Last Saturday the the crisis level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was rapidly on the rise. Hydrogen explosions, cracks in the wetwell torus and fires in a shutdown unit’s building — it seemed the sequence of new problems would never end. A week later, the situation remains troubling, but, over the last few days, it has not got any worse. Indeed, one could make a reasonable argument that it’s actually got better.

Yes, the IAEA has now formally listed the overall accident at an INES level 5 (see here for a description of the scales), up from the original estimate of 4. This is right and proper — but it doesn’t mean the situation has escalated further, as some have inferred. Here is a summary of the main site activities for today, followed by the latest JAIF and FEPC reports. You also might be interested in the following site map:

Another large cohort of 100 Tokyo fire fighters joined the spraying operation to cool down the reactors and keep the water in the spent fuel ponds. The ‘Hyper Rescue’ team have set up a special vehicle for firing a water cannon from 22 m high (in combination with a super pump truck), and today have been targeting the SNF pond in unit 3. About 60 tons of sea water successfully penetrated the building in the vicinity of the pool, at a flow rate of 3,000 litres per minute. Spraying with standard unmanned vehicles was also undertaken for 7 hours into other parts of the the unit 3 building (delivering more than 1,200 tons), to keep the general containment area cool. The temperature around the fuel rods is now reported by TEPCO (via NHK news) to be below 100C.

Conditions in unit 3 are stabilising but will need attention for many days to come. Promisingly, TEPCO has now connected AC cables to the unit 1 and 2 reactor buildings, with hopes that powered systems can be restored to these building by as early as tomorrow (including, it is hoped, the AC core cooling systems), once various safety and equipment condition checks are made.

Holes were made in the secondary containment buildings of Units 5 and 6 as a precautionary measure, to vent any hydrogen that might accumulate and so prevent explosions in these otherwise undamaged structures. The residual heat removal system for these units has now been brought back on line and these pools maintain a tolerable steady temperature of 60C. More here. These buildings were operating on a single emergency diesel generator, but now have a second electricity supply via the external AC power cable.

Why are they concentrating on these activities? Let’s revisit a bit of the history of last week. The spent fuel pool still has decay heat (probably of the order of few MW in each pool) that requires active cooling. When power went out on Friday, the cooling stopped and the pool temperature has been rising slowly over the weekend, and probably started boiling off (and a large volume may have also been lost due to ‘sloshing’ during the seismic event). The pool is located on the 4th floor above the reactor vessel level. It remains unclear why they could not arrange fire trucks to deliver the sea water before the fuel rods got damaged and started releasing radioactivity. Now the effort is hampered by the high radiation level (primarily penetrating gamma rays). This is the inventory of those spent fuel ponds that have been causing so many headaches:



In order to remove the decay heat after the reactor shutdown, the cooling system should be operating. Following the loss of offsite power, the on-site diesel generators came on but the tsunami arrived an hour or so later and wiped out the diesel generators. Then the battery provided the power for 8 hours or so, during which time they brought in portable generators. However, the connectors were incompatible. As the steam pressure built up inside the pressure vessel, the relief valve was open and dumped the steam to the pressure suppression chamber, which in turn was filtered out to the confinement building and the hydrogen explosion took out the slabs.

The sea water was then pumped in by fire trucks and the reactor pressure vessels are now cooled down to near atmospheric pressure but the fuel assemblies are uncovered at the top quarter or third (the FEPC updates give the actual pressure and water levels). It appears that the pressure vessels and the reactor containment structures are intact, except the Unit 2, where the hydrogen explosion took place inside the containment and hence damaging the lower wetwell torus structure (but almost certainly not the reactor vessel, although the exact status is unclear). It appears that the radioactivity releases are mostly coming from the spent fuel storages than the reactor cores.

World Nuclear News has a really excellent extended article here entitled “Insight to Fukushima engineering challenges“. Read it! Further, you must watch this 8 minute reconstruction of the timeline of the accident done by NHK — brilliant, and really highlights the enormous stresses this poor station faced against a record-breaking force of nature. As I’d noted earlier, just about everything that could have went wrong, did. But valuable lessons must also be learned.

