Power in the rising sun

The theme behind these stories is the energy situation in Japan since the Fukushima disaster last year. In the aftermath of the destruction a report was quickly compiled for the Japanese Govt. outlining the possible worst case scenarios and actions that might need to be taken.

Report on Japan nuclear crisis said millions might need to leave homes; gov’t kept it secret
Associated Press, January 25

The Japanese government’s worst-case scenario at the height of the nuclear crisis last year warned that tens of millions of people, including Tokyo residents, might need to leave their homes, according to a report obtained by The Associated Press. But fearing widespread panic, officials kept the report secret.

It also casts doubt about whether the government was sufficiently prepared to cope with what could have been an evacuation of unprecedented scale.

Nuclear: too hot to handle

Bloomberg reported last week that the Fukushima meltdown continues to set new radiation records - Tepco Says Highest Radiation Yet Is Detected at Fukushima Dai-Ichi.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, said it detected the highest radiation to date at the site.

Geiger counters, used to detect radioactivity, registered more than 10 sieverts an hour, the highest reading the devices are able to record, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility, said today. The measurements were taken at the base of the main ventilation stack for reactors No. 1 and No. 2.

The Fukushima plant, about 220 kilometers (137 miles) north of Tokyo, had three reactor meltdowns after the March 11 magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and backup generators. Radiation leaks displaced 160,000 people and contaminated marine life and agricultural products.

The Times Union reports that the Japanese are growing suspicious of offical claims and are starting to measure radiation levels themselves - Japanese monitor radiation on their own.

Kiyoko Okoshi had a simple goal when she spent about $625 for a dosimeter: She missed her daughter and grandsons and wanted them to come home.

Local officials kept telling her that their remote village was safe, even though it was less than 20 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But her daughter remained dubious.

So starting in April, Okoshi began using her dosimeter to check nearby forest roads and rice paddies. What she found was startling. Near one sewage ditch, the meter beeped wildly, and the screen read 67 microsieverts per hour, a potentially harmful level. Okoshi and a cousin who lives nearby worked up the courage to confront elected officials, who did not respond, confirming their worry that the government was not doing its job.

With her simple yet bold act, Okoshi joined the small but growing number of Japanese who have decided to step in as the government fumbles its reaction to the widespread contamination, which leaders acknowledge is much worse than originally announced. Some mothers as far away as Tokyo have begun testing for radioactive materials.

Crikey has some choice words to say about the disaster - Fukushima disaster: worse than Hiroshima.

More gravely serious truths about the severity of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster following the earthquake and tsunami of March 11 have emerged.

Two things are now clear and they justify the following charges: the nuclear experts that the Australian media relied upon should never be trusted again; and social media real-time raw and unfiltered audio and video reports are providing a more truthful and relevant coverage of the aftermath of the continuing nuclear crisis than the selective and filtered copy being carried by print and wire agencies.

While the Bloomberg news report overnight of two extremely high radiation readings being recorded at the Fukushima complex of nuclear plants on August 1 and August 2 are alarming, other significant disclosures are also made in this story.

* The reading of 10 sieverts of radiation per hour outside the damaged reactor buildings was the highest level the equipment used could have detected, meaning the lethality of the contamination was off the scale; and

* For the first time a tenured nuclear expert Tetsuo Ito, the head of the Atomic Energy Research Institute at Kinki University concedes that the melted cores of one or more reactors may have melted through the supposedly failure proof containment vessel floor, sinking deeper into the subsoil and given the nature of the radioactive material concerned, into a position where it can spread a very long distance directly through the subsoil water table.

It took TEPCO and nuclear apologists until last month to even concede that “partial meltdowns” had occurred in up to three of the reactors, even though the only plausible explanation for the caesium contamination detected outside the reactors within 48 hours was the rupturing of the caesium sheaths surrounding the uranium rods upon their exposure to air following the draining of coolant fluid, setting up the requirements for a melt down to occur.

In what would be consistent with a deliberate policy of gradually revealing the truth some months after the event, the Japanese nuclear authorities and government are also now routinely referring to the fact that contamination levels outside the exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi complex include hot spots that are as highly affected as they were around the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in the former Soviet Union 25 years ago.

Which is where social media in Japan is making itself felt.

In a series of widely viewed and replicated YouTube videos a Japan nuclear expert, Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama, has told Japan’s lower house Diet that the nation has failed miserably to make a timely evacuation of the at risk population worst affected by Fukushima radioactive fallout compared to the massive relocation that occurred in the Ukraine in the two weeks after the Chernobyl disaster.

In the English language transcripts of these videos, notably on the Penn-Olsen Asia tech blog, Kodama says he is shaking with anger at the incompetence and dishonesty of the government and nuclear authorities and the TEPCO power company in the aftermath of the accident. He attacks the use of simplistic readings that ignore for example the accumulation of deadly isotopes at the foot of slippery slides in children’s playgrounds in favour of readings at the top from which rain has washed away the contamination.

The readings, like the children, are being cooked, either by ignorance or intent.

