Making sense of Fukushima

As a technophobe it was always a struggle to understand exactly what happened at Fukushima following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, especially amidst the often conflicting information and misinformation.  Even now we get statements like "IF there's a meltdown" at Fukushima.

So when I discovered that ABC correspondent and longstanding resident in Japan, Mark Willacy had written a book I sat down and read it.

I found that it brought a lot of clarity to the bits of information that came out piecemeal from different sources.

Willacy, in writing the book interviewed many people, including firemen and fishermen affected by the tsunami and events at Fukushima as well as some of the people, such as the manager at the Fukushima plant at the time, Tepco officials and - notably, the then-prime minister Naoto Kan.

I have made these notes, focusing on events at Fukushima Dai-ichi in the days following the tsunami.

What comes out clearly is the corruption of Tepco and collusion between the nuclear company, regulation officials and government, as well as the comfortable relationship between industry and media which ensured that the real story couldn't emerge - whistleblowers and truth tellers were weeded out and dealt with.

It is equally clear from Willacy's book that although the immediate cause of the catastrophe at Fukushima Dai-ichi was a natural disaster, it was also definitely an avoidable, man made phenomenon.

I hope that you find that the following  adds to your understanding, even if it doesn't answer the question of whether the fuel rods at Reactor 4 dried out (in which case the worst has already happened, or whether they remain, damaged but intact, presenting the real possibility of further disaster.

I guess,at present, no one really knows for sure and only the future will tell.

Meltdown 

at Fukushima

Seemorerocks

Government was not getting information from Tepco: “was extremely uneasy about whether they were telling us the truth about the situation at the site”

(Naoto Kan)

The top brass of the company were out of the country – on junkets – when the earthquake hit

“We couldn't understand who was taking the responsibility at TEPCO for this situation”

Tepco manager Yoshida was asking to vent the radioactive steam from reactor #1 to prevent an explosion.

Pressure in the containment vessel had soared to nearly double of its design strength.

The main fear was of a hydrogen explosion. If the zirconium-coated fuel rods inside the reactor over-heated, they would react with water, creating hydrogen.Once the hydrogen leaked out of the containment vessel it could reach an ignition point with oxygen in the air that could blow the building and reactor containment vessel apart

PM made decision to vent at 1.30 am

Bleeding and venting

Venting would take the pressure off the vessel and allow them to inject cooling water into the reactor to prevent meltdown – this is called feed and bleed

It was already too late

The fuel had begun melting more than 7 hours earlier.

3pm Edano announced there would be a 'small' release of radiation, assuring the public that the prevailing winds were blowing out to sea.

While at the plant Kan would be seen as interfering and slowing things down.

Kan takes helicopter to personally visit Fukushima – to get answers- and is assured by Haruki Madarama (head of Nuclear Safety Commission) “there will be no H2 explosion” in Reactor 1

Kan arrives to find that venting has no yet occurred. It turns out that they don't know how to do this manually (they could not do it remotely, because of the lack of power), so there is a frantic consultation of the operating manual – trying to figure it out while watching radiation levels rise.

Kan is told they would open the vents manually as soon as possible, 'even if we have to set up a suicide squad'

Kan's visit came at a crucial time for the operators.

At 8.03 orders went out to open the vent valve in an hour and Kan leaves for Tokyo

Kan at the time contemplated “the worse-case scenario: a doomsday release of radiation caused by multiple meltdowns, a chain reaction requiring the evacuation of …. Tokyo, and its 35 million people”

Non-essential people in the bunker were allowed to leave.

Suicide teams were working inside the reactor #1 control room with rising radiation level with full protection gear with oxygen tanks, thyroid tablets. One worker received 106 miilisieverts – were working in the dark, in intense heat.

Radiation levels so high that workers rotating in and out every 17 minutes

After a while they found the wheel for manually opening the vent and set the aperture for the valve at 25% - and left.

Radiation levels were rising (125 millisieverts in front of service building

Radioactive cesium-137 and iodine-131 near reactor 1 – a sure sign that the reactor core's fuel was damaged. Tellarium 132 – a telltale sign of reactor meltdown – was also discovered

At 8.15 am vapor seen rising into the sky – venting had begun – 'pressure was going lower'

It took Tepco 13 hours to start venting.

