Nelle’s Fukushima Meltdown Update Oct. 3, 2011
Courtesy: Pacific Free Press

 

No one who has taken any interest in the world around them should be surprised by Arnie Gunderson’s latest video, Nuclear Oversight Lacking Worldwide, released by Fairewinds yesterday.

Whether you are talking big pharma, big agriculture, big energy, big mining, big forestry, or big banks, the established mode of operation in our world is the same. It is all about profit as an end by any means and, lest we forget, power to control.

It’s a revolving door between regulators and industry. “Stakeholders” sit behind closed doors with bureaucrats writing the laws and the regulations. Then they self-test and self-report, often on a voluntary basis. They lobby and buy our representatives in government who subsidize their industries with taxpayer dollars for the “economy” and “jobs”. They manipulate the mainstream media (perception management) with onslaughts of opinion pieces based on junk science which has been bought and paid for.

They can afford to do this because they have virtually all the money. And they justify it all as being in the public interest.

The costs to our global ecosystem is incalculable. The cost to humans is all too clear. From unsafe vaccines and over-medicated populations, to chemically fertilized and GMO-laden processed foods and medicated meat products, from the loss of local, small mixed farms to ocean-based fish farms at the cost of wild stocks, from smart grids/smart meters to confabulated “energy security” schemes, from pipelines and tankers to decimated watersheds and forests, from global financial collapse to Fukushima.

The tail wags the dog. Our natural wealth is liquidified into money that “isn’t worth the paper it is not printed on” (as Gerald Celente is wont to to point out).

No wonder populations around the world are in the streets as more and more death and suffering surrounds us in that process of transformation.

Here is a full transcript of the video at Fairewinds web site.

Here are some excerpts from that transcript posted on EnergyNews with the video
http://enenews.com/nrc-chairman-true-everything-gundersen-absolutely-performed-quite-service-video

Transcript Excerpts
a. A report from 1987 and it is entitled “NRC Coziness With Industry”. That is not my name for it, that is the congressional report’s name, “The NRC’s Coziness With Industry.” And it is written by the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Congress.

b.  In the 1990′s […] I brought some safety concerns forward to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and they were ignored. And in the process, discovered a very cozy relationship between the regulator and the people that they were attempting to regulate. It went to congressional hearings with John Glenn and in the congressional hearings the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this: “It is true. Everything Mr. Gundersen said was absolutely right. He performed quite a service.” Nothing changed after that hearing. What he said to Congress had no affect on the way the agency was behaving.

c.  There is an excellent journalism piece out and it is in the Austin Chronicle. It is investigative journalism at its very best and it is called, “Will Shill For Nukes.” The author of it discovered that an industry group, NEI, the industry trade organization, was writing opinion pieces and they were then giving those opinion pieces to professors around the country and asking those professors of nuclear engineering at universities around the country, they were asking those professors to put those in the local newspapers. Well, quite a few professors obliged.

At the Plant Site

Recriticality On-going?

Energy News reports today, “There have now been seven recent detections of iodine-131 across Japan: Ibaraki, Tokyo, Iwate, Nagano, Niigata — and now Miyagi and Nagasaki.”

This raises speculation on the the question of on-going recriticality at the plant site. The government has attempted to explain these occurrences as medical isotopes used in cancer treatment entering the waste stream.
http://enenews.com/recriticality-be-happening-continuously-iodine-131-detected-nagasaki-miyagi-charts

Radioactive Waste Problems

Meanwhile the problems with radioactive waste at the site continue to mount. As discussed many times in these reports the decontamination system for cooling water is resulting in large amounts of very highly contaminated waste. The JAIF Report (which are now only released once a week, rather than daily) stated on September 29 the amount of waste from the decontamination system as follows:

Sludge: 581m3 (Storage capacity 800m3),
Used vessels: 220 (Storage capacity 393),
Concentrated waste liquid: 2,473m3* (Storage capacity 10,000m3
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_1317292903P.pdf

On Sept 22 the numbers reported were:
Sludge: 581m3 (Storage capacity 800m3) 75% capacity reached
Used vessels: 206 (Storage capacity 393) more than 50% of capacity reached
Concentrated waste liquid: 2,497m3* (Storage capacity 10,000m3) 25% capacity reached

Note that in the course of one week the figures show the following waste generated from the decontamination systems:

1.. there is no change in the amount of sludge. This could be explained if only the SARRY system was in use during that week. since it is the Areva system that produces the sludge.

2.. 18 more vessels (each approximately 3 ft in diameter by 8 ft high) were accumulated which would be from the SARRY system.

