Dear Readers,
At last! Some levity! But not on a good day. Things aren't getting better yet, by any means.
However, Mark Fiore has released a marvelous animation on the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident:
tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/6gkbpff
Below(top), Deb Katz reports on the main spent fuel pool at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which apparently is unattended right now!
Below that, Marsha Rose asks an interesting question about pouring raw sea water on the reactors. My response appears below, followed by Rose's original letter.
Here is the only live radiation monitoring station I have found in SoCal:
http://www.enviroreporter.com/2011/03/enviroreporter-coms-radiation-station/
As I send this, all systems appear reasonably normal from this measuring device. "Normal" is apparently 40 to 48 counts per minute.
We certainly appreciate EnviroReporter for providing this webcam and monitoring system! Over two thousand people are using it right now.
My wife and I visited several stores yesterday, but could find no KI (Potassium Iodate) or anything like it. People had already bought everyone's stock of such things. We bought multi-vitamins instead and ate some kelp. Fortunately, we have some KI left over from Y2K... One web site indicates a seven-year shelf life, another indicated a greater than 99% effectiveness after 11 years, so we assume this is still good enough to use in an emergency... and this may certainly constitute an emergency at any moment.
However, I'm not sure what level, for example in Counts Per Minute, would constitute a reasonable time to start taking KI. More on that in the next newsletter, I hope...
One wonders if the Japanese habits of eating seaweed and taking their shoes off when they enter a house skewed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb data significantly? I'll bet it could have -- IF that data had any integrity to begin with!
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
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More terrifying news from Deb Katz (via facebook):
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Giant "Common" Nuclear Waste Storage Pond to All Six Fukushima Daiichi Reactors Has Been Without Cooling
by Deb Katz on Saturday, March 19, 2011 at 4:30am
Giant "Common" Nuclear Waste Storage Pond to All Six Fukushima Daiichi Reactors Has Been Without Cooling
There is yet another surprise at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex.
The long awaited arrival of electrical power to Tokyo Electric Power Company's devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station has yet another vital task to perform: restore cooling to an independent large scale common nuclear waste storage pond for all six nuclear units that has received no attention since loss of electricity following the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.
According to Yomiuri Shimbun news service (March 18, 2011), the giant common "spent" fuel storage pond has also been without cooling since the tsunami. The pool is not to be in any rated containment structure which is a concern if hydrogen gas generation leads to another explosion. The shared nuclear waste fuel assembly pool building is about 50 meters (150 feet) west of the now extremely radioactive Daiichi Unit 4. The common fuel pool facility has a total capacity of 6,800 highly irradiated fuel assemblies. According to TEPCO documentation from November 2010, the storage pool was at 90% capacity in March 2010 with 6,291 nuclear waste assemblies.
The large scale pool measures approximately 38 feet wide, 92 feet long and 35 feet deep. Highly radioactive nuclear waste assemblies that have been allowed to cool down in the six reactors' roof top storage ponds have been transferred and stored here since 1997. From this pool, some of the fuel has been loaded into more secure dry cask storage units awaiting shipment to the Rokkasho nuclear waste reprocessing facility.
According to Yomiuri Shimbun, TEPCO authorities have not been able to approach the largest nuclear waste storage facility at the complex because of high radiation levels emitting from Units 3 and 4. AS a result, it was reported that TEPCO has not been able to check the giant cooling pond's temperature and water level. However, TEPCO officials reassures that this nuclear waste also stored outside of a containment facility consists of the "coolest" assemblies in wet storage onsite.
However, even after two decades, a single used fuel assembly from a typical Boiling Water Reactor will emit over 3,000 BTU/hr
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Salts of reactor fuel? Yecch!!
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3/19/2011
Dear Marsha,
Yes, I'm sure it has created additional "monsters" they never calculated for. They are pouring sea water into the reactors and probably even onto the spent fuel pools.
Sea water combines with the radioactive isotopes. This combination being lofted into the atmosphere by being poured onto the burning reactors was against predictions in ways never considered in their many tens of thousands of reassuring pages claiming (falsely) that nuclear fuel, with its deadly rainbow of fission products, isn't a hazard to life on earth, it's a "manageable threat" in their opinion. But it's been mismanaged many times before this time, too.
