After two months it’s amazing how much this has dropped off the radar. If news isn’t fresh it disappears.
My first impression within days was there was far worse things going on then they were saying.
Now it comes out that now that they have gone inside reactor #1 for the first time since the explosion that reactor #1 melted within hours. And they knew it. Not 5% like they initially said, not 70% like the U.S. said later, but virtually all of it. It appears that reactors #2 and #3 probably are in the same condition.
No one has been in reactor #2 since March 14.
The key was the huge amount of water they have been pumping in. Water has to go somewhere. There hasn’t been enough steam to account for the water, so it must be leaking out the bottom. There isn’t enough space to store all that water. The tsunami flooded all of the buildings. Where did that water go?
So helpless were the plant's engineers that, as dusk fell after Japan's devastating March 11 quake and tsunami, they were forced to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes. They pulled batteries from cars not washed away by the tsunami in a desperate effort to revive reactor gauges that weren't working properly. The meltdown started almost immediately—and workers didn’t even realize it.
Workers thought the reactor’s backup batteries would buy them eight hours, not realizing those batteries were down.
The effects of the earthquake alone appear to have been catastrophic. The concrete containment vessels may have broken, some of the pipes entering the reactor certainly did. The containment vessel and spent fuel pool may be near collapse in reactor #4.
The extreme delay between the time that gases should have been vented and actual time the valves were opened manually (the operator received a very high dose of radiation.) allowed the pressure inside the vessel to be 50% over the designed maximum pressure.
Tests done in the U.S. on the same reactor type showed that at lower pressure the containment dome may not hold pressure. This may account for the hydrogen gases accumulating in the building. Normal venting takes place out of the very tall stacks in the pictures.
In the numerous pictures linked below I don't see any heavy equipment. I don't see any clean up of the extensive debris outside the building. I don't think ANY work has been done in two months. Tepco realized early on that there was no fixing the situation and has decided to squirt water until . . . no one knows. I think they will eventually have to inject liquid nitrogen to freeze the water so that repair work can start. As long as highly radioactive water continues to leak out no work can be done. They keep saying cold shutdown within months and cleanup in a few years. How can you predict something that you have no idea what the condition is right now? I don't think there will be a clean up. I think they will end up entombing it like Chernobyl.
The only changes to the initial effort to spray and inject sea water with fire engines is the replacement of the fire engines with electric pumps and sea water with fresh water. There was a lot of press mid-March about the lights being on in the control room. You can see the red and blue power cables in the outside shots. That seems to be the only power that has been restored. Later pictures still show blank screens and indicators in the control rooms.
The damage from the explosions was massive. It's interesting that reactor #4 had a huge hydrogen explosion that had to have been from exposed fuel rods in the spent fuel pool. The fuel from the reactor had been removed. That has never been explained, and the next mention was pictures that show water in the pool.
Damage photos
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htmAll of the photos are here. There are 15 pages and a zip file.
http://cryptome.org/#moreIdentify the tsunami barrier in this photo. The breakwater is to separate the cool inlet water from the warm outlet water. This is a conventional breakwater made from concrete forms that look like kids jacks. They are effective at keeping normal wave action from eroding the breakwater. On the left side you see the beach and some rocks. I don't see anything that looks like a purpose built tsunami barrier.
This photo is the wave hitting the Fukushima Daini plant 10 miles up the coast. How did they escape the same fate?
An elevator in the building.
Reactor #3 is in there somewhere. Everything in this photo is extremely radioactive. How do you start fixing it?
70 photos in zipped format
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-70/daiichi-70.zip
