This is getting real grim too fast.
The Kyodo newswire is very slow to respond, due to the overwhelming amount of traffic they are receiving. However, from what I can gather, it looks like the situation at Fukushima Daiichi power plant’s Unit 1 is deteriorating. It’s being reported that part of the core may be “melting down.” I loathe people who ring alarms for the sake of garnering attention. However, logic dictates the Japanese officials would not be making statements like this, unless they felt a melt-down was a real possibility.
In the event of a meltdown, the affected area would be at least 5 kilometers.
Here is a helpful twitter feed to keep up to date with developments as they progress.
End of days
As if the anti-nuclear crowd needs any more ammo. Although I guess it isn’t unfounded at this point. Who are some of the players in nuclear? SHAW, ES (hammered today), CCJ, USU… Can’t think of many more, but I’m sure there are other derivative plays like GE etc.
Should get interesting if it goes Chernobyl. My wife’s brother works in Tokyo on the 18th floor and said it crossed his mind that there was a chance he would die. Said it was definitely scary.
Some guy on the TV just said Tokyo could be effected if the wind blew the right direction given a meltdown. That being said, let’s hope this is just hyperbole like we heard from the guy who thought we should nuke the BP well.
I think the main plays are crude refiners. Crack spreads will explode
Live blog – http://blogs.aljazeera.net/live/asia/live-blog-japan-earthquake#update-10551
According to the blog,
Japanese officials and experts have dismissed suggestions of a repeat of a Chernobyl-type disaster.
“No Chernobyl is possible at a light water reactor. Loss of coolant means a temperature rise, but it also will stop the reaction,” Naoto Sekimura, a professor at the University of Tokyo, says.
Even in the worst-case scenario, that would mean some radioactive leakage and equipment damage, but not an explosion. If venting is done carefully, there will be little leakage. Certainly not beyond the 3 km radius.
.
True.
“crack spreads exploding” sounds funny to me.
Explosion reported
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.html
CCJ will drop like a drop in the coming weeks. It might be a good opportunity to load up CCJ for cheap during this summer.
Remember this is the same news media that is reporting expected earthquake/tsunami deaths in the mere hundreds, still. And they are saying no meltdown, or meltdown that is a containable problem. This reactor is 100 times more powerful than the one at Chernobyl. Chernobyl resulted in increased cancer rates anywhere down wind of the reactor. I got my hands on a fallout map from Australian Radiation Services and the expected rads hitting the US West Coast would be 750 rads in 10 days (down from 3,000 rads near the reactor melt down site). 750 rads is plenty enough to kill a lot of people over a few weeks.
The Fukushima reactors are individual units and are NOT 100x more powerful than the one at chernobyl. The one in trouble (Fuk 1) is smaller by 1/2 than the Chernobyl Unit that had a hydrogen explosion, but would be of cold comfort if they melt it down and release fuel to the environment. The explosion, whatever it was, at one of the plants, is not comforting.
Spooked: Gravestone’s been doing great work bringing facts into this, and I’m barely worthy to fill in, but I can ease your mind about a couple of things.
OK, the explosion, yeah, that’s bad news. The reactor is a write-off – they’re dumping seawater into it to cool it, and adding boric acid to the seawater to make sure that it isn’t going to start again, with “will never be used in a reactor again” consequences for the fuel cladding, but if the bundles have already been damaged, they aren’t going to be used again anyways. Also bad news is the incrase from “flying cross-country” to “levels where you don’t want to spend more than a few weeks working there”.
So yeah, it’s bad, but that map is an entirely fake ‘shop, likely a Photoshop of an early tsunami forecast, debunked yesterday in a 3000-post thread on another website. There is no physics known to engineer or weaponeer that could produce those numbers.