Sunday Paranoia, Resolved

It was too much, I decided. After all, if everybody on the west coast of North America will have to be evacuated, and they’re not worrying, why should I? Shouldn’t they be writing intemperate, fiery screeds to the Japanese government, demanding that an international team of scientists / experts be given complete control of stabilizing the failed—and melted-down—reactors at Fukushima?

Warning to any readers out there—Fukushima, the nuclear power plant that sustained major damage from the tsunami following the earthquake in April of 2011, seems to evoke two reactions, the first being indifference. And the second? Complete, rampaging paranoia, as you can see in the clip below.

OK, I admit it—I fall into the second camp, since no, I don’t trust the Japanese government in the least to come out and say to the world, “Ooops, sorry, but the situation is completely out of control and we have absolutely no clue about what to do, and so everybody on the West Coast? You’re fucked.”

Well, I justify this by the fact that at least two respected scientists feel the same way: Dr. Helen Caldicott, who revived Physicians for Social Responsibility; and David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, activist, and broadcaster. 

And what do they say?

That we are not just on the edge of the precipice but hanging over the void, with gale winds behind us.

Anything, you see, can happen. The cleanup will take decades to complete—they just covered Chernobyl a month or two ago, and the meltdown occurred in 1986. So Suzuki points out that if there is an earthquake of 7.0 or more, reactor four will collapse, and the amount of radiation released? Here’s one writer:

According to the Nuclear Regulation Authority, there are 1,533 spent and unused fuel rod bundles in the cooling pool that contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

Right—an earthquake is just one unfortunate event. There’s also the fact that the ground around the reactor is saturated, and the building is unstable, and may collapse even without an earthquake.

Then there’s the possibility that the fuel rods, which TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and raise your hands anyone out there who believes those guys know what they’re doing….) is trying to remove, will get dropped, will be jammed into position, will lose their cooling system, will jostle one another and all of that? 14,000 Hiroshimas!

Or maybe a little less, because we also know radioactive water from the plant is spewing into the ocean, so maybe it’s only 13, 999 Hiroshimas! Whew, what a relief.

Oh, and who’s doing all this work? Well, from the same source cited above:

The shortage of qualified workers has been an opportunity for the yakuza. Gangsters have stepped in to supply labor to subcontract to TEPCO's contractors. The yakuza's labor pool is the most desperate men in Japan. They are poorly trained, suffer from wage theft, and are over-worked and demoralized. TEPCO is enabling the yakuza because management is unwilling to cut profits to pay competitive wages.

Guys?

‘It’s too much,’ I think, ‘ so I’ll do what I always do, when I can’t cope anymore and it’s too early to start drinking.’ So I went over to bother Lady, which is permissible since she has been painting houses from the days dinosaurs roamed the earth, and can easily chat and paint.

So we recreate what Harry, my friend who grew up half a century ago in Old San Juan, told me was a typical Sunday afternoon.

“People would sit for hours at a time in each other’s houses, talking, chatting, sometimes just sitting. You would pass by, and they’d just be sitting there in silence. And time seemed to stretch out—the afternoons were infinities. No worries, no anxieties, no rushing around or doing errands. Just sitting with family and old friends….”

Well, yesterday it was a new friend, since Mary Anne, a neighbor of Lady’s and a woman of a certain age, strolled in, bearing frozen yogurt. We smile at each other.

“How can two really important people in my life not know each other,” asks Lady; to a gringo, this is plausible. To a Puerto Rican? Completely crazy.

So now we shake hands, and discover: Mary Anne is a music lover, a painter, a professor.

“Marc is a cellist, and a writer. He plays Bach every day at five in the Poet’s Passage, and gives whatever money people throw into the case to charity.”

“You gotta do it,” I tell Mary Anne, “all cellists have to play an hour of Bach every day.”

“Yeah?” says Lady. You can tell she’s not buying in….

“Absolutely,” I tell her. “It’s like the Spaniards: they have to read a chapter of Don Quixote every day.”

Now she’s really not buying in….

“Well, run over to Spain when you go off to France in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see: all the Spaniards are sitting around reading Don Quixote.

I get a look….

“Anyway, if you don’t play your hour of Bach every day, they don’t let you call yourself a cellist….”

“Yeah?”

“Yup, they take away your license…”

“You got a license?”

“Of course I have a license! Good Lord, Lady, do you know what damage could be done, having a lot of unlicensed cellists buzzing around out there! I’m a board certified cellist, licensed by the American Society of Cellists!”

Nobody believes me, of course, but is that the point? I am waving my mouth as ladies waved their decorative fans a century or so ago: not to much effect but prettily. So a beautiful man strolls in with his four-month old baby—named Abel, and no, I didn’t ask and neither should you—and I have to go talk to him, because who doesn’t like new fathers, especially beautiful ones? And then Naïa strolls in, with her hair looking like one half of a giant dandelion, very much gone to seed.

So Lady goes to deal with that, and I kiss everyone except the one I really, really, want to, and then it’s time to go home.

