Friday, March 18, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
“You should not come back here now, no matter what."
“You won’t believe this. I don’t know how to describe this. On Sunday, March 13, I was in a taxi following a unit of the Self-Defense Force. They were moving forward with removing wrecked houses. And we reached the town of Onagawa. But we saw nothing. There is nothing left. It was just like after the carpet-bombing raid.”
That description was sent to me via e-mail by Noriyuki Imanishi, an experienced freelance journalist. He was in the disaster-stricken area in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture. Onagawa is a town of a little more than 10,000 population. According to Imanishi, the town has been destroyed.
“The Hanshin Earthquake is nothing compared to this one,” he wrote. “I don’t have any word to explain the situation. I saw the SDF unit collecting dead bodies. The bodies were all covered with mud and you can’t really tell which is what. It’s like a picture of hell.”
The Hanshin Earthquake hit the western part of Japan in 1995, killing more than 6,400 people and destroying more than 240,000 buildings. As a native of the region, Imanishi covered the earthquake.
“In the Hanshin Earthquake, we saw all the buildings collapsed. But here, you don’t see buildings. Everything has been taken by the tsunami. The casualties can easily surpass 10,000. We just don’t know how many yet.”
As of early Wednesday morning in Japan, the National Police Agency of Japan put the deaths at 3,376 and estimated the number of missing people at 7,555.
As a reporter for NHK, I also covered the Hanshin Earthquake in 1995. I remember that I had never thought conditions in Japan could be so catastrophic. But Imanishi told me that this earthquake is much worse than the Hanshin earthquake.
An e-mail from my friend Shingo Oki on March 14 makes it clear that the troubles aren’t confined to the northeast area of the country that was so hard hit by the combination of the earthquake and the tsunami.
Oki works for a sport newspaper called Sports Nippon. He wrote me in an e-mail that he is covering the earthquake in Tokyo. “The situation of Fukushima nuclear plant seems to be a lot more serious than it’s been reported,” he said. “And life in Tokyo has been hit by this earthquake as well. Of course, it’s much better than those living in the area. But the planned power cut is paralyzing the train system, and we can’t go back to home. You can’t find foods in stores around.”
Hidetugu Tokitsu, who is my colleague from NHK, wrote me on March 14: “It’s not reported, but many people in Tokyo metropolitan area can’t go back to home. There are many refugees around the area.”
Another e-mail from Tokitsu on the same day said, “I have never imagined the situation as such that explosions keep happening inside of the nuclear reactors in this country. We used to consider Japan as the country where safety and water are free. Where did the country go?"
It was afternoon of Friday, March 11 (about 1 a.m. in Washington) when the 9.0 magnitude earthquake 9.0 hit Japan. I learned the news that morning as I was checking news in Japan on the Internet.
I immediately began trying to reach my family members, who live in Tokyo and Fukushima, where the nuclear power plant was hit by the earthquake. When I received no response by cell phone, I realized that the situation is serious, because I knew that all the cell phone companies shut down service at the request of the central government so they would be available for emergency use only.
I later found out, much to my relief, that nobody in my family had been harmed by the earthquake.
But as all of the e-mails expressed, the damages of the earthquake are hard to estimate, and people’s lives are still in danger.
Shingo Oki of Sports Nippon and I have been friends for more than 10 years. He visited me in Washington last summer. He is the kind of man who enjoys jokes.
But I don’t think he was joking when he ended the e-mail with this sentence: “You should not come back here now, no matter what."
Stories | Japanese reporters describe 'a picture of hell' | Investigative Reporting Workshop
That description was sent to me via e-mail by Noriyuki Imanishi, an experienced freelance journalist. He was in the disaster-stricken area in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture. Onagawa is a town of a little more than 10,000 population. According to Imanishi, the town has been destroyed.
“The Hanshin Earthquake is nothing compared to this one,” he wrote. “I don’t have any word to explain the situation. I saw the SDF unit collecting dead bodies. The bodies were all covered with mud and you can’t really tell which is what. It’s like a picture of hell.”
The Hanshin Earthquake hit the western part of Japan in 1995, killing more than 6,400 people and destroying more than 240,000 buildings. As a native of the region, Imanishi covered the earthquake.
“In the Hanshin Earthquake, we saw all the buildings collapsed. But here, you don’t see buildings. Everything has been taken by the tsunami. The casualties can easily surpass 10,000. We just don’t know how many yet.”
As of early Wednesday morning in Japan, the National Police Agency of Japan put the deaths at 3,376 and estimated the number of missing people at 7,555.
As a reporter for NHK, I also covered the Hanshin Earthquake in 1995. I remember that I had never thought conditions in Japan could be so catastrophic. But Imanishi told me that this earthquake is much worse than the Hanshin earthquake.