Kodama says the uranium equivalent of the contamination released by the three affected reactor cores and four cooling ponds at Fukushima was that of 20 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs:

“What is more frightening is that whereas the radiation from a nuclear bomb will decrease to one-thousandth in one year, the radiation from a nuclear power plant will only decrease to one-tenth.

“In other words, we should recognise from the start that just like Chernobyl, Fukushima I Nuclear Plant has released radioactive materials equivalent in the amount to tens of nuclear bombs, and the resulting contamination is far worse than the contamination by a nuclear bomb.”

Kodama’s testimony, poorly reported in the established Japan media, is circulating in social media in tandem with raw videos of government officials telling a meeting of Fukushima residents demanding urgent help in evacuating to other parts of the country that they should stay put and trust them to reduce radiation. The meeting becomes increasingly angry after one official tells the residents they could evacuate at “their own risk”, while they shout at them for telling them to stay put and die.

The bigger context to these reports from Japan is that the guidance given by nuclear scientists and apologists alike to the media in Australia was disgracefully inaccurate and patronising. The reality of the caesium contamination was ignored, and the quoting of initial radiation readings in the wrong metric was ignored (and later found to be fictitious as well as mischievous, when TEPCO confirmed that it didn’t actually have any capability of measuring contamination within key parts of the complex).

The constant refrain that Fukushima would never be a level-seven disaster such as Chernobyl contained longer in the Australian media than anywhere else, even after the nuclear authorities in France and US broke with the usual protocol of not commenting on other national agencies, and said that it could reach level six or level seven and expressed a lack of confidence in their Japan counterparts.

One thing that is becoming apparent after this disaster is that the truth, like the fallout, is going to force itself on the authorities no matter how much the business, political and scientific establishments try to play it down.

The Climate Spectator has a look at the elevated level of skepticism about nuclear power - Nuclear: too hot to handle.

Recent reports about the potential of BHP Billiton to delay uranium production from its massive Olympic Dam project, and Resource Minister Martin Ferguson’s urging of the NSW coalition government to overturn the state’s ban on uranium mining, suggests differing views about the outlook for the nuclear industry.

That the much anticipated “nuclear renaissance” has been stalled – at least in western democracies – appears to be beyond doubt, at least in the short term. But the medium- to long-term outlook is subject to much conjecture, and seems to depend on how you answer two questions: Who is going to want it? And who is going to pay for it?

In the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, we noted that the nuclear industry was unique among energy sources in that it relied on the indulgence of public opinion – unless, of course, you live in a country like China – to be built. This has been borne out by events in Germany and Italy, and the continuing angst in Japan.

But it’s not the only problem – even in those countries where nuclear is supported by the government, the question remains, who is going to pay for them? And it seems clear that the private sector is not.

Advocates for nuclear power in this country like to present the industry as the lowest-cost clean energy alternative to fossil fuels. But this ignores the fact that nuclear plants are massively expensive and involve huge up-front costs, invested well in advance of a commercial return because of the long lead times.

And it is completely dependent on government support. As Citigroup analysts pointed out in a 2009 analysis on the economics of the nuclear industry, there hasn’t been a plant in the world built without the relevant government assuming much of the construction, operating and financing risk. There is not a single insurer, banker or construction company in the world that is willing to assume that risk.

France is often cited as the glowing example of low cost nuclear energy, but the French government effectively wrote off the capital investment of its nuclear fleet, meaning that the operating companies such as EdF and GDF Suez have been able to book what the International Energy Agency described as billions of dollars in “nuclear rent."

Now, the assumption that nuclear will be cheaper than competing “clean” technologies such as coal with carbon capture and storage is being questioned again, particularly in light of the extra costs that will become an inevitable consequence of post-Fukushima safety reviews.

Nomura Securities analyst Kyoichiro Yokoyama last week released a detailed assessment of competing clean baseload technologies, in which he concluded that the cost of nuclear was considerably higher than that of even coal with carbon carbon and storage.

Yokoyama noted that low costs had been a key selling point for nuclear power, underpinned by an analysis from the IEA and the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency last year that suggested that the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for coal-fired plants with CCS comes out 25-40 per cent higher than that for nuclear plants, with or without a carbon price. But Yokoyama said that, since the Fukushima Daiichi incident, an increasing number of people have been questioning the real cost of nuclear power generation.

“Some observers have noted that the cost of the various subsidies paid when nuclear plants are constructed is not factored in and it has also been pointed out that the estimation of costs associated with spent fuel has tended to be overly optimistic,” he wrote. “In many cases, the details of these amounts are unclear or unspecified, which makes calculating the actual cost of nuclear power generation somewhat problematic.”

He drew on research from MIT that noted how the cost of disposing of spent fuel and numerous regulatory and political risks associated with operating licences, including gaining the approval of residents, meant the capital costs were considerably higher (around 2-3 percentage points) than for thermal generation. MIT suggested that this translated into a LCOE for nuclear power generation of $US60-$US65/MWh for the US and Germany and $90/MWh for the Czech Republic. These costs are roughly the same as for coal-fired generation with CCS.

