Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants

MadderDoc

That's not good enough when you are two days after the explosion in the unit and you have just handed a photo out to the press showing the unit was steaming already by the morning of yesterday.

MadderDoc

Journalists are as a breed inquisitive, but what could they do, with counterparts moving about the map confusing as crabs and barely more outspoken than oysters.

The media did seem ready to blow. Media temper flares on March 16th Tepco press conference. But then next day we were at war with Poolasia, and news from the front naturally took focus.

Edit: After the first day of the war the generals could declare victory in the first few battles:
"Holding a midnight press conference, TEPCO is cautiously optimistic efforts with
helicopter drops and water cannons had some success cooling the spent fuel rod pool at the #3 Fukushima reactor.
"We were able to see some steam," says an official, "it’s fair to say that the spraying was somewhat effective." "

So the war with Poolasia which was started because Poolasia was steaming, was now being won because Poolasia was steaming.

jim hardy

Oysters? Confusing? Counterparts?
you have to be blunt with me. I am more obtuse than normal people and miss social cues. It's called Asperger's.



The experts were caught flat-footed .. some of their emails are still floating around.
http://list.ans.org/pipermail/ncsd-f...il/000020.html

i think Tepco's scurrying about was from a genuine lack of knowledge compounded with shock and disbelief . Probably official pressure to quell panic, too.

I spent a lifetime working in a plant . Certainly i had a hard time acceptng that one of these things is capable of what it did.
But i've got over that and as i've said so many times - i'm ready for that Nova show.

A calm scholarly presentation would be welcome. Nobody needs tabloids screaming end of the world scanarios, though. And that's what would have happened last year.

We're ready now, IMHO.

old jim

MadderDoc

I assume you mean this as two distinct propositions. a) Scurrying about from a genuine lack of knowledge compounded with shock and disbelief -- and b) scurrying about due to official pressure to quell panic. It is difficult for one man to claim to be doing both of those two at the same time. I am ready to give Tepco some slack on the first one up to some limit, limiting the claimable period of shock and disbelief, and of course some limit on how ignorant one can claim to be. I have seen no evidence of outside pressure on Tepco to quell panic. I don't think there was any.

jim hardy

Fair enough on both.

]

jim hardy

OP-ed on response over there , from "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...XSuetJc5xW-ehw

Fair enough.
If the Prime Minister comes on site and grills folks to get first-hand knowledge, well, he's cutting through the bureaucracy. Good for him.

While that's not political pressure,
when he fires his deputy director for publicly admitting "the possibility of a core meltdown,"
it would sure make people think twice about what they say.

MadderDoc

Yeah. I also can't see any fault with his doing that.

The said deputy director is still in his same position at NISA, so he was not fired. Initially during the Fukushima accident, Mr Nakamura appeared as spokesman on behalf of NISA at press conferences, but for the main part thereafter Mr. Nishiyama, another deputy director at NISA, was assigned with that duty.

NISA has several deputy directors. Somebody who thought there was only one deputy director of NISA, might on hearing that Mr. Nishiyama had replaced Mr Nakamura in press conferences have made the false inference that Mr Nakamura had been replaced in his position of Deputy Director.

Perhaps a bit strange that your source document did not check its own source for this particular piece of information. Anybody with political clout would know a Prime Minister would not fire a high ranking official in a governmental safety agency in the midst of its dealings with a high profiled accident unless there was an immediate serious criminal charge to be held against that official. PMs have a high aversion of political suicide or they wouldn't be PMs.

MadderDoc

Alright. On the night between March 17th and March 18th, a Tepco official expressed some satisfaction that the spraying operations had been effective to cool the fuel rods in the spent fuel pool, because, he said, they were able to observe some steam.

One is compellingly led to assume that he is implying a causal relationship: Spraying hits hot fuel, causing evaporation of water, causing observable steam plume. In effect then he says the hot fuel had little contact with liquid water when the spraying operations was initiated, and did therefore not steam, while after the spraying, some steam was observed.

(And that, we understand, is the good news, some cooling of the fuel had been achieved. The bad news would be the implied message, that the fuel is currently in a state of near complete exposure. The total message including the bad news part would not seem well suited to quell panic.)

However, steam had in fact been observable continuously for days from the building. Succinctly, it steamed just fine before as well as after the helicopter and the water cannon sprayings. There was in fact no basis to conclude from observing steam after the spraying, that it effected cooling of overheated fuel rods.

Now, this Tepco official hardly can be taken to be ignorant about the fact that the unit steamed also before the mission. He also cannot be assumed to be in a state of shock and disbelief, such that he didn't quite know what he was saying. His message was also not suitable to quell panic, it was actually rather a frightening message (Headline e.g.: "Tepco struggling with fully exposed fuel") IOW, I am struggling to explain this using your theory.

