Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants

zapperzero

Hm? What distorsion?

EDIT: the camera was focused on unit #4 and panning left to right, then back again.

tsutsuji

Thank you. Thanks to your pictures, I think I could see all of them, except those for unit 4. Have they been wiped out by the tsunami, or have they already been removed for cleanup or repair ?

Their absence is conspicuous on :


Are you sure ? Looking at that picture, it is difficult to say if the blue structure is close or far enough behind.

zapperzero

Yep. Ruthenium, Strontium, Uranium and Plutonium present. That's used fuel, basically. It needs to have melted down for this stuff to be mobilized, I think.

jlduh

Well, on this other picture taken March 12, after the tsunami, you see that in the area close to intake N°4, there were some blue covers at the intake, and i think this tend to make e think that they were doing some repair in this area when the tsunami hit.



But this is a guess, also based on the fact that N°4 was stopped.

For the blue structure, i don't know if it hit or not the pumps at N°5 but fore sure there has been some damage on this structure.

At first, when the accident happened, i heard in the news that they lost first the cold source, then the electrical power. I don't know if all the pumps were still fully functionnal after the tsunami, in addition to loss of electrical power, in fact...

Maxion

Yeah, I kind-of ignored that subject because those white dots are definitely an image artifact that I have never seen before. The color white comes when the bayer-filter registers all three color channels as fully saturated. The only artifact that comes close is hot pixels when shooting with high ISOs and long exposure, but they aren't white, or very rarely are.

jlduh

For experts: how can you interpret that water from N°1 is significantly less contaminated (orders of magnitude lower for most isotopes) than N°2 and N°3, and that Ba-140, La-140 (short half life) and Sr 89 and 90 are much lower in this N°1 water (see page 3 of pdf)?

Is La-140 a daughter isotope in the decay process of other elements?

ModelX

The "funny" pixels are not always white. It looks like impulse noise affecting one or more color components to me. I've seen artifacts like these when the CCD power source had noise or when there was some RF interference. There can be several places where the noise could be introduced: in CCD, in ADC converter or when transfering digital data from imager to the processing system. Sometimes the data transfers are done using YUV data channels, so a single bit off could change the overall luminance or color. It's not at all certain that radiation is causing this.

jarvik

The U, Pu and Ru are below detection limits as the are all reported as < X.

While there certainly is Radioactive Sr present in large amounts (3rd table), most of the Sr in table 2 (by mass) will be stable Sr from sea water.

Sea water will also contain trace amounts of U, though that leads me to my 3rd point, the detection limits in table 2 are two high to be useful from the point of view of detecting fuel failure etc.

Crap load of 134/137Cs and 90Sr to deal with for long-term clean up though. Pity the table didn't give volume estimates of the various "pools" so we could easily convert this to total inventories of the isotopic activities.

Maxion

I never said it was ;) I tried to ignore the subject because my knowledge of how an image is formed on a sensor and it's path to becoming a RAW or JPG is quite limited. I do know that it is not caused by the cameras normal operation under normal operating conditions.

jarvik

I'd like to hear an expert on this too,

My non-expert thinking is the I and Cs isotopes are more volatile and more readily escape the fuel than Sr so the increased Sr in # 2 and 3 likely means much greater damage to fuel and containment for those units.

jpquantin

One can question this "<". For U in page 2 they explicitly stated "ND" (not detected?). Moreover for Zr in page 2, the detection limits would not be the same for each sample analyzed ... (I understand Italic numbers as being recalculated from analysis of diluted solutions).

Is it plausible that JAEA may not be able to detect concentration lower than 1.2 mg per liter for Pu?

tsutsuji

Some details about Daini are provided in this article :
I wonder how enough seawater pumps at Daini unit 3 could remain safe after being flooded by the OP+6m ~ OP+14m wave reported and depicted on dramatic pictures at http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp.../110409e10.pdf, if they are located outdoors. How can we explain the Daini unit 3 miracle ?

The following attachments are from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M23LpgDL8Ho , a video explaining how the Tokai NPP (located further South in Ibaraki prefecture) survived the March 11th tsunami. The video says that the seawater pumps are enclosed in "more than 6 m" high walls, while the tsunami wave was only "more than 5 m" high. Two pumps survived. The third pump didn't survive because its wall was still under construction and not finished.

Tokai NPP's pump protecting wall is also depicted on a diagram at http://www.asahi.com/photonews/galle...0_toukai2.html and on photographs at http://mytown.asahi.com/areanews/iba...104190562.html (according to that article, the seawater pumps are also providing cooling for the emergency diesel engines ; One diesel engine stopped because the seawater pump for that engine was flooded through a hole in the wall. The reason for the existence of the hole is that the wall was under construction ; If the wall had been 70 cm lower, the Tokai NPP might have had the same destiny as Fukushima Daiichi)

Attached Thumbnails

   

jarvik

Oh I thought it was odd that U was given as ND while most others are reported as <X. The analsyis here is evidently a relatively rough chemical analysis as only the major ions of sea water are given values (Na, Ca, Cl etc) as even expected minor ions like Si are only given <X. From my own experience an analyitical lab will give you an actual value OR give you <X where x is the detection limit in question.

I'm not sure I follow you on the Zr, the < X value is the same for all straight samples and reduced by the dilution factor as appropariate for dilution runs.

The inability to detect Pu I think is another reflection of this being a wet chemical method and not a radiometric method which would be far superior at detecting Pu.

In all honesty the detection limits seem piss poor for the question that will obviously be asked from the data (fuel failure?) but more appropriate for asking what % is sea water and water % is fresh water sourced in each sampling pool.

For a comparison I recently have gotten some chemical elemental (30 elements) analysis data back for some work I'm doing and looking at it the reported detection limits vary by element but for example they have a detection limit of 0.05 mg U /kg soil and 0.5 mg Mo/kg soil for the lab we went with. Seems far better than Tepcos lab sadly.

zapperzero

Yes. It is daughter of Ba-140, which in turn can be found in the decay chains of both U-238 and U-235, iirc. But I can't find a chart so... let's wait for the experts.

jarvik

Er.. you mean fission product of U I expect.

zapperzero

Err. Yes. Found a chart as well :D

http://www-nds.iaea.org/sgnucdat/c3.htm

Jorge Stolfi

Sigh. Try to locate the *pillars*. Do NOT use the outline of the building (walls, corners and roof) since it is obscured by hanging debris, sagging beams, paint spots and such. Then check the pipes in the tower.