An e-mail from my friend Shingo Oki on March 14 makes it clear that the troubles aren’t confined to the northeast area of the country that was so hard hit by the combination of the earthquake and the tsunami.
Oki works for a sport newspaper called Sports Nippon. He wrote me in an e-mail that he is covering the earthquake in Tokyo. “The situation of Fukushima nuclear plant seems to be a lot more serious than it’s been reported,” he said. “And life in Tokyo has been hit by this earthquake as well. Of course, it’s much better than those living in the area. But the planned power cut is paralyzing the train system, and we can’t go back to home. You can’t find foods in stores around.”
Hidetugu Tokitsu, who is my colleague from NHK, wrote me on March 14: “It’s not reported, but many people in Tokyo metropolitan area can’t go back to home. There are many refugees around the area.”
Another e-mail from Tokitsu on the same day said, “I have never imagined the situation as such that explosions keep happening inside of the nuclear reactors in this country. We used to consider Japan as the country where safety and water are free. Where did the country go?"
It was afternoon of Friday, March 11 (about 1 a.m. in Washington) when the 9.0 magnitude earthquake 9.0 hit Japan. I learned the news that morning as I was checking news in Japan on the Internet.
I immediately began trying to reach my family members, who live in Tokyo and Fukushima, where the nuclear power plant was hit by the earthquake. When I received no response by cell phone, I realized that the situation is serious, because I knew that all the cell phone companies shut down service at the request of the central government so they would be available for emergency use only.
I later found out, much to my relief, that nobody in my family had been harmed by the earthquake.
But as all of the e-mails expressed, the damages of the earthquake are hard to estimate, and people’s lives are still in danger.
Shingo Oki of Sports Nippon and I have been friends for more than 10 years. He visited me in Washington last summer. He is the kind of man who enjoys jokes.
But I don’t think he was joking when he ended the e-mail with this sentence: “You should not come back here now, no matter what."
Stories | Japanese reporters describe 'a picture of hell' | Investigative Reporting Workshop
Are the pools stable? Or leaking and boiling?
Four atomic reactors in Fukushima, Japan, seem to be in partial meltdown. One of them, reactor No. 2, seems to have ruptured. The situation is spinning out of control as radiation levels spike. The US Navy has pulled back its aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, after seventeen of its crew were exposed to radiation while flying sixty miles off the Japanese coast.
But despite three major explosions—at reactor No. 1, then No. 3, then No. 2—the Fukushima containment vessels seem to be holding. (Chernobyl lacked that precaution, having only a flimsy cement containment shell that collapsed, allowing the massive release of radioactive material.)
But there is another, potentially far more dangerous problem: the spent fuel rod pools that sit right next door to the reactors. The storage pools are packed with radioactive uranium, rise several stories above ground and are always close to the reactor, thus facilitating easy transfer of the fuel rods. Their name—especially “spent” and “pool”—conveys calm dissipation. But spent fuel rod pools are actually highly radioactive, very unstable, extremely dangerous and, compared with reactors, not well supported, contained or looked over.
The spent rods give off considerable amounts of “decay heat” and thus must be submerged in constantly circulating water. Expose them to air for a day or two, and they begin to combust, giving off large amounts of radioactive cesium-137, a very toxic, long-lasting, aggressively penetrating radioactive element with a half-life of thirty years. When cesium-137 it enters the environment, it essentially acts like potassium and is taken up by plants and animals that use potassium. (For the record, that includes you.)
The explosions at reactors No. 1 and No. 3 blew apart the respective containment buildings but left the vessels intact. Or so we think. But what did the blasts do to the nearby spent fuel rod pools? On Monday night the news in Japan confirmed that the pool next to reactor No. 3 lost its roof.
“I’ve been studying overhead photographs of Fukushima. It is very disturbing,” said Robert Alvarez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the Energy Department under Clinton and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.
“The steel wall of the pool seems to show damage. All the surrounding equipment, including the two cranes, has been destroyed. There is smoke coming from reactor No. 3, and steam coming from the spent fuel pool next to it. That indicates that the water in the pool is boiling. And that means the spent fuel rods are getting hot and could start burning.”
If the spent rods start to burn, huge amounts of radioactive material would be released into the atmosphere and would disperse across the Northern Hemisphere.
Unlike the reactors, spent fuel pools are not—repeat not—housed in any sort of hardened or sealed containment structures. Rather, the fuel rods are packed tightly together in pools of water that are often several stories above ground.
“With damaged [fuel rod] pools, we are talking about things that were never considered a credible threat,” said Alvarez.
Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action Kyoto, met Fukushima plant and government officials in August 2010. “At the plant they seemed to dismiss our concerns about spent fuel pools,” said Mioko Smith. “At the prefecture, they were very worried but had no plan for how to deal with it.”