What the Tepco official happened to produce was a statement which would be known to him and other well informed persons to be absolute hokum, otoh it had some built in plausible deniability, due to its vagueness. Strictly it was not a false statement: some steam was observable. To less informed persons already with concerns about the spent fuel pool it would be an alarming message of a very serious condition of the spent fuel. To the rest of people, probably most, it just produced a vague message of some mildly good news from the plant, for a change. Soothe the many into passivity, let a few ill-informed destroy their own credibility with scare stories, get on with whatever you now have sanctity to be doing, and if you are called on the facts, 'you didn't mean it that way' Looked upon as a piece of technology propaganda, this was technically a masterpiece. Why should I think this was coincidental?

jim hardy

now THAT i do believe went on. For whatever motives.
It's even discussed in anthropology circles:
www.sfaa.net/newsletter/may11nl.pdf page 6. The Button article she references is interesting too.

So - people will be people... "Forgive them Father they know not what they do".

ZZ wrote: It looks to me like there's a real good chance it goes through a favorable geomety period before it becomes a debris bed.

What's just underneath that deck where the steam came out ?

MadderDoc

On March 14th, there was a spectacular explosion in the unit 3 building, and naturally that would have left everyone who saw it suspecting that the RPV or the PCV could possibly have been damaged. Although steam started rising from the building after the explosion likely already by late afternoon on March 14th and it steamed throughout the next day, March 15th was a hectic day on the plant, Unit 4 blew up, Unit 2 started steaming, there were multiple fires. so in all that confusion Tepco never got to reporting that white smoke was coming from unit 3. Consequently, the official status of the PCV integrity remained "Not damaged".

On March 16th Tepco finally reported to the authorities, that white smoke was rising from Unit 3. The official status of the PCV was promptly changed to "Damage suspected" by noon on March 16th. There was an overhanging risk that media would start asking questions, radioactivity in increasing quantities was emitted from the plant. If the PCV of Unit 3 was in fact leaking steam directly to the atmosphere it would become the likely suspect, and it would attract attention in a way distinctly abhorred by Tepco. It was in this environment the bait and switch operation to draw attention away from the PCV was conducted. The explosion of Unit 4 had conveniently raised attention about the spent fuel pools, and the media were hungry after another bad thing to happen in the plant.

Now, having a boiling pool in Unit 3 was to Tepco by far preferable to having a leaking PCV. Steam plumes from a boiling pool would not in the same way as plumes from a leaking PCV be an interesting potential source of the observed high radioactive emissions. So Tepco decided that the steam plumes from unit 3 should be coming from the spent fuel pool, and not from the PCV. In that venture Tepco was hugely successful. Already by the evening on March 16th, Tepco had the attention of everybody focused to the dangerous development of the unit 3 spent fuel pool, and any growing interest of the PCV had been quenched.

During the morning of March 17th, the breaking news were of air force helicopter dropping water on the ever steaming reactor building, and during the afternoon the water cannon artillery took over the headlines. The plumes just kept rising from the building, as if it didn't care. With shaking voices the speakers commented on the battle. Would the heavily water-armed forces be able to pacify the pool? Yes! by midnight Tepco could report -- cautiously optimistic -- that the first day of spraying had been effective in cooling the fuel rods. Some steam had been seen.

The next day, on March 18th, the official status of the PCV was changed from 'Damage Suspected' to 'Might be ”Not damaged”' I am not sure much note was taken of this status change. The difference between 'damage suspected' and 'might be "not damaged"' is subtle indeed. Some would say there is no logical difference. The weight of the latter expression nonetheless seems to lean more towards "not damaged" than the former expression. 'Damage suspected' is such an awful thing to say about a PCV. Also a bit weird to keep saying that, seeing the pool of unit 3, as everyone knew by then, was the real problem.

The PCV status in Unit 3 was now kept in limbo at the 'Might be ”Not damaged” level until the end of the war. Smoke in all colors from white to black kept rising from the building seemingly unstoppable. At one stage a Tepco official explained that black smoke for unknown reasons was rising from the south-eastern corner of the building, the location of the SFP, while a picture quite surreal showed black smoke rising from the north-eastern corner of the building. But things do get confusing during a war.

Then on March 24th, when the final water spraying by fire truck was performed, the PCV status was changed from 'Might be ”Not damaged”' to 'Not damaged'. Satellite photos showed that the plumes of steam had all but stopped. Only a slight mist remained over the spent fuel pool. Not only had the war with the pool been won -- the PCV had miraculously become undamaged in the process. Tepco could celebrate, deservedly, all operations be they white or black had gone very well. Mission accomplished.

Still, by the end of March someone felt it imprudent to say with such seemingly absolute certainty that the PCV was undamaged. So, the status of the PCV was slightly adjusted, from 'Not damaged' to 'Not damaged (estimation)'. Probably that was just to remind everyone that in science there is no absolute truth.