The question of costs and the ability of the private sector to come to the party has been raised on several occasions in recent weeks in the UK, which is keen on pressing ahead with its nuclear rollout. A joint venture between France’s EDF and the listed UK utility Centrica plans to roll out of three or four nuclear plants by the end of the decade.

Last week, Lakis Athanasiou, the utilities analyst with London-based investment bank Evolution Securities, warned that Centrica should "not touch (the new nuclear venture) with a barge pole," particularly if the UK government is unwilling to take construction risk.

The Evolution Securities view reinforces renewed concerns expressed by other investment specialists such as Citigroup, which a week earlier said new nuclear was not an investable option for public equity markets and listed companies such as Centrica or Germany’s RWE.

“The cost of capital based on those risks would be way too high to give you an electricity price which is affordable,” Citigroup’s utilities analysts told reporters at a briefing in London. "You would be looking at a project cost of capital of at least 15 per cent. That would require a power price of about 150-200 pounds per megawatt hour (based on 2017 money) to make that project work," he said, noting it is three to four times as much as current UK spot power prices.

"We think (nuclear energy) is uninvestable for public equity markets. EDF may be willing to take on the construction risks but none of the other (big utilities) are willing to do that." EDF, he noted, is an exception because it is majority-owned by the French government.
In that 2009 report, Atherton noted that three of the risks faced by developers – construction, power price, and operational – are “so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially. This makes new nuclear a unique investment proposition for utility companies.” He noted that UK government policy remains that the private sector takes full exposure to the three main risks. “Nowhere in the world have nuclear power stations been built on this basis,” he said.

Further delays and cost overruns at new generation nuclear plants being developed in Europe by French companies have also raised questions about the cost factor, particularly with the extra safety measures that would appear to be an inevitable consequence of the Fukushima incident. EDF said the new generation European pressurised reactor (EPR) at Flamanville, in north-western France, has been further delayed and is now expected to open in 2016 (rather than 2014), and its budget has now jumped out to €6 billion ($8 billion). It was originally to be built by 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion.

Another French company, Areva, is experiencing similar problems at its EPR plant in Finland.

And in weirder nuclear news, the ABC has a report on some Swedish dude who had a "meltdown" occur on his stovetop - Man tries to build nuke reactor in kitchen.

A Swedish man who tried to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen says he started the experiment "just for fun".

Richard Handl, 31, from Aengelholm municipality in south-western Sweden, was detained by police two weeks ago and says he started the project as a hobby. "I have always been interested in nuclear physics and particle physics," he said.

In May, he launched an English-language blog, Richard's Reactor, in which he charted his progress in the project, complete with pictures.

His plan was "to build a working nuclear reactor. Not to gain electricity, just for fun and to see if it's possible to split atoms at home." ...

Mr Handl's blog can be found at http://richardsreactor.blogspot.com.

Cross posted from Peak Energy.

Mythonium

Easier to create than Unobtainium, and with a longer half life than any of the transactinides, it is a powerful and necessary element in any public relations effort.

Myth creation is common during a crisis. Some of them are deconstructed below.

The first major myth concerns Japanese technological prowess. As a nation the Japanese have a strong technological history, but they are not alone in  having a long cultural history of avoiding (or outright denying) uncomfortable “truths”.

The first article below is an extensive cut and paste from the New York Times (follow the link for the complete story). I have edited out more from the start of the original piece and highlighted some of the more boring technical or “factual” statements that normally get relegated to the bottom of the journalists pyramid.

‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis

Norimitsu Onishi, NYTime, 24 June

SHIKA, Japan — Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”

“It’s terrible, just terrible,” the White Rabbit says in the first exhibit. “We’re running out of energy, Alice.”

A Dodo robot figure, swiveling to address Alice and the visitors to the building, declares that there is an “ace” form of energy called nuclear power. It is clean, safe and renewable if you reprocess uranium and plutonium, the Dodo says.

“Wow, you can even do that!” Alice says of nuclear power.

See more images at Building Japan’s Nuclear ‘Safety Myth’ also from the NY Times

Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely to advertise the safety of nuclear plants. Politicians pushed through the adoption of government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.

The result was the widespread adoption of the belief — called the “safety myth” — that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe. Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced themselves from it.

As the Japanese continue to search for answers to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, some are digging deep into the national psyche and examining a national propensity to embrace a belief now widely seen as irrational.

Because of this widespread belief in Japanese plants’ absolute safety, plant operators and nuclear regulators failed to adopt proper safety measures and advances in technology, like emergency robots, experts and government officials acknowledge.]

Banri Kaieda, who runs the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the nuclear industry, said at a news conference at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna on Monday. “It’s a fact that there was an unreasonable overconfidence in the technology of Japan’s nuclear power generation.”

