Announcing the new and improved Atomic Insights

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The Atomic Insights Blog has been published here on Blogger since March of 2005. It has been a great host at a terrific price. Who can beat free?

However, there are some limitations to the format and the expandability. Some of my friends have also teased me about having an outdated, old fashioned looking lay out. One of them took it upon himself to design a new site and show me what it would look like if I moved my blog to a different platform with a much more creatively supported blog engine – like WordPress.

The raw material for that site update was the “classic” Atomic Insights web site, the one that sort of looked like a blog created before the word was invented. Actually, for the web historians in the audience, Atomic Insights was more like an e-zine or a webzine – it started life as a paper newsletter in April of 1995. Another friend who called me old fashioned back then took on the task of converting it to HTML and showing me how to publish it on the web. For its first few years of existence, Atomic Insights lived in a directory on a server at the University of Wisconsin. (As you can tell, I am kind of a cheapskate who is willing to use free services if available.)

Anyway, this message is a long-winded way of saying that there is a new Atomic Insights that will be the new place to read updated content and engage in intelligent discussions about energy from an atomic point of view. For the time being, the plan is to leave this Blogger site in place and to finish up the conversations that are still going on.

Once we have worked out all of the kinks associated with starting up a new platform and converting a moderate number of existing files, we will open up comments at the new site. Then we hope to migrate the articles posted here to be archived there. However, there are some technical issues that might prevent that from being a smooth process. I am still a conservative, risk averse nuke at heart, so we are taking a tight pants, belt and suspenders approach and trying to prevent any breakage for all of the links that are involved.

Not that I am complaining, but the task of convincing more than 60,000 visitors to change their bookmarks from http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com to http://atomicinsights.com may take a few reminders. Notifying and modifying the hundreds of sites that provide links here might be an even longer process. For any webmasters in the crowd, if you have links to individual posts, please do not worry or modify them; they will continue to work. The biggest challenge of all will be to get the crawlers to notice the new site and the PageRank algorithm to begin giving the new site the same kind of web cred that this blog has developed.

If you try out the new site and like the way it looks and works, you can get in touch with Jason, the creative and technical force behind the conversion project http://www.facebook.com/correiaj.

Shaken, flooded, stressed by power outages, Fukushima Daiichi moves into second place

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Two weeks ago, I wrote an article titled Nuclear plant issues in Japan are the least of their worries that attempted to provide a realistic prediction of the worst case consequences of the one-two punch from a very large earthquake and tsunami on a large nuclear power station on the coast of Japan. It has become increasingly apparent during the past week that my view from afar was not as clear as I would have hoped. I was overly optimistic about the final consequences of the events at Fukushima Daiichi.

On the catastrophic scale of commercial nuclear energy accidents, where Three Mile Island was in second place and Chernobyl was the clear leader, Fukushima Daiichi has moved into second. It is likely that it will end up to be far closer to Chernobyl than to Three Mile Island in overall economic, public health and geographic consequences.

Update: (Posted on March 27, 2011 at 0234) The above paragraph has been changed to specify commercial nuclear energy accidents to avoid complications with discussions about accidents that have occurred in the other aspect of nuclear technology. The commercial and military sides of nuclear are complicated enough to merit two mostly separate conversations. End Update.

There has been enough damage to the plants and enough radioactive material released to pose a danger to public health for someone who does not take any precautions, though actions to evacuate, shelter and monitor contamination have minimized the actual effects – so far. There have also been a fair number of plant workers and other emergency responders who have received substantial radiation doses in the range of 100-200 mSv (10-20 Rem). Those doses are about 20% of the dose required for early signs of radiation sickness (1 Sv or 100 REM) and at the threshold where there is a statistically significant increase in long term cancer risk.

None of those heroic recovery workers has been exposed to the doses that caused radiation sickness for Chernobyl first responders, but the use of emergency limits for large numbers of recovery workers is certainly no cause for celebration among those of us who believe strongly in the importance of safely using nuclear energy. As long as the recovery workers pay attention to their monitoring devices and use caution, there is no reason to expect that there will be anyone exposed to any higher levels than those already received. Achieving the goal of acceptable individual doses will likely require rotating a rather large, well trained work force over a long period of time during the clean up operations.

