Last Call

At this point the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant situation has devolved into US vs. Japan nuclear expert finger-pointing, the Americans are saying that the Japanese are seriously underplaying the level of true disaster here and the Japanese are kindly telling the US to piss off.  Yes, the situation is that bad, folks.

The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a significantly bleaker appraisal of the threat posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis than the Japanese government, saying on Wednesday that the damage at one crippled reactor was much more serious than Japanese officials had acknowledged and advising Americans to evacuate a wider area around the plant than the perimeter established by Japan.


The announcement marked a new and ominous chapter in the five-day long effort by Japanese engineers to bring four side-by-side reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by an earthquake and tsunami last Friday. It also suggested a serious  split between Washington and Tokyo, after American officials concluded that the Japanese warnings were insufficient, and that, deliberately or not, they had understated the potential threat of what is taking place inside the nuclear facility.

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the commission, said in Congressional testimony that the commission believed that all the water in the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station had boiled dry, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation. As a result, he said, “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”

On Thursday morning a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power, the Daiichi plant operator, and a spokesman for Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency, denied Mr. Jaczko’s account, saying the situation at reactor No. 4 had not changed and that water remained in the spent fuel storage pool. But both officials said the situation was changing and that the reactor had not been inspected in recent hours.

"We can’t get inside to check, but we’ve been carefully watching the building’s environs, and there has not been any particular problem," said Hajime Motojuku, the spokesman for Tokyo Electric.

Takumi Koyamada, the spokesman at Japan’s nuclear regulator, said that as of 12 hours ago water remained and the temperature reading was 84 degrees Celsius and that no change had been reported since then. "We cannot confirm that there has been a loss in water," he said. "But we face a very unpredictable situation." If the American analysis is accurate and Japanese workers have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled — it needs to remain covered with water at all times — radiation levels could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at reactor No. 4, but to keep workers at the Daiichi complex from servicing any of the other problem reactors at the plant. 

The problem is the panic over the leaks is taking away from the very real and present danger of millions of Japanese citizens with no power, light, or heat, facing dwindling food and water supplies in a snowy March spring, with nights getting down to below freezing.   The humanitarian crisis is very real right now, radiation or no radiation.

All the nuclear plant issues are doing is making it impossible to get help to people who badly, badly need it.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature: Five Years Later

As I mentioned this morning, today is the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which resulted in tens of thousands dead, tens of thousands more displaced, and a nuclear plant meltdown that will continue to cause detrimental environmental effects for generations.

Reactor number one at Fukushima Daiichi is still so hot that five years later, robots still can't enter.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site. 

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake and tsunami. 

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return. 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco)  has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed. 

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.” 

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods. 

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said. 

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.

And so the cleanup will continue, probably for the rest of the lives of the people there working to decontaminate the site now.  It's a massive environmental disaster that should have been the end, worldwide, of nuclear power technology.  It's not.  And there are hundreds more potential Fukushima meltdowns waiting to happen.  We do this to ourselves and see the results, and we still do it.

We only get one planet, and we've killed it multiple times over.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 28

Time for a two-month mark check on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.  First, the plant itself continues to remain in crisis with fully exposed fuel rods and the reactors are still out of control as the coolant systems are still damaged and the radiation is making it nearly impossible to repair.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said fuel rods are fully exposed in the No. 1 reactor at its stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, setting back the utility’s plan to resolve the crisis.

The water level is 1 meter (3.3 feet) below the base of the fuel assembly, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility known as Tepco, told reporters at a briefing in Tokyo. Melted fuel has dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and is still being cooled, Matsumoto said. The company doesn’t know how long the rods have been exposed, he said.

Tepco is trying to contain the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl after a quake and tsunami two months ago knocked out power and cooling systems at the Fukushima station. The utility planned to flood the No. 1 containment chamber, which surrounds the reactor vessel, in a procedure known as water entombment to prevent fuel from overheating.

“I’ve been saying from the beginning the water tomb plan won’t work,” said Tadashi Narabayashi, a professor of nuclear engineering at Hokkaido University. “Tepco must work on a water circulation cooling system as soon as possible. They’ve been going round and round in circles and now realize this is what they need to do.”

It’s unlikely the situation has worsened with the discovery the rods are exposed because they’ve probably been out of the water since shortly after the crisis started, Narabayashi said. 