With radiation levels too high for workers to approach the reactors, the Japanese authorities floundered. They sent police trucks mounted with water cannons — equipment designed to disperse rioters — to spray water into the reactor buildings. Military helicopters flew over the buildings, dropping water that was scattered off course by strong winds, in a “performance, a kind of circus” that was aimed more at reassuring an increasingly alarmed Japanese population and American government, said Kenichi Matsumoto, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

Japan lacked some of the basic hardware to respond to a nuclear crisis and, after initial resistance, had to look abroad for help. For a country proud of its technology, the low point occurred on March 31 when it had to use a 203-foot-long water pump — shipped from China…

But perhaps more than anything else, the absence of one particular technology was deeply puzzling: emergency robots.

Japan, after all, is the world’s leader in robotics. It has the world’s largest force of mechanized workers. Its humanoid robots can walk and run on two feet, sing and dance, and even play the violin. But where were the emergency robots at Fukushima?

The answer is that the operators and nuclear regulators, believing that accidents would never occur, steadfastly opposed the introduction of what they regarded as unnecessary technology.

“The plant operators said that robots, which would premise an accident, were not needed,” said Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, 77, an engineer and a former president of the University of Tokyo, Japan’s most prestigious academic institution. “Instead, introducing them would inspire fear, they said. That’s why they said that robots couldn’t be introduced.”

The rejection of robots, Mr. Yoshikawa said, was part of the industry’s overall reluctance to improve maintenance and invest in new technologies.

“That’s why the safety myth wasn’t just an empty slogan,” said Mr. Yoshikawa, now the director general of the Center for Research and Development Strategy at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. “It was a kind of mind-set that rejected progress through the introduction of new technology.”

After Chernobyl, the nuclear establishment made sure that Japanese kept believing in safety.

The plant operators built or renovated the public relations buildings — called “P.R. buildings” — attached to their plants. Before Chernobyl, the buildings were simple facilities intended to appeal to “adult men interested in technical matters,” said Noriya Sumihara, an anthropologist at Tenri University who has researched the facilities. Male guides wearing industrial uniforms took visitors around exhibits consisting mostly of wall panels.

But after Chernobyl, the facilities were transformed into elaborate theme parks geared toward young mothers, the group that research showed was most worried about nuclear plants and radiation, Mr. Sumihara said. Women of childbearing age, whose presence alone was meant to reassure the visitors, were hired as guides.

In Higashidori, a town in northern Japan, one of the country’s newest P.R. buildings is built on the theme of Tonttu, a forest with resident dwarfs. The buildings also holds events with anime characters to attract children and young parents…

Here in Shika, more than 100,000 guests last year visited the P.R. building where Alice discovers the wonders of nuclear power. The Caterpillar reassures Alice about radiation and the Cheshire Cat helps her learn about the energy source.

The nuclear establishment also made sure that government-mandated school textbooks underemphasized information that could cast doubt on the safety of nuclear power. In Parliament, the campaign was led by Tokio Kano, a Tepco vice president who became a lawmaker in 1998.

In 2004, under the influence of Mr. Kano and other proponents of nuclear power, education officials ordered revisions to textbooks before endorsing them. In one junior high school social studies textbook, a reference to the growing antinuclear movement in Europe was deleted. In another, a reference to Chernobyl was relegated to a footnote.

The nuclear establishment itself came to believe its own safety myth and “became entangled in its own net,” said Hitoshi Yoshioka, an author of a book on the history of Japan’s nuclear power and a member of a panel established by the prime minister to investigate the causes of the Fukushima disaster.

Will these events mark a transition to more questioning approach by the public to the otherwise supine acceptance of authoritarian opinion?

Survey shows disappointment, anger among Fukushima evacuees

Asahi Shimbun (Asahi.com), 25 June.

Disappointment toward Tokyo Electric Power Co. for its failure to guard the safety of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and anger at the central government's inept handling of the accident.

Those are the two major themes that emerge from the results of an interview survey of 407 evacuees from the Fukushima nuclear accident.

About 90,000 Fukushima residents have evacuated because of the nuclear accident, with about a third of that number moving outside of the prefecture entirely.

While TEPCO may have provided many Fukushima residents with jobs, the nuclear accident has turned many evacuees against nuclear energy.When asked their opinion on the use of nuclear energy, 70 percent of respondents said they were opposed while 26 percent said they were in favor of nuclear energy.While the survey methods and sample sizes are different, those results are much more anti-nuclear than a nationwide poll conducted by The Asahi Shimbun in June in which 37 percent favored the use of nuclear energy and 42 percent opposed it.

Having young children was an obvious reason for not wanting to return to Fukushima.

A 37-year-old woman left her home in Minami-Soma with her husband and one-year-old son even before the region was designated as a potential emergency evacuation zone.

Whenever her son has health problems because of the unaccustomed evacuation life, the woman blames herself for giving birth at such a difficult time.

"No matter how much they say it is safe, there is no way we can believe them ever again," the woman said.The deep disappointment felt by many of the respondents is due to the fact that many believed TEPCO and other experts who repeatedly said Japan's nuclear power plants were safe and that no accident would ever occur.