The radioactive material released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has already complicated recovery and response efforts for the area affected by the earthquake and tsunami. According to a recent story in the New York Times titled Extent of Damage to Japan’s Infrastructure Still Unclear transportation to the area is not easy, and some assistance from normal sources of expertise is being prevented because there is enough contamination to cause insurance concerns. I even heard through the grapevine that some of the US Navy ships that were off of the coast of Japan are having to engage in some complex and expensive efforts to clean up the fallout.

The final results are worse than what I predicted. Even if you are deeply steeped into the science of the health effects of low level radiation and recognize the evidence showing that doses below a certain level have a very good chance of being hormetic, it is not good to “crap up” a large geographic area with a significant mass of fission product isotopes like Cs-137 that will give off strong gamma radiation for many years. (Cs-137 has a 30 year half life.) Though I hope that the Japanese government does not take the step of permanently evacuating large, lightly contaminated areas, there is little doubt that some formerly prosperous farms and fisheries will be out of business for a very long time.

What this event has taught me is that I need to retreat a bit. I remain firm in my belief that human society needs nuclear energy and that there is no other alternative to fossil fuels that has a chance of meeting needs for reliable power. The importance of reducing fossil fuel consumption should be apparent to anyone who is following the current events in the Middle East and North Africa, whose community is a new host to gas extraction, whose mountains are being blown up, or who is concerned about the effects of dumping 20 billion tons of waste gases into our common atmosphere.

However, I am now certain that not all operating reactors are equally safe, equally well maintained, or equally well sited. I have always known that there are risks associate with nuclear energy – it is such a concentrated source of power that it is impossible to ignore just how quickly it can get out of control.

The importance of keeping fission and the resulting radioactive material under control; the importance of careful civil, mechanical, electrical and system engineering; the imperative for intensive, continuing training; and the always vital step of conducting operations and maintenance with a questioning, learning attitude was such a part of my indoctrination into the technology that I projected that attitude onto the entire enterprise. That was a mistake that I will not repeat. Humans can learn to use nuclear energy safely and effectively; we can design and operate systems that do not put the public at risk. However, that does not happen automatically.

There will always be some who are tempted to take short cuts or to fail to correct design errors because they are concerned about short term costs. The best lesson that I can take from Fukushima Daiichi is a better understanding of the scale of the potential losses. Final costs in the tens to hundreds of billions can overwhelm any short term savings in materials and construction time. It is not worth it to engage in efforts to slice a few dollars from initial costs by slimming down the defense in depth that has made most nuclear plants the safest, cleanest and most reliable energy production systems on the planet.

The good news is that no one has been building the types of boiling water reactors whose limits were exceeded at Fukushima Daiichi in many decades. Today’s Generation III and beyond reactors include numerous design features that would have provided substantial margins against the specific challenges faced at Fukushima, but that is no cause for complacency. There is always something more to learn and improve.

Additional Reading

The Independent (March 26, 2011) Fear and devastation on the road to Japan’s nuclear disaster zone

Depleted Cranium (March 26, 2011) Putting radiation exposure into context

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Public Meeting – Response to Fukushima Daiichi Events

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***MEDIA ADVISORY*** NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION TO HOLD PUBLIC MEETING ON NRC RESPONSE TO RECENT JAPAN EVENT

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be briefed by its staff on the NRC’s response to the ongoing nuclear event in Japan in a public meeting on March 21 at 9 a.m. at NRC Headquarters, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md. The commission meeting will be open to public observation and will be webcast at: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/webcast-live.html.

Due to limited space availability, the meeting will be set up for a C-SPAN pool camera crew. Broadcast media outlets interested in receiving the feed should contact the network pool at 202-626-7966. For still photographers, this meeting will be pooled with AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg and Getty.

In order for us to try to ensure sufficient seating for reporters, please notify the Office of Public Affairs at the contact information above if you plan to attend. There will be additional space available in our auditorium on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Pool photographers will have limited space at the meeting in which to take photos. Movement must be kept to a minimum so as not to be distracting and entry into the inner well closest to the Commission briefing table is prohibited. Plan to arrive in advance of the meeting at the Marinelli Road entrance of the NRC with proper media credentials. The NRC offices are located across the street from the White Flint Metro station. Parking is available at the White Flint metro parking garage on Marinelli Road.