Thus prepared noone could be surprised, when one month later, by the end of May the status of the PCV was changed again -- from 'Not damaged (estimation)', to 'Damage and Leakage Suspected'.

In the following months it dawned, that the war on the pool had been with an imagined enemy. The pool had in fact never boiled. The PCV had tricked us all into blaming those steam plumes on the spent fuel pool. Sneaky bastard.

jim hardy

I agree they have not shown their hand .

There is a lot riding on this "Nuclear Renaissance" .
There are forces that dont want public opinion against it.

You and I just want to know what happened. It's going to be hard to find out.

This Stolfi plot clearly shows the vessel bottom remained hot enough to steam those early days.
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/EXP...A-un3-full.png

Did they have a fire truckpumping water in? Presumably it came out as steam so with flow and pressure one could estimate size of opening and compare to say an ADS valve.. But the Stolfi plots dont have flow those first days.

I speculated at the time they were keeping temperature in the superheat region so steam leaving would be dry, it carries fewer radioactive "friends" if it has no water droplets.

Plant data was sparse and photos sparser.
That's why i am waiting on photos of head area, and that "Nova" show.

zapperzero

From a perspective of public relations, TEPCO did their utmost to avoid the appearance of the terms meltdown and melt-through for as long as possible, preferably until the crisis could be presented as largely contained.

They have succeeded in this, at the cost of using some tortuous language and a few lies of omission. Eh.

MadderDoc

Yes peace be with them, and good luck.
Although more data has emerged since Jorge's plots, what happened is not yet clear to me. The temperature sensors suffered collateral damage in the war with the pool, and the water injection records are a messy brew of untrustworthy measurements, best estimates and data from pump specifications.

According to Tepco's estimates, while the building top was being douched with fire trucks, they pumped water into the reactor at an impressive rate of about 50 m³/h. I can't understand that other than they were attempting to flood the PVC, and to some extent successfully, apparently enough to have the steam plumes quenched by March 24th, but according to core water level indicators, not enough to flood the core.

My best guess is that it then occurred to them, that there was leakage to a degree such that upholding the present water level in the PVC would necessitate continued massive injections that would just leak out and accumulate as radioactive water elsewhere. So they cut back the injection rate, PCV water level dropped back, and the reactor started steaming again after a few days, and kept steaming for months thereafter.

MadderDoc

I don't quite know what to say to that, jim. I never really liked people, but I do sympathise with the pity expressed by that ancient quote. However this is the 21st century, people must acquiesce to what it takes to uphold the complex society they are fed by, and that includes their willingness to accept, indeed crave, that what they do is being controlled by controlling what they know. There is no other way, and that way is perhaps not even passable. Only time can tell if people can take it or they will rather blow the whole thing up in an explosion of irrationality. When I was young we read SF novels about it, but now we are in it. Welcome to Dystopia.

zapperzero

Well, that was unexpected. Anyway, from my trawling through NRC FOIA transcripts (some freedom of information, that, by the way, about half of the material is censored) the impression I get is that the NRC had no idea what was really going on - they were plugged in to the Japanese PMs emergency center (from what I can gather, with very limited access) and they had no info first or second hand info, bar what various US technical assets, experts and simulations were telling them.

In the meantime the J-gov was asking them for advice - there's huge potential there for GIGO and for inattentional blindness.

It seems to me that the tactic everyone fixated onto, pretty early on, was "just keep pouring water on the damn things". This was done, enthusiastically even. So what if they were spraying the wrong corner of the building? Some of the water must surely have made it into the pool.

jim hardy

M'doc thank you for that thoughtful post. I will have to think on it for a while.i cant crave it and i dont really accept it either. But i do accept my powerlessness to do much about it. So i'll understand as much as my doddering brain can glean .
Did you guys read Golding's "Lord of the Flies" in high school? Remember Simon... truth might set one free or it might get one killed.

ZZ
As you and m'doc observe the early response was "more water". Until the sheer amount of it became problematic.

i agree, the unthinkable had happened and everybody was in uncharted territory.

I have to believe there was strong desire to not let potentially scary information out.
Did you notice the references in that FOI to the 'secure phone line with other information' ?
And that the expert emails went encrypted ?
And how little of the drone video footage was of unit 3? 30 seconds out of twenty minutes ?

Given the propensity in some circles to stir trouble i can sympathize with TPTB on that count at that time
but as i said earlier it's getting time for calm reflection over what went on.

That would be a LOT of steam. Any idea how much heat it takes to make that all into steam and how it compares to decay heat ? I did that calc last year on another forum but dont remember result. Seems to me it was a good match, though. I did not calculate the area required to vent that much steam at reported pressure because at that time i thought RPV was wide open and the pressure readings were wrong . Might try it this evening.

Gotta tend to some chores now -

later,

old jim

Bandit127

Sorry, but you lost me completely there.