Status of the Fukushima Reactor Accidents Part II

BY Herschel Smith
13 years ago

In Status of the Fukushima Reactor Accidents, I said:

… it’s important that everyone realize what I have already said concerning this set of accidents.  The main stream media (both print and television) continue to point towards avoiding a core melt event, as if it will announce itself with some sort of trumpet blast and melt through the earth.  As I have explained, it doesn’t happen that way.  The corium, if it makes it through the lower reactor vessel head, will disperse and cool from that dispersal, not even making it through the lower basemat of concrete.

The cores for Units 1, 2 and 3 are already damaged.  They are partially melted, and partially shattered and rubblized, sitting in the lower part of the reactor vessel.  Most of the radiological source term that can be expected to be released from the core to containment has already been released.  It is being held up inside hard containments and depleted via radioactive decay, plateout, etc.

The work now has to do with mitigation of the radiological source terms, from water injection into the reactor coolant system, water washdown of plant components, and so on.  If the semi-volatile fission products and alkali metals are in effluent, they will likely not re-evolve to the atmosphere in large quantities.  Most importantly, for now, the Spent Fuel Pools deserve attention, and hopefully the operators will be able to mitigate zirconium fire events in the pools.

And in Primer for Studying News Releases on the Japanese Reactor Accidents, I described how computer codes – including one that I have written – model fission product release as a function of temperature during fuel heatup.  Fuel melting doesn’t have to occur to release fission products.

On March 19th Glenn Reynolds linked an article at Pajamas Media that weighs in thusly:

Nature has also learned that initial CTBTO data suggest that a large meltdown at the Fukushima power plant has not yet occurred, although that assessment may change as more data flow in during the coming days. Lars-Erik De Geer, research director of the Swedish Defence Research Institute in Stockholm, which has access to the CTBTO data and uses it to provide the foreign ministry and other Swedish government departments with analyses, says that the data show high amounts of volatile radioactive isotopes, such as iodine and caesium, as well the noble gas xenon. But so far, the data show no high levels of the less volatile elements such as zirconium and barium that would signal that a large meltdown had taken place — elements that were released during the 1986 reactor explosion in Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

And today the AP acknowledges that the cores in Units 1, 2 and 3 are “partially melted.”  The Captain’s Journal is a week or so ahead of the rest of the nuclear experts.

Here is another prediction and technical explanation.  Power has been restored to the plant.

Japanese authorities have taken a major step in managing a nuclear crisis by connecting all six earthquake-damaged reactors to power supply, but it’s too soon to say the crisis has reached a turning point, experts said on Monday.

Power has been connected but not switched on to crank up most coolers and pumps, which may have been badly damaged in the quake and tsunami that on March 11 triggered the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Only one pump has been activated.

The damaged reactors and their spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, urgently need cooling from air-conditioners and from water pumped in.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, asked by CNN whether the worst of Japan’s 10-day nuclear crisis was over, said: “Well, we believe so, but I don’t want to make a blanket statement.”

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko added that radiation levels at the plant appeared to be falling.

But nuclear experts in the United States and elsewhere were not quite as positive.

“I am not sure if the crisis has passed but it is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Peter Hosemann, a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Nuclear Engineering Department.

“It is getting better. However, we don’t know if the pipes and connections and pumps still work at this point or what works and what not. But having power makes external water supply easier.”

This is a positive step.  This is good.  This makes addressing the problems an order of magnitude easier.  But don’t hurry to a conclusion.  Water may have intruded into terminal cabinets, circuitry, pump motors, transformers, load centers and motor control centers, and getting power to the plant is not the same thing as getting power to individual components.  There will be ground faults, broken connections, flooded components, and breakers that trip open on over-current and under-voltage when they are closed.  It will be a massive headache for the operators.

This isn’t over.  The Japanese are performing heroically as I have observed.  They are improving the situation.  But habitability of land, edibility of crops, cleanup of the plant, and recovery operations for the rubblized reactor cores will take time and money.  Pray for the Japanese – and don’t jump to any conclusions from MSM reports, like the notion that the fact that Unit 3 contains mixed oxide fuel (MOX) makes it somehow more dangerous than UO2 cores.  Please don’t fall for the hype.  Fuel fines will not become aerosolized or airborne, and the Plutonium is part of a metal crystalline structure.  It will stay bound within the fuel matrix.


Comments

  1. On March 22, 2011 at 6:12 am, Prasad said:

    This is the big lesson for the entire World. So we have to forget to build nuclear reactors. We have to search for alternatives to produce power.

  2. On March 22, 2011 at 12:45 pm, Warbucks said:

    The design criteria for these reactors should consider a “drop-dead” switch, which drops or ejects the entire core into a gravity fed self-sealing dispersing pit, which is then cooled by sea water or other reliable subterranean water supplies which are set to operate once the drop-dead switch is activated.

    Apparently there is problem with safety zones and evacuation radii around a worse case scenario reactor failure, that it makes more sense to somehow just seal these beasts in place quickly and write them off, end of story. That obviously requires massive re-thinking and design.

    Why design emergency procedures and reactors to save the utility company money in the reactor failure mode? Trying to mitigate cooling with fire hoses as trillions of $’s are lost in surrounding property and social productivity is the greater problem. Design the reactors to save the public from displacement, dislocation, and economic disruption instead. Pull the mechanical lever and eject the core deep into a containment pit constructed to disburse, cool, and seal permanently. End of reactor, billions of $’s lost to the utility company (which catastrophic insurance can cover). We can do better.

    The design of these reactor beasts now make both utility companies and everyone living around the utilities for miles and miles both suffer. Better to rethink the entire concept of loss. What do you want to lose: (a) trillions of $’s in property and productivity and a reactor, or (b) a reactor?

  3. On April 29, 2011 at 10:21 am, Warbucks said:

    I live in a small community put on the map by the late Dr Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb, home to LLNL- National Labs. Perhaps as a consequence of knowing so many world class scientists as neighbors after all these decades one of their characteristics may have rubbed off on to me: The scientist has no respect for authority, religious, spiritual, civil, social, or scientific … at least in his core spirit of professional drive and his search for truth. There are many exceptions but this seems to be the spirit that drives research.

    They are kept under control by the times tested ancient management system on “need-to-know” compartmentalization of information.

    To understand the Fukushima reactor disaster one needs to transcend all compartments and dare to look at great global theories that push our comfort zones. One of our local ladies from LLNL dares to think for herself and speaks publicly about the disaster.

    I’ve posted her talks here http://umc-unofficiallaymanopenforum.ning.com/forum/topics/one-of-our-local-ladies-speaks

    In 2004 she went to Japan and delivered a lecture in which she warned that Japan was playing reactor roulette in building on liquification prone soils at the conjunction on four moving tectonic plates. Her testimony stands as lone gospel of an enlightened soul to truths too great for most to bear.

    The third tape is her most recent I think.

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You are currently reading "Status of the Fukushima Reactor Accidents Part II", entry #6599 on The Captain's Journal.

This article is filed under the category(s) Fukushima Reactor Accident,Nuclear and was published March 21st, 2011 by Herschel Smith.

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