Official: “This sort of mistake is not something that can be forgiven”
Highly contaminated water is escaping a damaged reactor at a crippled nuclear power plant in Japan and could soon leak into the ocean, the country’s nuclear regulator warned on Monday.The discovery raises the danger of further radiation leaks at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and also poses a further setback to efforts to contain the nuclear contamination crisis as workers find themselves in increasingly hazardous conditions.
That’s the morning report from the NY Times.
But the story of the day is, “Utility behind Japan’s worst ever nucler crisis gets it wrong — again and again,” by Yuri Kageyama, a business reporter and Tokyo correspondent for the AP:
The obviously harried officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co. have repeatedly announced botched radiation readings, corrected themselves over and over and indulged in seemingly endless rounds of apologies.
Every few days, Japan’s nuclear safety industry scolds them to “to take steps to prevent a recurrence of similar mistakes.”
The bumbling offers alarming insight into the embarrassing failure of crisis management at the nation’s top utility, which rakes in 5 trillion yen ($60 billion) in annual sales….
In the morning, Tokyo Electric Power Co. told reporters that radiation levels in contaminated water in one of the troubled reactors at the plant had surged to 10 million times the level than when the reactor is working normally.
Eight hours later, TEPCO Vice President Sakae Muto bowed in apology. They had gotten it wrong, misreading a machine that analyzes water samples and mistaking one radioactive isotope for another.
The real number turned out to be 100,000 times normal “” still high, but well below their terror-inducing earlier figure that caused an immediate evacuation of workers from the reactor.
“This sort of mistake is not something that can be forgiven,” Chief Cabinet spokesman Yukio Edano said Monday.
Earlier Monday, TEPCO was forced to apologize again for naming the wrong isotope in its correction. It had gotten their isotopes wrong not just once, but twice.
If such errors seem dizzyingly technical to most of the world, they are basics for the nuclear power industry, where mistaking two isotopes is a major error.
The AP lists more “missteps”:
“” For the first week after the tsunami, TEPCO radiation reports showed that hourly readings of airborne levels near the plant had were twice as high as recommended health levels. In fact, they had been off by one decimal point for dozens of readings for days. Radiation doses had actually exceeded the limit by 13 times.
“” When three TEPCO workers were hospitalized after wading into radioactive water, the company gave their condition only as “unknown.” Days later, the hospital and government officials reported the workers’ conditions “” but TEPCO still refused to say anything.
“” TEPCO officials said two of those workers were injured after they were issued ankle-high protective boots to walk into highly radioactive knee-high water. The company has yet to explain how that happened.
TEPCO makes Three Mile Island look like a model of transparency and competence.
By the way, it looks like this disaster is going to have a much bigger impact on the auto industry, especially Japan’s, than first realized. The AP lays this out in a Sunday story, “As Japan shutdowns drag on, auto crisis worsens”:
In the weeks ahead, car buyers will have difficulty finding the model they want in certain colors, thousands of auto plant workers will likely be told to stay home, and companies such as Toyota, Honda and others will lose billions of dollars in revenue. More than two weeks since the natural disaster, inventories of crucial car supplies – from computer chips to paint pigments – are dwindling fast as Japanese factories that make them struggle to restart.
Because parts and supplies are shipped by slow-moving boats, the real drop-off has yet to be felt by factories in the U.S., Europe and Asia. That will come by the middle of April.
“This is the biggest impact ever in the history of the automobile industry,” said Koji Endo, managing director at Advanced Research Japan in Tokyo.
Much of Japan’s auto industry – the second largest supplier of cars in the world – remains idle. Few plants were seriously damaged by the quake, but with supplies of water and electricity fleeting, no one can say when factories will crank up. Some auto analysts said it could be as late as this summer.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
I can imagine auto components becoming radioactive as well as the local spinach. How about shipping containers? This disaster has a long play yet.
The solution to this mess is obvious. The workers at the plants should be withdrawn, and replaced by TEPCO executives and their pet crony politicians. This would all but guarantee such an accident never happened in Japan ever again.
That, Chad, is a stunningly simple and effective idea. One that, in principle, could be usefully extended to many other industries.
I wonder if the erroneous report of 10 million times the normal level radiation was an intentional error for PR. After reporting that 10 million was wrong, and the actual level was 100,000, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. If they had accurately reported 100,000 all along, everyone would be concerned about that figure.