Remarkably, that is the norm—both in Japan and in the United States. Spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not equipped with backup water-circulation systems or backup generators for the water-circulation system they do have.
The exact same design flaw is in place at Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant of the same GE design as the Fukushima reactors. At Fukushima each reactor has between 60 and 83 tons of spent fuel rods stored next to them. Vermont Yankee has a staggering 690 tons of spent fuel rods on site.
Nuclear safety activists in the United States have long known of these problems and have sought repeatedly to have them addressed. At least get backup generators for the pools, they implored. But at every turn the industry has pushed back, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consistently ruled in favor of plant owners over local communities.
After 9/11 the issue of spent fuel rods again had momentary traction. Numerous citizen groups petitioned and pressured the NRC for enhanced protections of the pools. But the NRC deemed “the possibility of a terrorist attack...speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action.” So nothing was done—not even the provision of backup water-circulation systems or emergency power-generation systems.
In fact, just one day before the earthquake hit Japan, the NRC recommended a twenty-year renewal for Vermont Yankee's license. Now, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin is fighting to close the plant. He told Democracy Now! that his state has "an aging nuclear plant owned by Entergy Louisiana, a company we found we cannot trust." Shumlin noted that the plant had been scheduled to be closed in 2012.
Short of closing plants, there is a fairly reliable solution to the problem of spent fuel rods. It is called “dry cask storage.” Germany adopted it twenty-five years ago. Instead of storing huge amounts of spent fuel in pools with only roofs over them, small amounts of spent fuel rods are surrounded with inert gas inside large steel casks. These casks are quite stable and secure. At Vermont Yankee one of them was mistakenly dropped a yard or more when a crane malfunctioned—and the cask was fine.
But there is a problem with dry cask storage: it costs money. The track record of the atomic energy industry in the United States—less so in Japan—is to spend as little money as possible and extend the life of old plants for as long as possible, no matter the risks.
Meanwhile, in Japan, they wait for news. Are the pools stable? Or leaking and boiling?
But despite three major explosions—at reactor No. 1, then No. 3, then No. 2—the Fukushima containment vessels seem to be holding. (Chernobyl lacked that precaution, having only a flimsy cement containment shell that collapsed, allowing the massive release of radioactive material.)
But there is another, potentially far more dangerous problem: the spent fuel rod pools that sit right next door to the reactors. The storage pools are packed with radioactive uranium, rise several stories above ground and are always close to the reactor, thus facilitating easy transfer of the fuel rods. Their name—especially “spent” and “pool”—conveys calm dissipation. But spent fuel rod pools are actually highly radioactive, very unstable, extremely dangerous and, compared with reactors, not well supported, contained or looked over.
The spent rods give off considerable amounts of “decay heat” and thus must be submerged in constantly circulating water. Expose them to air for a day or two, and they begin to combust, giving off large amounts of radioactive cesium-137, a very toxic, long-lasting, aggressively penetrating radioactive element with a half-life of thirty years. When cesium-137 it enters the environment, it essentially acts like potassium and is taken up by plants and animals that use potassium. (For the record, that includes you.)
The explosions at reactors No. 1 and No. 3 blew apart the respective containment buildings but left the vessels intact. Or so we think. But what did the blasts do to the nearby spent fuel rod pools? On Monday night the news in Japan confirmed that the pool next to reactor No. 3 lost its roof.
“I’ve been studying overhead photographs of Fukushima. It is very disturbing,” said Robert Alvarez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the Energy Department under Clinton and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.
“The steel wall of the pool seems to show damage. All the surrounding equipment, including the two cranes, has been destroyed. There is smoke coming from reactor No. 3, and steam coming from the spent fuel pool next to it. That indicates that the water in the pool is boiling. And that means the spent fuel rods are getting hot and could start burning.”
If the spent rods start to burn, huge amounts of radioactive material would be released into the atmosphere and would disperse across the Northern Hemisphere.
Unlike the reactors, spent fuel pools are not—repeat not—housed in any sort of hardened or sealed containment structures. Rather, the fuel rods are packed tightly together in pools of water that are often several stories above ground.
“With damaged [fuel rod] pools, we are talking about things that were never considered a credible threat,” said Alvarez.
Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action Kyoto, met Fukushima plant and government officials in August 2010. “At the plant they seemed to dismiss our concerns about spent fuel pools,” said Mioko Smith. “At the prefecture, they were very worried but had no plan for how to deal with it.”
Remarkably, that is the norm—both in Japan and in the United States. Spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not equipped with backup water-circulation systems or backup generators for the water-circulation system they do have.
The exact same design flaw is in place at Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant of the same GE design as the Fukushima reactors. At Fukushima each reactor has between 60 and 83 tons of spent fuel rods stored next to them. Vermont Yankee has a staggering 690 tons of spent fuel rods on site.
