bigmoose
1 MW
Some flyover thermal images of Reactor 1, 2, 3 & 4:
Hydrogen Explosion at Japanese Nuclear Plant!
- Thread starter LI-ghtcycle
- Start date
dnmun
1 PW
from the NYtimes today:
April 2, 2011
From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.
Thanks to the unfamiliar but sophisticated art of atomic forensics, experts around the world have been able to document the situation vividly. Over decades, they have become very good at illuminating the hidden workings of nuclear power plants from afar, turning scraps of information into detailed analyses.
For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant’s reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.
Scientists in Europe and America also know from observing the explosions of hydrogen gas at the plant that the nuclear fuel rods had heated to very dangerous levels, and from radioactive plumes how far the rods had disintegrated.
At the same time, the evaluations also show that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi escaped the deadliest outcomes — a complete meltdown of the plant.
Most of these computer-based forensics systems were developed after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, when regulators found they were essentially blind to what was happening in the reactor. Since then, to satisfy regulators, companies that run nuclear power plants use snippets of information coming out of a plant to develop simulations of what is happening inside and to perform a variety of risk evaluations.
Indeed, the detailed assessments of the Japanese reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave on Friday — when he told reporters that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged, and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown — came from forensic modeling.
The bits of information that drive these analyses range from the simple to the complex. They can include everything from the length of time a reactor core lacked cooling water to the subtleties of the gases and radioactive particles being emitted from the plant. Engineers feed the data points into computer simulations that churn out detailed portraits of the imperceptible, including many specifics on the melting of the hot fuel cores.
Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as “safety codes.†Many of these institutions — including ones in Japan — are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.
“The codes got better and better†after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.
Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.
“They don’t want to go there,†said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. “The spin is all about reassurance.â€
If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.
By definition, a meltdown is the severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor that results in either the partial or full liquefaction of its uranium fuel and supporting metal lattice, at times with the atmospheric release of deadly radiation. Partial meltdowns usually strike a core’s middle regions instead of the edge, where temperatures are typically lower.
The main meltdowns of the past at civilian plants were Three Mile Island in 1979, the St.-Laurent reactor in France in 1980, and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.
One of the first safety codes to emerge after Three Mile Island was the Modular Accident Analysis Program. Running on a modest computer, it simulates reactor crises based on such information as the duration of a power blackout and the presence of invisible wisps of radioactive materials.
Robert E. Henry, a developer of the code at Fauske & Associates, an engineering company near Chicago, said that a first sign of major trouble at any reactor was the release of hydrogen — a highly flammable gas that has fueled several large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi. The gas, he said in an interview, indicated that cooling water had fallen low, exposing the hot fuel rods.
The next alarms, Dr. Henry said, centered on various types of radioactivity that signal increasingly high core temperatures and melting.
First, he said, “as the core gets hotter and hotter,†easily evaporated products of atomic fission — like iodine 131 and cesium 137 — fly out. If temperatures rise higher, threatening to melt the core entirely, he added, less volatile products such as strontium 90 and plutonium 239 join the rising plume.
The lofting of the latter particles in large quantities points to “substantial fuel melting,†Dr. Henry said.
He added that he and his colleagues modeled the Japanese accident in its first days and discerned partial — not full — core melting.
Micro-Simulation Technology, a software company in Montville, N.J., used its own computer code to model the Japanese accident. It found core temperatures in the reactors soaring as high as 2,250 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to liquefy many reactor metals.
“Some portion of the core melted,†said Li-chi Cliff Po, the company’s president. He called his methods simpler than most industry simulations, adding that the Japanese disaster was relatively easy to model because the observable facts of the first hours and days were so unremittingly bleak — “no water in, no injection†to cool the hot cores.
“I don’t think there’s any mystery or foul play,†Dr. Po said of the disaster’s scale. “It’s just so bad.â€
The big players in reactor modeling are federal laboratories and large nuclear companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva, a French group that supplied reactor fuel to the Japanese complex.
The Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque wrote one of the most respected codes. It models whole plants and serves as a main tool of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Washington agency that oversees the nation’s reactors.
Areva and French agencies use a reactor code-named Cathare, a complicated acronym that also refers to a kind of goat’s milk cheese.
On March 21, Stanford University presented an invitation-only panel discussion on the Japanese crisis that featured Alan Hansen, an executive vice president of Areva NC, a unit of the company focused on the nuclear fuel cycle.
“Clearly,†he told the audience, “we’re witnessing one of the greatest disasters in modern time.â€
Dr. Hansen, a nuclear engineer, presented a slide show that he said the company’s German unit had prepared. That division, he added, “has been analyzing this accident in great detail.â€
The presentation gave a blow-by-blow of the accident’s early hours and days. It said drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and that peak temperatures hit 2,700 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt steel and zirconium — the main ingredient in the metallic outer shell of a fuel rod, known as the cladding.
“Zirconium in the cladding starts to burn,†said the slide presentation. At the peak temperature, it continued, the core experienced “melting of uranium-zirconium eutectics,†a reactor alloy.
A slide with a cutaway illustration of a reactor featured a glowing hot mass of melted fuel rods in the middle of the core and noted “release of fission products†during meltdown. The products are radioactive fragments of split atoms that can result in cancer and other serious illnesses.
Stanford, where Dr. Hansen is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun.
The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster.
“We cannot comment on that,†Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was “because it was not an officially released document.â€
A European atomic official monitoring the Fukushima crisis expressed sympathy for Japan’s need to rely on forensics to grasp the full dimensions of the unfolding disaster.
“Clearly, there’s no access to the core,†the official said. “The Japanese are honestly blind.â€
April 2, 2011
From Far Labs, a Vivid Picture Emerges of Japan Crisis
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
For the clearest picture of what is happening at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, talk to scientists thousands of miles away.
Thanks to the unfamiliar but sophisticated art of atomic forensics, experts around the world have been able to document the situation vividly. Over decades, they have become very good at illuminating the hidden workings of nuclear power plants from afar, turning scraps of information into detailed analyses.
For example, an analysis by a French energy company revealed far more about the condition of the plant’s reactors than the Japanese have ever described: water levels at the reactor cores dropping by as much as three-quarters, and temperatures in those cores soaring to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn and melt the zirconium casings that protect the fuel rods.
Scientists in Europe and America also know from observing the explosions of hydrogen gas at the plant that the nuclear fuel rods had heated to very dangerous levels, and from radioactive plumes how far the rods had disintegrated.
At the same time, the evaluations also show that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi escaped the deadliest outcomes — a complete meltdown of the plant.
