Japan hit by 8.9 earthquake w/tsunami

How? When the radiation levels are so high you can't even get near them?

Depressing article of the moment:
Up to 1,000 bodies left untouched near troubled nuke plant | Kyodo News

 

:rockon: Send in kamikaze workers and GERD! Seriously, I understand workers are volunteering for fatal assignments.

 

Primarily because the decay heat and contamination spread does not stop just because you bury it with something. The other major problem is that a very large area of Japan becomes a permanent evacuation or safety zone. While the radiation is very dangerous and intense, it has not reached the point where a large area of Japan needs to be permanently evacuated. However, much better disaster handling needs to be implemented to prevent widespread contamination continuing to be released and spread.

 

It's tremendously contaminated. It's being dumped to provide room for super tremendously contaminated water.

 

That would halt all further cooling efforts. Aren't these cores still producing heat somewhere in the 10MW range? Is there any concrete that can tolerate this through bulk conduction cooling alone?

 

SciAm led to a NYT article to the contrary:
"The water being intentionally released contains about 100 times the legal limit of radiation, said the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant’s operator. The more contaminated water that it hopes to contain has about 10,000 times the legal limit."

The highly contaminated stuff was from a leak, not intentional pumping, that appears to have been plugged today. From a different description of the radioactivity falling off very rapidly, with a few dozen meters, I don't know that it's volume is comparable to the stuff being pumped out.

Diluting this in seawater, which naturally contains 15 tons of uranium per cubic mile, seems significantly less hazardous than air releases.

 

One approach, new to this event, is to extract some/most of the radionclides from the stored water. I understand that ion-exchange resins are used for that. If the radioactivity can be concentrated into a smaller volume and buried (somewhere), that would be much better than release to the currents of the sea.

Uranium in seawater can also be expressed as 3.3 parts per billion. Sounds pretty different eh? it's not. It's 'spin'.

But important to keep in mind that the stucture of marine food web is based on bioaccumulation at each trophic level. That is how tuna can become toxic with mercury.

 

If we can contaminate tuna with both mercury and radioactive material perhaps we can have larger tuna from the expanding mercury. This could be a growth industry. Another possibility is self heating tuna. It would be great for tuna melts.

Tom

 

Tom, this is leading us nowhere. Maybe fish catch will become unsafe, or maybe not. Testing is required, and at least, fish will become more expensive (locally? regionally?) as a result.

All so tiresome for us far frm the scene, and how much more so for the people on site doing the difficult work?

Gotta wonder when the next Godzilla remake will appear...

 

Yeah, this whole Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster smacks of a Japanese class B movie thriller, but it's oh, so real! Stand down Godzilla, you've just been outdone.

 

Did you take my post seriously? Danny definitely needs to add those [HUMOR][/HUMOR] flags.

I thought the notion of a hot mercury laden fish expanding like the mercury in a thermometer was so ludicrous as to be obviously silly and ridiculous. Oh well.

Tom

 

Monty san found...

World Blog - Body of missing US teacher 'Monty-san' found in Japan

 

I got it and thought it cleverly funny. In fairness to the OP, maybe a language/cultural translation issue.

 

Everyone expects you to be serious Tom.

 

If they only knew me.

Tom

 

Tom? Serious? You've got to be kidding.


edit: I should add, lest you think my friend Tom is merely a jokester, that he's a pretty smart guy quite capable of honesty and seriousness. He also knows wisdom and wit tend to go together.

 

OMG...another 7.4 quake strikes Japan today. I didn't hear of damage, so I don't know the outcome. I know Japan is a high quake area, but this is just too much! CNN news reports that Toyota will keep car mfg in Japan rather than shift overseas in light of recent events. Hmm...that may not bode well for Toyota.

 

Another good writeup that adds some perspective about radiation exposure:

In Japan, will sea dilute radiation pollution? - CNN.com

Tom

 

Obviously my loose words can be taken either way. When we are talking about massive volumes of water with contamination at 100 times the legal limit not being a minor issue compared to what is being battled....