If I could attend the above event, I would ask how anyone who understands radiation, radioactive material, doses, dose rates, and contamination could consider an evacuation order to be a conservative approach focused on protecting the public. Putting large populations in motion is always a decision that carries significant potential for causing public harm; that is especially true in the middle of a widespread natural disaster that has strained transportation networks and the logistics support needed to provide food, water and gasoline to the people who have been ordered to move.

However, it is time for me to go back to my day job. You might notice a bit less responsiveness at Atomic Insights compared to what I have managed during the past 10 days; I used up 4.5 days worth of vacation time to do what I think still needs to be done. People need access to more accurate sources of information about the hazards of nuclear energy especially compared to the hazards of all other energy options.

Separate topic – Nuclear Exceptionalism

News flash – the Chiba refinery fire has been reported to have been extinguished as of 0342 EDT on March 21, 2011. That fire was initiated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake. That refinery is about 10-20 miles outside of Tokyo. It dumped thousands of tons of potential hazardous material into the atmosphere in Japan every day for ten solid days. The people who own that refinery could not approach the fire close enough to take effective action due to the high levels of radiation (thermal) being emitted from the fire. My guess is that the fire’s fuel finally ran out.

You might recognize some of the footage in the above video. Similar scenes were run several times in the background as the anchors at major news outlets including CNN and CBS talked about the struggles at the Fukushima nuclear station – giving viewers the impression that the dramatic blazes had something to do with nuclear energy.

The reality of the very brief hydrogen explosions was quite different. In those cases, a large, visible volume of smoke erupted and rapidly dissipated. There was no continuing fire, but I am pretty certain you have seen the video clip enough times to have had it impressed into your brain that nuclear plants can explode during an accident. No one has tried to help you put that fact into any context, so it remains unanchored and kind of scary. I can only guess why the only footage I have found of the Chiba refinery fire came during the very first day of the 10 day long blaze.

Have you heard or found any follow-up to the story about the hydroelectric dam that collapsed during the earthquake, destroying 1800 homes? I am just guessing here, but I think that the probability of all of those homes having been empty at the time they were flooded is far lower than the probability of a used pool being emptied. However, no coverage of that accident can be found outside of dusty corners of the internet and no one has even speculated on the death toll from that single renewable energy accident.

Context and comparisons between various sources of energy must play an important role in near term decisions about the use of nuclear energy. We cannot allow people who want us to continue in our present course of consuming fossil fuels as fast as we can extract them to set the agenda for the review. They must explain how slowing nuclear energy helps to improve public safety compared to energy sources like coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal. All have some risk, but the measured, numerical risks must be put on the table and rationally evaluated.

One more topic – there is a new Atomic Show Podcast available. On March 20, 2011, I gathered five pro nuclear communicators together for a discussion about our collective and individual efforts to share as much information as we know in response to the earthquake and tsunami disaster that included a nuclear component that turned into the media’s focus area.

You can find the podcast at Atomic Show #164 – Fukushima Discussion by Pro Nuclear Communicators. There is an inline player or you can download the file for future consumption. If you like what you hear, please consider subscribing so that you will get the shows whenever they are ready – the production schedule is so fluid as to not actually be a “schedule.”

Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan Fukushima Status Report – March 19, 2011 12:30 PM EDT

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I am sharing this status report to provide wider distribution. The content is posted without edits other than minor formatting.


Update to Information Sheet Regarding the Tohoku Earthquake

The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC) Washington DC Office
As of 12:30PM (EST), March 19, 2011


Radiation Levels

  • At 10:30PM (JST) on March 19, radiation level outside main office building (approximately 1,640 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 2,854 micro Sv/hour.
  • Measurement results of ambient dose rate around Fukushima Nuclear Power Station announced at 4:00PM and 7:00PM on March 19 are shown in the attached two PDF files respectively.
  • 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

  • At 4:50PM on March 19, pressure inside the reactor core: 0.205MPa.
  • At 4:50PM on March 19, water level inside the reactor core: 1.75 meters below the top of the fuel rods.
  • At 4:50PM on March 19, pressure inside the primary containment vessel: 0.18MPaabs.
  • As of 9:00PM on March 19, the injection of seawater continues into the reactor core.
  • Recovery work of power supply is to be scheduled.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 reactor

