guardian article on the UK Governments secret response to the Fukushima disaster.
by imlite 6/20/2011 9:31:24 PM

www.scribd.com The UK Governments secret report and contingency planning concerning the Fukushima disaster - released through freedom of information request.
by imlite 6/20/2011 9:33:11 PM

@imlite Thanks :)
by es 6/20/2011 9:44:23 PM

@imlite ty I have tweeted that great find
by ElaineKirk 6/20/2011 9:52:44 PM

@lillymunster : i have read about the pet bottles. you can fill any kind of dirty water in it, put it into the sun, and after some days it is clean. it is widely used to purify water in the third world.
by Edano 6/20/2011 9:58:01 PM

Just noticed this. Calhoun's cask storage it outside their flood control. The casks are rugged but their storage is modular cast concrete. One would think they would have sand bagged around it at least to keep water out. Does anyone know if they have to anchor those cast concrete blocks down into something or are they just sat on the concrete pad? cryptome.org
by lillymunster via Cryptome.org 6/20/2011 10:12:24 PM

@lillymunster That is not a picture you want to see. At least that one is in cold shutdown though.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 10:14:12 PM

@lilly I havent read it all but looks a good legit explanation of the storage www.thebulletin.org
by ElaineKirk edited by lillymunster 6/20/2011 10:17:57 PM

@radioguy There is a photo somewhere in my photos, I think in one of the plant tours that showed a cask that had corrosion started on the seal. How hard would it be to sandbag around that block of casks and just keep the water out in the first place.
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 10:18:21 PM

@ElaineKirk the story is good but that website plagiarized the entire thing. I would call it plagiarizing because they just copied the entire article over rather than referencing it in their blog post. Here is the original and worth a repost, Dean originally found it last week? Maybe just swap links on yours? www.thebulletin.org
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 10:20:49 PM

@lillymunster I'm still stuck on how hard it seemed to be to do anything but end up scrambling to fill sandbags at the last minute. 1993's flooding should have shown them that their defenses were iffy.
by radioguy 6/20/2011 10:21:03 PM

@lilly yes please I am not signed in could you switch them pls
by ElaineKirk 6/20/2011 10:21:54 PM

@ElaineKirk will do!
by lillymunster 6/20/2011 10:23:22 PM

finally, from the guardian/scribd document we can calculate the entire radiation in the reactors. that is:
- 3 reactors/coriums: 1e18 Bq cesium 137 + 7.2e18 J131
- 6 fuel pools: 2.2e18 cesium 137
by Edano 6/20/2011 10:25:43 PM