Oh, and by the way? It’s true about the Spaniards reading a chapter of Don Quixote and how do I know…?

Harry told me!

Hold Your Breath—for about a Year

Great news, Dear Readers! I’m giving you total permission to start chain smoking! Oh, and you can drink all you want, starting with a pitcher of martinis before breakfast. Red meat, all you can eat! Put a lot of salt on, and then have an extra piece of cheesecake. Oh, you can also skip going to the gym, bothering to drop in at the office, and contributing to that 401K plan….

Why the good life, all of a sudden?

Well, consider the state of affairs at Fukushima reactor four. The reactor, you remember, was down for maintenance when the earthquake / tsunami struck, which meant that the radioactive rods were not in the core of the reactor, but in a cooling pool.

Einstein said it best: nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water. So here’s my physics-for-poets of how this process works.

Small pellets of radioactive fuel are placed in rods, which are encased in zirconium alloy. Important—that zirconium alloy is highly explosive, and can ignite on contact with air. Anyway, during the reaction process, enormous heat is generated, which goes to heat the water, which produces steam, which drives turbines, which in turn produce electricity. The problem?

Well, the fuel in the rods is only 95% consumed, so those rods—logically called “spent rods”—need to be cooled. For how long? Five years, minimum. So the spent rods are put in cooling pools, which circulate cool water constantly.

Now, where did the rocket scientists decide to put the cooling pools for the Fukushima plants? Five or six storeys up, on the roofs! Oh, and there’s no containment up there, as there is in the reactor. So if something blows the roof off, the cooling pool is exposed.

You know what happened—initially, the plants were cooling down after the earthquake. The tsunami hit, and guess where the generators were? Yup, right there in the basement.

Guys?

But before you start raising you eyes in disgust at the Japanese, I should point out that we have 23 of the buggers in the US. Oh, and they were designed by General Electric.

Nor is that all—the generators flooded, the power was off, but it wasn’t “just” spent rods up there, because the operators of the plant had emptied the core, and had put 202 unspent, reactor-ready rods up in the cooling pond on the top floor. And they are side by side with the 1331 spent rods. (Note—in fact, the sharp-eyed Miss Taí pointed out that it’s really 202 unspent and 1331 spent rod assemblies. Why? Because up to 80 rods are packaged together in one unit. So the actual number of rods is something over 120,000….)

Now then, here’s what the building looks like:

Two things—minimally—happened: the earthquake damaged the structure, and the there was an explosion / fire at the plant. Think it can’t get worse? Think again, because the operators of the plant made the decisions to pour seawater into the cooling tanks. And that seawater is corrosive.

Fasten your seat belts—we’ve barely begun….

Because the water from the cooling pool, you see, is leaking, and that leaking is making the ground very soggy. So what do we have? A sinking building with 1500-plus spent and unspent rod assembies of radioactive fuel in a leaky pool 100 feet in the air in a building that might collapse.

Oh, did I mention that the pool may have had debris from the explosion, and that that debris may have damaged the integrity of the pool?

And I probably forgot as well to tell you that there are 80 damaged fuel rods up there? Here’s what one source had to say:

In an 11-page information sheet released in August, TEPCO said one of the assemblies was even damaged as long ago as 1982, when it was bent out of shape during a transfer. … The damaged racks were first reported by a Fukushima area newspaper on Wednesday, as TEPCO is preparing to decommission the plant and remove the spent fuel assemblies from Reactor No. 4. 

I should note, by the way, that the “August” referred to is August of 2013, two years after the disaster took place.

Or rather, started. Because let me tell you—it’s by no means over yet. Yes, they have installed a crane, and work started in November of last year to remove the fuel rods from the pool. As of 30 March of this year, 983 rods were still in the cooling pool—the process is expected to last all year.

Now then—time for today’s vocabulary enrichment—“criticality.” And here, I bring you one source on the issue.

Arnie Gunderson, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, told Reuters that “they are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” especially given their close proximity to each other, which risks breakage and the release of radiation.

Gundersen told Reuters of an incredibly dangerous “criticality” that would result if a chain reaction takes place at any point, if the rods break or even so much as collide with each other in the wrong way. The resulting radiation is too great for the cooling pool to absorb – it simply has not been designed to do so.

“The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no control rods to control it,”Gundsersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”

Simply put, for the next year, we are all going to have to hope that nothing, absolutely NOTHING happens out of the ordinary—not one fuel rod dropped, not one rod corroded significantly, not one rod stuck in the pool, not one rod bumping into each other.

Oh, and keep your fingers crossed, Readers, that there isn’t another earthquake of 7 or above on the Richter scale since that…?

I know you’re asking—so what happens if one rod breaks, releasing radiation? Well, take a look at this headline:

Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario. Radiation Fuel Rods Matches Fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima Bombs

Potentially, there could be a huge cloud of radiation drifting over the Pacific Ocean, and reaching the West Coast in a week.

Now you see why I was up at four in the morning?