Sunday, July 1, 2012

I believe the Fukushima Nuclear Plant Situation is Severely Deteriorating


I'm a webcam watcher. I watch the Tepco and TBS-JNN cams.

The Tepco webcam is located at the plant whereas the TBS-JNN cam is located on a distant hillside and is focused in on the plant.

It is true that those cams' feeds are censored and sometimes the Tepco webcam cam runs "safe" old loops to censor viewers' observations of ongoing events at the plant.

But not every major event at the plant is censored by the TBS-JNN and Tepco webcam operators.

Recently, a lot of events have been broadcasted.

The events recorded by the TBS-JNN cam here are simply terrifying: a strange blaze, a sharp blast of light and then a purple glow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zDFlI0GzQQ

Then, we had unprecedented night-time steam and/or smoke releases visible on the Tepco webcam from June 29 - July 1.

Here's a sample that is particularly disturbing because you can see that units 1  and 2 are spewing steam/smoke that is obviously highly radioactive because of the distortions/pixillation. These units rarely emit such plumes.

And the space near unit 4 looks very bad based on the steam/smoke releases from that area
We haven't had releases like this visible since June of 2011

Another big, recent event was the criticality recorded and available here:
The early morning hours from 24.06.2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3X-aFxx4JE&feature=youtu.be

So, it seems to me that the situation is not stable and that Tepco's recent efforts to knock down parts of unit 4 must either:
have been prompted by some severe emergency  
have caused caused some severe emergency
I believe everyone at risk of exposure to Fukushima plumes should be paying attention now.

3 comments:

  1. The 6-29 video with the flash near the end is very interesting.

    In the first 30 seconds or so you can see the cam operators manipulating the "fuzziness of the picture" - to obscure the view.

    Then about 1:30 in you can start to see the "fire" or whatever it is starting to build to the right of the vertical crane boom in the picture.

    Then for the next minute you see a sympathetic "fire" start blooming to the left of the crane boom. Then notice you see two additional sympathetic "fires" start burning further to the left.

    The flash could be their day/night switchover, I've been caught by that one before.

    The first fire is from the area of the SFP4, or possibly the Common SFP - which is between the camera and unit 4. The second fire is still in the unit 4 building, but on the other side- where I've speculated they had MOX fuel stored in the machinery pool - I'm surprised there's still fuel there.

    The third and fourth fires are over in Unit 3. The #3 SFP and possibly what's left of the #3 core.

    This is very interesting. It harkens back to one of Nuckelchen's colorization videos where you can clearly see the fission reaction jumping from one fuel source to another - even though they are dozens of meters apart.

    It would be an interesting topic for a nuclear physicist to teach us about this "jumping" capability. How far can these reactions jump?

    I've feared that very large flareups such as this could potentially light off Fukushima Daini or other nearby reactors.

    James

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  2. On looking at it again, I'm curious about the first sympathetic fire - the one to the left of the crane boom.

    It appears to be coming from in front of the crane boom, because I see no shadow whatsoever of the steel crane. That means this fire is either in the foreground (common spent fuel pool) or the emissions we are seeing can travel through steel uninhibited.

    James

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  3. OK,

    I looked at the sequence of videos and figured something out very interesting. They "smoked out" the video a bit after the video we refer to above. It remained obscured for about 14 hours then the "smoke" cleared.

    The smokescreen is artificial, and a common way for them to obscure what's going on - the smoke is a recorded overlay and always comes in exactly the same.

    After about 14 hours, presumably when the fission settled down, they opened up the view. However the most interesting video is a few hours later - this one at June 30, 14:44 to 15:44:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRmQOYfqqvM&feature=plcp

    About 2 minutes in, they give us the clearest view of the situation I've seen in awhile. I notice several new things.

    First you can clearly see the demolition excavator up on the deck of #4. You have to remember this is 100 feet off the ground, even though it doesn't appear to be.

    Second; I notice they've built a wall of some kind between units #3 and #4 - wonder what that is? It wasn't there a few months ago and it's really tall.

    Third and most importantly; AT ABOUT 2:05 YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE THE FISSION RIGHT THROUGH THE CRANE BOOM ON THE NORTH END OF REACTOR BUILDING 4. There isn't supposed to be any fuel there.

    This is the machinery pool, where I speculated they had MOX ready to go into the reactor.

    THE DANGER OF UNIT 4 IS NOT THE SFP - IT'S THIS MOX FUEL THAT IS APPARENTLY STILL THERE!!!!

    Check it out...

    James

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