Anger at the central government was due in major part to the confusion over evacuation instructions in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

A number of evacuees said they were given conflicting or incomplete instructions that made it difficult to understand where they should flee to.

A 72-year-old woman said, "Information that radioactive materials had spewed from the plant was only transmitted later. If I had known about it earlier, I would have evacuated much farther away."

A woman in her 60s from Namie said, "Not being informed about radiation, I was told to go to a location that had dangerously high levels of radiation."

As a result of such experiences, a total of 80 percent of respondents said the government's response was either totally inappropriate or somewhat inappropriate.

With life in evacuation centers now exceeding three months, close to half of the respondents said their health had worsened as a result.

When workers are put at risk they must be hailed as heros, whether they had a choice or not or new the risks.

Japan's 'throwaway' nuclear workers

Reuters, 24 June.

A decade and a half before it blew apart in a hydrogen blast that punctuated the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was the scene of an earlier safety crisis.

Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to work to try to stem the damage at the oldest nuclear reactor run by Japan's largest utility.

At the time, workers were racing to finish an unprecedented repair to address a dangerous defect: cracks in the drum-like steel assembly known as the "shroud" surrounding the radioactive core of the reactor.

But in 1997, the effort to save the 21-year-old reactor from being scrapped at a large loss to its operator, Tokyo Electric, also included a quiet effort to skirt Japan's safety rules: foreign workers were brought in for the most dangerous jobs, a manager of the project said.

"It's not well known, but I know what happened," Kazunori Fujii, who managed part of the shroud replacement in 1997, told Reuters. "What we did would not have been allowed under Japanese safety standards."

The previously undisclosed hiring of welders from the United States and Southeast Asia underscores the way Tokyo Electric, a powerful monopoly with deep political connections in Japan, outsourced its riskiest work and developed a lax safety culture in the years leading to the Fukushima disaster, experts say.

The repeated failures that have dogged Tokyo Electric in the three months the Fukushima plant has been in crisis have undercut confidence in the response to the disaster and dismayed outside experts, given corporate Japan's reputation for relentless organization.

Hastily hired workers were sent into the plant without radiation meters. Two splashed into radioactive water wearing street shoes because rubber boots were not available. Even now, few have been given training on radiation risks that meets international standards, according to their accounts and the evaluation of experts.

The workers who stayed on to try to stabilize the plant in the darkest hours after March 11 were lauded as the "Fukushima 50" for their selflessness. But behind the heroism is a legacy of Japanese nuclear workers facing hazards with little oversight, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former nuclear workers, doctors and others.

And finally,

Report From Tokyo: No News Is Good News?

Huffington Post, 23 June

Controlling information flow in a crisis is crucial to its outcome. So it should come as no surprise that much information received about how the crisis at Fukushima unfolded has been kept away from traditional and social media as long as possible. In the end, however, the truth does come out.

One of my favorite truths this week was the acknowledgment by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that 69 workers who worked at reactor #1 at the Daiichi Fukushima nuclear power plant in March "cannot be found." This means that these individuals, who may have been exposed to high doses of radiation, cannot be located for testing. Was this a case of "sloppy paperwork" or something else? Either way, one wonders how long and why this was kept from the public eye.

While many are no longer surprised to see this sort of thing occurring in Japan, it becomes even less palatable when it happens on the global stage. Take the case of International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) recent decision to hold talks about the Fukushima disaster behind closed doors.

But the picture emerging after three months of radiation release is nothing to laugh about. The June 17th edition of Science magazine reports that radioactive cesium (both 134 and 137) has spread over 100 miles from the plant and now affects an area southwest of the reactors with a large pocket of contamination further south to the outskirts of Tokyo.Not telling the truth gives traditional and social media pundits much to write about and makes the pain last longer when it is revealed. Let us hope that more of those with inside knowledge prioritize the people more than they do their entrenched interests.

For an amusing expat view from Japan of the events try Spike Japan. Read the article about Pluto kun (Plutonium Child) and the bizarre world of TEPCO PR aimed specifically at children  After the earthquake: So farewell then, Plutonium kun.

“I’m hardly absorbed by your stomach or intestines and I’m expelled by your body, so in fact I can’t kill people at all”.

Fukushima was always worse than thought

[Update - 25th]

Meltdowns confirmed at Fukushima reactors
Shinichi Saoshiro, Stuff.co.nz

"Now people are used to the situation. Nothing is resolved, but normal business has resumed in places like Tokyo," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Tokyo's Sophia University.

Nakano said that by confirming the meltdowns now, Tepco may be hoping the news will have less impact. The word "meltdown" has such a strong connotation that when the situation was more uncertain more people would likely have fled Tokyo, he said.


Japan nuclear plant confirms meltdown of two more reactors
Guardian

[Update - 24th]

Fukushima owners failed to follow emergency manual - report
NZ Herald, 23rd May

It appears likely that the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant did not follow the procedures to prevent a hydrogen explosion, NHK World reports.

NHK obtained the manual for the No.1 reactor, where the hydrogen blast occurred on March 12th, one day after the tsunami destroyed the reactor's cooling system.

