The shit just keeps hitting the fan. It appears the containment shell for reactor #2 has failed. We're now at a Chernobyl level disaster...


http://mitnse.com/

***UPDATE – 3/14 10:55 pm EST***

The details about what happened at the Unit 2 reactor are still being determined. The post on what is happening at the Unit 2 reactor contains more up-to-date information. Radiation levels have increased, but to what level remains unknown.

TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Japan authorities said Tuesday that an explosion inside part of the No. 2 reactor at the Daiichi nuclear power plant appears to have caused damage, and some staff have been evacuated from the facility as radiation levels at the site rose sharply.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110314-716066.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html

Government officials also said the containment structure of the No. 2 reactor had suffered damage during an explosion shortly after 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

They initially suggested that the damage was limited and that emergency operations aimed at cooling the nuclear fuel at three stricken reactors with seawater would continue. But industry executives said that in fact the situation had spiraled out of control and that all plant workers needed to leave the plant to avoid excessive exposure to radioactive leaks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/14/2011 11:25PM by trogdor!.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-15/japan-s-stricken-nuclear-power-plant-rocked-by-two-blasts-fire.html

"As of 10.22 a.m. local time, 400 millisieverts of radiation were detected at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors, Edano said. That’s 20 times the annual limit for nuclear industry employees and uranium miners, according to the World Nuclear Association. A radiation dose of 100 millisieverts a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is evident, the London-based WNA said on its website."

To give you an idea how high that reading is, being near that reactor now is like getting 4,000 chest x-rays an hour.

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features/chernobyl-15/liquidators.shtml

"Some 350,000 people involved in the initial clean-up of the [Chernobyl] plant in 1986-87 received average total body radiation doses of the order of 100 millisieverts (mSv) - a millisievert is a unit of radiation dose equivalent to about 10 general chest x-rays. This dose is about five times the maximum annual dose limit currently permitted for workers in nuclear facilities (20 mSv per year). Average worldwide natural “background” radiation is about 2.4 mSv annually."

I'm glad folks are now citing news and sourcing now rather than playing off as nuclear reactor experts and scientist just making up shit. Anyway most of the authors of cited articles on various post about the Japanese nuclear reactors situations on the FFXU to me are just as dubious in their expertise and knowledge in nuclear reactors as the FFXU. I seriously doubt if most of them are real experts and are just manufacturing news...writing for a paycheck...got to pay the rent somehow. Just google some of the article authors names. You believe what you want to believe, your right.

I'm no expert maybe superstitious. I guess I'll believe when I see folks around here start to glow.

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I'm probably the only person here who actually received training in operating/maintaining nuclear reactors. We went over the TMI incident (and a number of others on a much smaller scale), although Chernobyl hadn't happened when I went through school.

Anything that breaches the reactor vessel is going to be bad, but the worst radiation sources are from the materials produced in the feed water as the radiation, heat and pressure react with the materials of the core and pumping systems. The real fear now is the potential for a steam explosion if the core manages to breach the bottom of the containment vessel while it is super-hot and then hits a source of water, or if it gets hot enough to start burning material inside the core and allowing ash and other burned particles to escape into the atmosphere. Not that radiating Uranium isn't bad for you, but the stuff like Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 - that stuff is nasty. Let's hope the sea water works - although it isn't looking good for the #2 reactor now.

Now I just wonder who they are going to get to go in and dump tons of sand, boron and concrete into the buildings... In particular if they are radiating so much now. It isn't like that will stop anytime soon.

If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2011 04:50PM by Registered Voter.

Would be nice if they could just bulldoze the whole thing into the fucking ocean and deep six it. What a mess.

Registered Voter Wrote:
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> Now I just wonder who they are going to get to go
> in and dump tons of sand, boron and concrete into
> the buildings...

The poor helicopter crews who did that at Chernobyl didn't live very long...I remember Gorbachev on the news visiting one of them to give him a Hero of the Soviet Union medal. The guy was in an oxygen tent dying of lukemia and all his hair had fallen out. Gorbachev couldn't actually touch the guy to shake his hand because his immune system was shot. IIRC he died not long after that.

Found it here: http://articles.latimes.com/1990-07-04/news/mn-106_1_helicopter-pilot

Quite a story. Hope no Japanese guys have to do this kind of work.

will it effect us directly?

Hmmmm..Heart attack??:

TEPCO worker who fell unconscious at Fukushima, Japan, nuke plant dies; no radioactivity detected - Kyodo

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/05/91037.html

super toll!!

Damn! There goes all the cool electronic stuff for this year!
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