  • At 9:05PM on March 18, access to the substation for reserve power supply from external transmission line was completed.
  • As of 1:30PM on March 19, the work for laying the electric cable from the substation to the load site is being carried out.
  • At 4:30PM on March 19, pressure inside the reactor core: -0.009MPa.
  • At 4:30PM on March 19, water level inside the reactor core: 1.3 meters below the top of the fuel rods.
  • At 4:30PM on March 19, pressure inside the primary containment vessel: 0.135MPaabs.
  • As of 9:00PM on March 19, the injection of seawater continues into the reactor core.
  • Activities for connecting the commercial electricity grid are underway.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 reactor

  • At 0:30AM on March 19, Tokyo Fire Department began to shoot water aimed at the spent fuel pool, continuously until 01:10AM.
  • At 5:25PM on March 19, pressure inside the reactor core: -0.050MPa.
  • At 5:25PM on March 19, water level inside the reactor core: 1.85 meters below the top of the fuel rods.
  • At 5:25PM on March 19, pressure inside the primary containment vessel: 0.210MPaabs.
  • At 5:30PM on March 19, Tokyo Fire Department began to shoot water continuously aimed at the spent fuel pool.
  • As of 9:00PM on March 19, the injection of seawater continues into the reactor core.
  • As of 9:00PM on March 19, activities for recovering the external power supply are underway.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 reactor

  • No official updates to the information in our March 19 update have been provided.
  • As of 9:00PM on March 19, activities for recovering the external power supply are underway.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 5 reactor

  • At 5:00AM on March 19, pump for Residual Heat Removal (RHR) started up and cooling of spent fuel storage pool has started.
  • At 6:00AM on March 19, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 155.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • At 9:15AM on March 19, making 3 holes in the roof of reactor building to prevent hydrogen from accumulating has been completed.
  • At 6:00PM on March 19, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 118.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 6 reactor

    At 4:22AM on March 19, the second unit of emergency diesel generator started up.
  • At 5:11AM on March 19, Fuel Pool Cooling (FPC) pump started to circulate the water of spent fuel pool.
  • At 6:00AM on March 19, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 151.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • At 9:15AM on March 19, making 3 holes in the roof of reactor building to prevent hydrogen from accumulating has been completed.
  • At 6:00PM on March 19, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 152.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fukushima Daiichi Common Spent Fuel Pool

  • At 11:19AM on March 18, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 131.0 degrees Fahrenheit.

Our official sources are: Office of The Prime Minister of Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Press Releases Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)

Former NRC Commissioner Jeffery Merrifield Discusses Fukushima Lessons Learned and Those Already Implemented

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Jefferey Merrifield served on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1998 – 2007. He was there when the Commission and the industry engaged in numerous “what if” discussions in the wake of 9-11 and major natural disasters like hurricanes Katrina and Isabella. As a result of those on going efforts, the US nuclear industry has already implemented a number of measures to make nuclear power plants more resilient and even better at protecting public health and safety. The effort certainly will not stop there; one of the things that the public does not fully comprehend about the people involved in nuclear energy production is that they (we) are constantly engaging in an effort to improve, to learn lessons, and to fight the temptation to become complacent.

Aside: I wish that the current Chairman was as calm and methodical as people like Jeffery Merrifield and Dale Klein.

Focus on food, water, shelter. Dr. Greg Jaczko is wrong and giving dangerously bad advice

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At about 2:22 Eastern Daylight Time a journalist sent me a brief email to inform me that Dr. Jaczko had just told the House Energy and Commerce committee that the fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi unit 4 was dry.

I had just read a status report that indicated that the temperature in that pool as of the morning of March 15, four days after the earthquake and tsunami struck, had been measured as 183 degrees F (about 84 degrees C). Since fuel pools are normally maintained at about 100 F, my “radcon math” brain immediately told me that the fuel pool would not even begin to boil for at least another day after that.

Even that was a very pessimistic number, because as the temperature in a container of water rises, the heat losses to the container and the surfaces increases. Of course, the elevated temperature was an operational concern – the higher the temperature, the greater the rate of evaporation and the greater the amount of fogging on the surface. (Think about what a hot tub surface looks like, especially at a ski resort where the air is pretty chilly. Now imagine that pool at about 60 – 70 F hotter. Lots of fog, not all that much water departing the pool.)