The manual calls for releasing air from the vessel when the pressure is projected to rise to 853 kilopascals - double the operating limit.

The manual NHK has obtained shows that the pressure inside the vessel was close to the level that requires a venting operation 13 hours before the explosion occurred.

But the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), did not start the operation until 6 and a half hours before the explosion, and the operation was carried out just one and a half hours before the blast because it was hampered by high-level radioactivity.

[Update, 20th May]
Scandals in Japan have a familiar pattern. Revelation is followed by reassurance, which on further disclosure, is soon followed by denial, and dissembling before a scapegoat is produced and symbolically offered up to the public for (hopefully) a ritual cathartic closure. It's a kind of theater.

Japanese nuclear boss quits over $15bn loss
Al Jazeera, 20th May.
"I wanted to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close,'' he told reporters, bowing during the news conference. "We are doing our utmost to settle the crisis."

Tepco also announced it will be permanently shutting down its four damaged reactors at the Fukushima plant.

"Today’s loss figures do not account for the huge amount of compensation that is going to have to be paid out to more than 80,000 people who have been directly affected by the disaster, having to be relocated outside the 20-30km zone," our correspondent said.

Tepco has not made an estimate for the likely cost of compensating all victims. Analyst forecasts have ranged from around $25bn up to $130bn, if the crisis at the nuclear complex drags on.

Tepco president resigns over Japan nuclear crisis
Telegraph (UK), 20th May.
Fuel rods appear to have largely melted at three of the plant's reactors after a March 11 earthquake triggered a tsunami that knocked out cooling systems...

"I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power, and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people," Mr Shimizu told reporters, bowing in a traditional Japanese apology during a news conference.

Mr Shimizu's resignation was widely anticipated because heads of major Japanese companies are expected to step down to take responsibility for even lesser scandals and problems.

Insurance not withstanding (see BNC comments below) TEPCO shares are now one level above junk bond status as the costs mount.

Moody's cuts Tepco to one notch above junk on compensation plan
Reuters, 16th May.

[end update]

While a prominent Australian based pro nuclear site went in hard and fast (prematurely) extolling the safety of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor and its operators; decrying any popular press report of dangers as alarmist, two months on a clearer picture begins to emerge.

Several themes were proposed about the failure in the face of the massive earthquake that struck the Tohoku region. But one, which increased in height with time, was that no one could have foreseen the danger presented by the Tsunami. This has now been revealed as false. It was foreseen; TEPCO was warned.

Japan govt body detailed tsunami risks before March 11:documents
Reuters, May 15

A government body conducted analyses on the damage tsunamis of various scale would inflict on a nuclear power plant, according to documents made public on Sunday, adding to allegations that Japan and its largest utility failed to heed warnings.

The latest revelation, reported by the Mainichi daily, emerged as the government prepares to help Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) compensate victims of the crisis at the tsunami-crippled nuclear Fukushma Daiichi plant.

The government and Tokyo Electric Power have repeatedly described the combination of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the ensuing 15-meter (46.5 foot) tsunami on March 11 as beyond expectations.

The institution affiliated with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, however, analyzed the dangers of tsunamis ranging from 3 meters to 23 meters in a report originally published in December.

"Our analysis shows that a tsunami of a certain height (some 7 meters in the absence of a seawall and some 15 meters if one were present) or higher would have almost a 100 percent chance of damaging the reactor core...," the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization said in the report.

[presumably this means if the reactor were at or near sea level - as the Fukushima plant is ~10 meters above it]

"We presume a tsunami of at least 7 meters would destroy the functions of a seawater pump and that of at least 15 meters would destroy outside equipment such as an electrical transformer."

Through out the early phase of the disaster BNC continued to claim that no damage had occurred to the containment. Many fancy annotated pictures (the site loves them) with big arrows were posted. In fact investigators are now conducting an inquiry reassessing the time-line of events and now believe that the reactor containment may have been damaged by the earthquake. This is not totally surprising given the size of the earthquake.It also explains the later leaks.

Tokyo Electric: reviewing records of how nuclear crisis unfolded
Reuters, Mon May 16

Japanese officials have said until now that the apparent meltdown in three of the reactors at Fukushima was caused by the loss of power to cooling systems when the tsunami knocked out backup diesel generators.

A finding that the reactors were damaged by the quake itself could complicate the growing debate on the future of nuclear power in Japan at a time when Tokyo is under pressure from local officials to tighten safety standards.

"We want to review the data from the 40 to 50 minutes between the time of the earthquake and when the tsunami struck,"

Kyodo news agency quoted an unnamed source at the utility on Sunday as saying that the No. 1 reactor might have suffered structural damage in the earthquake that caused a release of radiation separate from the tsunami.

The utility said on Sunday that a review of data from March 11 suggested that the fuel rods in the No. 1 reactor were completely exposed to the air and rapidly heating five hours after the quake.

By the next morning - just 16 hours later - the uranium fuel rods in the first reactor had melted down and dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel, the cylindrical steel container that holds the fuel at the core.

