Month: April 2011

From the Stars and Stripes:

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — Frustrated Navy families say they are being advised by military medical officials to send their young children out of Japan, but they aren’t getting the straight answers needed to gauge the risks to their children’s health after March 11’s earthquake and tsunami.

U.S. Naval Hospital Yokosuka is calling parents of children age 5 and under and recommending that they send their children out of the country, several parents told Stars and Stripes. Other parents at Naval Air Facility Atsugi, which has a clinic operated by the hospital, said they were told that children age 2 and under should leave the country.
–

The military announced March 17 that it would assist family members to leave voluntarily, but stopped short of declaring a mandatory evacuation.

Then, on March 22, Japanese officials found radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water at levels deemed unsafe for infants. The military responded by passing out potassium iodide tablets to its personnel.

The tablets flood the thyroid with clean iodine, preventing the body from taking in the radioactive version. The military has warned its personnel not to take the pills unless directed.

That same day, Alex Breuer heard from a friend at Naval Air Facility Atsugi that children under 2 were being advised to leave.

Breuer called the medical clinic at Atsugi and was told by a Navy corpsman that it wasn’t true. But three days later, Breuer’s wife got a call from that same clinic, saying that children under 2 should leave.

Over the weekend I wrote about how TEPCO was looking at parking empty tankers offshore to suck up radioactive water from the festering nuclear site. No such luck.
This week, after trying concrete, shredded newspaper, sawdust, and polymers to plug an invisible, deadly leak,  they decided “Screw it. Just dump the water.”

Caption to this photo:”In this Saturday, April 2, 2011 photo released by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), leaking radioactive contaminated water drain through crack of a maintenance pit, right, into the sea, near the Unit 2 reactor of Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear nuclear power plant in Okumamachi, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan. (Tokyo Electric Power Co.)”

Reuters reports:

Japanese engineers were forced on Monday to release radioactive water into the sea while resorting to desperate measures such as using bath salts to try to find the source of leaks at a crippled nuclear power complex hit by a tsunami on March 11.

Engineers also planned to build two giant “silt curtains” made of polyester fabric in the sea to hinder the spread of more contamination from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.

The plant operator released low-level radioactive seawater that had been used to cool overheated fuel rods after it ran out of storage capacity for more highly contaminated water, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

“We have instructed strict monitoring of the ocean to firmly grasp the impact on the environment,” said Edano.

Radioactive iodine 4,800 times the legal limit was recorded in the sea off the plant last week. The contamination later fell to 11 times, but spiked to 630 times the legal limit on Saturday, said Japan’s Nuclear and Industry Safety Authority.

“We need to stop the spread of (contaminated water) into the ocean as soon as possible. With that strong determination, we are asking Tokyo Electric Power Co to act quickly,” said Edano.

“If the current situation continues for a long time, accumulating more radioactive substances, it will have a huge impact on the ocean.”

Meanwhile, concerns continue to rise about impacts beyond Japan.

Continue reading “Radiation, potentially “Huge impact on the ocean.””

ABC News reports:

Some Japanese plant workers, including former employees who are now miles away from the damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, say they are concerned about the health of their colleagues and the availability of equipment to keep them safe from the leaked radiation.

International nuclear experts believe that melted fuel in reactor No. 1 has caused a “localized criticality,” which is a small, uncontrolled chain reaction that occasionally emits a burst of heat, radiation and a blue flash of light.

It is not a threat to the area at large, officials say, but could be deadly for workers.

One worker from inside the plant spoke anonymously about safety concerns such as not having enough radiation-detection devices available for workers. The devices alert workers of too much exposure.

“Since the number of monitors is limited, only one or two devices are handed to each group,” the worker said. “But sometimes you have to move away from that person and in that case you’ll never know the level of your exposure.”
Continue reading “Debating Nuclear Energy’s Future, and How to Tell if you’ve Awakened in a Sci-Fi Movie”

Not as close to prime time as MIT’s recent breakthrough, the Solar Leaf, but exciting in the medium term, and evidence that the DOE’s ARPA-e program (see video below the fold) is making progress.

