Friday, January 20, 2012

Full Video of Inside the Reactor 2 Containment Vessel

For those of you who need to see the full version, not just the digest. TEPCO for some unknown reason uploaded 4 separate videos that are available for download for about a week. The total video length is about 40 minutes, with the last video being the longest (22 minutes). File sizes are big, and I will add to this post as I upload them on Youtube.

The scenes remind me of the movie "Alien".

Again, 40 unnamed workers in 10 teams prepped the site on January 17, receiving 3 millisieverts radiation exposure, and 34 unnamed workers operated the Olympus endoscope right outside the Containment Vessel, receiving 3 millisieverts radiation. Though Reactor 2's radiation levels are tame compared to those in Reactor 1 and Reactor 3, the air radiation level at the job site was over 20 millisieverts, according to TEPCO.

By the way, TEPCO released the photographs of the endoscope that was used, as if it was the hero of the operation.

Part 1 (Oh wait, it is supposed to be 8-plus minute video... What happened? Well enjoy while I try to figure that out.)



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay.
No core in the upper section of the RCV.
Praise the Lord.

Anonymous said...

so what is all the stuff flying around?

Anonymous said...

Hey, it looks like a cold shutdown!
So peaceful, so quiet, like nothing is going on anymore.

Oh wait, those are pictures of HELL!

Anonymous said...

water, water everywhere. i don't buy the "condensation" argument at all. must be dripping down from the RPV.

Atomfritz said...

I really recommend to download the videos from Tepco directly. The format conversions done by Youtube degenerate the already-poor quality much.

This intense raining visible there really amazes me. Aren't we supposed to assume that the around 15 cubic meters of water/hour is being fed into the RPV and not into the containment vessel?

Anyway a quick (and imprecise) calculation: assuming the inner diameter of the CV being 12 meters, the area is about 113 square meters. Assuming a rainfall of 15 cubic meters/hour on 113 sq.m, this would be a precipitation of 13 centimeters/hour, or 130 liters per sq.meter.

According to my subjective feeling the "rain" observed in the video is not as much as 13cm/h. I don't know if the installations above the camera allow for so much water to condense and drip down that way it's observed.
So I couldn't exclude the possibility that the "rain" observed is cooling water.

However, it's interesting that the distortions decrease when the camera lens is covered by this water.
If it were condensate water, I'd suppose it to be rather radioactive, and I'd expect the distortions to increase instead of decreasing yet.
So I suspect that this "rain" could be cooling water which has a shielding effect, rather than condensate.

I am not familiar with the inside of the containments, and so I can only say that the video didn't show much to me.

What I observed is;
-There must have been intensive infrared heating from the reactor, regarding the scorched paint all over there, and the damaged concrete surface, except on some areas that were shadowed.
-If this radiation-hardened camera which boasts to be resistent to one kilosievert of radiation is so heavily distorted, the radiation there can be assumed to be extreme, prohibiting any non-remote-controlled handling of the stuff there for centuries.
It's quite interesting to watch the distortions increase when the endoscope leaves the borehole to peek into the containment.
-Tepco should be asked where this "rain" water comes from.

We still have neither any clue where the corium is, nor in which shape it is, as they didn't drill into the reactor itself.

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