The No. 2 and No. 3 reactors are expected to have gone through a similar process and like No. 1 are leaking most of the water being pumped in a bid to keep their cores cool.

In parliament on Monday, government officials were grilled by an opposition lawmaker over their immediate response to the nuclear crisis.

"We can certainly say that if the venting took place a little earlier, we could have prevented the situation from worsening," Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame told parliament.

Both Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Trade Minister Banri Kaieda said that they had instructed Tokyo Electric to go ahead with the venting but that the company had taken time to act.

"We had instructed them to go ahead with the vent and I think Tokyo Electric was trying to do this. Even though we asked them repeatedly to vent, it did not happen and so we decided to issue an order. All of us there, including the prime minister and myself had said it should be done as soon as possible,"

Personally¹, this does not completely surprise me. Most Japanese do not live up to the myth of the Samurai. Japan is very hierarchical.

Much is made of the "defense in depth" strategy adopted by nuclear power plants. But defense in depth surely means more than just repeating the same (potentially flawed) subsystem over and over. Two examples. Almost all of the diesel generators were located in the basement. Mainichi Daily termed this a "lack of diversity".

Nuclear power plant disaster highlights importance of diverse safety measures
Mainichi Daily, May 16

After the crisis emerged at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, I heard experts lamenting that Japan had multiple safety measures in place but lacked an important factor: diversity.

Take, for example, the power generators at the plant. Altogether there were 13 diesel-powered generators designed to start up in the event of a power cut. Even if some failed, there would be spares. But almost all of these generators were set up in the same way, below ground level...

If the plant had adopted a diverse safety plan and placed some of the generators on higher ground, the situation may have been different. Of course it may not have been the perfect solution, but it seems like the obvious thing to do.

Researchers have in the past warned of the possibility of multiple facilities being crippled by a single cause -- such dangers were pointed out in a lawsuit aiming to halt operations at the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant. But why didn't officials count this as a real risk at Fukushima?

Why indeed? Because credentialed promoters of nuclear power are all convinced of the safety of the measures they propose and tend to argue that dissenting views are alarmist. Up until the explosion, the engineers at Chernobyl apparently held the same belief.

One possible underlying cause is that the group promoting nuclear power plants in Japan lacks diversity itself, and is exclusive.

Sound familiar?

In Japan, nuclear power plants have been promoted by a group comprising the government, electric power companies, manufacturers and universities. It is a body propped up by the official stance that Japan's nuclear power plants will not succumb to a major disaster. In the past, when the minority warned of the dangers, this body branded them "anti-nuclear" and dismissed their opinions as "extreme arguments."

But the safety of nuclear power plants is a scientific issue dealing with risks, not a matter of ideology. Scientifically, "absolute safety" is not possible.

Just substitute "Australia", "University of Melbourne" (or at least one of its most prominent graduates, Z. Switkowksi) and "Mining Industry" - which sometimes appears to be the defacto government anyway ;-)

Back to the matter of the water levels. TEPCO has only now, two months after the event, managed to obtain an accurate measurement of the actual water depth in the reactor cores - its not near the top.

I am not an engineer, but losing and not having an operable back up, of perhaps one of THE most important control system sensors for the duration of the disaster does not sound like adequate defense in depth.

More importantly, if true, this means that the technicians running the plant were flying partially blind. A point that was made by previously at The Union of Concerned Scientists after examining pictures of the control room after the event and here.

What does this say about all TEPCOs reassurances of a stable water supply?

Probably LUCK as much as design prevented a worse fate.




Compare these revelations to some of the early cocky statements from BNC.

cold shutdown within a few days

Now anticipated by the end of year.

The nuclear reactor containments were undamaged by the tsunami or earthquake

Obviously wrong.

There will be no breach of containment and no release of radioactivity beyond, at the very most, some venting of mildly radioactive steam to relieve pressure.

3. The only reactor that has a small probability of being ‘finished’ is FD unit 1. And I doubt that, but it may be offline for a year or more.

4 Yes, they are insured. No, the costs won’t be $50 billion, more like <<$1 billion depending on what needs to be repaired, and this will all be on-site work. I am happy to be quoted forever after on the above if I am wrong… but I won’t be. Barry Brooke, 12th March.

All wrong.
The emphasis since has been on radiation deaths, which, if they occur will not be for some time, and difficult to prove.



“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” Albert Einstein.


1. I lived there for a while.

Reviewing the Reviewers

A long while is shorter than it seems.

I have been kindly provided (thank you CV) with copies of the reviews mentioned in The least Fortunate Island, one of which was cited by George Monbiot in his “I’m shocked, shocked, I tells ‘e” article published globally to the delight and disdain of many depending on prior convictions.

This post provides a summary of two reviews, one used by George Monbiot in his public tiff. George bends it a bit.

My take on this issue. I think about it this way:

Just as no individual cancer can be easily attributed to Chernobyl, no individual weather event can be easily attributed to climate change.

Does this mean we ignore the cumulative effects of an increase in temperature? No. So how about those of radiation?