In the past several hours, with a break for a nap, I have done a lot of fact checking and communicating. One of the nice things about being an old ring knocker (I graduated from the Naval Academy almost 30 years ago) is that you can have a pretty useful set of highly placed friends. Some of them gave me enough information to confirm what I suspected. I cannot think of any way to say this gently – Dr. Jaczko was wrong. It is possible someone in his staff provided bad information, but it should not be all that difficult to see the problem with some simple, back of the envelop calculations.

I would think a guy with a PhD could do the math in his head – or at least enough of the math to ask for a verification of the analysis. I would expect someone who is in charge of a large, technically competent organization would double and triple check numbers and statements before going in front of C-Span cameras and a congressional committee and making statements and recommendations that distract the entire world from a real and growing food, water and shelter crisis. If I was in charge, I would not have asked anyone to evacuate any area that did not have a measured, significantly elevated radiation level. I would CERTAINLY not recommend an evacuation radius that was 3 times longer than the one recommended by a very technically competent host country.

In all of this, there are far too many people who are far too narrowly educated and far too polite to strongly question the statements of people who have been appointed to a position of authority – even if they know that the appointee has no professional background that would provide them with the ability to independently verify their statements.

In the interest of time, I am going to repurpose an email that I just shared with some colleagues and friends in response to a NY Times piece in which Dr. Jaczko is quoted as saying “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”

It is time to move from “extremely high” to real numbers. Kyodo News is reporting that the helicopter crews have measured levels above the cooling pool as follows:

At an altitude of 1,000 feet, the dose rate was 4.13 millisieverts (413 millirem)
At an altitude of 300 feet, the dose rate was 87.7 millisieverts (8.7 rem).

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78838.html

Those numbers do not exactly match the normal equations, but I assume that the helicopter crews were reporting their elevation above the ground, not their distance from the spent fuel pools. I have no way of knowing how high those are above the ground, but the distance between the helicopter and the top of the fuel rods is shorter by that elevation. Those dose rates require some attention and care, but they are not, by themselves, life threatening.

Based on those numbers, here is my analysis:

The spent (aka used) fuel pools are not generating much hydrogen. They are not boiling away. They are not empty. UO2 CANNOT burn, it is almost fully oxidized already. (That is what the O2 part of the compound equation is.) Between 90-95% of the material in a used fuel pool is UO2.

The water level in the pool at unit 4 is significantly lower than normal, which leads to higher radiation levels above the pools than normal.

The measured levels can be caused by a reduced amount of shielding above the still radioactive used fuel. Pools normally contain about 6M of water, the tenth thickness of water is .7 meters. You lose 70 cm of water, the dose rate above the water increases by a factor of 10.

As swimmers or hot tub lovers know, it is never surprising to see clouds of vapor rising from hot water on a cold day. However, even with an increased rate of evaporation, pools full of water take a long time to empty out.

The temperatures in the pool at unit 4 rose from about 40 C to 84 C during the first 4 days after the quake/tsunami. That should give you numerically inclined people the confidence to assert that boiling off of 6 meters of water could not have occurred during the 5th day. (Don’t forget about the latent heat of vaporization.)

All that said, adding even centimeters of water back to a pool is not something that a few helicopter loads can handle. They cannot carry all that much water; the stuff weighs a kilogram per liter.

It takes a 200,000 liters to raise the level of a pool that is 10 meters wide by 20 meters long by a meter. A CH-46 medium lift helicopter has a capacity of about 3,180 kg. It would require 63 trips to raise the water level one meter if my guess on fuel pool dimensions is reasonable.

See why they want to bring in fire cannons to top off the pool? This is not desperation, it is simple math and logistics.

Here is a great fact sheet from NEI about spent fuel pools.

Used Nuclear Fuel Storage at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

Additional Reading

Guardian UK (March 18, 2011) IAEA urges Japan to give more information on nuclear crisis.

This quote helps to illustrate why I am hard over on the terrible effects of evacuation orders that are completely unnecessary. They are not a “conservative” approach to a difficult situation, they add an extraordinary level of complexity and burden the people who still have a massive humanitarian crisis on their hands. It is bordering on immoral to add additional stress and anxiety that put real barriers on the ability to effectively take care of the higher priority tasks of providing food, water and shelter.