Most of these computer-based forensics systems were developed after the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, when regulators found they were essentially blind to what was happening in the reactor. Since then, to satisfy regulators, companies that run nuclear power plants use snippets of information coming out of a plant to develop simulations of what is happening inside and to perform a variety of risk evaluations.
Indeed, the detailed assessments of the Japanese reactors that Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave on Friday — when he told reporters that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged, and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown — came from forensic modeling.
The bits of information that drive these analyses range from the simple to the complex. They can include everything from the length of time a reactor core lacked cooling water to the subtleties of the gases and radioactive particles being emitted from the plant. Engineers feed the data points into computer simulations that churn out detailed portraits of the imperceptible, including many specifics on the melting of the hot fuel cores.
Governments and companies now possess dozens of these independently developed computer programs, known in industry jargon as “safety codes.†Many of these institutions — including ones in Japan — are relying on forensic modeling to analyze the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi to plan for a range of activities, from evacuations to forecasting the likely outcome.
“The codes got better and better†after the accident at Three Mile Island revealed the poor state of reactor assessment, said Michael W. Golay, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These portraits of the Japanese disaster tend to be proprietary and confidential, and in some cases secret. One reason the assessments are enormously sensitive for industry and government is the relative lack of precedent: The atomic age has seen the construction of nearly 600 civilian power plants, but according to the World Nuclear Association, only three have undergone serious accidents in which their fuel cores melted down.
Now, as a result of the crisis in Japan, the atomic simulations suggest that the number of serious accidents has suddenly doubled, with three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in some stage of meltdown. Even so, the public authorities have sought to avoid grim technical details that might trigger alarm or even panic.
“They don’t want to go there,†said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert who, from 1993 to 1999, was a policy adviser to the secretary of energy. “The spin is all about reassurance.â€
If events in Japan unfold as they did at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the forensic modeling could go on for some time. It took more than three years before engineers lowered a camera to visually inspect the damaged core of the Pennsylvania reactor, and another year to map the extent of the destruction. The core turned out to be about half melted.
By definition, a meltdown is the severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor that results in either the partial or full liquefaction of its uranium fuel and supporting metal lattice, at times with the atmospheric release of deadly radiation. Partial meltdowns usually strike a core’s middle regions instead of the edge, where temperatures are typically lower.
The main meltdowns of the past at civilian plants were Three Mile Island in 1979, the St.-Laurent reactor in France in 1980, and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.
One of the first safety codes to emerge after Three Mile Island was the Modular Accident Analysis Program. Running on a modest computer, it simulates reactor crises based on such information as the duration of a power blackout and the presence of invisible wisps of radioactive materials.
Robert E. Henry, a developer of the code at Fauske & Associates, an engineering company near Chicago, said that a first sign of major trouble at any reactor was the release of hydrogen — a highly flammable gas that has fueled several large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi. The gas, he said in an interview, indicated that cooling water had fallen low, exposing the hot fuel rods.
The next alarms, Dr. Henry said, centered on various types of radioactivity that signal increasingly high core temperatures and melting.
First, he said, “as the core gets hotter and hotter,†easily evaporated products of atomic fission — like iodine 131 and cesium 137 — fly out. If temperatures rise higher, threatening to melt the core entirely, he added, less volatile products such as strontium 90 and plutonium 239 join the rising plume.
The lofting of the latter particles in large quantities points to “substantial fuel melting,†Dr. Henry said.
He added that he and his colleagues modeled the Japanese accident in its first days and discerned partial — not full — core melting.
Micro-Simulation Technology, a software company in Montville, N.J., used its own computer code to model the Japanese accident. It found core temperatures in the reactors soaring as high as 2,250 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to liquefy many reactor metals.
“Some portion of the core melted,†said Li-chi Cliff Po, the company’s president. He called his methods simpler than most industry simulations, adding that the Japanese disaster was relatively easy to model because the observable facts of the first hours and days were so unremittingly bleak — “no water in, no injection†to cool the hot cores.
“I don’t think there’s any mystery or foul play,†Dr. Po said of the disaster’s scale. “It’s just so bad.â€
The big players in reactor modeling are federal laboratories and large nuclear companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse and Areva, a French group that supplied reactor fuel to the Japanese complex.
The Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque wrote one of the most respected codes. It models whole plants and serves as a main tool of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Washington agency that oversees the nation’s reactors.
Areva and French agencies use a reactor code-named Cathare, a complicated acronym that also refers to a kind of goat’s milk cheese.
On March 21, Stanford University presented an invitation-only panel discussion on the Japanese crisis that featured Alan Hansen, an executive vice president of Areva NC, a unit of the company focused on the nuclear fuel cycle.
“Clearly,†he told the audience, “we’re witnessing one of the greatest disasters in modern time.â€
Dr. Hansen, a nuclear engineer, presented a slide show that he said the company’s German unit had prepared. That division, he added, “has been analyzing this accident in great detail.â€
The presentation gave a blow-by-blow of the accident’s early hours and days. It said drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and that peak temperatures hit 2,700 degrees Celsius, or more than 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt steel and zirconium — the main ingredient in the metallic outer shell of a fuel rod, known as the cladding.
“Zirconium in the cladding starts to burn,†said the slide presentation. At the peak temperature, it continued, the core experienced “melting of uranium-zirconium eutectics,†a reactor alloy.
A slide with a cutaway illustration of a reactor featured a glowing hot mass of melted fuel rods in the middle of the core and noted “release of fission products†during meltdown. The products are radioactive fragments of split atoms that can result in cancer and other serious illnesses.
Stanford, where Dr. Hansen is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun.
The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster.
“We cannot comment on that,†Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was “because it was not an officially released document.â€
A European atomic official monitoring the Fukushima crisis expressed sympathy for Japan’s need to rely on forensics to grasp the full dimensions of the unfolding disaster.
“Clearly, there’s no access to the core,†the official said. “The Japanese are honestly blind.â€
bigmoose
1 MW
Here is a link to Dr. Hansen's analysis. Has the most detail seen to date publicly. Good photos and diagrams to get you bounded for what we are seeing in the news.
http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/6615/March21_JapanSeminar.pdf
Inside a boiling water reactor by nrc http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/6615/March21_JapanSeminar.pdf
Inside a boiling water reactor by nrc http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
dnmun
1 PW
i was amazed that it took so long for this to come out. i know how outraged i was at the time, i did find out that the president of TEPCO was in osaka at the time of the quake and was not in touch with the plant operators. this is in the era of sattelite phones...................
the devastation to the japanese economy not from the tsunami only but from the consequences of restricting property owners right to remain in their homes. thought wineboy would appreciate that, anyway this is from the wsj today:
BUSINESSAPRIL 23, 2011
Reactor Team Let Pressure Soar
By PHRED DVORAK
TOKYO—The operator of Japan's stricken nuclear plant let pressure in one reactor climb far beyond the level the facility was designed to withstand, a decision that may have worsened the world's most serious nuclear accident in a quarter century.
