15 March 2011

al jazeera phoning it in

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It's not just them. It's all over the place. Most of them are reporting three explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant. There have been four. Four separate reactor containment structures have blown up. There are a total of six at the site, and the last two still intact are in danger of losing the coolant level needed to prevent explosions just like the first four. Thousands of spent, but nonetheless highly radioactive, fuel rods are also at risk of losing cooling water. There is no mention anywhere of any of the reactors actually melting down, only some mention of some rods being exposed and emitting exponentially more radiation than the original safe-ish-but-troubling releases. Don't ask me to give you any links because it changes back into something else the minute I try to go back to it.

Any of you left suffering under the delusion that information on the tubes is better than on the tube can only feel marginally more comfort if you are willing never to sleep and to catch EVERYTHING hot off the press. It goes away, I tell you. It goes away. Soon it will not get up there at all.

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I am caving in, here, to link Dave Lindorff's hyperbolic post about the construction of these nuclear power units, because it contains some salient information, but I edited the living snot out of it because the bare facts are more than enough:
These plants feature huge pools of water up in the higher level of the containment building above the reactors, which hold the spent fuel rods from the reactor. These rods are still “hot” but besides the uranium fuel pellets, they also contain the highly radioactive and potentially biologically active decay products of the fission process — particularly radioactive Cesium 137, Iodine 131 and Strontium 90.

If these waste cooling ponds were to be damaged in an explosion and lose their cooling and radiation-shielding water, they could burst into flame from the resulting burning of the highly flammable zirconium cladding of the fuel rods, blasting perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster. Each pool generally contains five to ten times as much nuclear material as the reactors themselves. A 1997 Nuclear Regulatory Commission study predicted that a waste pool fire could render a 188-square-mile area uninhabitable.

The Fukushima Reactor 3 unit uses MOX fuel rods, which are a mix of uranium and plutonium. Plutonium is far more dangerous chemically and in terms of its radioactivity.
Few are mentioning the problem with the fallout being blown over the Pacific. The explosions, or fires, or meltdowns, or near meltdowns, whatever way you want to look at it, are spewing radioactive material directly in the path of the Jet Stream that is rolling right on over to bump into the California coast, all of Oregon and Washington, and even on up into western B.C. and Alaska over the next few days.

Would that we had a Julian Assange in the IAEA or some American outpost of matters nuclear. Anyone got a geiger counter?

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love, 99
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22 comments:

  1. Numerous reports I've seen say spent rods at reactor # 4 burned in the fire yesterday...

    Situation now at level 6...

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/japan-quake-nuclear-france-idUSLDE72E2M920110315

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  2. Well, it's a chicken and egg situation because I think the rods burning caused the fire, and after that the structure blew up... constituting the fourth explosion few are reporting today. I cannot find any reports of whether those rods have been re-submerged or how much trouble they're having preventing reactor cores from meltdown. I heard a whiff yesterday about partial meltdown in one of them. Things are definitely FUBAR and worsening, but unfortunately potentates in the nuclear industry have taken over most of the punditry on this and we are unlikely in the extreme to get a full accounting until it is entirely too late to do anything about it, if there even is anything we can do about it.

    I wonder if there are calls to select oligarchs, informing them what their best moves will be.

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  3. Oh, and I don't think much of their fucking rating system. If Chernobyl was a seven, there needs to be an eight, no? And being publicly wavery about it being a six, makes everyone feel better when it's really a seven by many accounts.

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  4. Hardly anyone is talking about the presence of plutonium in some of the fuel rods.

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  5. I just watched a video showing HAARP grid pattern clouds over Japan just before the earthquake... plus the backassward whirlpool... I don't know if the clouds thing was real, not attached to MSM coverage that I could see, but the denizens of Out There are definitely going postal.

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  6. Another fire?

    Need to check that link later - it seems there is another fire - the time line of the article is current within the last hour - I'm unable to find supporting info.

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  7. "Everything I've seen says that the containment structure is operating as it's designed to operate. It's keeping the radiation in and it's holding everything in, which is the good news," said Murray Jennex, of San Diego State University.