They were running out of fresh water to cool the reactors, and they knew they would have to start to use seawater, but this would be the end of the reactor

“The injection of water as a coolant for the reactors was the first priority; it is the most important issue. When fresh water ran out, there was no choice but to inject seawater” (N. Kan)

Tepco preferred not to cool with seawater because salt would damage it and it would have to be decommissioned.

“Can we agree that we have the option of waiting as long as possible in order to use fresh water” - Tepco official

At 2.50 pm there was no fresh water left and injection for cooling was stopped

Explosion at Reactor No. 1

At 3.36 reactor building #1 exploded (white smoke seen billowing from Fukushima)

Wind pushed the plume up the coast

“Suddenly, what looked like a sound wave rippled upwards from the Reactor 1 building, making the very air shimmer. Then light-grey smoke mushroomed sideways out of the building towards the sea and to the north. The wind pushed the spreading plume up the coast, as more smoke pured out. A magnified, slow-motion replay showed a hint of flame as the hydrogen inside the building combined with the oxygen already there, igniting and blowing off the roof, sending contaminated smoke into the atmosphere. The side walls of the upper building were blasted away, exposing the X-shaped steel framework”

The PM had heard nothing from Tepco or the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency about the explosion. He had learned about it from television.

Engineers at plant started stepping up measurements of radiation and feared that they would never get out alive.

Confirmation came that the containment vessel was intact but the building damaged – likely a hydrogen explosion. Workers ordered to stay in the bunker.

Prepared to get underway to open vents at both reactors 2 and 3.

Radiation and evacuation of the population

NHK made announcement to residents of Fukushima to stay indoors and close doors and windows, cover mouths and not drink tap water.

.

At 5.44 there was an announcement of the evacuation of people within a 10 km range of the plant – but this was not communicated to local officials.

Residents were evacuated inland, but the wind changed and radiation moved inland in same direction as the evacuees at about 4 pm – just 24 minutes after the hydrogen explosion at reactor no.1

This area became one of the most contaminated in Fukushima.

The report subsequently put out by Tepco lied about informing local officials

“The reports said they (Tepco) sent people to the temporary town hall at Tsushima to explain the situation”

“I still think it was an act of murder...What were they thinking whne if came to people's dignity and their lives? I doubt they even thought about our existance” (Tamostsu Baba, mayor of Namie)

Bureaucrats in Tokyo knew the truth as they had a computer system (SPEEDI) to predict the spread of radiation. These forecasts went unpublished, so as “not to create panic”.

This information was supposed to be made available to local officials, but wasn't. The Education and Science Ministry which oversaw SPEEDI, was holding it all back.

Even the PM and most of his inner circle didn't know SPEEDI existed.

The information was withheld until 12 days after the disaster for fear of 'creating a panic'

During this period SPEEDI information was made available hourly to the United States military.

12 March – 7 pm Workers started injecting sea water from the Pacific into Reactor to bleed away excess heat. 60,000 tonnes of water would be sprayed over and into the reactors in the first month, creating pools of highly reactive water in tunnels, basements, cracks and drains inside the buildings.

A worker checking water inside Reactor 2 would see his dosimeter max out at 1000 millisieverts (or 1 sievert) an hour.

Tepco officials claimed : “the water being poured into the reactors wlll evaporate in due course” (sic)

PM Kan tried to get answers from Tepco about the spraying of seawater (about which he was not advised) and the possibility of re-criticality (when a nuclear reaction accelerates and then reaches a self-sustaining level that is difficult to stop).

Tepco intended to prevent re-criticality by adding boric acid.

An order was made to stop to seawater injection.

“Yoshida must have thought it was the PM ordering it to stop. Of course I did not order it to stop”. (N Kan)

This instruction (wherever it came from) was disobeyed by Yoshida, the plant manager – he continued to inject seawater into Reactor 1. He defied and overrode Head Office.

“Suspending the seawater would have meant death (for those at the plant)”

14 March, 2011

Water levels at Reactor 3 dropped below measurable levels, leaving the 548 fuel assemblies fully exposed.

