* The nuclear situation is changing by the hour and people are making decisions and actively managing it.

* Having 3 to 5 nuclear reactors under various stages of meltdown is a big story in its own right. The existence of massive loss of life nearby does not diminish its importance.

* The earthquake+tsunami event is unlikely to get worse and there little people are able to do to prevent it anyway.

* Conflicting information keeps coming out about possible worst case scenarios (and their relative likelihoods) with the nuclear reactors.

* Some of these scenarios are, in fact, much worse than even the current unimaginably bad scenario. Just because things are bad doesn't mean they couldn't get worse.

* This has definite implications this for US and global energy policy. In my view, it's probably best to hold off that debate until these incidents are concluded and informs our hindsight, but the discussion is inevitable.

* The nuclear incidents are affecting rescue and cleanup. Rescue is hard enough without a 20km evacuation going on at the same time. For example there are reports that the US Navy had some ships which needed to relocate due to detected radiation.

* Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world, faces a power shortage. Commuter trains are not running. It is unclear how long this will persist. This is a huge economic impact in its own right.

There is only one worst-case scenario, so although I very much agree that the information coming out of Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the Japanese national government is inconsistent, that doesn't mean new "worst-case" scenarios become possible.

IMHO the worst-case scenario is fuel melting through the reactor pressure vessel, through the thick steel containment which was not damaged in the hydrogen explosion, and through the bottom of the concrete containment (the top of which was damaged), and then from there into the environment.

The worst-case plausible scenario from what I can tell (which again, has been true from the moment they lost cooling systems for decay heat removal) is fuel melting to the bottom of the reactor vessel, possibly breaching the primary boundary but getting trapped by the steel containment, with possible further release of gaseous radioactivity.

I say this because cooling the fuel if it is outside the primary but inside the steel containment is much easier than cooling the fuel inside the primary: you must merely submerge the steel containment in seawater (which would boil away as it heats up), but this time you don't have to worry about pumping to high pressures. The fuel was transfer its heat across the steel containment to the seawater.

As long as the steel containment is intact (as was true last I heard, but refer to my earlier point about TEPCO) then there would be no additional release of radioactive contamination from this. If there are air leaks in the containment that would be worse, but a portable radiation monitoring device would quickly identify such areas so they can be quickly patched or covered to at least keep contamination from spreading.

So, I also disagree with "unimaginably bad". Unimaginably bad might be something like coal slurry breaking through its retention walls and killing all aquatic life in a nearby river for hundreds of miles (as actually happened in Kentucky in 2000 IIRC). At my last check all three reactors that had been operating at Fukushima-Daiichi have probably had fuel damage, which means that any steam they vent from the plant will contain radioactive contamination. So, definitely bad.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find to many numbers for activity concentration (how frequently the radionuclides are actually decaying) or for dose rate (a measure of biological damage per unit time). A Guardian article mentions 680 microsievert per hour to the northwest of the site, which would be 68 millirem/hour, which is a value that is actually fairly high, but far below levels that would lead to immediate health risk.

For a point of comparison, there are (inhabited ;) spots in the world (Ramsar, Iran) where you would receive 70 millirem/day, every day, which is far above what a trained radiation worker would be permitted to receive and yet still appears to have little (if any) effect on the local population.

Of course any unnecessary exposure is unacceptable! But I also wouldn't come close to calling it "unimaginably bad", except in regards to the economic cost to TEPCO and the substantial loss of generating capacity (which as you mention, can have a substantial economic impact).

There is only one worst-case scenario, so although I very much agree that the information coming out of Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the Japanese national government is inconsistent, that doesn't mean new "worst-case" scenarios become possible.

This is an interesting question.

Repeatedly we've seen commentators and outside observers saying "this can be no Chernobyl because...". But the situation at Fukushima-Daiichi is still very dynamic and many questions remain. These cores still have a lot of energy left to dissipate and thus each still seems to have a life of its own.