Nuclear safety activists in the United States have long known of these problems and have sought repeatedly to have them addressed. At least get backup generators for the pools, they implored. But at every turn the industry has pushed back, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consistently ruled in favor of plant owners over local communities.
After 9/11 the issue of spent fuel rods again had momentary traction. Numerous citizen groups petitioned and pressured the NRC for enhanced protections of the pools. But the NRC deemed “the possibility of a terrorist attack...speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action.” So nothing was done—not even the provision of backup water-circulation systems or emergency power-generation systems.
In fact, just one day before the earthquake hit Japan, the NRC recommended a twenty-year renewal for Vermont Yankee's license. Now, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin is fighting to close the plant. He told Democracy Now! that his state has "an aging nuclear plant owned by Entergy Louisiana, a company we found we cannot trust." Shumlin noted that the plant had been scheduled to be closed in 2012.
Short of closing plants, there is a fairly reliable solution to the problem of spent fuel rods. It is called “dry cask storage.” Germany adopted it twenty-five years ago. Instead of storing huge amounts of spent fuel in pools with only roofs over them, small amounts of spent fuel rods are surrounded with inert gas inside large steel casks. These casks are quite stable and secure. At Vermont Yankee one of them was mistakenly dropped a yard or more when a crane malfunctioned—and the cask was fine.
But there is a problem with dry cask storage: it costs money. The track record of the atomic energy industry in the United States—less so in Japan—is to spend as little money as possible and extend the life of old plants for as long as possible, no matter the risks.
Meanwhile, in Japan, they wait for news. Are the pools stable? Or leaking and boiling?
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Radioactive Releases at Fukushima Could Last Months - read before paywall goes up
"Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. “Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement,” he said.
Another nuclear engineer with long experience in reactors of this type, who now works for a government agency, was emphatic. “To completely stop venting, they’re going to have to put some sort of equipment back in service,” he said. He asked not to be named because his agency had not authorized him to speak.
The central problem arises from a series of failures that began after the tsunami. It easily overcame the sea walls surrounding the Fukushima plant. It swamped the diesel generators, which were placed in a low-lying area, apparently because of misplaced confidence that the sea walls would protect them. At 3:41 p.m. Friday, roughly an hour after the quake and just around the time the region would have been struck by the giant waves, the generators shut down. According to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant switched to an emergency cooling system that operates on batteries, but these were soon depleted.
Inside the plant, according to industry executives and American experts who received briefings over the weekend, there was deep concern that spent nuclear fuel that was kept in a “cooling pond” inside one of the plants had been exposed and begun letting off potentially deadly gamma radiation. Then water levels inside the reactor cores began to fall. While estimates vary, several officials and industry experts said Sunday that the top four to nine feet of the nuclear fuel in the core and control rods appear to have been exposed to the air — a condition that that can quickly lead to melting, and ultimately to full meltdown.
At 8 p.m., just as Americans were waking up to news of the earthquake, the government declared an emergency, contradicting its earlier reassurances that there were no major problems. But the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, stressed that there had been no radiation leak.
But one was coming: Workers inside the reactors saw that levels of coolant water were dropping. They did not know how severely. “The gauges that measure the water level don’t appear to be giving accurate readings,” one American official said.
Another nuclear engineer with long experience in reactors of this type, who now works for a government agency, was emphatic. “To completely stop venting, they’re going to have to put some sort of equipment back in service,” he said. He asked not to be named because his agency had not authorized him to speak.
The central problem arises from a series of failures that began after the tsunami. It easily overcame the sea walls surrounding the Fukushima plant. It swamped the diesel generators, which were placed in a low-lying area, apparently because of misplaced confidence that the sea walls would protect them. At 3:41 p.m. Friday, roughly an hour after the quake and just around the time the region would have been struck by the giant waves, the generators shut down. According to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant switched to an emergency cooling system that operates on batteries, but these were soon depleted.
Inside the plant, according to industry executives and American experts who received briefings over the weekend, there was deep concern that spent nuclear fuel that was kept in a “cooling pond” inside one of the plants had been exposed and begun letting off potentially deadly gamma radiation. Then water levels inside the reactor cores began to fall. While estimates vary, several officials and industry experts said Sunday that the top four to nine feet of the nuclear fuel in the core and control rods appear to have been exposed to the air — a condition that that can quickly lead to melting, and ultimately to full meltdown.
At 8 p.m., just as Americans were waking up to news of the earthquake, the government declared an emergency, contradicting its earlier reassurances that there were no major problems. But the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, stressed that there had been no radiation leak.
But one was coming: Workers inside the reactors saw that levels of coolant water were dropping. They did not know how severely. “The gauges that measure the water level don’t appear to be giving accurate readings,” one American official said.
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