The IAEA and Japanese government has reported the potential contamination of food products from the local Fukushima area via radioactive iodine (mostly vented as part of the pressure relief operations of units 1 to 3). This is a short-term risk due to the 8-day half-life of radioactive iodine (and a small risk, given the trace amounts recorded), but precautions are warranted, as discussed here. What does this mean?

In the case of the milk samples, even if consumed for one year, the radiation dose would be equivalent to that a person would receive in a single CT scan. The levels found in the spinach were much lower, equivalent to one-fifth of a single CT scan.

… and to further put this in context:

The UK government’s chief independent scientific advisor has told the British Embassy in Tokyo that radiation fears from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant are a “sideshow” compared with the general devastation caused by the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck on 11 March. Speaking from London in a teleconference on 15 March to the embassy, chief scientific officer John Beddington said that the only people likely to receive doses of radiation that could damage their health are the on-site workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. He said that the general population outside of the 20 kilometre evacuation zone should not be concerned about contamination.

As to the possibility of a zirconium fire in the SNF ponds, this seems unlikely. Zr has a very high combustion point, as illustrated in video produced by UC Berkeley nuclear engineers. They applied a blowtorch to a zirconium rod and it did not catch on fire. The demonstration is shown about 50 seconds into this video. The temperature was said to reach 2000C [incidentally, I visited that lab last year!].

The the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum has provided their 12th reactor-by-reactor status update (16:00 March 19).

Here is the latest FEPC status report:

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Radiation Levels At 7:30PM on March 18, radiation level outside main office building (approximately 1,640 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 3,699 micro Sv/h. Measurement results of ambient dose rate around Fukushima Nuclear Power Station at 4:00PM and 7:00PM on March 18 are shown in the attached two PDF files respectively. At 1:00PM on March 18, MEXT decided to carry out thorough radiation monitoring nationwide. For comparison, a human receives 2,400 micro Sv per year from natural radiation in the form of sunlight, radon, and other sources. One chest CT scan generates 6,900 micro Sv per scan.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 reactor Since 10:30AM on March 14, the pressure within the primary containment vessel cannot be measured. At 4:00PM on March 18, pressure inside the reactor core: 0.191MPa. At 4:00PM on March 18, water level inside the reactor core: 1.7 meters below the top of the fuel rods. As of 3:00PM on March 18, the injection of seawater continues into the reactor core. Activities for connecting the commercial electricity grid are underway.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 reactor At 4:00PM on March 18, pressure inside the primary containment vessel: 0.139MPaabs. At 4:00PM on March 18, pressure inside the reactor core: -0.002MPa. At 4:00PM on March 18, water level inside the reactor core: 1.4 meters below the top of the fuel rods. As of 3:00PM on March 18, the injection of seawater continues into the reactor core. Activities for connecting the commercial electricity grid are underway.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 reactor At 2:00PM on March 18, six Self Defense emergency fire vehicles began to shoot water aimed at the spent fuel pool, until 2:38PM (39 tones of water in total). At 2:42PM on March 18, TEPCO began to shoot water aimed at the spent fuel pool, until 2:45PM, by one US Army high pressure water cannon. At 3:55PM on March 18, pressure inside the primary containment vessel: 0.160MPaabs. At 3:55PM on March 18, pressure inside the reactor core: -0.016MPa. At 3:55PM on March 18, water level inside the reactor core: 2.0 meters below the top of the fuel rods. As of 3:00PM on March 18, the injection of seawater continues into the reactor core.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 reactor No official updates to the information in our March 18 update have been provided.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 5 reactor At 4:00PM on March 18, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 152.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 6 reacto r At 4:00PM on March 18, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 148.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

r Fukushima Daiichi Common Spent Fuel Pool At 10:00AM on March 18, it was confirmed that water level in the pool was secured.

Fukushima Daiichi Dry Cask Storage Building At 10:00AM on March 18, it was confirmed that there was no damage by visual checking of external appearance.



At 5:50PM on March 18, Japanese Safety Authority (NISA: Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) announced provisional INES (International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) rating to the incidents due to the earthquake.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1, 2 and 3 Unit = 5 (Accident with wider consequences)

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 = 3 (Serious incident)

Fukushima Daini Unit 1, 2 and 4 Unit = 3 (Serious incident)

(No official provisional rating for Fukushima Daini Unit 3 has been provided.)

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