As much as we would like to know the current state of the reactor cores and all the possible paths they could take, the picture emerges that those officials in charge of the mitigation efforts don't have a perfect picture either.

Whether there are multiple worst case scenarios, or there is only one that we can't see clearly yet seems to be a philosophical question about a highly physical phenomenon.

Well my opinion as to the worst-case scenario was wrong: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15fuel.html?_r=...

To be clear, the spent fuel facility at the shutdown and de-fueled Unit 4 reactor has ended up catching fire, and now they are measuring radiation levels on the site on the scale of 400 mSv/hr and 100 mSv/hr (yes, millisievert).

Yes, because this can't be a Chernobyl. I do understand that you don't exactly have time to train yourself on the ins and outs of nuclear energy. But if you're really interested in the topic, Wikipedia actually has good articles on Chernobyl and the Chernobyl disaster, including a lot of information on the design flaws that were present in the Chernobyl design, flaws which are not inherent to either nuclear plant design in general, or the Fukushima boiling water reactors in particular.

> But the situation at Fukushima-Daiichi is still very dynamic and many questions remain.

I agree. But that does not mean that any disaster conceivable is in the set of possible outcomes of the casualty. Although I know it may not seem like it, especially with all the confusing and contradictory information being put out, but what has occurred up to this point has occurred almost like clockwork from the initial conditions leading up to the casualty and the actions taken (and unable to be taken) thereafter.

A full nuclear fuel meltdown has been the final disaster since the start. The bad things that have happened since then have taken TEPCO progressively closer to that stage but as I said before, it's not like there's a multitude of different paths for the casualty to go down.

> These cores still have a lot of energy left to dissipate and thus each still seems to have a life of its own.

Yes, but the response is completely predictable. Everything that has gone and is currently going on (as far as the nuclear core response goes) is due just to the laws of nature. Decay heat is a well-understood concept (it is, after all, why so many redundant systems were part of the design in the first place), and the decay heat itself depends fully on things which can be figured out before shutdown, such as average power level, operating time, etc. It's not like some nuclear fuels have randomly different heat generation profiles and the Fukushima plant happened to pick up the super-reactive uranium.

The only variable so far has been how much cooling could they provide? So far it hasn't been enough, but that hasn't changed the underlying phenomena, and the worst case is completely predictable (i.e. no cooling could be provided whatsoever under any circumstances).

This is not like the weather where the phenomenon interact in such a chaotic way that it's effectively unpredictable: Decay heat production is easy to predict (to at least a general approximation) and even the decay of that residual decay heat over time is predictable. Even the hydrogen production from steam-zirconium reaction is a well-known and predictable effect, even during the time of Three Mile Island. The hydrogen explosions themselves were unpredictable, but even they were unsurprising.

If this is all surprising to you because it's the first you've been exposed to nuclear theory then don't feel bad, but that doesn't make what's happening at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants at all unpredictable or chaotic, or for that matter, philosophical.

I know it's not voodoo and obviously the laws of physics are well understood, but it also seems like there hasn't been enough experience with actual meltdowns that these things are entirely predictable.

I understand that the Chernobyl design contained a large quantity of graphite and little containment beyond the vessel itself.

But I still have questions:

* If the engineering is well-understood, then why did the buildings blow up due to accumulated hydrogen?

* Do these reactor designs (GE Mk I and II) include a "core catcher"? Some analysts act like it's obvious that they do, but I find no mention of it in the NRC docs. Mainly it's counted as a feature of more advanced designs.

* What does it mean for the suppression pool to be damaged? Was that optional equipment? It's being described as the "last line of defense" by a smart-looking fellow from Tokyo U.

* Can the control rods fall out? They don't drop in from above, they're pushed up from the bottom hydraulically.

* Do the materials of the fuel and the control rods melt at different rates? It seems like this could result in the materials separating as they melt and a partial core re-igniting as a lump at the bottom of the vessel. Or was this possibility considered and designed against in this '60s-era reactor?

* What is the real implication of the plutonium in the MOX fuel in Fukushima Daiichi reactor No.2? They were mostly exposed for 2+ hours.

