Here's a story that Reuters carried earlier today. It demonstrates clearly that accidents can't be controlled. In the case of Fukushima I, the suggestion is to bury the problem. All the snazy engineering solutions (which never were, apparently), failed. Plan B is to just do another cover up. But something interesting happened.

This is a current Google search for this text, in quotation marks. "TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese engineers conceded on Friday that burying a crippled nuclear plant in sand and concrete may be a last resort to prevent a catastrophic radiation release, the method used to seal huge leakages from Chernobyl in 1986." This is the Google result that I received at around 12:30am ET:

I found what I was looking for.  Is that ever a perfect description of epic failure. 

But when I clicked each of the links and the "Cached" link on  #3, that story had disappeared.  Somebody has it and Google, bless their hearts, still shows the search results.  But the failure was too hot too handle and Reuters pulled the story.

Link 1      Link 2       Link 3   Cached Link 2      Cached Link 3

Here's the lede at those links:

March 18 (Reuters) - Exhausted engineers attached a power cable to the outside of Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant on Saturday in a race to prevent deadly radiation from an accident now rated at least as bad as America's Three Mile Island incident in 1979.

It looks like Reuters got ahead of the timeline.  They presented the denoument out of order.

If there's nothing to hide, tell the truth. If there's something to hid, the nuclear industry must be forced to tell the truth.

I'm not a fan of the political class in any of the industrialized nations. They're like a wrecking crew. However, these are top nuclear officials making categorical statements that were cleared before they were made, you can be sure. They were not acting on their own. I didn't mention it, but the Emperor of Japan's statement was a remarkable one, as well. It contradicted the "we'll get it under control" party line from Tokyo Electric. They were given facts and prepared statements in behalf of the government. While they may not be engineers, they are certainly capable of presenting facts gained by those qualified to make the assessments.

This blog is so far off the mark, they aren't even in the same firing range. For those wanting to know, the plants stood up to the earthquake just fine. It didn't even phase the safety systems in place at the power plant. The reactors were automatically shut down by the earthquake just as they should. Then the emergency diesel generators started up and powered the emergency cooling systems. It was the tsunami that really did the damage, taking out the generators.

For those that don't know how the nuclear process works, fissions happens as a result of a uranium or plutonium particle absorbing a neutron and then splitting into two or three other particles called fission products along with several other neutrons. These neutrons go on to induce fission in other atoms thus creating a chain reaction. When the safety rods are inserted, they absorb all the free neutrons thus stopping the reaction. The fission products are extremely high energy which is where the majority of the heat comes from in the plant. This heat is used to make water boil and turn into high pressure steam and then turns a turbine.

However, these fission products are also unstable and undergo a process called beta minus or beta plus decay. This also releases heat. This is called decay heat and continues to be produced after shutdown. This is also the same process that releases radiation in the air if these fission products reach the atmosphere. And this is why cooling is needed in spent fuel rods and shut down reactors.

When the diesel generators were knocked out, the battery back ups kicked in. These batteries are designed to last 8 hours to provide cooling water flow to the plant. And they did. Once the batteries were dead, there was no way to add cool water to plant and it began to heat the water that was in there. As the water heated, it expanded thus raising pressure in the plant. Now, keep in mind, the 8 hours of battery life is long enough to let enough fission products decay to stability to the point where the reactor is producing about 1,000,000,000th the amount of heat output as when it was running. But once all circulation was lost, the water in the core continued to heat and expand and build pressure. Ultimately, to ensure the containment vessel does not rupture, they had to vent steam from the vessel. This steam is filtered as it exits to minimize the release of fission products to the environment.

The containment vessel is housed inside an air tight building called the primary containment building. This building is inside another building called the secondary containment building. It is also air tight. These are to provide extra boundaries of protection to the environment. The secondary containment building is actually inside a third building used only to protect against the weather. This one, unlike the other two isn't designed to keep stuff in, its designed to keep the weather out. This is actually where the vented steam goes as it is released.

