Fukushima Management and Government Performance

joewein

An article in Japan Times (2011-11-09, "Scrub homes, denude trees to wash cesium fears away") provided advice on how to decontaminate areas affected by nuclear fallout, such as in Fukushima, Tochigi and northern Chiba prefecture. Most of the advice is sound, but some is downright alarming:

As for trees, it's best to remove all their leaves because of the likelyhood they contain large amounts of cesium, Higaki [of University of Tokyo] said.
(...)
What should you do with the soil and leaves?
(...)
Leaves and weeds can be disposed of as burnable garbage, a Fukushima official said.

So let me get this right: you should collect all those leaves because they contain so much radioactive cesium (cesium 134 has a half life of 2 years and cesium 137 of 29 years). And then, when you have all that cesium in plastic garbage bags, you have it sent to the local garbage incinerator, so the carefully collected cesium gets spread over the whole neighbourhood again via the incinerator smokestack. That makes no sense at all.

Shinjukusam

Quote by joewein

An article in Japan Times (2011-11-09, "Scrub homes, denude trees to wash cesium fears away") provided advice on how to decontaminate areas affected by nuclear fallout, such as in Fukushima, Tochigi and northern Chiba prefecture. Most of the advice is sound, but some is downright alarming:

So let me get this right: you should collect all those leaves because they contain so much radioactive cesium (cesium 134 has a half life of 2 years and cesium 137 of 29 years). And then, when you have all that cesium in plastic garbage bags, you have it sent to the local garbage incinerator, so the carefully collected cesium gets spread over the whole neighbourhood again via the incinerator smokestack. That makes no sense at all.

Generally, emissions for burnable garbage in Japan are pretty strict, and they do not emit very much particulate smoke. This leads to the large amount of radioactive ash that has been collecting at disposal facilities.

It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, but the overriding trend seems to be to strive to concentrate waste in limited areas.

etudiant

Quote by Shinjukusam

Generally, emissions for burnable garbage in Japan are pretty strict, and they do not emit very much particulate smoke. This leads to the large amount of radioactive ash that has been collecting at disposal facilities.

It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, but the overriding trend seems to be to strive to concentrate waste in limited areas.

The objective, to concentrate the contamination, is laudable. However, the method may be counterproductive.
It is unlikely that the current emission controls would pick up cesium, which is quite volatile at exhaust stack temperatures.

tsutsuji

Nov. 14. Ohi NPP :

Consideration of the first formal application by a nuclear plant operator to restart a suspended reactor under the government’s new stress test system was postponed after experts challenged the safety of the procedure.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311dis...AJ201111150015

zapperzero

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_ZdB...ailpage#t=609s

If anyone can think of a valid reason for which a reporter should NOT be allowed to film the outside of Unit 2, as viewed from the causeway near the sea, please let me know.

zapperzero

TEPCO analyzes own response to accident, concludes everything went just fine and there was nothing more to be done
http://www.shimbun.denki.or.jp/en/news/20111206_01.html
color me surprised.

Caniche

Quote by NUCENG

Come on now, Caniche, that is just a bit over the top, isn't it? By that logic, what was once true must always be true, which is logically absurd. It denies any possibility of progress or change. I don't believe the Japanese recovery from the devastation of the Second World War would have been possible if the society was still based on the Shogunate form of feudalism. I will defer to the Japanese citizens participating in this thread. Is Japanese society today based on forced labor and slavery?

Silly sausage, nothing is set in stone. You might wish to reconsider that strange response ;all you were given was historical fact.

NUCENG

Quote by Caniche

Silly sausage, nothing is set in stone. You might wish to reconsider that strange response ;all you were given was historical fact.

I will reconsider, if you can explain what the "historical fact" has to do with current conditions in Japan.

zapperzero

More on the jumpers. Article claims cumulative exposures are not tracked.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...er-plants?bn=1

zapperzero

On March 12, a day after the tsunami, Yoshida ignored an order from Tepco headquarters to stop pumping seawater into a reactor to try and cool it. Tepco said it may penalize Yoshida even though Sakae Muto, then a vice president at the utility, said it was a technically appropriate decision. Yoshida received a verbal reprimand after then Prime Minister Naoto Kan defended the plant chief, the Yomiuri newspaper reported.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...teps-down.html

what is this i don't even

tsutsuji

I could not find a Japanese version exactly similar to the English article. The closest Japanese article is http://www.bloomberg.co.jp/news/123-LVFBSX1A1I4H01.html published on the same day, by the same reporters. The word "sanction" is not used in http://www.bloomberg.co.jp/news/123-LVFBSX1A1I4H01.html . http://www.bloomberg.co.jp/news/123-LVFBSX1A1I4H01.html says 口頭で注意した (he was verbally warned).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...teps-down.html mentions http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/atmoney/new...OYT1T01036.htm as it source, which talks about Tepco's president Shimizu summoning Yoshida to Tokyo on 6 June for a verbal warning for not having reported the facts for more than two months, but where 人事上の処分には当たらないとしている means "He said that this is not a basis for a disciplinary sanction".