Japanese nuclear-power companies are so leery of releasing radiation into the atmosphere that their rules call for waiting much longer and obtaining many more sign-offs than U.S. counterparts before venting the potentially dangerous steam that builds up as reactors overheat, a Wall Street Journal inquiry found.
Japan's venting policy got its first real-world test in the chaotic hours after March 11's earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex. By the first hours of March 12, an emergency was brewing inside the plant's No. 1 reactor.
By around 2:30 a.m., the pressure inside the vessel that forms a protective bulb around the reactor's core reached twice the level it was designed to withstand. Amid delays and technical difficulties, it was another 12 hours before workers finished releasing radioactive steam from this containment vessel, via reinforced pipes, to the air beyond the reactor building.
About an hour later, the reactor building itself exploded—a blast that Japanese and U.S. regulators have since said spread highly radioactive debris beyond the plant. The explosion, along with others amid overheating at reactors 2, 3 and 4, contributed to radiation levels that led to mandatory evacuations around the plant and the government's admission that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster ranks alongside Chernobyl at the top of the nuclear-disaster scale.
Experts in the U.S. and Japan believe the venting delay may have helped create conditions that led to the blast. In one possible scenario, pressure built so high that it damaged gaskets and other parts of the venting system, through which highly explosive hydrogen gas leaked from the core into the reactor building. It was Japan's cautious approach to venting, an outgrowth of its profound concern over nuclear contamination, that may well have made the accident worse, they say.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. chief executive Masataka Shimizu defended his company's actions when asked in Parliament last week to explain the timing of venting at the plant, which Tepco operates.
"Venting means you're affecting the surrounding area," Mr. Shimizu said. "It was imperative we made completely certain that evacuation was taken care of for everyone affected."
The controversy has reached Japan's embattled Prime Minister Naoto Kan. Shortly after 7 a.m. that same morning, Mr. Kan paid a 50-minute visit to the Fukushima Daiichi grounds and held a meeting there with plant executives. Opposition lawmakers have argued that his visit distracted plant managers, while Mr. Kan's supporters say he pushed to accelerate venting.
Manufacturers of nuclear reactors build the containment vessels that surround the core at a "design pressure" the units are capable of withstanding without breaking, under all the conditions envisioned for the plant's life. Those include all but the most severe accidents.
Venting is a last resort.
The plant operator said of a decision to release possibly radioactive steam.
Containment vessels can withstand higher pressures, some studies have indicated. Among these are studies conducted in the 1990s by Japanese operators and equipment manufacturers, in preparation for Japan's first set of severe-accident protocols, that say such vessels can withstand twice the design pressure. Many Japanese operators have adopted this as their benchmark for releasing contaminated air.
Tepco spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai confirmed that if there is a risk of releasing radiation, the company doesn't vent until pressure hits roughly twice the design limit. "Venting is a last resort," Mr. Nagai said.
General Electric Co., the designer of the vessel at Fukushima Daiichi, said it is unaware of any such Japanese studies or venting protocols.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it doesn't have specific guidelines on venting and doesn't comment on the appropriateness of actions taken in member countries.
U.S. protocols on handling accidents at similar reactors call for venting before pressure exceeds the design level. The same protocol is followed by plant operators using similar types of reactors in Korea and Taiwan, industry experts in those countries say.
The U.S. approach allows for a faster response in crisis conditions, and accepts the radiation released as part of venting as the price of possibly preventing a larger release.
Earthquake in Japan
More photos and interactive graphics
One significant passage in the U.S. protocol says a reactor should be vented even if that results in "exceeding offsite radioactivity release rate limits"—in other words, shooting more radiation into the environment than is allowed—say people familiar with the protocol.
Another key difference: U.S. rules put the person at the controls of the plant in charge of venting. In Japan, it is common for operators to bump the decision to company or government superiors when there is a chance radiation will be released.
Several of those factors came into play in the early hours of March 12. Industry experts in the U.S. and other countries say that during the early hours after power and cooling systems were lost at reactor No. 1, overheating fuel rods in the reactor produced hydrogen gas and increased the pressure within the reactor and its containment vessel.
Tepco says pressure in the containment vessel likely hit 840 kilopascals (the metric equivalent of 121.8 pounds per square inch) around 2:30 a.m, roughly double the maximum pressure of 427 kilopascals the vessel was designed to handle.
Following Japan's decision chain, the control-room chief was required to first notify the utility's president, currently Mr. Shimizu, to approve venting. It is unclear when he was notified of the possible need to vent the reactor.
Much seems undisturbed in Futoba, Japan, where part of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is located. But one element is largely missing: people.
But in a serious nuclear accident, Japanese nuclear-emergency laws kick in, bringing a host of other requirements to consult with the government. At 3 a.m., the minister overseeing the industry regulator convened a press conference to announce the decision to vent.
Fukushima Daiichi's reactors, like those in the U.S., have a venting system that runs to a chimney outside the building and is built to withstand high pressures that would blow out weaker pipes. When a plant loses power, as Fukushima Daiichi did, the valves must be opened manually.
Those efforts didn't start until after 10 a.m., regulators say. The valves may be harder to open manually when there is a lot of pressure on them, according to one U.S. industry official with experience working with emergency protocols. Tepco has confirmed it had trouble opening the valves.
The vents were finally opened at around 2:30 p.m., and a pressure drop confirmed.
It remains unclear how much radiation was released by the venting. And there is no way to know what would have happened if Japan had followed the U.S. procedure, or even if it could have in the aftermath of the debilitating quake and tsunami.
It is also possible, industry experts said, that explosive hydrogen gases could have come not from the containment vessel, but from spent fuel rods that were also inside the reactor building.
The subsequent explosion at reactor No. 1 didn't damage the containment vessel but destroyed much of the building itself. Amid the turmoil, Tepco didn't start injecting cooling sea water into the reactor until the evening of March 12—a delay that likely led to even greater damage to the reactor core.
The blast may also have damaged other equipment, leading to more leaks and malfunctions. Rubble from the building hindered later rescue efforts.