“The fact that pressure is rising in the dry well means that – like the number 1 reactor- a hydrogen explosion is now a possibility …. we have neither water nor ideas (to stop water blowing over and the building blowing up) (Yoshida)

One quarter of the Reactor 3 core had already melted down

Japan;s Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano had mentioned the possibility of meltdown, but would soon backpedal, insisting the rods had not melted and there was no danger to the population.

At this stage a PA announcement was made in the bunker – could the workers lend Tepco some money to buy water, fuel or food!!

The company was preparing a damage-control strategy for the media, saying the prospects of further explosions was 'extremely remote'.

“So do we really want to scare the public? If we are asked at our next press conference, we will deny it. We'll say (another hydrogen explosion is )impossible” - (Tsunehisa Katsumata – Tepco chairman)

Explosion at Reactor 3

At 11.01 Reactor 3 exploded.

The smoke from the explosion was black.

Tepco decided to simply parrot the government line even though no one knew what had caused the explosion.

The cause of the explosion has never been established, some speculating that it was a nuclear explosion – just like Chernobyl.

“There was an orange flash, which suggests the temperature must have been thousands of degrees centigrade before the explosion. Then there was black smoke' (Setsuo Fujiwara, nuclear-reactor designer) - a hydrogen explosion creates white smoke and steam.

The fuel in Reactor 3 is MOX – plutonium was scattered about after this blast.

The reactor building was bent like candy, unlike no.1 where the steel framework remained intact.

All this indicates a nuclear explosion.

At Fukushima Daiichi there was worry about a chain reaction.

At 1.25 pm Yoshida feared the Core Isolation Cooling system at Reactor 2 has stopped.

By 4 pm they knew the fuel rods were fully exposed.

At 5 pm Masataka Shimizu asked how much time left until they reached 'the worse-case scenario' (an uncontrolled meltdown and a chain reaction). He was told – 2 hours.

Tepco started thinking about evacuating the workers.

Pressure inside Reactor 2's containment vessel had exceeded it design limit and radiation was spewing into the atmosphere.

The fear was of a chain reaction involving Fukushima Dai-ini.

“There are a total of ten reacotrs in the first and second sites, and 11 spent fuel sites. If these ten reactors and all the fuel pools melted down in the days and weeks afterwards, it would cause the spread of radioactive substances dozens of times greater than Chernobyl....Should that happen, the entire east of Japan, including Tokyo, would have to be evacuated. Japan as a state would be finished. Many people would be killed”

(Naoto Kan, ex-PM of Japan)

Tepco wanted to evacuate workers from plant

Tepco started to discuss the evacuation of all workers from the plant

“We are now working to confirm the status of the situation with the appropriate body” (ie the PM's department).

Kan was woken up to be told that Tepco had decided to withdraw, they were sounding the PM's department out.

“I want to evacuate the staff at the #1 plant to the #2 plant. Would you help in any way” (Imasataka Shimizu to Industry Minister Kaeda)

Kan was incensed by suggestions that Tepco should pull out and faced down Tepco president Shimizu

“There will be no withdrawal, Not ever... Our country will not survive unless we put our lives on the line to bring this situation under control”

The Tepco president backed down immediately.

Tepco subsequently adopted the position that it never wanted a full withdrawal.

Reactors 4 and 2

At 5.35 am there was another explosion.

Smoke was coming out of Reactor 4.

In Reactor 2 pressure soddenly dipped to zero. It is not known what happened but this explosion released the greatest single burst of fallout during the entire crisis.

At about this time (9.38 am) the Reactor 4 building exploded and its wall collapsed and a fire started on the 3^rd floor. Firefighters couldn't get near it because radiation levels were too high. It would have to burn itself out.

The fifth floor rooftop are was badly damaged, ripped apart from the explosion. This is where the fuel pool was stored.

“We'll die if it (the fuel pool) explodes”

Reactor 4 had been shut down prior to the tsunami and the fuel rods transferred to the spent fuel pool on the upper floor – 1331 highly radioactive fuel assemblies – containing about 10 times more cesium-137 than was released by Chernobyl., 5000 times more cesium than released by the Hiroshima bomb.