In May, before Yoshida went to Tokyo, the Asahi said:

However, TEPCO officials are considering disciplinary action against Yoshida because he kept quiet about what actually happened for more than two months.

"It is difficult to understand why several days had to pass before revising the facts of a previous announcement," said Kenji Sumita, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Osaka University. "Repeated changes to announcements will affect the process of examining the accident. It would be natural to suspect the reliability of other records."
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311dis...AJ201105270252

NUCENG

I am a bit confused. If Yoshida was responsible for the deliberate decision to ignore scientific findings about the seismic and tsunami risk, then he should be held responsible. If however, he was the guy in charge on the worst day nucklear power ever saw, and he was trying everything he knew to combat the accident, is it reasonable to expect every decision to be correct? If they can demonstrate negligence, they should file that case. If all he did was withhold information from the people that were really to blame (TEPCO and the Japanese Regulators), I think he may end up as the hero along with the rest of the "Fukushima Fifty" in this story.

My problem is that we don't know enough to judge Yoshida, and we shouldn't. We do know that some people had knowledge of the risk and could have taken action to prevent or lesson the severity of this accident and they didn't. Why isn't that at the top of the page in every newspaper?

zapperzero

Quote by NUCENG

My problem is that we don't know enough to judge Yoshida, and we shouldn't. We do know that some people had knowledge of the risk and could have taken action to prevent or lesson the severity of this accident and they didn't. Why isn't that at the top of the page in every newspaper?

Thank you for articulating my concerns. I was, for once, at a loss for words.

Astronuc

Japan May Declare Control of Reactors, Over Serious Doubts
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/wo...-reactors.html

Quote by NYTimes

“The government wants to reassure the people that everything is under control, and do this by the end of this year,” said Kazuhiko Kudo, a professor of nuclear engineering at Kyushu University. “But what I want to know is, are they really ready to say this?”

. . . .
“Claiming a cold shutdown does not have much meaning for damaged reactors like those at Fukushima Daiichi,” said Noboru Nakao, a nuclear engineering consultant . . . .

. . . .

Astronuc

Quote by zapperzero

More on the jumpers. Article claims cumulative exposures are not tracked.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...er-plants?bn=1

Assuming that the article is acurate, it is disgraceful. In the US, such of practice of not accounting for exposure, and essentially falsifying records, would be illegal.

On the other hand, while working summer construction jobs during my university years, I watch similar practices with illegal aliens in Texas, but at non-nuclear sites. One of the nations largest construction companies brought truckloads of illegal aliens on-site, and if they were injured on the job, they were dismissed. They received no benefits, such as insurance, accumulated no social security, and earned less than the legal minimum wage.

NUCENG

Quote by Astronuc

Assuming that the article is acurate, it is disgraceful. In the US, such of practice of not accounting for exposure, and essentially falsifying records, would be illegal.

On the other hand, while working summer construction jobs during my university years, I watch similar practices with illegal aliens in Texas, but at non-nuclear sites. One of the nations largest construction companies brought truckloads of illegal aliens on-site, and if they were injured on the job, they were dismissed. They received no benefits, such as insurance, accumulated no social security, and earned less than the legal minimum wage.

One immediate red flag about the article: TLD's are passive dosimeters for measuring cumulative doses. And electronic dosimeters I have used don't have on/off switches. If they were to be turned off and lost the initialization for the worker and his dose limits, they would alarm on exit.

Astronuc

Quote by NUCENG

One immediate red flag about the article: TLD's are passive dosimeters for measuring cumulative doses. And electronic dosimeters I have used don't have on/off switches. If they were to be turned off and lost the initialization for the worker and his dose limits, they would alarm on exit.

That's a good and important point. I had read that to mean they just leave them behind or place them in their lunch box or in some situation where the dosimeters were not exposed.

Whenever I worked in a hot area, I check out a dosimeter and checked it back in after leaving the hot area. The cumulative doses were reported at the end of the year, IIRC.

No one was allowed in a hot area unless they were wearing a dosimeter.

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zapperzero	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_ZdB...ailpage#t=609s If anyone can think of a valid reason for which a reporter should NOT be allowed to film the outside of Unit 2, as viewed from the causeway near the sea, please let me know.