It took 51 workers (from TEPCO and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, most likely) 3 hours on October 11, 2012 to probe again the Containment Vessel of Reactor 1 at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.
TEPCO's handout for the press (Japanese, 10/11/2012) says the maximum radiation exposure for the workers was 1.83 millisievert. TEPCO does not say how many groups of workers went in, and how long each group spent inside the reactor building.
Tomorrow (October 12), TEPCO will send in the workers again (no information if they are the same ones who have been going there every day since October 9) to collect water samples. On October 13, the workers will go there again, and install a thermocouple and a water gauge inside the Containment Vessel, again using the same penetration.
This is the abbreviated version of the full video which is nearly 1 hour and 40 minutes long (which you can download for your record, here):
It is simply infuriating to think all this work may not have been needed if enough people at TEPCO had dared to break the rules and social niceties on March 11, 12, 13. Even more infuriating that most Japanese still don't get it.
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10 comments:
So infuriating, indeed !
It does not bode well............
http://beforeitsnews.com/environment/2012/10/radiation-spreading-east-and-south-across-mainland-usa-2450544.html
Check this out, I spotted this last week. It’s the top story at “Before it’s News”
If you follow the links, you can click on spots on the USA maps and get the radiation readings, so far, right around Wisco/Illinois everything looks pretty normal.
Nothing to panic on here, just the same old things of proper living in the modern world
1) Antioxidants (lots of vitamin C as the cheapest easiest way, no need to get “tricky” with this one)
2) HEPA filters in your house, 3 or 4
3) Stay out of the rain, unless proven (i.e. Geiger counter) that the rain is not radioactive.
Kyodo: Water at Fukushima Unit 1 is more radioactive OUTSIDE containment vessel than inside
http://enenews.com/strange-water-fukushima-unit-1-radioactive-containment-vessel-inside/comment-page-1
The unit 1 would have exploded and melted down even if TEPCO employees broke the rules and got enough batteries. There were no problems venting this particular unit and the meltdown happened just hours after the tsunami.
So no need to be infuriated - this particular work would have been needed anyway. If they had enough batteries, maybe the problems at the other two units could have been lessened, but we would still have a widespread contamination of the surrounding area from the unit 1 alone.
Maybe. But we would never know.
Reactor 1 explosion did not result in wide-area contamination, by the way. And they had a very hard time venting Reactor 1. The worker who finally managed to manually open the valve got 100 millisieverts, as I remember.
Completely agree, anon 1:27.
They for sure could have saved at least reactor 4-6, so the economical loss would have been less.
But I really believe this would have been possible only if reactor 2 and 3 won't have molten.
Maybe I am naive, but I still believe that this could have been prevented if Kan would have called the SDF for an all-out effort instead of attempting to micromanage every detail by himseld like it were just a SimCity accident.
Sweet water, batteries, all this won't have been a problem to get to the site asap with military usage, even less when accepting USA help.
But, what I still don't understand and what the news' wording doesn't reveal to me: did the Tepco people say "Umm here is 730 dollar, we need as many batteries we can get for the money", or did they say "we have a problem at the nuclear plant! We need 1000 batteries asap. Ship there what you have and call your competitors also to dump all their stock! You'll be rewarded well!"
Did the battery buyers dare to reveal at all that the batteries were needed to avert a catastrophe? (which would be a face-loss to Tepco independently of the outcome)
Atomfritz, I bet my money on the latter, that they couldn't even tell the store what they needed the batteries for.
I find it more infuriating that none of this would have happened if people weren't stupid in general.
If you want to draw parallels, remember the Gulf Oil Spill incident a few years back? The whole area was being covered in oil, destroying life, nature, business and making people horribly ill.
BP and the others responsible got away with it, diverting blame and avoiding paying compensation to the victims. Their "solution" was to spray the whole thing with toxic Corexit to push the oil to the bottom of the sea.
The Gulf never recovered from that oil spill, and from what I've been hearing, the oil's back again. Do you know how people were reacting to the whole thing? "There was never any oil spill." "It was just mass media hysteria."
And this is just ONE example. Ignorance and stupidity is everywhere.
No way workers could have mentioned the impending meltdown when seeking to acquire batteries; I am sure however they could persuade the seller with other arguments: a purchase order stamped by the plant director would probably have worked fine.
Whether that would have made a difference, and how much of a difference, is another story: the reactors were anyways likely damaged by the quake, without ultimate heat sink (no cooling pumps), flooded and without external power supply. At most, batteries are good to operate valves (unless they are stuck...), instrumentation and a little light.
Also, even if they saved reactor 4, Tepco would be bankrupt anyways.
Beppe
The people of Lithuania voted against reintroducing the use of nuclear power in their country -- and beat Japan on democracy 1-0.
A large liquified natural gas terminal to be completed in 2014 will allow them to stop being exclusively dependent on Russian gas pipes for electricity and even export it (source: Associated Press).
Lithuania will likely save money too, because npps are not competitive with gas fired plants.
Beppe
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