Latest reports say plutonium has been detected on plant grounds. Does this indicate a containment breach, or could this come from just leaky plumbing?
I find it hard to understand that after weeks have gone by, TEPCO still does not know the answers to vital and elementary questions. Have reactor vessels been damaged and do they leak? Are the fuel rods damaged in the reactors that were in operation at the time of the earthquake? Is any fuel loose at the bottom of their reactors?
Can they take photographs of the spent fuel in their storage pools? If so, what do the fuel rods look like? Why don’t the workers have up-to-date, 3-dimensional radiation maps of the buildings, inside and outside? Such detailed maps would pinpoint leaks, especially if radiation type and energy info was obtained. From the point of view of the outside public, it appears that workers enter a black hole when they go into the nuclear plants; little or no real information ever comes out.
As Leif (#1) has pointed out, anyone thinking that the private sector is always more efficient than the public just has to compare Tokyo Electric to the U.S. Navy and their many thousands of years of nuclear reactor operation on board submarines, aircrafts carriers and other ships that have carried countless sailors (and a Mission Accomplished, Banana Republican Dictator-type [what other leaders parade in military garb] President) and docked near many cities like Seattle and San Diego without comment.
Also based on Leif’s comment above, any Jetsonesque futurists who imagined nuclear cars might now have them: “You’ll glow with excitement at your new Toyota Isotope, available in colors from Mutating Mauve to Radioactive Red. . .”
They merely asserted that it was an error. Given everything that’s happened lately,WHY should I believe that the lower figure is accurate? Because it makes everyone feel good?
With each passing day it becomes more apparent that the information being released by TEPCO about the physical condition of the facility is a tiny fraction of what they know.
Even if the reactor buildings and turbine buildings are too hot thermally or radioactively to enter TEPCO will have gained good imagery of reactor containment and the fuel storage pools by one or more remote devices. Fiber optic pipe inspection cameras are built for this sort of work. They have pictures, they just aren’t willing to publish them.
The spent fuel rods are about 1% in Plutonium, and it looks as though No 3 was only partially loaded with MOX, so any of the fuel pools or reactors could be the source of Pu. CNN reports that water in drainage trenches outside of buildings is also reading 1000 milliSeiverts.
Re #2 and #3:
Sorry, I can’t agree that the idea is effective. You’d get several hundred dead executives, but that kind of idiocy is a dime a dozen, and easily replaced. Meanwhile, the contents of the plant would be strewn far and wide.
The Japan fiasco further clarifies the sequence by which industrial civilization f*&%s up the biosphere on time scales ranging from the ‘human’ to the ‘geologic’. Here’s a hastily-produced list from short to long term:
1. IMMEDIATE & SEVERAL-YEAR SCALE: ‘downwind/downstream’ air & water pollution by toxic gases, effluent & particulate emissions
2. MULTI-YEAR TO DECADES SCALE: persistent water & soil pollution by toxic metals & long-lived toxic organics
4. DECADES TO CENTURIES SCALE: climate destabilization from greenhouse gases & attendant positive feedbacks
5. DECADES TO MILLENIA SCALE: radiation from long-lived radionucleotide release from abandoned-in-place & improperly disposed-of nuclear reactors — a situation that degenerates as the industrial economy implodes & electricity becomes scarce.
…Hey, whose idea WAS this industrial experiment anyway? :-)
Leif @ 1
Any shipping container coming into a US port should set off Heartland Security alarms if it is radioactive.
Now if it enters at a Canadian or Mexican port I don’t know….
Americans would still be safe even a hot can got onto Canadian soil and an attempt was made to transport it across the border by truck or train.
Internal border crossings also have detection devices.
Serious Stuff
TEPCO says plutonium found on quake-damaged plant grounds
Three plutonium isotopes — Pu-238, -239 and -240 — were found in soil at five different points inside the plant grounds, Tokyo Electric reported. It said that plutonium found in two of the samples could have come out of the reactors that were damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that ravaged northern Japan.
All three isotopes have long half-lives, with plutonium-239 taking
24,000 years
to lose half its radioactivity. Plutonium-238 has an 87-year half-life, while plutonium-240′s is more than 6,500 years. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/japan.nuclear.plutonium/?hpt=T2
TomG, @12: I am aware of that but that does not help the supply routes or the workers between somewhere and somewhere else that may not have the high tech screening. What do you do with a hot container once found? Does all the contents become hazardous waste? It is unfair to look only thru the prism of effects on Americans.