The full reasons behind the venting delay are unclear. Tepco has said it must investigate further before it can say whether its venting policy was appropriate.
Tepco also said malfunctioning equipment meant it didn't have much reliable data on pressure within the reactor containment vessel to begin with. Nuclear-industry executives in Japan and the U.S. cautioned that it may be months before experts can piece together what happened.
A spokesman for Japan's regulator said Tepco followed its protocols and moved speedily considering that it had to consult with regulators.
The agency spokesman said it is unclear whether venting at higher pressures was connected to the reactor-building explosion.
The protocols that tell operators what to do in nuclear accidents are supposed to prevent events from spiraling out of control. The U.S.'s protocols took shape after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. Plant owners and equipment makers like GE banded together to create general guidelines that are then adapted for each specific reactor.
Japanese operators are under no obligation to use the same protocols as the U.S., even when using U.S. designs such as the GE-designed reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.
Japanese industry officials said they referred to the U.S. protocols when developing their own guidelines for Japan. A Tepco spokeswoman said the company didn't base its own accident protocols on the U.S. version, but that the content is "basically the same."
—Rebecca Smith and Peter Landers contributed to this report.
Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc
the devastation to the japanese economy not from the tsunami only but from the consequences of restricting property owners right to remain in their homes. thought wineboy would appreciate that, anyway this is from the wsj today:
BUSINESSAPRIL 23, 2011
Reactor Team Let Pressure Soar
By PHRED DVORAK
TOKYO—The operator of Japan's stricken nuclear plant let pressure in one reactor climb far beyond the level the facility was designed to withstand, a decision that may have worsened the world's most serious nuclear accident in a quarter century.
Japanese nuclear-power companies are so leery of releasing radiation into the atmosphere that their rules call for waiting much longer and obtaining many more sign-offs than U.S. counterparts before venting the potentially dangerous steam that builds up as reactors overheat, a Wall Street Journal inquiry found.
Japan's venting policy got its first real-world test in the chaotic hours after March 11's earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex. By the first hours of March 12, an emergency was brewing inside the plant's No. 1 reactor.
By around 2:30 a.m., the pressure inside the vessel that forms a protective bulb around the reactor's core reached twice the level it was designed to withstand. Amid delays and technical difficulties, it was another 12 hours before workers finished releasing radioactive steam from this containment vessel, via reinforced pipes, to the air beyond the reactor building.
About an hour later, the reactor building itself exploded—a blast that Japanese and U.S. regulators have since said spread highly radioactive debris beyond the plant. The explosion, along with others amid overheating at reactors 2, 3 and 4, contributed to radiation levels that led to mandatory evacuations around the plant and the government's admission that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster ranks alongside Chernobyl at the top of the nuclear-disaster scale.
Experts in the U.S. and Japan believe the venting delay may have helped create conditions that led to the blast. In one possible scenario, pressure built so high that it damaged gaskets and other parts of the venting system, through which highly explosive hydrogen gas leaked from the core into the reactor building. It was Japan's cautious approach to venting, an outgrowth of its profound concern over nuclear contamination, that may well have made the accident worse, they say.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. chief executive Masataka Shimizu defended his company's actions when asked in Parliament last week to explain the timing of venting at the plant, which Tepco operates.
"Venting means you're affecting the surrounding area," Mr. Shimizu said. "It was imperative we made completely certain that evacuation was taken care of for everyone affected."
The controversy has reached Japan's embattled Prime Minister Naoto Kan. Shortly after 7 a.m. that same morning, Mr. Kan paid a 50-minute visit to the Fukushima Daiichi grounds and held a meeting there with plant executives. Opposition lawmakers have argued that his visit distracted plant managers, while Mr. Kan's supporters say he pushed to accelerate venting.
Manufacturers of nuclear reactors build the containment vessels that surround the core at a "design pressure" the units are capable of withstanding without breaking, under all the conditions envisioned for the plant's life. Those include all but the most severe accidents.
Venting is a last resort.
The plant operator said of a decision to release possibly radioactive steam.
Containment vessels can withstand higher pressures, some studies have indicated. Among these are studies conducted in the 1990s by Japanese operators and equipment manufacturers, in preparation for Japan's first set of severe-accident protocols, that say such vessels can withstand twice the design pressure. Many Japanese operators have adopted this as their benchmark for releasing contaminated air.
Tepco spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai confirmed that if there is a risk of releasing radiation, the company doesn't vent until pressure hits roughly twice the design limit. "Venting is a last resort," Mr. Nagai said.
General Electric Co., the designer of the vessel at Fukushima Daiichi, said it is unaware of any such Japanese studies or venting protocols.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it doesn't have specific guidelines on venting and doesn't comment on the appropriateness of actions taken in member countries.
U.S. protocols on handling accidents at similar reactors call for venting before pressure exceeds the design level. The same protocol is followed by plant operators using similar types of reactors in Korea and Taiwan, industry experts in those countries say.
The U.S. approach allows for a faster response in crisis conditions, and accepts the radiation released as part of venting as the price of possibly preventing a larger release.
Earthquake in Japan
More photos and interactive graphics
One significant passage in the U.S. protocol says a reactor should be vented even if that results in "exceeding offsite radioactivity release rate limits"—in other words, shooting more radiation into the environment than is allowed—say people familiar with the protocol.
Another key difference: U.S. rules put the person at the controls of the plant in charge of venting. In Japan, it is common for operators to bump the decision to company or government superiors when there is a chance radiation will be released.
Several of those factors came into play in the early hours of March 12. Industry experts in the U.S. and other countries say that during the early hours after power and cooling systems were lost at reactor No. 1, overheating fuel rods in the reactor produced hydrogen gas and increased the pressure within the reactor and its containment vessel.
Tepco says pressure in the containment vessel likely hit 840 kilopascals (the metric equivalent of 121.8 pounds per square inch) around 2:30 a.m, roughly double the maximum pressure of 427 kilopascals the vessel was designed to handle.
Following Japan's decision chain, the control-room chief was required to first notify the utility's president, currently Mr. Shimizu, to approve venting. It is unclear when he was notified of the possible need to vent the reactor.
Much seems undisturbed in Futoba, Japan, where part of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is located. But one element is largely missing: people.
But in a serious nuclear accident, Japanese nuclear-emergency laws kick in, bringing a host of other requirements to consult with the government. At 3 a.m., the minister overseeing the industry regulator convened a press conference to announce the decision to vent.
