Thursday, July 28, 2011

#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Humans Enter Reactor 3, Receive 4.61 Millisieverts for 40 Minute Work

11 TEPCO employees entered the Reactor 3 reactor building on July 27 to measure radiation in locations where they would need to work in order to switch the water injection point to the ECCS pipe for more efficient "cooling" of the "fuel in the RPV".

Looking at the survey map that they did, those locations have particularly high radiation. One particular spot measured 280 millisieverts/hour, and that's where they hope to use for water injection. (See page 3 of TEPCO handout below.)

They also managed to measure the radiation level on the stairs leading up to the 3rd floor, and it was even higher than on the stairs to the 2nd floor, almost twice as high.

TEPCO's July 28 English handout of the survey is full of interesting misspellings, but when they say "bulb", I do believe they meant "valve". To Japanese ears, the difference between "b" and "v" is close to zero, and the difference between "u" in bulb and "a" in valve is non-existent:

(Page 1)


(Page 2)


(Page 3)

One of Fukushima workers who tweets is worried about plutonium in the reactor building. He also said some time ago that the emergency radiation limit for the workers at the plant of 250 millisieverts was applied only to TEPCO employees in practice, while most of the subcontractors were limiting their workers' cumulative radiation below 100 millisieverts. TEPCO has been sending its own employees to the areas with very high radiation.

But when it comes to actually installing pipes and equipment, it will likely be the subcontractors who will have to do the job. It will be people like Mr. Watanabe who was interviewed by The Independent. I don't think TEPCO employees know much about plumbing. 1 minute of work at that highest radiation location, and you will get 2.8 millisieverts.

4 comments:

doitujin said...

why so many people? and i feel i really can't stand reading things like these anymore... it gets worse and worse and the cumulative dose numbers are so high by now... (http://mainichi.jp/select/weathernews/20110311/nuclear/archive/news/2011/07/20110728k0000m040088000c​.html
"福島第1原発:高線量被ばくの作業員は2160人 not even mentioning the inner dose...)
i feel so bad for them, so sad. and the article about school baseball... well... what to write... purely sick and disgusting.

Anonymous said...

I hope Tepco brings a huge, ginormous, whopping, biggest-in-history lawsuit against GE for building such dangerous plants. That's the only thing these huge corporations care about, money. Human suffering means nothing to them as long as it doesn't hurt the bottom line too much. That's the only way to stop more from being built.

"The reactors for Units 1, 2, and 6 were supplied by General Electric, those for Units 3 and 5 by Toshiba, and Unit 4 by Hitachi. All six reactors were designed by General Electric.[4]"

4. Dedman, Bill (March 13, 2011). "General Electric-designed reactors in Fukushima have 23 sisters in U.S". MSNBC. Retrieved March 14, 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Condos Puerto Vallarta said...

I’ve been visiting your blog for a while now and I always find a gem in your new posts.

Anonymous said...

Average radiation dose Estimate of the number of radiation-induced
fatal cancers *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/should-we-be-giving-low-dose-radiation-research

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