In other words, the fuel rods in Reactor 1 have been exposed and in a slow meltdown cycle for close to two months.  TEPCO's plan to flood the reactors with water to cool them is failing because of the quake and explosion damaged containment vessels, which are clearly full of leaks and unable to keep the water in the reactor core.  Reactor 1 has been in meltdown for dozens of days now.  TEPCO is simply hoping nobody notices.


So the environmental and human nightmare in Japan still continues.   Meanwhile, Japan's politics are getting distinctly ugly.  TEPCO quietly agreed to a de facto government takeover Wednesday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Wednesday accepted six government conditions to ensure state support for the payment of massive compensation over the damage caused by the nuclear crisis at its Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

The conditions included confirmation that no ceiling would be set on compensation and that the utility would comply with a third-party investigation into its financial situation.

The latter condition means that TEPCO in effect will be put under public management.

TEPCO's acceptance of the six conditions laid the foundation for a compensation scheme calling for the establishment of a new entity to deal with damages payments.

And oh, are those damage payments going to be massive.  I think the total damage in cleanup and compensation costs will be in the trillion range, and that's dollars, not yen.  Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan is desperately trying to keep his government in one piece, and he's having to give in on nuclear plants in Japan completely.

Japan is reassessing how it produces electricity after March's earthquake and tsunami sparked a crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan this week persuaded the operators of another nuclear plant west of Tokyo to temporarily close it to make safety improvements. And he is canceling a plan to build more nuclear facilities.

Kan's decisions to back away from nuclear power came after an unusual number of public demonstrations. The protests have been more frequent because many Japanese have grown impatient with the government, says Koichi Nakano, who teaches political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.

"Skeptics argue that, in fact, Japan has enough energy already as of now without nuclear power plants, using fossil fuels and hydro-electronic power generation, and so I think people are now becoming gradually exposed to those new facts," Nakano says.

We're looking a sea change in Japanese culture, folks.  The Fukushima Daiichi disaster is going to do for Japan what 9/11 did for us...only there's no "bad guy" to get...except maybe TEPCO itself.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 20

The "concrete box" solution to Fukushima Daiichi is now very much on the table.

Top government spokesman Yukio Edano suggested Wednesday that all of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant should be scrapped.


''It is very clear looking at the social circumstances. That is my perception,'' Edano said in a news conference when asked if all six reactors at the troubled nuclear plant should be decommissioned.

And with the damage to Fukushima's containment structures and the surrounding area (after all, you can't just turn off plutonium, folks) it's looking more and more like decommissioning the reactors means building a rather smart tomb around the place, especially since it's looking like the race to stave off nuclear disaster has been lost.

Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have "lost the race" to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

Workers have been pumping water into three reactors at the stricken plant in a desperate bid to keep the fuel rods from melting down, but the fuel is at least partially exposed in all the reactors.

At least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel "lower head" of the pressure vessel around reactor two, Lahey said.

"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."

Last of the Fukushima Fifty out the door, turn out the lights.  We're now well beyond a "partial meltdown" scenario and into "what are our emergency containment options at this point".  It's just a matter of how much additional exposure is necessary before the Powers That Be give the order to box the thing in.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 8

Tyler Durden with the latest on Fukushima Daiichi:

More on the earlier news that Steven Chu "thought" a partial meltdown may have occurred, the just released news escalates the verbiage, which is now a definitive: "US Energy Chief says 'partial meltdown' occurred at the Fukushima Plant." The next step is his urgent recommendation for all US citizens who live within 80 kilometers of Fukushima to evacuate or take shelter indoors.

Meanwhile here in the states, the US dollar is melting down as investors are fleeing towards the Japanese yen.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled and the Japanese Yen broke to fresh 16-year highs against the US Dollar on fresh fears over risks at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant.

European Energy Commissioner Oettinger fanned fears as he told a European Parliament committee that “the [nuclear] site is effectively out of control,” and the situation is somewhere between “a disaster and a major disaster.” Frayed market nerves meant that the comments instantly sparked sharp sell-offs in ‘risk’; the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearly 200 points in the 20 minutes following the commentary. 

At one point after Oettinger's comments, the dollar was under 80 yen.  And as far as the plant is concerned, we're seeing things get worse by the hour.

Japan’s nuclear crisis intensified on Wednesday after the authorities announced that a second reactor unit at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan may have ruptured and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam. 