And so on...press conference on NHK world right now (available on ustream.tv nhk-world-tv).

As far as hydrogen goes, the building itself was not designed to be the containment (instead there's a hefty steel containment around the reactor and primary piping from what I understand), so I don't think they bothered trying to make the building resistant to explosion from the inside (since they didn't have to). It would still be better to have the building in place, but I think the answer is as simple as it wasn't necessary for the meltdown casualty analysis.

I'm not sure if the Mk I and II containments contain a core catcher or not. Modern designs do from what I understand, but I would imagine the Mk I does not. Perhaps the Mk II does.

The Three Mile Island core suffered much greater fuel melting and still didn't make it past the reactor vessel, but a lot of that depends on core geometry as melting progresses, and the TMI reactor vessel was much stronger than the Fukushima plants since TMI was a pressurized-water reactor. On the other hand, the Fukushima designs have the steel containment that would catch any core leakage out of the primary initially and as long as they have seawater available they can keep the steel containment intact, and without having to send that seawater into a high-pressure system.

I'm not sure what they mean by damage to the suppression pool. The suppression pool is a torus of water that steam from the primary system is ducted to when pressure relief valves lift, which acts to condense the steam and help with filtering some of the radioactive contamination to keep it from going airborne. Doing this heats up the suppression pool, which will itself boil eventually.

I assume this is what they meant when they talked about venting the containment (as opposed to the reactor or primary). Anyways, if the suppression pool is damaged I assume that means there is a leak of the water inside of it, which would leak to the bottom of the steel containment. Without water in the suppression pool any venting of the reactor would not be immediately condensed, and would cause higher levels of airborne radioactivity inside the containment building for Unit 2 (intact AFAIK). This would not affect the ability of venting the reactor to lower pressure though, which is important for allowing water to be forced into the coolant system.

Anyways, some of my IRC buddies have clued me more into a blast at Unit 2's suppression pool? I'll try to read up on that. Until then:

According to http://rushi-langaliya.blogspot.com/2011/01/boiling-water-re... control rods are inserted into the core from the bottom. I'm not certain of BWR design but obviously if all the metal is melted then the control rod could fall out (this was actually a concern with Chernobyl which used metals with very low melting points to hold up control rods). I will say the plant I was on had about 5 different ways to keep control rods in position whether there was power or not so I'd be very surprised if the control rods weren't latched in place now at the very least. But I don't know for sure, don't want to tell you otherwise.

* I don't know what their control rods are made out of, but the good assuming is that control rods melt after fuel does. That actually means the fuel would melt down away from the control rods before lumping up. If there is coolant there, the fuel shouldn't melt further. If there is no coolant, the nuclear chain reaction can't go critical again since the fuel is not enriched enough (the coolant actually also helps aid the neutron chain reaction). I can't speak to reactor protection analysis for BWR to that level of detail, but again I'd be very surprised if that's something that wasn't considered at some point between the 1960's and the last couple of years.

If they had considered it and concluded there was a risk of re-criticality they would have taken measures to preclude it. That might be why they're already using boric acid for instance.

As far as plutonium, it has a fairly long half-life, which means it's not very radioactive. With that said it is an alpha-emitter so it is very important that it is not inhaled. As long as it's not inhaled it's not a large concern from there radiologically. As with any other heavy metal though, it is highly dangerous chemically.

Hopefully better information gets put out at the press conference.

They mentioned radiation going up right after the explosion, which could indicate a reactor vessel or other primary piping rupture, but could also just be from trapped radioactive contamination in the suppression pool being thrown out by the explosion.

Either way it's important to make sure they don't allow the concrete building shell to get damaged at Unit 2 if they want to avoid further airborne release.

My theory is that the vessel pressure vented into the suppression pool which caused the drop in pressure. That could have made a loud noise, perhaps one they had never heard in testing. Since the pool is a metal torus containing water held up by concrete and tightly coupled to the other parts it's a rigid, massful, structure. It may have been damaged by the quake.