Fukushima Daiichi's reactors, like those in the U.S., have a venting system that runs to a chimney outside the building and is built to withstand high pressures that would blow out weaker pipes. When a plant loses power, as Fukushima Daiichi did, the valves must be opened manually.
Those efforts didn't start until after 10 a.m., regulators say. The valves may be harder to open manually when there is a lot of pressure on them, according to one U.S. industry official with experience working with emergency protocols. Tepco has confirmed it had trouble opening the valves.
The vents were finally opened at around 2:30 p.m., and a pressure drop confirmed.
It remains unclear how much radiation was released by the venting. And there is no way to know what would have happened if Japan had followed the U.S. procedure, or even if it could have in the aftermath of the debilitating quake and tsunami.
It is also possible, industry experts said, that explosive hydrogen gases could have come not from the containment vessel, but from spent fuel rods that were also inside the reactor building.
The subsequent explosion at reactor No. 1 didn't damage the containment vessel but destroyed much of the building itself. Amid the turmoil, Tepco didn't start injecting cooling sea water into the reactor until the evening of March 12—a delay that likely led to even greater damage to the reactor core.
The blast may also have damaged other equipment, leading to more leaks and malfunctions. Rubble from the building hindered later rescue efforts.
The full reasons behind the venting delay are unclear. Tepco has said it must investigate further before it can say whether its venting policy was appropriate.
Tepco also said malfunctioning equipment meant it didn't have much reliable data on pressure within the reactor containment vessel to begin with. Nuclear-industry executives in Japan and the U.S. cautioned that it may be months before experts can piece together what happened.
A spokesman for Japan's regulator said Tepco followed its protocols and moved speedily considering that it had to consult with regulators.
The agency spokesman said it is unclear whether venting at higher pressures was connected to the reactor-building explosion.
The protocols that tell operators what to do in nuclear accidents are supposed to prevent events from spiraling out of control. The U.S.'s protocols took shape after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. Plant owners and equipment makers like GE banded together to create general guidelines that are then adapted for each specific reactor.
Japanese operators are under no obligation to use the same protocols as the U.S., even when using U.S. designs such as the GE-designed reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.
Japanese industry officials said they referred to the U.S. protocols when developing their own guidelines for Japan. A Tepco spokeswoman said the company didn't base its own accident protocols on the U.S. version, but that the content is "basically the same."
—Rebecca Smith and Peter Landers contributed to this report.
Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc
dnmun
1 PW
this is the most enlightened article i have seen in review. i had originally been very upset thinking that the plant operators had not acted promptly to use seawater for cooling the core, but it turns out that the plant's operating supervisor had actually already started using seawater for cooling before TEPCO management decided he should stop. for this he received a verbal reprimand. of course he should be awarded honors for acting to save the japanese from an even worse disaster than the $500 billion tragedy this has become, and will be for decades and decades. this is the end of japan's post war economy, the end of almost everything the japanese have built since then.
from the nytimes>>>>>>>
June 12, 2011
In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust
By NORIMITSU ONISHI and MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — On the evening of March 12, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s oldest reactor had suffered a hydrogen explosion and risked a complete meltdown. Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked aides to weigh the risks of injecting seawater into the reactor to cool it down.
At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting nearly in the dark. He had received a confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a fervently pro-nuclear academic whom aides said Mr. Kan did not trust. He was also wary of the company that operated the plant, given its history of trying to cover up troubles.
Mr. Kan did not know that the plant manager had already begun using seawater. Based on a guess of the mood at the prime minister’s office, the company ordered the plant manager to stop.
But the manager did something unthinkable in corporate Japan: he disobeyed the order and secretly continued using seawater, a decision that experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown and has made him an unlikely hero.
The convoluted drama has exposed the underlying rifts behind Japan’s handling of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, which eventually resulted in explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors. Mutually suspicious relations between the prime minister’s aides, government bureaucrats and company officials obstructed smooth decision-making.
At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need for quick action but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliances between powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympathetic politicians deprived him of resources he could have used to make better-informed decisions.
A onetime grass-roots activist, Mr. Kan struggled to manage the nuclear crisis because he felt he could not rely on the very mechanisms established by his predecessors to respond to such a crisis.
Instead, he turned at the beginning only to a handful of close, overwhelmed advisers who knew little about nuclear plants and who barely exchanged information with the plant’s operator and nuclear regulators. Struggling to manage a humanitarian disaster caused by the tsunami, Mr. Kan improvised his government’s response to the worsening nuclear crisis, seeming to vacillate between personally intervening at the plant and leaving it to the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco.
“There were delays. First of all, we weren’t getting accurate information from Tepco,†said Kenichi Matsumoto, an adviser to Mr. Kan. But Mr. Matsumoto added that the prime minister’s distrust of Tepco and bureaucrats “interfered†with the overall response.
The early disarray alarmed the United States government enough that it increasingly urged the Japanese to take more decisive action, and to be more forthcoming in sharing information. Making matters worse was Mr. Kan’s initial reluctance to accept the help of the United States, which offered pump trucks, unmanned drones and the advice of American nuclear crisis experts.
“We found ourselves in a downward spiral, which hurt relations with the United States,†said Manabu Terada, a lawmaker who served as an aide to Mr. Kan at that time. “We lost credibility with America, and Tepco lost credibility with us.â€
Lack of Experience
Even some supporters say that Mr. Kan could have moved faster and more decisively if he had used Japan’s existing crisis management system.
The system was created in 1986 and subsequently strengthened by Japanese leaders who had sought more power for the prime minister. Modeled on crisis management in the White House — even down to the Situation Room under the prime minister’s office — the system brought together bureaucrats from various ministries under the direct command of the prime minister, said Atsuyuki Sassa, the head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office in the late 1980s.
Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner. Sometimes those advisers did not even know all the resources available to them.
This includes the existence of a nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.
If they had known earlier, they would have seen Speedi’s early projections that radiation from the Fukushima plant would be blown northwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Mr. Kan’s own party. Mr. Kawauchi said that many of the residents around the plant who evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew south during winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactive plume, he said — exposing them to the very radiation that they were fleeing.
Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.
“It’s more of an emotional thing,†Mr. Matsumoto said of Mr. Kan. “He never trusts bureaucrats.â€
That is a legacy from Mr. Kan’s stint as health minister in the mid-1990s, when he became wildly popular after exposing his own ministry’s use of blood tainted with H.I.V., which led to hundreds of hemophiliacs dying of AIDS. Mr. Kan found that bureaucrats and pharmaceutical company officials had long known of the tainted blood.
