this could never become an event like Chernobyl....it will be Chernobyl times 6.

@1 No. But the comparison to deepwater horizon is pretty fitting at this point.

Indeed, if only the regulatory rulebook is written just so, and then debacles like Deepwater Horion and Fukushima can't happen.

Of course they're similar events with respect to how governments, corporate interests and the media have obfuscated, downplayed, and covered up critical information on what's really happening.

It will only take one reactor meltdown (and it seems that is in process at reactor 3) to set off a chain reaction. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.

The explosion at Chernobyl effectively stopped its reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse and it seems nuclear fission is still taking place in multiple reactors.

Lastly, what happens when the third largest economy in the world, the one who produces more than half of its silicon chips, cars and other electronics has its energy infrastructure slashed by 40% overnight? We will find out. We are all Japanese now.

"even safe levels are only safe statistically" What does this mean Goldy?

@5,

It means that there's a cost/benefit analysis that is at play in setting a maximum exposure level, based on the statistical likelihood of causing illness.

For example (and I'm totally pulling this number out of my ass) say that exposure to a particular substance at a given level might increase the likelihood of cancer by 1 in 10 million. That's awfully damn low. But expose 10 million people to that substance at that level, and statistically, one should expect an additional case of cancer.

Goldy, it would probably scare the pants off of you to know how much I've been hanging on your every word these past three weeks. The mainstream press treats this story like a sidebar, but it's the part of the earthquake/tsunami that we will all be living with for years, and it's STILL happening.

I did manage to haul my 20-year-old daughter home from Tokyo (and she is none too grateful for it) and your posts were 50% of my decision-making process. The other 50% were my friends at the State Department who said (long before it was official that Americans should leave), "Look, nothing like this has ever happened in the history of man, and it will be waaaay worse for a long time before it gets better, and we won't even know how bad it was for years."

You guys sure were/are right.

Our Governor said that the radiation in a pint of milk is less than 5 hours of flight time. So each gallon is equivalent to the radiation of 32-39 hours of flight time. According to the American Nuclear Society, the radiation in 20 hours of flight time is equivalent to a chest xray... http://www.new.ans.org/pi/resources/dose….
So a gallon of milk could have as much radiation as 1 or 2 chest xrays. And that is just milk. Obviously the radiation is falling on our other food supplies as well.

Ha, I told you so. The bullshit statements Tepco was issuing, each subsequent one proving the prior one was a prevarication, pretty much painted this a disaster of incompetence from the get-go. The Japanese government deferring time and again to the company, sealed it.

One reason this is potentially worse than Chernobyl is the sheer amount of uncontained, uncontrolled nuclear fuel now, both new and spent, at Fukushima Daiichi. Something like a couple thousand tons, which is a shitload more than Chernobyl had. If it can get controlled this second, it's still fucked up, but not as bad as Chernobyl, but it's not controlled now, won't be controlled tomorrow, and I don't see any particular plan to get it controlled.

Another reason it's worse is that Japan, a more densely-populated and efficient country, which uses its land more intensely, and struggles to be self-sufficient in food production, can scarcely afford to lose that entire corner of their country in virtual perpetuity to an exclusion zone. There's no way to replace that.

Coming back to our own country for a second, I keep thinking about the location of the Indian Point nuclear plant, twenty-some-odd miles up the Hudson River from New York City. It sits on a seismic fault, oddly enough. It also sits on a river that flows downstream to the largest metropolitan area in the US. It also sits on the edge of the great watershed area that provides all the municipal water for a city of 8 million. What would be the result of a disaster there? A city that had to be abandoned, for lack of water supply if nothing else, the transportation corridor that connects New England to the rest of the United States for another, a massive humanitarian crisis trying to relocate that many people, and a death blow to our economy that would be unbearable. I hope we'll learn something from the Japan crisis, the unbearable costs of fucking up when the fuck-up is nuclear.

@8 Ummm... the effect of radioisotopes inside your body are entirely different from radiation emitted by those isotopes outside your body. Besides that, I-131, once consumed, doesn't act on your body equally. It heads straight for your thyroid gland and concentrates there, because that's the part of your body that's most hungry for iodine.

@6 I see - but the numbers you use aren't that far off. And while I think it's good to get accurate information, people don't really grasp that, and we still end up with people like bluesun who's afraid of his milk.

Whereas prompt isn't even bothered by dog turds in his garden, long as they don't stink any more. Cause it the smell dat git ya. Or something.

Same guy predicted there wouldn't even be any significant radioactive contamination. I bring this up because he won't tell you about all the times he's been dead wrong about this, any more than the cheerleaders who told you to buy Goldman Sachs right up until they tanked will remind you how wrong they were. Guys like that have no memory, and they're hoping nobody else does either.

You have these immensely complex credit default swaps, or immensely complex nuclear plants, or offshore drilling rigs, run by corporations that live to gamble, and who will never admit to the public the size of the risk.