Once the reactor reached about 1200C, the fuel pellet outer protective shell starts to break down by a chemical process. This process releases large amounts of hydrogen. This hydrogen is what built up in the weather shed and ultimate caused the explosions in several reactors. There was minimal release of contaminant to environment. And the secondary building was not damaged.

The radiation coming from inside the plants were caused by the build up of fission products released through the steam and caught in the filters. Each time they had to vent, more fission products where built up in the filters. As more fission products build up in the filters, the radiation levels in the plant will continue to climb. This is what is actually driving any workers radiation levels up, not the spent fuel rods or the reactor itself. They need to restore power to the plant so they can run the water pumps and introduce colder water to the plant and maintain the temperature of the core at a safe level, no longer needing to vent steam.

The spent fuel rods are stored up high for a reason. When they sit long enough, the fission products decay to a stable condition. When they have reached a low enough thermal output, they can be transported to a permanent storage location. The are up high near the roof because they will be removed by crane when the plant is shutdown and cooled down. The hatches in the building rooves above it can be opened once pressure in the plant is low enough that a containment breech is improbable. If they were stored lower in the plant, this would greatly complicate the removal process and increase the chance of damaging the plant while trying to remove spent fuel.

There is extremely little chance of a meltdown in the plant at this point. Even if the plant was vacated for a week, it would not be enough time for temperatures to reach the 2600C+ required to begin a meltdown process.

There is an extremely large amount of miss information about this situation floating around the news media. Even the IAEA is putting out misinformation received from bad sources. Don't believe everything you hear and read. Instead, investigate the truth and ask someone who knows.

And for those that don't know whether this is true or not, I am a trained nuclear reactor operator and sat behind the panel of a reactor for 6 years. I do have some basis for my statements. This blog is full of fallacies, find better information to base your opinion of nuclear power upon. Not the rhetoric of someone who is antinuclear simply because he doesn't understand it.

Oh no! The amount of people defaulting is falling?! Looks like banks/creditors will be collecting less overdraft fees as more and more people are working toward credit repair and paying off their debts entirely! The sad thing is, you're going to start seeing more and more other fees popping up to replace their lost revenue! You can quote me on that! Chase is already implementing checking account fees, which is why I recently switched banks! What a difference three years can make in a bank... WaMu was such an awesome bank and I never had ANY problems with them, but as soon as Chase takes over, they start lying, stealing and cheating their way into huge profits. Banks, by nature, are criminal.

Oh, and if you want some facts - here's what the actual radiation monitoring around Fukushima looks like:

http://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/other/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfil...

Units are in microsieverts - the numbers are extremely low; background radiation is 1.6 microsieverts/hour.

Tokyo radiation monitoring:

http://www.denphone.com/denphone-tokyo-office-geiger-counter

Indeed, the numbers from both of these links contradict the alarmist crap from both Oettinger and Jaczko.

A concern troll comment like yours. You have no facts, no information and ignoring the half life of the radioactive material. Of course the engineers did their job and of course it was corrupted by those out for profit....hello, must be missing 4,000 years of human history here.

Gee, 100,000 people must flee their homes and move to an alien nation and you think that's just great to have a forced migration of the Japanese people.

I guess the phrase there for the Grace of God Go I is meaningless to you.

Bloomberg has a piece on Japan's Nuclear Industry faking reports, not reporting accidents.

The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.

The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.

With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors -- more than any other country except the U.S. and France -- to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.

Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.

Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”

And they wonder why no one believes them anymore.

Quote: "As for hydro and geothermal - there simply aren't that many sites available. Theoretically, if every single large site remaining were covered, it might be possible to generate 5% to 10% of the existing electricity demand"

Hydro can be greatly added to if we build very large scale new infrastructure like the old plans from 1960s like North American Water and Power Alliance. You can add 45 gigawatts with better turbines at existing plants alone and with NAWAPA you can a net 145 gigawatts. Other new projects should get us to 250 gigawatts.

However, just remember that so far hydroelectric has killed more people than the Nuclear plants in Japan when the dams broke and washed away more than 1800 homes.