Officials have warned that the nuclear incident is hampering efforts to deliver aid to victims of last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, with reports that drivers are reluctant to travel to areas even outside the exclusion zone.

If I was the President and I had someone on my staff who provided such lousy advice, I know what I would do. It might not even be a calm conversation and could involve a common send off for a poor performer, “don’t let the door hit you in the butt on your way out.”

FEPC Information Sheet for Fukushima Daiichi on March 16 2011

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Update to Information Sheet Regarding the Tohoku Earthquake

The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC) Washington DC Office
As of 10:15AM (EST), March 16, 2011
Highest Radiation Levels

At 6:40AM (JST) on March 16, a radiation level of 400 milli sievert per hour was recorded outside the west side of the secondary containment building of the Unit 3 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 6:40AM on March 16, a radiation level of 100 milli sievert per hour was recorded outside the west side of the secondary containment building of the Unit 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 8:47AM on March 16, a radiation level of 150 milli sievert per hour was recorded outside the secondary containment building of Unit 2 reactor of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 8:47AM on March 16, a radiation level of 300 milli sievert per hour was recorded between the exteriors of the secondary containment buildings of Unit 2 reactor and Unit 3 reactor of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 8:47AM on March 16, a radiation level of 400 milli sievert per hour was recorded outside the secondary containment building of Unit 3 reactor of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 8:47AM on March 16, radiation level of 100 milli sievert per hour was recorded outside the secondary containment building of Unit 4 reactor of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 10:40AM on March 16, a radiation level of 10 milli sievert per hour was recorded at the main gate of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

At 4:10PM on March 16, a radiation level of 1530 micro sievert per hour was recorded at the main gate of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

For comparison, a human receives 2400 micro sievert per year from natural radiation in the form of sunlight, radon, and other sources. One chest CT scan generates 6900 micro sievert per scan.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 reactor

  • At 6:55AM on March 16, the pressure inside the reactor core was measured at 0.17 MPa. The water level inside the reactor core was measured at 1.8 meters below the top of the fuel rods.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 reactor

  • At 6:55AM on March 16, the pressure inside the reactor core was measured at 0.043 MPa. The water level inside the reactor core was measured at 1.4 meters below the top of the fuel rods.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 reactor

  • At 8:37AM on March 16, white smoke was observed emanating from the vicinity of the secondary containment building.
  • At 9:55AM on March 16, the pressure inside the reactor core was measured at 0.088 MPa. The water level inside the reactor core was measured at 1.9 meters below the top of the fuel rods.
  • At 11:32AM on March 16, the Japanese government announced that the possibility of significant damage to the primary containment vessel was low.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 reactor

  • At 4:08AM on March 15, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 183 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • At 5:45AM on March 16, a fire occurred in the vicinity of the third floor of the secondary containment building.
  • At 7:26AM on March 16, no flames or smoke was observed and thus it was concluded that the fire extinguished on its own accord.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 5 reactor

  • At 4:00AM on March 16, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 141 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fukushima Daiichi Unit 6 reactor

  • At 4:00AM on March 16, the temperature of the spent fuel pool was measured at 137 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant and Accompanying Facilities

  • As of 12:00PM on March 15, power generation of all facilities was restored to the commercial electricity grid from backup power generation systems. It was confirmed that no fire, damage to equipment, injuries to personnel occurred. Radiation levels were measured at a normal level of safety.
This update conflicts with the rumors that have been flying around regarding the state of the used fuel pool at unit 4. Though the temperature in the pool is high enough to cause operators to worry a bit about getting some cooling water into that pool before it gets too much hotter, it is still almost 20 degrees F below the boiling point of water.

The talk about getting a fire hose to fill the pool brings back a very intense memory for me of one of my duty days as the engineering duty officer. Without getting into any details, I ended up having a very stern talk with the tender’s DC Central about my need for a fire hose. After the person on the phone gave the order to get a fire hose down to us NOW, he came back on the line and introduced himself.

It seems that the tender XO was making a round and happened to be in DC Central at the time that I called. As an ensign, I was chewing out a commander. I managed to obtain the services that my ship needed, but oops.