From the University of Minnesota:

University of Minnesota researchers are a key step closer to making renewable petroleum fuels using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide, a goal funded by a $2.2 million United States Department of Energy grant.

Graduate student Janice Frias, who earned her doctorate in January, made the critical step by figuring out how to use a protein to transform fatty acids produced by the bacteria into ketones, which can be cracked to make hydrocarbon fuels. The university is filing patents on the process.

Continue reading “Most Important News of the Next Decade?”

They’re not coming. They’re here. The video shows one company’s approach.

ZDNet has it:

Pythagoras Energy has signed deals with manufacturers including Arkema, China Sunergy and Flextronics in order to get the new technology to market as quickly as possible.

Gonen Fink, co-founder and CEO of Phythagoras Sola, says the new material should help construction companies bridge the gap between materials that are energy efficient and aesthetically appealing. The material combines insulating qualities, shading and lighting benefits AND, as implied, solar generation features. So, it both blocks the sun to keep it cool inside and captures sunlight to create solar energy. The video below talks about how the technology works:

Below, see how it works, and what it costs.

Continue reading “Solar Windows”

I’ve been waiting for some news on this. It seems as if reports of criticality (here and here) at the Fukushima site have dropped into a black hole over the last 48 hours.

Dr. Gunderson has a lengthy background in nuclear energy, and is a credible source, until someone with direct knowledge comes along.

Note: depending on your browser, the vimeo player embedded above may give you a menu of segments to watch. The current one is titled
“Newly Released TEPCO data provides evidence of periodic chain reactions at Fukushima Unit 1”

So all you Debbie Downers out there, chill out. We got this.

In other news, attempts to block the leakage of highly radioactive water with cement and sawdust failed. Now they’re going to try plastic and newspapers. Film at 11.
UPDATE: Washington Post Story:

The announcement, coming a day after Tepco found irradiated water leaking into the sea from a crack in a storage pit at the No. 4 reactor, stoked fears about what other surprises lie in wait for emergency workers. Efforts to stem the leaking water, first by pouring concrete into the crack and then a water-absorbent polymer, have been unsuccessful, government officials said.

Asked about the ongoing problems, a spokesman for Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency insisted there has been “a degree of progress.”

–

Deep skepticism has set in among reporters who pressed the government panel Sunday evening, asking why the discovery of the dead workers had not been announced last week and why top elected officials and Tepco executives were not appearing at the briefings.

“I will let the elected officials know of your concerns,” a government spokesman replied, without elaborating.

Swamped by the volumes of now-radioactive water that must be removed from the damaged reactors at Fukushima, Japanese authorities are now considering anchoring tankers nearby to take on the tainted slurry. No word on what to do with the tankers after that…

The Japan Times reports:

The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. have been struggling for three weeks to end the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear crisis but are being stymied by the need to remove massive amounts of highly radioactive water.

The highest priority is to extract the contaminated water in the flooded basements of some of the reactor turbine buildings, whose electric systems must be checked in order to cool fuel rods inside the reactors and spent fuel pools.

Continue reading “What to do with Fukushima Water? Ghost Ships, and the Cat that Came Back to Bite us…”

I love this guy. “Alex”, a French ex-pat, living in northern Tokyo, has been providing man-on-the-street updates from Japan through YouTube.

He’s talking about the plan that’s being floated to spray the contaminated site with some kind of resin that will bind with radio-nuclides.

Given the quality of information we receive from TEPCO, and the placating reassurances of the tuned-out mainstream press, it’s a refreshing jolt of pure populist freakout.  As CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported on Friday, fewer and fewer people are believing anything they hear from the Japanese government, press or corporate sources.

New video update below the fold:

Continue reading “Sealing Reactors in Resin: Solution? Or just Plan 9 from Fukushima?”