3.. the liquid waste was reduced by 24 cubic meters. This to me is unexplainable since this is being stored and would accumulate over time. Perhaps it is evaporating? or leaking?

This report from Mainichi News contains technical information and pictures which put the scale of the problem in perspective.

Radioactive waste piles up at Fukushima nuclear plant as disposal method remains in limbo, Mainichi, October 3, 2011:

[… A]t the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, high-level radioactive waste has kept piling up amid no clear indications of its final disposal destination.

[…] 4,700 drums of radioactive waste after three months of cesium decontamination […]

TEPCO has been unable to fully grasp the details such as the types and the concentration of nuclear materials.

Professor Akio Koyama at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute says, “The density of high-level decontaminated water is believed to be a maximum 10 billion becquerels per liter, but if it is condensed to polluted sludge and zeolites, its density sometimes increases by 10,000 times [100 trillion Bq/L]. The density cannot be dealt with through conventional systems.”

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111003p2a00m0na011000c.html

Source of Hydrogen Unresolved

Meanwhile, the hydrogen gas in the pipe at Unit 1 was measured by the proper equipment and is reported to be at 63% of the gas in the pipe.

TEPCO intends to cut the pipe (after forcing the hydrogen out of the pipe with nitrogen injection) to install the device to “control” radioactive emissions.

Unit 2 and 3 will be also have these filtering devices or whatever they are installed.

Fuku I Hydrogen Gas Update: It Was 63% Concentration and no need to worry, TEPCO will take care of it.

“[…] Looking at TEPCO’s handout for the press on September 28 (Japanese only for now), all they will do is to try to expel hydrogen in the pipe alone by injecting nitrogen from the far end of the pipe. They must be operating on the assumption that all the hydrogen in the pipe is from the initial zirconium cladding and water interaction, not the recent or on-going radiolysis, and once the hydrogen currently in the pipe is expelled, that will be the end of the story.”

http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/09/fuku-i-hydrogen-gas-update-it-was-63.html

March 15th Redux
TEPCO released a report last Friday regarding the explosions at Unit 4 and Unit 2 on March 15th. There have been many questions about what happened that day at the site.

Both explosions happened within 15 minutes of each other: Unit 4 at 6am and Unit 2 at 6:14am.

TEPCO’s report and conclusions are discussed by SKF:
TEPCO Now Says There Was No Hydrogen Explosion at Reactor 2
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/10/tepco-now-says-there-was-no-hydrogen.html
#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: March 15 6AM Explosion Was “Somewhere in the Plant”, Not Near Reactor 4
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/10/fukushima-i-nuke-plant-march-15-6am.html

TEPCO’s report and conclusions are also discussed on Physics Forum beginning on page 712 (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=480200&page=712 ) with comments #11389 through 11393 as follows:

“[…] Tepco’s internal investigation committee is preparing an interim report into the accident. According to the draft report, the explosion at unit 2 was not a hydrogen explosion. Whereas the damage at unit 4 and unit 2 occurred almost at the same time, the seismometer readings show only one hydrogen explosion which is thought to be the one which occurred at unit 4. The pressure in unit 2’s suppression chamber dropped suddenly and it is thought that, for some reason, the suppression chamber was damaged.
—What else could sound like an explosion, manage to break containment but not be an explosion? Any word on that?
— According to the records of solar-powered seismometer(s), explosion happened only once on 15 March at 06:12 AM. It is inferred that it is the explosion at unit 4. The reason why no hydrogen explosion occurred at unit 2 is that, by chance, [unit 2’s] blowout panel was removed by unit 1’s explosion, enabling the hydrogen gas to be released to the outside.

—“”What else could sound like an explosion, manage to break containment but not be an explosion? …..””
A severe “water hammer” in a big vessel like a torus as cautioned in those ORNL reports that used Brown’s Ferry design as example.
Setup for water hammer is venting steam via too few safety valves, driving water in one region of torus up to saturation temperature…

— torus pressure twice over design for about 24 hours right before the explosion.
http://www.houseoffoust.com/edano/2pre.bmp

So the outcome of all this is that we know Unit 2, despite looking okay above ground, has a hole blown in its torus (wet well) in the basement of the reactor building. Water injected into the reactor above will eventually flow out into the ground through foundation cracks and into the ocean as well. Whether it was a hydrogen explosion or a design flaw is ultimately immaterial to the out flow of contaminated water from Unit 2.

Yomiuri has these illustrations to their story on this matter.
No explosion at No. 2 reactor / TEPCO: Only 3 hydrogen blasts occurred at Fukushima N-plant (Oct.3)

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T111002003221.htm