To Mr. Kan, the nuclear establishment — with politically connected utilities abetted by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and compliant academics — represented the worst example of this kind of collusion, Mr. Matsumoto said.
Ignoring Orders
The seawater example is telling.
In testimony in Parliament in late May, Mr. Kan said that he asked advisers to weigh the risks that the seawater injection could cause “recriticality,†a phenomenon in which nuclear fission resumes in melted nuclear fuel lying on the floor of a storage pool or reactor core. Mr. Kan’s aides said they grew worried after Haruki Madarame, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, a nuclear regulator in the prime minister’s office, warned that the chances of this happening were “not zero.â€
On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to suspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepco liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.
“Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,†Sakae Muto, Tepco’s executive vice president, explained at a news conference.
Mr. Sassa, the former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, said: “Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?†But Mr. Yoshida chose to ignore the order. The injections were the only way left to cool the reactor, and halting them would mean possibly causing an even more severe meltdown and release of radiation, experts said.
Mr. Yoshida had the authority as the plant manager to make the decision, said Junichi Matsumoto, a senior official at Tepco. And indeed, guidelines from the International Atomic Energy Agency specify that technical decisions should be left to plant managers because a timely response is critical, said Sung Key-yong, a nuclear accident expert who participated in the agency’s recent fact-finding mission to Japan.
After revealing in May that he had ignored the order, Mr. Yoshida explained himself to a television reporter by saying that “suspending the seawater could have meant death†for those at the plant.
Mr. Yoshida, 56, according to friends, is a square-jawed, hard-drinking and sometimes rough-talking man who is a straight shooter. A practitioner of kendo in his youth, he also quotes from Raymond Chandler and enjoys cooking Italian food.
“In class, if a teacher didn’t explain something properly, he’d push for an explanation that satisfied him,†said Masanori Baba, a childhood friend.
His candor impressed Mr. Kan, who met him the day after the tsunami when he took a trip on a military helicopter to the plant. They shared a willingness to buck the system, as Mr. Kan had when he uncovered the tainted blood scandal. And, in a country where alumni ties are extremely important, they found they had attended the same college, the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
“One or two days later, Mr. Kan said Mr. Yoshida was the only one he could trust inside Tepco,†Mr. Matsumoto, the adviser to Mr. Kan, said.
Last week, Tepco gave Mr. Yoshida its lightest punishment of a verbal reprimand for defying the order.
Distrust and Distraction
Mr. Kan’s critics and supporters alike say his suspicions of Tepco were well-founded. In the early days after the March 11 disaster, Tepco shared only limited information with the prime minister’s office, trying instead to play down the risks at the plant, they said.
Tepco declined to make senior executives available for this article. Mr. Matsumoto, the Tepco senior official, said at a news conference that the company had provided information as best as it could. He declined to comment on Mr. Kan’s reported lack of trust of Tepco.
Yet the Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclear crisis in the crucial first three days to Tepco, focusing instead on relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, Mr. Terada and other aides said. Then on March 14, the gravity of the plant’s situation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at Reactor No. 3, and a startling request that night from Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu: that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plant because it had become too dangerous to remain.
When he heard this, Mr. Kan flew into a rage, said aides and advisers who were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of the four stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the two remaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4.
“This is not a joke,†the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.
They said Mr. Kan convened an emergency meeting early on March 15, asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors. Then he gave Tepco barely two hours’ warning that he planned to visit the company.
At 5:30 a.m., Mr. Kan marched into Tepco headquarters and stationed one of his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on the company.
Mr. Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk, said his aide, Mr. Terada.
“Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,†Mr. Kan told them.
Advisers said the placement of Mr. Hosono in Tepco was a turning point, helping the prime minister to take direct control of damage-control efforts at the plant. “For the first time, we knew what Tepco was debating, and what they knew,†said one adviser, who asked not to be identified.
However, even Mr. Kan’s supporters acknowledge that the move came too late.
“We should have moved faster,†said Masanori Aritomi, a nuclear engineer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and an adviser to Mr. Kan. Mr. Aritomi said that even with Mr. Hosono stationed inside Tepco, the company still did not disclose crucial information until mid-May, including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four active reactors had melted down.
Strains With an Ally
The poor flow of information and ad hoc decision-making also strained Japan’s relationship with the United States, which has about 50,000 military personnel stationed in Japan.
While Japan was quick to accept the American military’s offers to help victims of the tsunami, the perception in Washington in the early days, that it was being rebuffed and misled in the unfolding nuclear disaster, had created “a crisis in the United States-Japan alliance,†said Akihisa Nagashima, a former vice minister of defense.
Within 48 hours of the earthquake, officials from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission arrived in Tokyo, but they were unable to get information or even arrange meetings with Japanese counterparts. Meanwhile, Washington became convinced that Tokyo was understating the damage at the plant, based on readings that the Americans were getting around the plant from aircraft and satellites normally used to monitor North Korean nuclear tests, said one American official, who asked not to be named.
According to this official, the Obama administration made a decision “to lean on the Kan government†to share more information. On March 16, American officials, including the ambassador to Japan, John V. Roos, informed their Japanese counterparts that the United States would advise its citizens to evacuate an area 50 miles around the plant — much larger than the 18-mile voluntary evacuation zone then established by Japan.
The Americans also began voluntary evacuations of nonessential personnel at their bases, and hinted at more drastic steps, even pulling out some essential military personnel, if Tokyo did not share more information, said this American official and Japanese officials, including Mr. Terada.
To show Washington and an increasingly anxious Japanese public that utmost efforts were being made, Mr. Kan deployed military helicopters to drop water into the reactors, Mr. Terada and other Japanese advisers said, adding they knew this would have only a limited effect on cooling them. On March 17, on live television, the helicopters dropped water from the air, though strong winds clearly blew much of the water off course.
Still, Mr. Terada said that Mr. Kan personally called President Obama to tell him the operation was a success. Later that day in Washington, Mr. Obama paid a visit to the Japanese Embassy to sign a book of condolences — a gesture seen in the prime minister’s office as a nod of approval by the American president.
Mr. Nagashima said the American demands to be better informed ultimately improved Japan’s own response. On March 20, he brought a proposal to Mr. Kan for a daily meeting between American and Japanese officials to coordinate information and discuss responses to the nuclear accident.
The first such meeting was held a day later at the prime minister’s office. Mr. Nagashima said the meetings lasted an hour and a half, and usually involved about 50 people, including officials from the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the United States Embassy and the military, as well as a far larger Japanese group made of political leaders, people from five ministries, from nuclear agencies and from Tepco. The meeting was led by Mr. Hosono, who by then had become the prime minister’s point man on the nuclear response.
