[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive Hollywood's impending Internet revolution – I, Cringely – Cringely on technology[...]…

There is a good Russian documentary on the web, a filmmaker was on site and captured some interesting and dramatic footage of the operation. Worth searching for, it’s onyoutube or google video, cant remember which…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/world/asia/concerns-grow-about-spent-fuel-rods-at-damaged-nuclear-plant-in-japan.html?smid=pl-share

You are correct that my nuclear days are long past, but they included developing on an old NASA IBM/360 accident simulations still used in the industry today. Some of your work is based on some of my work.

Just as we saw with General Public Utilities in Pennsylvania, entrenched management goes through a process of cognitive dissonance in which they become convinced that only the people who screwed it up in the first place can possibly fix it. Further, they come to believe that any delays are justified for exactly this reason (anyone else would take even longer). But that’s not true.

In my very first column on this subject, the day after the tsunami, I explained that the reactors were lost forever. It appears I was the first to write that — weeks before TEPCO came to the same conclusion.

My father was a pilot (I am too) and had a serious accident that ended his career and almost killed him following an engine failure. His accident was so bad not because of the engine failure but because of his response to it. Rather than belly-in the aircraft in a farmer’s field he pumped down the landing gear, increasing drag, decreasing glide, and making it inevitable that he wouldn’t reach the field at all, landing instead in the roof of a barn. That’s TEPCO in the early days of this accident, trying to save the plant when they could have been saving Japan. Now it’s too late and I think it’s a mistake to trust those people any further.

http://www.nerdpocalypse.net/Doomed%20Japan.html

Each purple is a link to an AGGREGATOR site of primary documents of support.
to whit:
the reactor has a LOT of new problems (hydrogen build up, unstable fuel rods, many other features).
Earthquakes happen.
Japan is unable to do squat.
(personally, the only hope I see is for a helpful large firebreathing monster to rise up out of the sea due to the effects of the nuclear waste dumping into the ocean)

For the tl;dr crowd, I point you at the debunking of this story by Adam Curry and Rod Adams.

First off, you’re repeating the hysterical claims of Bob Alvarez & Mitsuhei Murata without crediting them. Like you, neither of them have any technical expertise in radiological analysis, health physics, severe accident phenonmenology, aerosol generation and transport, structural mechanics or any one of topics which are actually relevant to assessing the risk of the unit 4 spent fuel pools. You don’t need a Ph.D. in the subject, but it would be nice if you actually had any technical cred in this area. But on to the science,..

You take on faith that the spent fuel pools are fragile; they aren’t. They already withstood the initial earthquake which is about 100 times worse than what you’re proposing. But even if the pools lost integrity and drained, the fuel wouldn’t melt; it simply can’t get hot enough. Spent fuel is typically ready for dry cask storage after 3-5 years; we’re well over a year after the accident and much of the fuel is older than that. With every passing day the fuel produces less heat.

The biggest effect of losing pool water is to reduce shielding around the pool, halting any fuel removal & cleanup operations. At worst, you may see some fuel failures (pinhole leaks) releasing a small amount of radioiodine. Not good, but far, far, far less than what’s already been released.

But to your main point about the cesium: it isn’t going anywhere.

The raw amount of cesium is a scary number but it’s a canard. In order for the cesium to hurt anyone offsite, it needs to actually get offsite. This is where aerosol generation and transport come in. Cesium is an alkali metal with a boiling point of 1250F. The only way cesium is going to get offsite rapidly enough and in a form which can hurt people is for it to be airborne, as in an aerosol. There are two ways to make cesium into an aerosol; grind it up very finely and puff it into the air or heat it up to boiling where the vapor will condense on dust particles and waft away. The problem is, there’s no credible mechanism for either of those happening. Neither you nor Murata, Alvarez, nor anyone else repeating this claim have ever suggested a realistic way that cesium will get out of the ceramic oxide it’s currently trapped in and become an aerosol that can be transported offsite.

The cesium released during the main accident came from the molten core debris from units 1-3, not from the spent fuel pools. It was able to get offsite because it was boiled off into aerosol form and was blown out through breaches in containment (likely airlock door seals or cable/piping penetrations.)

By analogy, your car likely has an 11 gallon gas tank. Properly aerosolized and ignited, a fraction of the gas in it could incinerate you in an instant. This doesn’t happen for precisely the same reason. Diesel fuel is actually a better example here since it’s not nearly as volatile as petrol. Now fill the gas tank with sand (note: don’t actually do this.) You’ve just made it that much harder for the fuel to disperse into the air into a dangerous configuration. The sand takes the place of the ceramic fuel pellet containing the cesium.

I really wish you would have credited Murata and Alvarez in your post because then it would have been clear you were simply citing incompetent fearmongers rather than appearing to be one yourself. I don’t mean this to be nasty; it takes seconds to repeat a BS claim like theirs and hours to debunk and the debunking will never get the traction of the original scare story. If a story is too good or too bad to be true, it probably is. At best, it requires some vetting and a healthy dose of skepticism.

Disclosure: My day job is in nuclear risk assessment, principly fire risk and defense waste issues. In a previous job, I was responsible for offsite dose calculations for a large power reactor, including fuel handling accidents in spent fuel pools, as well as severe accident analysis (core melting, containment failing, cats-and-dogs-living-together don’t-cross-the-streams sorts of scenarios.)