The break, at the No. 3 reactor unit, worsened the already perilous conditions at the plant, a day after officials said the containment vessel in the No. 2 reactor had also cracked.

The possibility of high radiation levels above the plant prompted the Japanese military to put off a highly unusual plan to dump water from helicopters — a tactic normally used to combat forest fires — to lower temperatures in a pool containing spent fuel rods that was dangerously overheating at the No. 4 reactor. The operation would have meant flying a helicopter into the steam rising from the plant.

But in one of a series of rapid and at times confusing pronouncements on the crisis, the authorities insisted that damage to the containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor — the main focus of concern earlier on Wednesday — was unlikely to be severe.

Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said the possibility that the No. 3 reactor had “suffered severe damage to its containment vessel is low.” Earlier he said only that the vessel might have been damaged; columns of steam were seen rising from it in live television coverage.

The reactor’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said it had been able to double the number of people battling the crisis at the plant to 100 from 50, but that was before the clouds of radioactive steam began billowing from the plant. On Tuesday, 750 workers were evacuated, leaving a skeleton crew of 50 struggling to reduce temperatures in the damaged facility. An increasing proportion of the people at the plant are soldiers, but the exact number is not known. 

At this point at least two reactors have suffered from containment breaches and partial meltdowns, and the other four reactors are all in various stages of problems, including the spent fuel rod pools continuing to be a massive potential issue.

"Duck and cover" is not a realistic response, guys.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 6

AJE's Dan Nolan explains what's going on at Fukushima Daiichi.



It's the second part of the video that should have you worried:  the reactor is contained somewhat (but still a partial meltdown would be terrible.)  But the stored spent fuel rods submerged in rooftop pools to keep them cool are the more immediate danger.

Tokyo Electric Power Company officials announced on Tuesday evening that they would consider using helicopters in an attempt to douse with cold water a boiling rooftop storage pond for spent uranium fuel rods. The rods are still radioactive and potentially as hot and dangerous as the fuel rods inside the reactors if not kept submerged in water.

“The only ideas we have right now are using a helicopter to spray water from above, or inject water from below,” a power company official said at a news conference. “We believe action must be taken by tomorrow or the day after.”

Hydrogen gas bubbling up from chemical reactions set off by the hot fuel rods produced a powerful explosion on Tuesday morning that blew a 26-foot-wide hole in the side of reactor No. 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A fire there may have been caused by machine oil in a nearby facility, inspectors from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said, according to an American official.

Concern remained high about the storage ponds at that reactor and at reactors 5 and 6. All three of those reactors at the plant, 140 miles northeast of Tokyo, were not operating on Friday afternoon when an offshore earthquake with a magnitude now estimated at 9.0 suddenly shook the site. A tsunami with waves up to 30 feet high rolled into the northeast Japanese coastline minutes later, swamping the plant. 

If those rods overheat, the potential for a widespread release of radioactive material into the atmosphere is extremely high, and this is completely separate from any of the six reactors at the plant losing containment.  Word is reactors 5 and 6 are heating up too, potentially meaning that all six reactors at the Fukushima plant are damaged and could be in various stages of a partial meltdown.


And it seems the worse-case scenario continues to play out.

Two workers are missing after Tuesday's explosion at one of the reactors at a crippled Japanese nuclear plant, the country's nuclear safety agency said.

The agency did not identify the missing workers, but said they were in the turbine area of the No.4 reactor at the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was damaged by last Friday's earthquake and tsunami.

Agency official also told a news conference there was a crack in the roof of the reactor building.

Reuters now quoting NHK World that Reactor 4 is now on fire again after the explosion today.   This can't be good.  It's on fire because the first reactor 4 fire was never fully extinguished.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Still Rising

Hey folks, a not-so-gentle reminder that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster didn't just go away because the US press stopped covering it.

A Japanese utility has said its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is likely to have leaked contaminated water into sea, acknowledging for the first time a problem long suspected by experts.

Experts have suspected a continuous leak since the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was ravaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. had previously denied contaminated water reached the sea, despite spikes in radiation levels in underground and sea water samples taken at the plant. Japan's nuclear watchdog said two weeks ago a leak was highly suspected, ordering TEPCO to examine the problem.