    Hmmm, steel walls holding in white hot molten uranium and plutonium but steel columns and beams melted on 9/11 in an oxygen starved jet fuel fire...

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/14/us-japan-quake-explosion-idUSTRE72D4SS20110314

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  8. "The latest fire, which started around 5.45 a.m. local time (4:45 p.m. U.S. Eastern time)..."
    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-fire-breaks-out-at-japan-nuclear-plant-2011-03-15

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  9. I'm just back from the health food store where I bought some chlorophyl and some kelp tablets. They're both good for radiation damage and my aching teeth and thyroid... so I will take an hour or two longer to die than the rest of us.

    BB2 is reading some unwarrantedly-optimistic shit there, albeit "amusing".

    If they have some exposed rods, they are having a meltdown. It may or may not breach the containment vessel... but it motherfucking doesn't cool down after four days. The goddam offline SPENT rods catch fire when there's no water on them. It seems to me the ONLY way they can prevent a breach in the exposed rods reactor is to get the water flowing in there and keep it flowing before the thing gives out. PLUS, now with a SECOND fire in number four's spent fuel pond, it's pretty obvious they are having GREAT difficulty keeping those containers and pools filled with enough cooling water.

    CNN was blathering away at the cable company and some dip switch was waxing all delighted that the prevailing winds were blowing the radiation due east... like we are to be DELIGHTED about this. Yes, I am thrilled for the Koreans and Russians and Chinese, but, uhm, I'm NOT very happy for US. Most of what I eat and ALL of what I breathe comes from where that radiation is blowing to.

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  10. Read between the lines...

    As crews battled to avert a nuclear disaster, TEPCO said it may pour water from helicopters to stop fuel rods from being exposed to the air and releasing even more radioactivity.

    If pouring water from helicopters will keep the fuel rods from being exposed to the air, the reactor containers must be breached - how else would the water get to them?

    The only other explanation would be that they are trying to keep containers from melting thus exposing the rods.

    If it is to that point I don't hold out much hope foe stopping it!

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/15/blasts-new-fire-escalate-japans-nuclear-crisis/


    Ya, I know - Raw Story

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  11. Did the west coast get any radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Any harm done?

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  12. BB - I think the helicopter thing is to keep water in the pools holding the spent fuel rods.

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  13. LOL, I love that video.... :o[]

    I thought the MOX reactor was number three? Fuck. This is confusing.

    The spent fuel rods are in big pools and one can walk by them and take pictures of them. And since the roofs have all blown off, it oughta be easy to dump water in from above... except if it will fry the pilots to do it.

    At least it seems the French experts are getting down to cases.

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  14. I don't know if we got any radiation from the bombs. I do know that the only reason anyone can live there now is that all the radiation shot up into the sky in the mushroom clouds, but I don't think this radiation will act like bomb radiation. I think this radiation will stay lower since the explosions are not of the force of a nuclear bomb. They're just blasting shit a few hundred feet into the air and the particles are blowing due east.

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  15. The folks at Godlikeproductions are chatting up MOX in smoke from #3.

    http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1397266/pg6#23014532

    Now I have to find where I saw it was #2 that had plutonium.

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  16. Helicopters -

    Ya, makes more sense for the spent rods. I wasn't thinking of them when I read the article.

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  17. as long as it's not shooting shit up into the jet stream, we should be ok, according to some "experts" cited somewhere I've been.

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  18. Well, number three, the one with the plutonium, was sending smoke/steam up into the air, next to #4 doing similarly. The jet stream will catch that.

    I have a new post at the top of the page. It has the very latest dope.

    IT'S NOOOOOOTTTT GOOD.

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  19. Now's a good time for a southern hemisphere vacation. I wonder if the rich are heading south in any numbers.

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  20. I shoulda bought the big jug of chlorophyll....

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  21. Well, number three, the one with the plutonium, was sending smoke/steam up into the air, next to #4 doing similarly. The jet stream will catch that.

    I believe it has to reach a few miles up to catch the jet stream, other wise it will just blow in the wind. Which, in turn doesn't bide to well for close neighbors :(

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