And they're all aided groupies. Happy warriors volunteering their spare time to soothe the worried public that nothing will go wrong.

As Bad As Chernobyl

I just did the math, based on the IAEA briefing for April 3 (I don't have a permanent link yet, so click the link for April 3), wherein it says:

On 2 April, measurements were made at 7 locations at distances of 32 to 62 km, North and Northwest to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The dose rates ranged from 0.6 to 4.5 microsievert per hour. At the same locations, results of beta-gamma contamination measurements ranged from 0.09 to 0.46 megabecquerel per square metre.

If my math is right (always a big if), .46 MBq/m2 is roughly equivalent to 12.5 Curies/km2.

Take a look at the map of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. That level of radioisotope contamination already puts it well within the parameters of that zone.

If the various nations of the world are willing to allow corporations to control energy resources (or anything else that affects everyone on earth), no one should complain when those corporations behave as they always do.

TEPCO's decision-making process was fully evident more than a week ago when it announced that it was "allowing" its workers to work around more twice as much radiation exposure as had previously been allowed. That wasn't a scientifically-arrived-at reconsideration of worker safety; it was a crass corporate decision. They're willing to effectively murder their own workers now when they should have decommissioned these reactors 10 years ago but didn't because they made a lot of money for the owners. Same situation with BP: they ignored obvious safety concerns and workers died. If corporations don't care about their own personnel, why would anyone expect them to care about anyone else.

Not to disagree with anything else you're saying, Goldy, but I-131 is a fission product. Thus, all the I-131 we have the potential of seeing was already in existence at the time fission stopped (if fission is still actually occurring, we're screwed in many other ways.) Much of it is still inside the reactor, presumably, but it, too, has gone through several half-lives of decay. It may still be in the process of being released, but the strength of what's in there remaining to be released gets cut in half every 8 days. Which is perhaps the only good thing there is to think about all this.

Hmm...interesting how all of our apologist friends have started to shutup.

I think this is bigger than any of us think. Goverments don't enjoy admitting their mistakes or showing weakness, especially Asian countries, so they probably have a ton of info they'll sit on for years.

@14 Fission is still occurring. In places expected and otherwise.

The partially-melted fuel rods have dropped enough of their contents to create a mass which is not moderatable and must be cooled until that mass runs out of fuel/accumulates enough fission-product neutron poisons to self-stop. Oh, in a year or two. Or three. Reactors 1 through 3 are experiencing fission, I'd guess, from those melted rods.

Then, there's this: The "spent-fuel" pool at reactor 4 is stuffed to the gills, has lost a lot or most of its coolant at one point or another, and actually has an entire set of brand-new, live, unspent fuel rods in it from when they took the reactor down for maintenance. Without the water, which not only acts as a coolant, but as a neutron moderator, a chain reaction was/is likely. I.e. fission. With fission comes heat. With heat comes melting, white smoke, grey smoke, etc. There are 480 metric tons (that's about a million pounds) of fuel in that pool. (Each fuel rod assembly is 320 Kg and there are 1400+ fuel assemblies in that pool.) A question for a reporter to ask: "Please show us a diagram of how the 204 unspent fuel rods were distributed in the pool amongst the spent ones." By right, they should have been "checkerboarded." I'd bet anyone a beer that they just put them all mostly together, because it was faster. And stupider.

You're right. This has gone far worse than I could have imagined. The idea that fission could still be occurring is frankly stunning to me. But the idea that we'll end up with tens of thousands of casualties is still quite a ways off. At this point, I'd wait for the IAEA to say things before I listen to TEPCO. And I'll say it again, and continue saying it, nuclear power is safe. Or as safe as reliable energy gets. Having worked in energy, it's not easy to control that much energy. Sure, ideally solar and wind and geo could save the world, but until it can, we have to do it this way. People bitching about this make me think of people telling the starving to only eat organic. Face reality.

@11 Mature.

@17

Americans could consume a fraction of the energy they do and still have a better standard of living than most of the world. Ending our energy gluttony is not "starving".

You present a false dilemma between coal and nuclear, and a false dilemma between profligate consumption and freezing in the dark. And your definition of "safe" is laughable.

@16

Your post is really interesting and I agree about the melted fuel forming a difficult-to-cool blob at the bottom of the reactor vessels that will require years of attention, but I'm not sure I agree with your concern about the spent-fuel pool:

"..an entire set of brand-new, live, unspent fuel rods in it from when they took the reactor down for maintenance. Without the water, which not only acts as a coolant, but as a neutron moderator, a chain reaction was/is likely. I.e. fission"

The purpose of the moderator (water) is to slow neutrons in the fuel assembly so that they CAN cause fission, without it the reaction will stop. Fresh fuel wouldn't have to be cooled in a pool, as it only gives of a slight amount of heat through spontaneous decay events. In any case, even if fresh fuel was stored in water (which strikes me as a bad idea), they would have to arrange it in such a way that the 'pitch'/ distance between adjacent fuel bundles was far enough to prevent it from becoming critical.