[edited]
One of the reasons for the adoption of the (conservative) Linear No Threshold model is that the consequences of making a Type II statistical error (i.e. failing to detect an effect when there is one) are so serious (i.e. cancer).

Pro Nuclear advocates of a self proclaimed green persuasion (Nuclear Greens) should remember that taking action against climate change started well before all the evidence was in for the same reason.

This is the precautionary principle.

Read the rest if you need some sleep material…

The least Fortunate Island

My final wrap up of the Fukushima (fortunate island) Nuclear Power Plant, starting with the media driven “he said, she said” spat between two high profile campaigners.

The Guardian has published an article by Helen Caldicott as a rebuttal to George Monbiots earlier article. This stoush could go on for a while.

Central to Monbiots argument was this quote:

"In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else."

Which is very similar to the text available at the website of the Annals of the New York Academy of Science posted 4/28/2010:

The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences issue “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”, therefore, does not present new, unpublished work, nor is it a work commissioned by the New York Academy of Sciences. The expressed views of the authors, or by advocacy groups or individuals with specific opinions about the Annals Chernobyl volume, are their own. Although the New York Academy of Sciences believes it has a responsibility to provide open forums for discussion of scientific questions, the Academy has no intent to influence legislation by providing such forums. The Academy is committed to publishing content deemed scientifically valid by the general scientific community, from whom the Academy carefully monitors feedback.

What the top quote says is that it is only the TRANSLATED volume that has not been peer reviewed. This quote could be misread

Asia, North-South: Nuclear, Climate, Energy and Efficiency

It's been a while since the last round up of “local” news. Below is a long link fest of articles about Asian views on the events in Japan, nuclear power, climate change, energy and efficiency. I've added a little link table of contents at the top to help speed navigation.

Korea – nuclear power

ASEAN – region rethinks nuclear

Myth of Japanese safety shattered

Vietnam – energy efficiency, climate change and efficient lights

Thailand – Japan, nuclear, climate

Singapore – Japan, nuclear, regional consequences

Malaysia – nuclear safety: are developing nations ready?

India – Nuclear Safety in light of Fukushima, protests over large nuclear facility at Jaitapur. Prominent scientists call for moratorium.

END – Next Post: Garnauts Gambit

Nuclear Shake Ups

A few quick articles before I go off and do something more productive.

[Updated]
Some newer articles added at end and then we need a change of topic.

Germany Plans Reunification-Style Speed to Build Grids for Cleaner Energy

Bloomberg, March 21

Germany may accelerate power-line projects to transmit more renewable energy to consumers after Japan’s nuclear disaster rattled voters in Europe’s biggest electricity market.

The Economy Ministry is preparing to use fast-track powers last exercised in 1990 when a newly united Germany had to build transportation infrastructure as fast as possible to replace crumbling roads in the east and improve connections in the country, according to a ministry document obtained by Bloomberg News. Control over power grids would be taken by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government from states and local councils.

“The scale of the challenge is comparable with infrastructure needs after reunification,” according to the document, an outline for a draft to be presented to the cabinet in two days. Power storage sites will be exempted from paying grid fees for 20 years rather than the current 10.

Merkel last year agreed to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear reactors in return for receiving 15 billion euros from their owners to help build the grids. The plan also commits the four main utilities to pay a nuclear tax from this year through 2016 of 2.3 billion euros annually.

Another 5 billion euros was earmarked for offshore wind parks. The steps cumulatively aim to speed Germany’s target of generating 80 percent of energy from renewable means by 2050.

The US and Australia have similar geo-political attributes.

The Political Demise of Nuclear Power in the U.S

Huffington Post, March 21

While there may be good reasons for nuclear power to be used as a bridge fuel to a renewable energy future, I am confident that nuclear power is politically dead in the United States. This makes the research and development of alternative energy and carbon capture and storage that much more important and urgent. It also means that environmentalists who have either reluctantly or enthusiastically embraced nuclear power as a form of carbon free energy should move on to other solutions. The catastrophe in Japan will not soon be forgotten, and it will shape the politics of nuclear power plant siting for decades.

This analysis is based on a few fundamental facts of American political structure. Despite the strength of our national government, this remains a federal system of divided power. States retain sovereignty, and we have a deeply rooted tradition of local control of land use. Our national elected leaders pay a great deal of attention to geography and to opinion leaders at the community level.

The "Not-in-my Backyard" (NIMBY) syndrome is not a passing fad in American politics; it is a central element of land use politics in communities throughout this country. While it is true that the definition of a noxious facility varies from place to place, no one doubts the ability of an American locality to veto a land use they do not like.

The images of earthquake and tsunami damage will be combined with the nuclear accident and form a single image in the public's mindset about nuclear power.

And in a country that has trouble maintaining roads (at least where I am) never mind the drainage system…

Courting Chernobyl in Ring of Fire Is Lunacy: William Pesek

Bloomberg, 20 March

Here a word for Indonesia as it mulls a nuclear future: Don’t!