Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Fukushima Daiichi and the Rats


hat tip Enenews

Tepco announced that the spent fuel pool cooling at Daiichi will be out at unit 2 for several hours while they make repairs: 


Reuters (2013, April 22) Fukushima nuclear cooling system offline for 3rd time in 5 weeks, http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201304220119

[Excerpted] Tokyo Electric Power Co. halted the cooling system for a spent fuel pool at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant on April 22.


It was the third time a cooling system has been offline there in the past five weeks, underlining the challenges the utility faces in trying to shut down the facility.


TEPCO said in a statement that it halted the system for the No.2 unit's spent fuel pool for inspection after it found dead rats near a transformer. [end]

Majia here: This is the 3rd time in the last 5 weeks that Tepco has announced spent fuel pool cooling outages.

The Tepco and TBS webcams depicted Daiichi as very steamy and hot (i.e., radioactive) during the last outages. See my post here

Indeed, Tepco has been looking very, very hot since mid March, as these posts illustrate

March 28 'the event' at Daiichi here
March 25 here
March 24 (TBS cam was obscured) here
March 23 here and here
March 22 here
March 21here
March 20 here
March 20 here
March 19 here
March 19 here
March 18 background on spent fuel pool fueling problems and links to screen shots here  
I think the 'rat' must be a rhetorical ploy.
Perhaps it signifies to Tepco's inability to control the atomic forces of nature.
Yesterday, March 22, I saw that the TBS cam was offering a more panoramic view than it does ordinarily, allowing the viewer to see the area 'north' (I think that is the proper direction) of unit 1.
Emissions were visible in that area. They are visible again today. Look to the left of the far left crane:
CrystalWind of Enenews kindly posted this link for a labeled map of the plant see the map here
 
The map indicates that the emissions I saw are coming either from the dry cask storage facility or units 5 and/or 6. Bad news.

Maybe Tepco's rat story is designed to signal each level of deteriorating conditions.

I swear I saw steam erupt from the ground a few weeks back. Commentators such as PattieB has claimed that the melted fuel has penetrated the earth and is fissioning in the water-logged site, causing periodic eruptions of highly radioactive steam (see here).

The uncontrollable rat, whose pursuits and energies sabotage all efforts at human control, has become iconic of Tepco's failure to control the Daiichi site.

Yet, we should not read the rat story literally because the lowly rat is but a bit player in the ongoing and now unstoppable human tragedy that Fukushima Daiichi has become.


2 comments:

  1. New criticality occurred April 7-8:

    http://optimalprediction.com/wp/xenon-detected-by-ctbto-blamed-on-north-korea/

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  2. Thanks Bobby1

    The expanded view available on the TBS cam appears to now include the dry cask storage facility. Steam is coming from that area.

    However, the common spent fuel pool appears to be the major source of the largest steam releases we've seen recently.

    I read and I believe Gundersen explained that the rods don't have to actually burn to release high amounts of radionuclides....

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