Surprise, after 28 months, TEPCO finally coming clean on the fact that radioactive water has leaked and most likely is probably still leaking into the Pacific.  Workers and cleanup crew there face serious health risks as a result.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the operator of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, said Friday that about 2,000 people -- 10 percent of those who were part of the emergency crew involved in the cleanup after the plant’s meltdown in 2011 -- face an increased risk of thyroid cancer due to exposure to nuclear radiation.

And that risk continues to grow as the waters off the bay continue to be contaminated.  Little coverage on that, it seems.  But the problem's still there, folks.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 40

Still plenty of unintended consequences from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, at this point we're starting to see heavily irradiated crops show up some distance away from the blast zone.

Japan found the first case of rice with radioactive materials far exceeding a government-set level for a preliminary test of pre-harvested crop, requiring thorough inspection of the rice to be harvested from the region, the farm ministry said late on Friday.

The ministry said radioactive caesium of 500 becquerels per kg was found in a sample of the pre-harvested rice in Nihonmatsu city, in Fukushima Prefecture, 56 km (35 miles) west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering the world's worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

The ministry said the Fukushima Prefecture will expand the inspection spots nearly ten-fold to around 300 areas.

It is the first case in Japan of rice containing radioactive caesium exceeding 200 becquerels per kg, a level which requires further thorough testing of the area for the harvested rice. 

If this level of radiation is being found in new crops some 35 miles from the plant and six months after the disaster, it's a pretty good bet there's going to be continued problems with irradiated crops for some time into the future.  How many tons of irradiated crops are being missed by spot inspections?

I've said before the total cost of this disaster will be into the trillion dollar range, and the more signs like this we see, the higher that bill will be in the end.

This will be a generational disaster for Japan.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 12

The real problem with Japan right now is again, lack of food, water, and power/heat to hundreds of thousands.  The radiation from Fukushima Daiichi is now making things much, much worse.

As workers scrambled to curb a nuclear crisis Sunday, the Japanese government considered halting the sale of food from farms near the Fukushima plant after abnormally high levels of radiation were found in milk and spinach.


Very small amounts -- far below the level of concern -- of radioactive iodine were also detected in tap water in Tokyo and most prefectures near the Fukushima Daiichi plant damaged by last week's monster earthquake and tsunami.

Six members of the emergency crew at the plant have been exposed to more than 100 millisieverts of radiation per hour, the equivalent of getting 10 chest X-rays per hour, plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company said.

The utility said the workers were exposed when trying to restore electricity to the stricken reactors in hopes of using the cooling systems again.

Tokyo Electric had raised the exposure level for emergency workers from its previous standard of 100 millisieverts per hour to 250 millisieverts.

Yeah see, irradiated food + limited food supply + no power to preserve food + wiped out transportation infrastructure to move in new food + winter temps = pretty much nightmare time.   From a large-scale logistics point of view, this is about as bad as it gets.  It would almost be darkly humorous if it wasn't so absolutely catastrophic.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 39

Please pay no attention to the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan and the fact that thousands of people will basically never be able to return to their homes near the still radioactive Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Broad areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels, several major media outlets said Monday.


The formal announcement, expected from the government in coming days, would be the first official recognition that the March accident could force the long-term depopulation of communities near the plant, an eventuality that scientists and some officials have been warning about for months.

Lawmakers said over the weekend — and major newspapers reported Monday — that Prime Minister Naoto Kan was planning to visit Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is, as early as Saturday to break the news directly to residents. The affected communities are all within 12 miles of the plant, an area that was evacuated immediately after the accident.

The government is expected to tell many of these residents that they will not be permitted to return to their homes for an indefinite period. It will also begin drawing up plans for compensating them by, among other things, renting their now uninhabitable land. While it is unclear if the government would specify how long these living restrictions would remain in place, news reports indicated it could be decades. That has been the case for areas around the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine after its 1986 accident. 

So yeah, Japan is washing its hands of a 12-mile radius around the plant...and the place is still hot.  Who knows how much larger the no-go zone could get say, six months or a year from now?  All land in 25 miles?  50 miles?  This thing isn't over by a long shot, and only now is the government admitting that being in 12 miles of the plant is uninhabitable by humans.  Who's going to live 13 miles from the plant?

This disaster just keeps on in its horror...and will for decades to come.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 34

Japanese officials are now finally admitting to the scenario I warned about nearly three months ago:  that not only have reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi gone through total meltdowns, but that the slagged fuel rods have melted through the reactor pressure containment vessels and have most likely been contaminating the area around the plant for months.