NAWAPA's extended water infrastructure would make activated Geothermal economical adding almost a Terrawatt of Generation capacity. Wind and Solar won't do much work but Hydro and Geothermal might be able to get renewables up to 20% electrical.

Now that fission is off the table for next 40 years in America the hopes for emissions reduction are all but dead and fossil gas is going through the roof. Hello Gasland, thanks Greenies.

The problem is Greenies hate large scale hydro almost as much as they hate nuclear so just as there will never be a new fission plant build in the United State we will never built another hydroelectric dam in the United States no matter how clean the energy.

The only hope now is guys like Eric Lerner at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, folks at EMC2, and Glen Wurden at General Fusion succeed with their long shot alternative fusion projects. Too bad they are literally working for shoe string budgets versus the ITER massive uneconomical wastes of time that are the so-called mainstream approaches.

The DOE only funds fusion projects which are inherently uneconomical and won't threaten the fossils.

The DOE is totally captured by the Fossils so this musical video about sums up the situation on energy, the environment, and politics and the economy.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Rgh4kHPwg

The well-funded, by the Feds, nuclear establishment is on the offensive, continuing to push a foolish, and bankrupt technology. The heart of the problem is that carbon-carbon bonds are rather weak, and humans are made with these linkages. The sun blasts out considerable radiation. However the earth's fortunate magnetic field deflects almost of these, and surface living creatures escape. With out those "shields" up, carbon polymers, like us, could not exist. Life might persist in the oceans, or course. So, there are two environments in this universe. One has damaging radiation, and one does not. It is very obvious that bring damaging radiation into ours, which does not have that, is a crime, or it should be.

Nuclear energy is just a heat source, as the Japanese experience demonstrates. That heat needs to be made into electricity, and that involves pressure-volume machinery. The conversion of heat to electricity is not efficient. Modern nuclear reactors are about 33% efficiency. So, a 1,000 MW generating station takes 3,000 MW of heat. Now, although not obvious to many, global warming is the result of too much heat. (That is the "warming" part, if you don't get this.) So, why would anybody stick 2,000 MW of wasted heat into the environment. (Sticking it in the ocean, as the Japanese reactors do, dumping that into the environment.) Wind machines on the contrary actually cool the environment. Not thought about much, but wind energy is just thermal energy, and the air on the back end of a wind mill is cooler than the air blowing into the front—that energy needs to come from some place. (The velocity of molecules, that thing we call 'Wind speed", is just an indication of temperature.) Photovoltaic systems do much the same trick. Part of the thermal flux from the sun gets made into electrons for us.

During the last few years, most of the new generating capacity in the US has been new windpower. You can do the numbers easily. If wind power grows at a 20% annual rate, in ten years the majority of electricity in the US will be wind. Get your compound interest tables out, and you can easily get there. However, there are many electricity generating stations that are ancient and need to be retired. In the mean time, the new Apple mini, a credible computer by any measure, consumes less than 10 W, and modern LED lighting will take about 25% of what compact fluorescent lights take. It will be easy, if we adapt the new technology, to cut electricity demand by 50%. Why would this thought to be a bad idea? Even conservatives should be able to think about using less money for energy, and that would then allow them to do other things with their money.

The last theme we need to consider is the contributions that US technology made to this Japanese disaster. We understand that the GE PWR design was "cheaper" and did not need the expensive concrete containment vessel. We also understand that Japan could have purchased reactors from a bunch of vendors including France and Russia. So, the US reactors came to Japan hyped and subsidized by our government. There are some people who are guilty in this terrible accident, like those who sited the reactor on the ocean. However, we must remember there are many more who are responsible, folks who observed and did nothing, folks who are getting paid to spout words to deceive and lie. It would seem in a moral world that General Electric, just like Tokyo Electric Power Company, would stand up and say, "We apologize for providing a reactor with an unsafe design, and one which allowed spent fuel to be stored in the same building as the main reactor. We apologize for not telling the Japanese that the site was not safe. We promise that we will provide economic assistance for the damage that our bad engineering and bad management caused." Some how, I doubt this will happen. Rather, the rest of the world will just watch the US fall into being of no consequence. Sad.