It also caused a reinforced concrete wall in the fuel pool to bulge by more than three centimetres.

The blast tore off the roof and left the fuel pool and its spent fuel exposed to the elements, hanging 4 stories above ground next to the reactor vessel. This was eventually covered with a white plastic sheet.

In addition to the danger of a collapse of the building (say in an earthquake) -

“if there's a crack in the pool and the water drains out, the fuel rods will be exposed...it will then be impossible to cool the fuel. So, if an accident happens, ten times more cesium than was already released by the meltdown will go into the atmosphere. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, Tokyo could become uninhabitable”

(Reactor engineer, Hiroaki Koide)

The wind which had been blowing eastwards changed direction and started to gust inland in the direction of Fukushima City.

The PM ordered the temporary evacuation of 650 workers at the plant, leaving a skeleton crew of essential staff, the 'Fukushima 50'.

An evacuation of people living within a 20 km radius of the plant was ordered, and for people within 20-30 km radius to stay indoors.

At reactor 2 radiation levels became extremely toxic, and radiation at the front gate spiked at 11,930 microsieverts/hour.

There is a description of the actions of firefighters to spray three tonnes of seawater every minute into the nuclear fuel pool of reactor 3 in conditions of high radiation, fir 7 hours at a time, retreating every few minutes to their airtight truck to ensure their radiation exposure didn't max out.

Radiation and Japanese schoolchildren

They were being exposed to 130 millsieverts per hour (or 2 millisieverts every minute), but the other danger was exhaustion and dehydration.

Some months after the disaster the Japanese government raised the radiation limit for schoolchildren to 20 millisieverts a year, which basically meant that children in Japan could receive the same annual dose of radiation as international nuclear power-plant workers.

This was done to keep the number of schools that exceeded the limit to the minimum.

Eventually the government flip-flopped and bowed to pressure by lowering the limit back to one millisievert.

On 15 May Tepco finally admitted what many had known for weeks:

"We estimate that regarding the Unit 1, nuclear fuel pellets have melted, falling to the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel at a relatively early stage after the tsunami reached the station"

Half the 4-metre-long fuel rods of Reactor 1 had been exposed to the air and melted down within five hours of the tsunami striking.

It was also feared that this molten pool had burnt through the bottom of the pressure vessel and was sitting on the concrete floor of the containment vessel below.  This was later confirmed by Tepco, estimating that this toxic lava had eaten its way through 70 cm of the 7.6 metre-thick slab.

Tepco also reported that:

• Reactor 2 probably suffered a meltdown 100 hours after the quake
• the fuel inside Reactor 3 was exposed and had melted down about 60 hours after the quake

International experts knew this within 24 hours of the tsunami - from the presence if cesium near the plant, a sure sign of nuclear fission.

Tepco maintained that it was simply too busy and distracted to tell the people that Japan was facing multiple meltdowns.

In the Japanese cabinet mention of the word 'meltdown' was taboo - to avoid public panic.  Also, it is clear that the government simply did not know what was happening at the plant and was grasping in the dark for information.

Tepco was (and is) unable to tell the public any more because extreme radiation made any assessment of the interior of the containment vessels impossible.

"The reactor cores melted down and  nobody knows where the melted fuel is now...we do not know the full scale of the contamination of the environment"

Hiroaki Koide

On 16 December 2011, none months after the meltdowns, Japan's new PM Yoshihiko Noda declared that the reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi had "been brought under control and were in a state of 'cold shutdown' ( another lie or half-truth) and announced the decommisioning of the nuclear plant - a process that would take 40 years.

Willacy talks about other issues, such as the underplaying of safety issues by the company in order to save money and finishes his account by describing how earlier this year power was cut to the cooling systems at four pools used to store 8800 radioactive rods because of the activities of one rat and the slapdash improvisations to keep the plant from spiralling out of control again.

The only thing marring the book was that he finishes it up with optimistic statements on how  innovative Japan is and how it will come out of this well - all of which is belied by the rest of the contents of the book.

Oh well! It is the habit of just about everyone to ignore their own arguments and take a good dose of hopium!