Molten nuclear fuel in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is likely to have burned through pressure vessels, not just the cores, Japan has said in a report in which it also acknowledges it was unprepared for an accident of the severity of Fukushima.

It is the first time Japanese authorities have admitted the possibility that the fuel suffered "melt-through" – a more serious scenario than a core meltdown.

The report, which is to be submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said fuel rods in reactors No 1, 2 and 3 had probably not only melted, but also breached their inner containment vessels and accumulated in the outer steel containment vessels.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), says it believes the molten fuel is being cooled by water that has built up in the bottom of the three reactor buildings.

In other words, only the seawater flooding the reactor areas, now highly radioactive and largely uncontainable, is keeping the molten fuel from melting through the outer steel containment vessels and going directly into the environment.

This situation is now near absolute worst case scenario.  The molten reactor fuel and the contaminated seawater will somehow have to be dealt with, removed, contained, or sealed up.  Meanwhile, every day that passes assures more radioactive material leaks into Japan's ecosystem.  The cumulative damage from this mess could take generations to repair. 

I don't see any way to deal with the water or the heavily damaged containment vessels short of entombing the entire facility...and that's if the steel outer containment shells for the reactor aren't breached in some way, which, given the amount of radiation in the reactor areas has to be the case.  If that's the reality, then the whole place will have to be buried under tons and tons of concrete and the area around the plant will have to be written off.

The worst part is that the plant's proximity to seawater means the concrete option may not be 100% effective if the radioactive material has gotten into the ground and the adjacent ocean, meaning that whole area of the Pacific may have to be put off limits for an indefinite time period.

TEPCO stock has fallen to a new low and the stock is in trouble of being delisted from the Tokyo exchange.  Bankruptcy and recievership cannot be far behind, and that means Japanese taxpayers are going to be footing a tremendous cleanup effort.

I initially put the total damage to Japan's economy at the $1 trillion mark.  I may be closer to the real total than anyone imagined, including myself.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 17

Radiation leaking from Fukushima Daiichi reactor #2 is so bad now that workers have been evacuated from the control room area.

Extremely high levels of radiation were detected in water leaking from reactor two of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, forcing the evacuation of workers, its operator said Sunday.

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said the level of radiation found in the leaked water in the turbine room was 10 million times higher than it should be for water inside the reactor, indicating damage to the fuel rods.

"We detected 1,000 millisieverts per hour of radiation in a puddle of water at the reactor number two. This figure is 10 million times higher than water usually kept in a reactor," the spokesman said.

"We are examining the cause of this, but no work is being done there because of the high level of radiation.

"High levels of caesium and other substances are being detected, which usually should not be found in reactor water. There is a high possibility that fuel rods are being damaged."

You think?   TEPCO says the radiation is coming from Iodine-134, which has a half-life of days, so there's "little chance" of it surviving long enough to cause harm outside the plant.  Of course, if radioactive iodine is loose at all, that definitely means the fuel rods are damaged.  Best part:

The company became aware of the high radiation in the turbine building of the No. 2 unit, a Tokyo Electric official said, when a worker attempting to measure radiation levels of the water puddles saw the reading on his dosimeter jump beyond 1,000 millisieverts, the highest reading. The worker left the scene immediately, and the company does not have an accurate reading, he said. 

At this point, after 16 days, it looks like TEPCO has lost control of at least one reactor. More may follow.  The cooling equipment may be back on-line to an extent, but it's not going to be enough.  The odds that Fukushima Daiichi will have to be buried is approaching "just a matter of when they admit defeat" territory.

[UPDATE]  TEPCO officials are now saying that these very high radiation readings were "completely wrong".

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) vice-president Sakae Muto apologized for Sunday's error, which added to alarm inside and outside Japan over the impact of contamination from the complex which was hit by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

Radiation in the water was a still worrying 100,000 times higher than normal, rather than 10 million times higher as originally stated, Muto said.

Yeah, it's a mistake anyone could make.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 22

The news out of Fukushima Daiichi continues to get worse.

Japanese utility and government authorities suffered fresh setbacks Tuesday with the detection of radiation in a fish and news that water gushing from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific had radiation levels more than millions of times above the regulatory limit.