Consider a line from a recent article I read, which believed this disaster would somehow be small. By "recent" I mean about a week ago, so I'll have to quote it from memory, paraphrase it, and not attribute it. But it goes something like this: "Fortunately, the vast majority of the radionuclides being released or that might be released in a nuclear fuel accident will be washed out to sea. There, some of the radioactive elements will combine with salts in the oceans to make very dangerous compounds. But fortunately most of these compounds will stay in the oceans until they decay. Hence, for Big Business, there's little to worry about."
Okay, I paraphrased that last line quite a bit, but they were saying not to worry.
But look at what's happening: They are pouring sea water onto fuel which is already burning and/or melting!
Steam releases, intentional or unintentional, happen regularly now. Fires, if they occur, are apparently being put out with sea water, which corrodes the metals very rapidly.
Fortunately, we have a lot of swimming pools near San Onofre were something like this (or a million other routes to the same thing) happen here. But to avoid lawsuits, they probably wouldn't dare empty them, so they'd probably use sea water here, too. Besides, it's closer.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Watching the dust settle in
Carlsbad, CA
At 10:16 PM 3/18/2011 -1000, Marsha Rose wrote:
Thank you Ace,
As usual, your insights are profound. We on the downwinder list have been shouting. However, our shouts have been drowned out by the highly paid staff and management of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Industry and the news media who rely on them.
The cover up began with General Grove of the Manhattan Project and The New York Times and has continued until today.
In orchestrating the official story of Hiroshima, as in so many aspects of the bomb, General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, played a central role.
In an internal memo, Groves warned that once the secret was out, "the project will be subject to harassing investigation, official inquiries ... and all the miscellany of crackpots, columnists, commentators, political aspirants, would-be authors and world savers."
To combat this, Groves proposed that officials "control the situation by the issuance of carefully written press releases." Indeed, from that moment on, control of nuclear commentary would be the government's goal until today.
Newspapers had to rely completely on information from the military. Press coverage amounted to little more than rewrites of War Department documents. But the War Department documents, it turns out, were written not by some military flack, but by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, one of the great names in the history of The New York Times -- William L. Laurence .
William L. Laurence said that he was invited, as he disclosed, to "give lie" to Japanese claims "that radiations were responsible for deaths even after" the Hiroshima attack. Laurence, as always, complied, more than willing to be of service to the nuclear cause, even though, unlike all the other reporters, he knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity shot, when animals died and Geiger counters clicked off the charts."
Back to today! You are a brilliant person and quite knowledgeable in this field. In fact, over the years I have learned so much from your writings. Thank you!
Now my question is - I'll set it up - when you burn anything the particles separate at the fire level, travel up into the atmosphere and then recombine as gravity sets in and fall to earth. That is the reason most incinerators where closed. Now by pouring contaminated sea water on the nuclear rods and who knows what else, as it burns and releases "stuff" into the atmosphere, NOW do we have any idea what is being released and when it falls will it have combined to create a new monster?
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----- Original Message -----
>From: "Ace Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
>Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 1:16 AM
>Subject: Update: Grim. "Worse than Chernobyl..."
>3/16/11
>Dear Readers...
>
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Additional commentary from Marsha Rose:
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Australian Wilfred Burchett and American George Weller told the A-Bomb horror story, but one report was reviled and the other suppressed.
At the end of the Pacific War, as the entire allied press corps focused on Japan's formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri, Burchett on September 2, set off on a 20-hour train ride to Hiroshima, evading US military efforts to confine reporters to Tokyo and away from the A-bombed cities. Seated on a concrete block surrounded by devastation and typing on a Baby Hermes, Burchett began his dispatch: "In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly -- people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as an atomic plague." He went on, "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."
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A Godzilla Gap?
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At 05:06 PM 3/18/2011 -0700, "Make" Lemons-aid wrote:
We simply cannot afford to have a Godzilla gap!
What super power are you hoping to get?
I will take anything except the ability to command sea creatures. That one is pretty lame.
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There are now reports from Japan that radioactive Iodine and Cesium have both been found in tap water.
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View the SHUT SAN ONOFRE video and see that without every activists' help, the "powers that be" won't do a thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK5oX-5MeR8
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