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?

The Silence Coming Out of Japan

For reasons completely obscure, I got it into my head to watch the documentary below about the meltdown at Fukushima, the Japanese nuclear energy plant which was damaged by the earthquake of March 11, 2011. The damage was not enough to prevent a cooling down of the reactors, and the plant was shutting down. Then the tsunami hit.

Anybody who has lived in hurricane alley knows—it’s not the wind, it’s the water. And unbelievably, the backup generators were located in the basement of the buildings. Oh, and while there was a sea wall in place to protect against tsunamis, it wasn’t high enough, since nobody imagined….

You remember what happened—or if you don’t, you can see it in the video below. It was, as my mother would deem it, a shambles. And then, the day after the tsunami, some 300,000 people were evacuated; the area around the nuclear plants to this day remains evacuated, and it will likely be years, or perhaps decades, before anybody can live there again.

There was, at the time, real concern about whether the world—not to mention the Japanese themselves—were getting the real information about what was happening in the plants. Part of that is that the plants had no electricity: workers were using car batteries to take vital measurements, such as radiation levels and pressure levels.

Ah, guys? Car batteries? This, as my brother would say, does not inspire confidence.

The plants were—and still are—being run by a company called Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which understandably was scrambling to put the best face on the matter. They were reluctant to say that the situation was essentially out of hand, and getting worse by the minute.

Into this picture sails—quite literally—the USS Ronald Reagan, who were first responders and who spent four days in the area. Here’s one account of what happened….

Meanwhile sailors like Lindsay Cooper have contrasted their initial and subsequent feelings upon seeing and tasting metallic “radioactive snow” caused by freezing Pacific air that mixed with radioactive debris.

“We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!” Cooper said. “My thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds in one month and then gain it back the next. My menstrual cycle lasts for six months at a time, and I cannot get pregnant.

“It’s ruined me.”

In fact, the lawyer representing the sailors reports that of the 71, half of them are suffering from cancer.

The lawyer, you ask? Why do the sailors have a lawyer?

Do I really have to answer that?

Well, the sailors put in, in some cases, 18-hour shifts, and then left after four days. Then what happened? Japan refused them entry into the harbor. Oh, so did South Korea. And also, unbelievably, Guam. So the USS Ronald Reagan drifted around at sea for two and a half months.

Here’s the same source’s description of the ship:

Senior Chief Michael Sebourn, a radiation-decontamination officer assigned to test the aircraft carrier, said that radiation levels measured 300 times higher than what was considered safe at one point.

There’s always been controversy about TEPCO, which had been dumping and denying radioactive water it the Pacific for months; they later admitted it.

Which they may no longer have to do. Why? Because Japan has passed—apparently, the Internet decided to drift off somewhere…—a state secrets act, and what happens if a journalist or a leaker like Snowden blows the whistle? Up to five years in the can. Here’s Reuters on the subject:

Media watchdogs fear the law would seriously hobble journalists' ability to investigate official misdeeds and blunders, including the collusion between regulators and utilities that led to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

A probe by an independent parliamentary panel found that collusion between regulators and the nuclear power industry was a key factor in the failure to prevent the meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co's (Tepco) tsunami-hit Fukushima plant in March 2011, and the government and the utility remain the focus of criticism for their handling of the on-going crisis.

Tepco has often been accused of concealing information about the crisis and many details have first emerged in the press. In July, Tepco finally admitted to massive leaks of radiation-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean after months of media reports and denials by the utility.

Oh, and who gets to determine the secrets? Top departmental officials of the government.

The documentary below features one authority who says that everything is fine—the fish is safe to eat and the ocean is safe for swimming even in Japan. So not to worry, readers in California who might want to go to the beach.

Me?

I’d stick to the pool….