Readings from samples taken Saturday in the concrete pit outside the turbine building of the plant's No. 2 reactor -- one of six at the crisis-plagued plant -- had radiation 7.5 million times the legal limits, said an official with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant. Newer findings, from Tuesday afternoon, showed a slight drop to 5 million times the norm.

The utility company also noted Tuesday that the radiation levels diminished sharply a few dozen meters from the leak, consistent with their assessment that the spill might have a minimal effect on sealife. But even in these spots, radiation levels remained several hundred-thousand times the legal limit.

The entire issued underlined that getting a grip on how to minimize the amount of radiation in the Pacific Ocean is the new, primary battlefront in the weeks-long crisis at the nuclear plant.

And it's a battle that is being lost.  Radioactive cesium-137 has a half-life measured in decades.  Japan's problems are going to continue for a very long time.

The Siege Of Fort Calhoun

Given my extensive coverage of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and subsequent cover-up by TEPCO and Japan's government, we know the exactly the lengths to which a government will go to -- even a "democracy" will go to -- in order to try to hide a nuclear disaster from the world.

As the disaster in Japan continues to unfold, people here in the US have asked if any American nuclear plants are at the same risk of flooding or earthquakes, with a similar design to the Fukushima Daiichi plant.  The answer unfortunately is yes, there are several nuclear power plants in flood zones and quake zones in the US.  One of them, in a flood zone, is the plant at Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, some twenty miles north of Omaha.

If you've been paying attention to the news, you know that flooding along the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers has been devastating this spring and continues into the early summer.  Fort Calhoun is on the Missouri River.

And the Missouri River has flooded the nuclear plant this weekend.

The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station turned to diesel-powered generators Sunday after disconnecting from the main grid because of rising floodwaters.

That move came after water surrounded several buildings when a water-filled floodwall collapsed.

The plant, about 19 miles north of Omaha, remains safe, Omaha Public Power District officials said Sunday afternoon.

Sunday's event offers even more evidence that the relentlessly rising Missouri River is testing the flood worthiness of an American nuclear power plant like never before. The now-idle plant has become an island. And unlike other plants in the past, Fort Calhoun faces months of flooding.

This can't be a good thing.  Months of flooding?  Is the plant designed to handle that?  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission of course says everything is fine.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is monitoring the Missouri River at the plant, which has been shut down since early April for refueling. The Fort Calhoun plant will remain surrounded at least through August as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continues dumping unprecedented amounts of water from upstream dams.

The 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:25 a.m. Sunday due to “onsite activities,” OPPD officials said. The Aqua Dam provided supplemental flood protection and was not required under NRC regulations.

“We put up the aqua-berm as additional protection,” said OPPD spokesman Mike Jones. “(The plant) is in the same situation it would have been in if the berm had not been added. We're still within NRC regulations.”

And that's exactly what TEPCO officials said three months ago.   Worth keeping an eye on this story, especially if you have friends or family near Omaha or Lincoln.  The news has gone out of their way to in fact stress that nobody's worried.

Just like Japan.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 13

Finally, Japanese nuclear officials and TEPCO workers are starting to get some of the less damaged reactors under control, and some of the more critical ones stabilized at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Workers began to see some success in their battle to cool down reactors at the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant Sunday, but Japanese officials said they may need to release additional radioactive gas into the air.

The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said electricity was being supplied to a switchboard in reactor No. 2.

But officials said they were monitoring reactor No. 3 to determine whether to release gas to reduce mounting pressure in the containment vessel -- the steel and concrete shell that insulates radioactive material inside.

Power company officials said pressure was higher than previous readings -- but stable -- Sunday afternoon. And Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the pressure increase did not require "an immediate release of the air at this moment."

Still, "even in the best scenario, there will be a lot of bumps ahead," Edano told reporters as he assessed the situation at the plant in a briefing Sunday.

There's a long way to go before the plant is under control, much less to the point where it can be buried under sand and concrete, much less to the point where the plant is salvageable in any fashion.  But finally people are making progress and the immediate danger is under control...for now.

But how much radiation has been released, and will continue to be released over the next several days and weeks, if not months?  It's a grim situation even without the earthquake and tsunami ravaged country being critically short on basics.  The missing/dead numbers have topped 20,000 total at this point in northern Japan, and the situation is getting worse by the hour as Japan is a country that relies heavily on imports for food and other staples.  Any damage to infrastructure, transport, power and production capabilities means there's no slack to absorb the disruption shock.

