QUAKE UPDATE Day 19



Kasumi and the girls will be moving in with us for a time... This should be interesting...

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Looks like they’re gonna go all Chernobyl on it... hints at abandoning the reactor site altogether and smothering the whole thing in some sort of substance...

"I think maybe the situation is much more serious than we were led to believe," said one expert, Najmedin Meshkati, of the University of Southern California, adding it may take weeks to stabilise the situation and the United Nations should step in.    
"This is far beyond what one nation can handle - it needs to be bumped up to the U.N. Security Council."

The isotope "most useful for nuclear weapons..."

Interesting little tidbit for all of us currently on this planet [emphasis mine]:
"If plutonium enters the blood it can do a lot of damage to our cells, leading to cancer of the bones or liver. ... Plutonium-239, a byproduct of fission, was found in soil samples taken on the plant site March 21 and March 22, according to Tepco. Two of the five samples contained more plutonium than known to have been deposited by atmospheric nuclear-bomb fallout and probably came from the damaged plant.”

I.e., all soil in Japan and around the world now (and since the sixties) contains plutonium - half life 24,000 years -... You'd think that was important, but funnily enough they never mentioned Plutonium-239 during the long fallout of atmospheric nuclear bomb testing... they only mentioned Strontium-90...

And "Duck-and-Cover"...

Malignant-looking stuff, plutonium...

QUAKE UPDATES Day 7 +++

Another heavy snow here, another earthquake up there, where "suicide squads" are frantically trying to stop several meltdowns as quakes keep happening and it's extra cold for March, but at least Kasumi and family are out of their shaky waterless danger-zone apartment and safe down here, at least till the next step, whatever that may be... no telling when or if they might return up north...

I haven't seen them yet, they arrived in Kyoto late afternoon yesterday, exhausted (they took 5am bus from their town), hungry and with basically only the clothes on their backs and a few things - and from there went to Tatsuya's parents' big house across the lake, ate, bathed (the luxury!) and went to sleep. Miasa was sick but seems better, but now Kasumi is sick. I'll talk to them tonight, find out when they'll be fit to visit over here where the kids can pick some spinach, plant some radishes, stack some firewood, go wild...

I see that the US govt is urging Americans to leave Japan or not travel to Japan, has planes at the ready to assist where necessary; press is interviewing Americans here, most aren't leaving, it seems, though some may, I don't know anyone who is... I've long opposed nuclear power for many reasons, and if this involved plutonium, the use of which is insane, I'd be out of here last week, but as of now I have no plans to leave despite some uranium byproducts in the air. I'm assuming that they'll see the dumbth of their ways, clean it all up eventually under the gaze of a stern public eye and never do it again, but I'm not holding my breath, though I might wear a mask while I withhold judgment pro tem. It's just too beautiful here to let it be destroyed for any reason, let alone greed, and though long-term foreign residents can't vote in Shiga, we can oppose. This site has good insights and rich links on local nuclear activism.

Always amazing, how low ad hoc lowlifes can go; in this case, a potassium iodide ripoff! List price $5.99!...

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"But what makes reactor 3 so special? In one acronymic word: MOX.

All of the fuel rods in all of the other reactors are made essentially of uranium with a zirconium cladding to seal in radioactive emissions. Reactor 4 uses something different. Its fuel rod are only 94% uranium, with 6% plutonium stirred in and then the same zirconium shell. This mixed oxide (hence the MOX moniker) formulation has one advantage [the public doesn't know what's actually in it]—and a number of disadvantages."

THOSE IDIOTS! 24,000 years!! Five times the length of our civilization!! Rethink.....

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"Denis Flory, a top safety official at the agency, pointed out that all used nuclear fuel contains plutonium." [Oh, that's OK then...] It forms naturally within conventional uranium fuel as the uranium is bombarded by neutrons. ["Naturally..." that's a nice 'official' touch...]
And although plutonium is a long-lived emitter of radiation, it is also quite heavy, so it is not likely to move very far downwind from its source. [Comforting, to be sure. And just how far IS "not very far downwind," in officialese? Just keep running, folks, and don't breathe too much... only 23,999.999 years to go...]

WIND, RAIN, QUAKE, RADIATION

As if the wind and the rain weren't enough, Niigata had its second severe earthquake in three years, stronger-feeling than the last one, many say; it caused 9 fatalities and 1100 injuries as reported thus far, collapsed many old houses and caused numerous landslides, aggravated by the past weeks of heavy rain.

There was also a fire at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear facility (near the quake epicenter), the world's largest nuclear-output power station. From what I saw initially, the blaze was just a transformer fire external to one of the buildings, nothing to worry about. In traditional Japan Atomic Energy Agency style, it wasn't revealed for some hours that there'd been a minor radioactive leak of mildly radioactive water from some waste barrels into the sea. Then it was announced the next day - far too late for anyone in the region to flee, had that been necessary - that more than 50 incidents of damage or malfunction had occurred - including radiation leaks, burst pipes, fires and the other usual whatnot of deadly radioactivity. If the past is any example, there's more to be revealed.

My in-laws live in Nagano, the next prefecture inland from Niigata; they also felt some tremors, though nothing major; Kasumi and family live in Saitama, another couple of prefectures away, where they felt the quake as a long slow wave motion, no damage there, though Kaya and the twins got scared.

One wonders, however, how much time they and those nearer the plant would have had for escape, had there been a major nuclear accident announced a day after it occurred, with details provided some time after that. Like all Japanese nuclear power plants, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is built to withstand an earthquake force of 6.5, which was not enough protection from this 6.8er - especially for a facility built on a major fault line, as are so many (all?) of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors (wisdom knows no bounds) - so now the radioactivity people are talking about upgrading to maybe 6.9, but as we know, earthquakes can go a lot higher-- and it would only take one biggie to give Tokyo a radioactive half-life of a few hundred years.

It was even scarier to learn that:
"The other Japanese reactor scheduled to load MOX [plutonium] fuel is Kashiwazaki-Kirawa, in Niigata prefecture, in western Japan. However, Niigata governor Ikuo Hiroyama yesterday told reporters that Kashiwazaki 'won't be the first to load MOX fuel' in Japan, indicating it would not use MOX fuel until after the reactor in Fukushima."

If a future plutonium-loaded Kashiwazaki-Kirawa should crumble to a glowing cloud in a big quake, the entire country would have the privilege of being the world's biggest Chernobyl - only this time with a plutonium half-life of 25,000 years - to say nothing of Japan's new historic renown as the world's only uninhabitable nation.

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July 19: Quake-damaged nuclear plant in Japan shut, leak worse than thought

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July 21: "The company was further embarrassed on Thursday when yet another leak was discovered from an exhaust vent, indicating leaks continued as late as Wednesday night, nearly three days after the quake."

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　 July 21: Fear and fury in shadow of Japan's damaged nuclear giant...