This post is in French but the animation can be understood in any language. (Except Braille)
http://www.irsn.fr/FR/popup/Pages/irsn-meteo-france_22mars.aspx
Leif, I can only look thru that American prism because they are the only ones that I know of that are aggressively protecting their border from radioactive dangers.
What Canadian port protection is there?
I don’t know and that makes me a little uneasy.
More by my lack of knowledge than anything else.
I’m a inter-city Canadian truck driver (18 wheeler) and I am currently running auto parts on the 401 into and out of the Toronto area so I suppose you could say that I am one of those workers you mention and I happen to be on the most heavily travelled supply route in Canada.
I used to haul cans, but that was over 6 years ago so I’m totally out of touch with those guys.
As for what happens with a hot container if one snuck in?
I just don’t know.
After we’ve cleaned up this mess and safely (???) closed all the others, it’s time for our proven destructive culture, with all its techno myths and hubris, to hand the place back to its original owners.
We will have to hope that we haven’t damaged them so much that they have totally lost their knowledge of how to look after the land but from what I know on at least 2 continents, there is enough traditional knowledge and wisdom left. I believe the same situation exists in S America.
If you can’t quite come at that, at least start inviting them into all your meetings and listen and learn, ME
Bulk cargo carrier ships will avoid Japanese waters due to radioactive engine cooling water or ballast water.
Prepare for economic recession, other than the one we’re already in (excepting the bailed-out rich who also pay little in taxes).
The problem with Japan, in my opinion, is that it is a corrupt one-party state, where the same stooges of Big Business have led sway, thanks to gerrymandering, malapportionment of electorates, total media dominance by the Right and naked bribery of voters, for 56 unbroken years. Whereas you would normally say that it is a typical market capitalist economy where local plutocrats call all the shots behind the usual facade of ‘democracy without choices’, and obedience to Imperial HQ in Washington is taken for granted, in Japan that obeisance is even, if perhaps just marginally, greater than the global norm. After all the US ensured, as in West Germany, that the ‘reforms’ after 1945 were superficial, and, after hanging a few big criminals, the militaristic/Zaibatsu criminal caste was returned to power. The same process occurred in South Korea, in Italy, in Indonesia after Suharto, and is happening today in Egypt. The top crook and his closest cronies go, to comfortable retirement, and the compradore elite is scoured for suitable replacements. The Japanese showed that they were not a sovereign country by allowing the Plaza Accord to be imposed on them by Imperial Diktat in 1985, ushering in the era of stagnation. The point was rammed home last year when Yukio Hatoyama, who thought he made decisions in Japan just because he had been elected Prime Minister, was brutally brought to heel by the Obamanauts over the detested US base in Okinawa, which he had pledged to remove. Hatoyama at least had the decency then to resign. In short Japan is a typical capitalist economy and satellite of the US-corrupt, ruled by compliant compradores and dedicated to untruth, dissembling and subterfuge, particularly when money is involved. Of course I think that the Japanese people are not like this, but like all capitalist states Japan is a kakistocracy in that the worst of its people control all the power.
Any nuclear reactor – it doesn’t matter where it’s located – in the United States, the Russian Federation, Japan or Germany – all of them are unsafe, and this non-safety is based on physical laws, the nature of nuclear reaction.
People exploit obtaining power from nuclear power plants, nuclear reactors. And the United States’ reactors are not exclusion, they’re having one of the biggest fleet of nuclear reactors in the world – 25% of all nuclear reactors.
Statistics say that they have the same amount of annual shutdown numbers for these reactors, that’s about 20 – 30% of reactors annually, an average shutdown in emergency situation. It means that all these reactors are part of the first phase of Fukushima accidental scenario, every year, every third reactor, which means that the Fukushima scenario in the United States of America is possible.
Moreover, there was quite a dangerous situation, it was about 6 years ago in the Davis nuclear power plant, when a commission discovered that the vessel of the reactor and the core zone of the reactor were on the edge of explosion, there was about 10 mms of a hole of the vessel, which was corroded, and it would take next couple of weeks before the explosion and the repeated scenario of Three Mile Island in 1979. This incident was marked as # 4th according to the rate system. The 4th level, this is accidental level means very high in the rate of consequences of such accidents. http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/03/28/48095285.html
Some newer photos seem to indicate that
Part of the reactor isn’t there anymore.