The country will continue to reel for quite some time.

Last Call

From the Fukushima Daiichi files comes this set of images from the plant.  Japan is eager to show off how "safe" the plant is right now but the reality is the plant could take a generation or longer to clean up.

While radiation emissions have dropped significantly since the 11 March earthquake and tsunami, workers continue to operate in highly dangerous conditions.

Towns near Fukushima have responded cautiously to plans to build temporary storage sites for massive quantities of radioactive debris generated by the accident.

Almost eight months after the start of the crisis the government says the facilities will not be ready for at least another three years. In the meantime, towns will have to store the contaminated waste locally, despite health concerns.

To reach its target of halving radiation levels within two years the government will have to remove large quantities of soil. Scraping 4cm of topsoil from contaminated farmland in Fukushima prefecture would create more than 3m tonnes of waste, says the agriculture ministry, enough to fill 20 football stadiums.

Once completed, the storage facilities would hold soil and other contaminated waste for up to 30 years, local reports said.

"We have been aiming to start cleaning up as soon as possible," Toshiaki Kusano, an official in Fukushima city, told Reuters. "To do so we need to talk about where to store the waste, but we have not been able to answer the question residents are asking: how long it was going to stay there?"

I still stick by my estimate of a trillion dollars to clean this mess up completely.  Now we have a decent idea of the timeframe to go along with it.

Fukushima Jujitsu

The incoming administration of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is pulling the full flip flop on the country's post-Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster policy of eliminating nuclear reactors, and if anything, new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is eager to greenlight more reactors ASAP to make up for the country's power shortages.

Japan’s new leaders set to work Thursday on dismantling plans to rid the country of nuclear power by 2040, pledging to review a post-Fukushima policy.

The pro-business Liberal Democratic Party-led government also said they would give the green light to any reactors deemed safe by regulators, indicating shuttered power stations could start coming back online.

“We need to reconsider the previous administration’s policy that aimed to make zero nuclear power operation possible during the 2030s,” Toshimitsu Motegi told a news conference.

Shinzo Abe, who was elected as prime minister and unveiled his cabinet line-up on Wednesday, appointed Motegi as his economy, trade and industry minister, also in charge of supervising the nuclear industry.

Abe’s LDP won a landslide victory in the December 16 election, returning to power after a three-year break.

Despite anti-nuclear sentiment running high in Japan following the Fukushima disaster, parties opposing atomic energy made little impact at the ballot box.

Motegi said he was ready to give the go-ahead to resuming generation at nuclear power plants “if they are confirmed safe”.

Given that the LDP was swept back into power, Japan's voters are clearly far more worried about Japan's stagnant economy than nuclear safety.  To their credit, the LDP is already proposing big infrastructure projects to rebuild the damaged northeast coast of Japan and to put people to work immediately (something the US should emulate).  That stimulative rebuilding effort is going to include nuclear plants however.

I wish Japan would consider other power sources, but it's hard for me to complain when the US lacks the will to even try to rebuild anything at this point because the greatest country in the world "can no longer afford expensive boondoggles" like, you know, roads, bridges, schools and power lines.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 43

Time for another update on Japan and the fallout from Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and the latest figures from Japan's science ministry are devastating: some 8% of Japan's total land mass has been irradiated, including basically all of Fukushima prefecture, as well as significant parts of neighboring Gunma and Tochigi prefectures.

Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

It says more than 30,000 square kilometres of the country has been blanketed by radioactive cesium.

The science ministry defines places with a concentration of more than 10,000 becquerels per square meter as “areas affected by the nuclear accident”….  The science ministry fine-tuned its methods by subtracting levels of naturally existing background radiation.

This is pretty grim and devastating stuff.  Fukushima is going to be uninhabitable for generations and there's basically nothing anyone can do about it to fix it.  At some point Japan is going to have to bite the bullet and just write the prefecture off, and I don't think that will be long in the offing.

My heart goes out to Japan.  They're going to need a lot of help to get through this.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature: Two Years Later

It's hard to believe today marks the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, but two years after the earthquake and tsunami flooded the plant, refugees are still coping with depression, anxiety, and pretty much full-blown PTSD.  Kenichi Togawa and his family are all too typical, as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel discovers.

