Thursday, September 27, 2012

Video of Inside the Smoke/Steam-Filled Reactor 1 Containment Vessel at #Fukushima I Nuke Plant


TEPCO released the 40-minute video on September 27, 2012, with no explanation of when the video was taken, or how much radiation exposure the workers manipulating the drill and the camera got. (The workers had been practicing on the mockup.)

The video starts after a 130-mm diameter hole was drilledAt first, nothing seems to be happening, until 50 seconds into the video when the aperture of the ball valve opens. What you see at the end of the hole is the inside of the Reactor 1 Containment Vessel. The camera gets inserted at about 2 minutes into the video.

The inside seems to be filled with whitish smoke or steam, though it doesn't look dripping wet like in Reactor 2's Containment Vessel. At about 4 minutes, some sort of structure is discernible. At 5 minutes, a rust-colored wall starts to appear on the left side of the screen.

At about 18 minutes, the camera focuses better, and you start to see what looks like metal and concrete(? it may be mangled metal) debris.

What destroyed the inside like this? Earthquake? Explosion?


TEPCO used Penetration X100B, which is on the northwest corner of the Containment Vessel above the equipment hatch door, not the high-radiation southeast corner.


According to TEPCO's monthly progress report as of September 24, 2012 (page 24 of the PDF), workers from Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy are doing the work. (Workers from Toshiba are doing the investigation of the Reactors 2 and 3 Containment Vessels.)

In June this year, TEPCO did the survey of the Reactor 1 torus room, where they found the radiation level just above the water surface to be over 10 sieverts/hour.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

no more white dots coming from gamma-ray ? and a picture totally blurry ?
very strange to me...

Atomfritz said...

The video's contrast is very low, unlike reactor 2's footage. No idea why, maybe a different camera, camera setting or some postprocessing to reduce radiation noise.

Anyway, on VLC player, using the Image Adjustment menu to increase contrast and saturation and some sharpening activated, some plasticity can be restored.

It's really unusual scene.

In the tube, some metallic-looking dust that is scratched off easily by the camera head (best seen when camera is being retracted). Hope they took a sample of the stuff that stuck at the camera when retracting.

But, in total the experiment seems to have failed, as there was an obstacle.
It looks to me like some metal part and some molten stuff (machine?).
Practically all stuff is discolored,
Possibly it wasn't even a real "explosion", but just a combination of some megawatt-size "steam cleaner" and the oxygen-starved "baking" afterwards?

So we didn't see what's behind the equipment monorail hatch, which was the objective of the "mission" :-(

Hope they use a telescopic camera to see more of the RPV itself at the next attempt!

Anonymous said...

finally, I found the dots:
if you look frame by frame, with a screen magnifier (I use os x), we can see postproduction which made dead white pixel colored (green, brown,dark red)
they are easy to spot as they just stand for 1 frame, so everything on 2 frames is just video noise.
may be it's to make the video more easy to wath and less scary
sorry for my bad english.

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