Mr. Nagashima said that even more important was what happened before the Americans arrived: the Japanese met an hour beforehand to discuss developments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans. Mr. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministries and Tepco, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time since the crisis began.
“The Japanese side needed to gather everybody in the same room,†Mr. Nagashima said. “U.S. irritation became a chance for Japan to improve its disaster management.â€
Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.
from the nytimes>>>>>>>
June 12, 2011
In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust
By NORIMITSU ONISHI and MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — On the evening of March 12, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s oldest reactor had suffered a hydrogen explosion and risked a complete meltdown. Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked aides to weigh the risks of injecting seawater into the reactor to cool it down.
At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting nearly in the dark. He had received a confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a fervently pro-nuclear academic whom aides said Mr. Kan did not trust. He was also wary of the company that operated the plant, given its history of trying to cover up troubles.
Mr. Kan did not know that the plant manager had already begun using seawater. Based on a guess of the mood at the prime minister’s office, the company ordered the plant manager to stop.
But the manager did something unthinkable in corporate Japan: he disobeyed the order and secretly continued using seawater, a decision that experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown and has made him an unlikely hero.
The convoluted drama has exposed the underlying rifts behind Japan’s handling of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, which eventually resulted in explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors. Mutually suspicious relations between the prime minister’s aides, government bureaucrats and company officials obstructed smooth decision-making.
At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need for quick action but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliances between powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympathetic politicians deprived him of resources he could have used to make better-informed decisions.
A onetime grass-roots activist, Mr. Kan struggled to manage the nuclear crisis because he felt he could not rely on the very mechanisms established by his predecessors to respond to such a crisis.
Instead, he turned at the beginning only to a handful of close, overwhelmed advisers who knew little about nuclear plants and who barely exchanged information with the plant’s operator and nuclear regulators. Struggling to manage a humanitarian disaster caused by the tsunami, Mr. Kan improvised his government’s response to the worsening nuclear crisis, seeming to vacillate between personally intervening at the plant and leaving it to the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco.
“There were delays. First of all, we weren’t getting accurate information from Tepco,†said Kenichi Matsumoto, an adviser to Mr. Kan. But Mr. Matsumoto added that the prime minister’s distrust of Tepco and bureaucrats “interfered†with the overall response.
The early disarray alarmed the United States government enough that it increasingly urged the Japanese to take more decisive action, and to be more forthcoming in sharing information. Making matters worse was Mr. Kan’s initial reluctance to accept the help of the United States, which offered pump trucks, unmanned drones and the advice of American nuclear crisis experts.
“We found ourselves in a downward spiral, which hurt relations with the United States,†said Manabu Terada, a lawmaker who served as an aide to Mr. Kan at that time. “We lost credibility with America, and Tepco lost credibility with us.â€
Lack of Experience
Even some supporters say that Mr. Kan could have moved faster and more decisively if he had used Japan’s existing crisis management system.
The system was created in 1986 and subsequently strengthened by Japanese leaders who had sought more power for the prime minister. Modeled on crisis management in the White House — even down to the Situation Room under the prime minister’s office — the system brought together bureaucrats from various ministries under the direct command of the prime minister, said Atsuyuki Sassa, the head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office in the late 1980s.
Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner. Sometimes those advisers did not even know all the resources available to them.
This includes the existence of a nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.
If they had known earlier, they would have seen Speedi’s early projections that radiation from the Fukushima plant would be blown northwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Mr. Kan’s own party. Mr. Kawauchi said that many of the residents around the plant who evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew south during winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactive plume, he said — exposing them to the very radiation that they were fleeing.
Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.
“It’s more of an emotional thing,†Mr. Matsumoto said of Mr. Kan. “He never trusts bureaucrats.â€
That is a legacy from Mr. Kan’s stint as health minister in the mid-1990s, when he became wildly popular after exposing his own ministry’s use of blood tainted with H.I.V., which led to hundreds of hemophiliacs dying of AIDS. Mr. Kan found that bureaucrats and pharmaceutical company officials had long known of the tainted blood.
To Mr. Kan, the nuclear establishment — with politically connected utilities abetted by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and compliant academics — represented the worst example of this kind of collusion, Mr. Matsumoto said.
Ignoring Orders
The seawater example is telling.
In testimony in Parliament in late May, Mr. Kan said that he asked advisers to weigh the risks that the seawater injection could cause “recriticality,†a phenomenon in which nuclear fission resumes in melted nuclear fuel lying on the floor of a storage pool or reactor core. Mr. Kan’s aides said they grew worried after Haruki Madarame, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, a nuclear regulator in the prime minister’s office, warned that the chances of this happening were “not zero.â€
On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to suspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepco liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.
“Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,†Sakae Muto, Tepco’s executive vice president, explained at a news conference.
Mr. Sassa, the former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, said: “Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?†But Mr. Yoshida chose to ignore the order. The injections were the only way left to cool the reactor, and halting them would mean possibly causing an even more severe meltdown and release of radiation, experts said.
Mr. Yoshida had the authority as the plant manager to make the decision, said Junichi Matsumoto, a senior official at Tepco. And indeed, guidelines from the International Atomic Energy Agency specify that technical decisions should be left to plant managers because a timely response is critical, said Sung Key-yong, a nuclear accident expert who participated in the agency’s recent fact-finding mission to Japan.
After revealing in May that he had ignored the order, Mr. Yoshida explained himself to a television reporter by saying that “suspending the seawater could have meant death†for those at the plant.
Mr. Yoshida, 56, according to friends, is a square-jawed, hard-drinking and sometimes rough-talking man who is a straight shooter. A practitioner of kendo in his youth, he also quotes from Raymond Chandler and enjoys cooking Italian food.
“In class, if a teacher didn’t explain something properly, he’d push for an explanation that satisfied him,†said Masanori Baba, a childhood friend.
His candor impressed Mr. Kan, who met him the day after the tsunami when he took a trip on a military helicopter to the plant. They shared a willingness to buck the system, as Mr. Kan had when he uncovered the tainted blood scandal. And, in a country where alumni ties are extremely important, they found they had attended the same college, the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
“One or two days later, Mr. Kan said Mr. Yoshida was the only one he could trust inside Tepco,†Mr. Matsumoto, the adviser to Mr. Kan, said.
Last week, Tepco gave Mr. Yoshida its lightest punishment of a verbal reprimand for defying the order.