At first they lived in a gymnasium in Kawamata town, about 30 miles away. For months, they slept in an open room with many other families and shared shower facilities and eating areas. People cut in line to get food, and others got angry when the kids played too loudly. "We were just like dogs and cats without chains," says Yuka, Kenichi's wife.

That was tough, but their current situation isn't much better. All five family members live in a tiny, temporary house that's roughly 300 square feet. Sixteen-year-old Rina says she often has arguments with her younger siblings, especially when they're settling down to sleep at night. "[The room's] just so small, we hit each other by mistake," she says.

Yuka is grateful to have a roof over her family's head, but she doesn't think of it as a home. "This is temporary," she says. "We leave our house in the morning and we come home and it's temporary. It's like floating in the air." She worries about her children. For now they are healthy, but she fears they may become sick from radiation exposure.

Kenichi is also having a tough time. He is more isolated now than he was before the accident. He spends hours each day playing video games. He has put on weight and drinks more than he used to. Other evacuees are doing worse. Many don't have jobs, and some have taken up drinking and gambling, according to Hiromi Yamamoto, an English teacher from Namie who fled to nearby Iwake City.

Public health officials believe that the stress and isolation the nuclear accident has caused may be more dangerous than the radiation itself. Big disasters are very difficult to recover from, says Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the emotional fallout from Hurricane Katrina. Over the course of years, mental health problems can get worse and worse. "If it's something that goes on for a long, long time as Katrina did, that's where you get into trouble," he says. "The Japanese situation looks like it might be a similar sort of thing."

The Japanese nuclear Katrina.  Cheery, eh?  And yet two years later, the reality is only now sinking in that the refugees from Fukushima will never be allowed to go back home.  I'd be depressed too.  Japan's government has basically failed here, even worse than we did with Katrina.

So who knows at this point what the real legacy of Fukushima will be?

Also, be sure to read over the rest of my Fukushima posts from 2011.  The problems are still there.  They will be there for a very, very long time.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 19

With news now that soil samples taken near Fukushima Daiichi reveal plutonium, the collapse of TEPCO's credibility is pretty much complete.

In the latest blow to hopes authorities were gradually getting the plant under control, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said plutonium was found at low-risk levels in soil samples at the facility. 

A by-product of atomic reactions and also used in nuclear bombs, plutonium is highly carcinogenic and one of the most dangerous substances on the planet, experts say. 

They believe some of the plutonium may have come from spent fuel rods at Fukushima or damage to reactor No. 3, the only one to use plutonium in its fuel mix. 

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said while the plutonium levels were not harmful to human health, the discovery could mean the reactor's containment mechanism had been breached. 

"Plutonium is a substance that's emitted when the temperature is high, and it's also heavy and so does not leak out easily," agency deputy director Hidehiko Nishiyama told a news conference. 

"So if plutonium has emerged from the reactor, that tells us something about the damage to the fuel. And if it has breached the original containment system, it underlines the gravity and seriousness of this accident."

Yes, leaking plutonium might be considered grave in some circles.  Any wonder then that TEPCO is about to be nationalized as a result of the disaster at Fukushima?

Imposing state ownership on Asia's largest utility is one option Japan is mulling, National Strategy Minister Koichiro Gemba said on Tuesday, as the cost of fixing broken reactors and compensating businesses and households soar.

At the same time, the utility's ability to pay has been hobbled by a fall in generating capacity that is causing rolling blackouts that are expected to last for weeks if not months. TEPCO provides electricity to a third of the Japanese population and usually operates enough capacity to power the whole of Britain.

"I see no other options than nationalizing TEPCO," a fund manager at a major Japanese asset management firm said, declining to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. "People are so angry with the company and that anger won't subside if the government just injects money and lets the management stay."

Shareholders will be hurt, but the risk of the company collapsing without government support would be tremendous, he added.

The disaster and prospect of nationalization thumped TEPCO shares, which closed down almost 19 percent at 566 yen on Tuesday -- their lowest since 1964.

Seems like TEPCO is pretty much done at this point, as it should be. There's no way the company is going to be able to pay all the illness claims over the next generation -- and yes, that's how bad this will get, folks -- without folding. Hell, judging from the stock price, the company won't survive another week.

There's a reason why I think the total costs of this disaster will approach the one trillion mark...and that's dollars, not yen. Pretty soon I'm going to start having to append the Legal Stupidity and Criminal Stupidity tags. As it is, we're into Economic Stupidity as far as TEPCO is concerned.