Distrust and Distraction
Mr. Kan’s critics and supporters alike say his suspicions of Tepco were well-founded. In the early days after the March 11 disaster, Tepco shared only limited information with the prime minister’s office, trying instead to play down the risks at the plant, they said.
Tepco declined to make senior executives available for this article. Mr. Matsumoto, the Tepco senior official, said at a news conference that the company had provided information as best as it could. He declined to comment on Mr. Kan’s reported lack of trust of Tepco.
Yet the Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclear crisis in the crucial first three days to Tepco, focusing instead on relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, Mr. Terada and other aides said. Then on March 14, the gravity of the plant’s situation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at Reactor No. 3, and a startling request that night from Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu: that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plant because it had become too dangerous to remain.
When he heard this, Mr. Kan flew into a rage, said aides and advisers who were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of the four stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the two remaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4.
“This is not a joke,†the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.
They said Mr. Kan convened an emergency meeting early on March 15, asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors. Then he gave Tepco barely two hours’ warning that he planned to visit the company.
At 5:30 a.m., Mr. Kan marched into Tepco headquarters and stationed one of his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on the company.
Mr. Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk, said his aide, Mr. Terada.
“Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,†Mr. Kan told them.
Advisers said the placement of Mr. Hosono in Tepco was a turning point, helping the prime minister to take direct control of damage-control efforts at the plant. “For the first time, we knew what Tepco was debating, and what they knew,†said one adviser, who asked not to be identified.
However, even Mr. Kan’s supporters acknowledge that the move came too late.
“We should have moved faster,†said Masanori Aritomi, a nuclear engineer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and an adviser to Mr. Kan. Mr. Aritomi said that even with Mr. Hosono stationed inside Tepco, the company still did not disclose crucial information until mid-May, including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four active reactors had melted down.
Strains With an Ally
The poor flow of information and ad hoc decision-making also strained Japan’s relationship with the United States, which has about 50,000 military personnel stationed in Japan.
While Japan was quick to accept the American military’s offers to help victims of the tsunami, the perception in Washington in the early days, that it was being rebuffed and misled in the unfolding nuclear disaster, had created “a crisis in the United States-Japan alliance,†said Akihisa Nagashima, a former vice minister of defense.
Within 48 hours of the earthquake, officials from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission arrived in Tokyo, but they were unable to get information or even arrange meetings with Japanese counterparts. Meanwhile, Washington became convinced that Tokyo was understating the damage at the plant, based on readings that the Americans were getting around the plant from aircraft and satellites normally used to monitor North Korean nuclear tests, said one American official, who asked not to be named.
According to this official, the Obama administration made a decision “to lean on the Kan government†to share more information. On March 16, American officials, including the ambassador to Japan, John V. Roos, informed their Japanese counterparts that the United States would advise its citizens to evacuate an area 50 miles around the plant — much larger than the 18-mile voluntary evacuation zone then established by Japan.
The Americans also began voluntary evacuations of nonessential personnel at their bases, and hinted at more drastic steps, even pulling out some essential military personnel, if Tokyo did not share more information, said this American official and Japanese officials, including Mr. Terada.
To show Washington and an increasingly anxious Japanese public that utmost efforts were being made, Mr. Kan deployed military helicopters to drop water into the reactors, Mr. Terada and other Japanese advisers said, adding they knew this would have only a limited effect on cooling them. On March 17, on live television, the helicopters dropped water from the air, though strong winds clearly blew much of the water off course.
Still, Mr. Terada said that Mr. Kan personally called President Obama to tell him the operation was a success. Later that day in Washington, Mr. Obama paid a visit to the Japanese Embassy to sign a book of condolences — a gesture seen in the prime minister’s office as a nod of approval by the American president.
Mr. Nagashima said the American demands to be better informed ultimately improved Japan’s own response. On March 20, he brought a proposal to Mr. Kan for a daily meeting between American and Japanese officials to coordinate information and discuss responses to the nuclear accident.
The first such meeting was held a day later at the prime minister’s office. Mr. Nagashima said the meetings lasted an hour and a half, and usually involved about 50 people, including officials from the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the United States Embassy and the military, as well as a far larger Japanese group made of political leaders, people from five ministries, from nuclear agencies and from Tepco. The meeting was led by Mr. Hosono, who by then had become the prime minister’s point man on the nuclear response.
Mr. Nagashima said that even more important was what happened before the Americans arrived: the Japanese met an hour beforehand to discuss developments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans. Mr. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministries and Tepco, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time since the crisis began.
“The Japanese side needed to gather everybody in the same room,†Mr. Nagashima said. “U.S. irritation became a chance for Japan to improve its disaster management.â€
Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.
bigmoose
1 MW
It has been stated that all of Reactor 1 core is on the bottom of the pressure vessel. Most to all of Reactor 2 and 3 cores are on the bottom of the pressure vessel. Sounds like what justmissu is saying. IIRC, Reactor 1 core melted down in like 5 hours, Reactor 3 in like 79 hours and Reactor 2 in like 80 hours. I would have to look up the report to get the numbers exactly right. By pressure vessel I mean the reactor vessel, not the containment vessel (the lightbulb shaped enclosure.)
Edit: Looked up reference and corrected the hours.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/06_33.html
More bad news http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/04_16.html
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/05_06.html
"It has been almost 3 months since the nuclear accident but there is no sign of the situation stabilizing."
Edit: Looked up reference and corrected the hours.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/06_33.html
More bad news http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/04_16.html
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/05_06.html
"It has been almost 3 months since the nuclear accident but there is no sign of the situation stabilizing."
dnmun
1 PW
just listened to japanese morning news and they said that the zeolite absorbant filter had shut down with a leak signaled. that's all the news. i assume this is on the high pressure side, really know nothing about the exchange mechanism.
what it means: in a week they will reach capacity of storage of water they are now flushing through all three of the leaking cores, so within a week there will be large releases through runoff to the ocean, this is getting more tragic every moment.
what it means: in a week they will reach capacity of storage of water they are now flushing through all three of the leaking cores, so within a week there will be large releases through runoff to the ocean, this is getting more tragic every moment.
flip_normal
100 W
dnmun said:
Not wishing to detract from the heroic efforts of the workers at the plant, but it seems more like a farce to me. Why did they have the backup generators in a place where they could be flooded? If there was more openness then surely someone could have pointed out the risk in that? How come alternative generators weren't brought in in the 8 hours when they ran the pumps on the emergency batteries? Why aren't nuclear reactors built on floating platforms out at sea? Russia is in the process of building a fleet of nuclear reactor ships each capable of powering 45,000 homes and desalinating sea water.