If the radiation is explained by the spent fuel fire at unit 4, the question remains whether or not the containment on unit 2 is still effective.

I actually feel sorry about the deaths and devastation in Japan, but I have no illusions that my feelings will do anything at all to help over there.

Btw., who knows how many people are currently dying in Libya. People are dying all over the place, all the time, unfortunately. I am just saying, maybe it would have been best if I hadn't even switched on the news, and concentrated on things that I CAN do something about.

I can spot at least one inaccuracy. He claims that TMI showed that there is no risk of nuclear fuel melting through the steel containment structure. But at TMI, the core was actively cooled through the entire incident, and the temperatures were not even high enough to melt the fuel itself. So this does not given any information about what would happen in the absence of cooling.

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely propaganda on both sides, but the anti-nuclear crowd pouncing on this before we have all the facts, and while there's a race against the clock to find survivors and prevent more loss of life, is counter-productive.

Actually, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the Three Mile Island core melted completely (i.e. far worse than mere zirconium cladding damage).

This was because the Three Mile Island core was not continuously cooled. There were a couple of elements to this:

1. In normal operation, the primary system is kept highly pressurized to ensure that the primary coolant does not boil. The way this is done, however, is to use something called a pressurizer, which does have a steam bubble, for much the same reason cars use shock absorbers. When the steam flow was cut off to the turbine generators, that acted as a loss of the heat sink that had been cooling the reactor, which caused pressure to go up.

When pressure got too high, a relief valve in the pressurizer automatically lifted to relieve the pressure increase and maintain primary piping integrity. The valve was supposed to automatically shut once the pressure dropped enough, but did not. The indication that the operators had showed that the valve had been commanded to shut, but did not show that the valve had not actually shut. The location of the leak tended to artificially increase water level in the pressurizer by essentially "sucking" it from the reactor vessel (the operators had no indication of reactor vessel water level, since it was normally completely full of liquid).

This loss of water from the reactor meant that it uncovered the fuel much quicker than might otherwise be expected. The operators had other ways of telling something was wrong (such as the sharp pressure drop from a stuck open relief valve) but did not put the puzzle together. They even did worse: Automatic safety systems kicked on to force-fill the reactor with cooling water, but the operators were afraid the system would overflow the entire primary (remember, they thought there was still water in the reactor vessel), so they dampened the flow, then shut off the system completely.

2. As steam started forming in the reactor vessel, the coolant loop piping connecting the reactor vessel to the reactor cooling pumps started to fill with steam, which caused the reactor cooling pumps to cavitate (which is certainly not good for the pumps). The operators had indication of this, but assumed the cavitation was due to the pressure drop and, again thinking the core was still covered with water, they shut down the reactor cooling pumps. This represented the loss of the last line of defense against reactor meltdown.

It was not until some hours later when a different shift relieved that it was realized that a relief valve was stuck open and that there was no water over the fuel. They started re-established cooling at this point, but the damage was already done.

This doesn't make the original article any more correct though. During most of the TMI accident the core was being actively cooled, and in fact it never got uncovered enough to even completely melt. So this still does not tell us anything about how containment would work in the absence of cooling.

Steam is not a coolant, which is why I went into so much detail on my first point. In fact steam has such atrocious heat conduction properties compared to water that you'll find many nuclear engineers refer to "steam blankets".

So if the coolant pumps were running or not is essentially immaterial if the coolant flowing over the fuel plates is itself steam. I only said the coolant pumps were the last line of defense. They are required, but not sufficient.

This is not ad hominem, I am not claiming anything about the correctness of his claims. However, I think it is important to distinguish this from the other numerous WSJ pieces on the situation of nuclear plants in Japan right now.

whether a core melts through the containment vessel or not depends on specific temperature that pool of melted uranium on the floor will develop. That in itself depends on the geometrical shape of the pool, uranium enrichment degree and presence of the neutron moderator material in the pool. That in itself depends on a bunch of other things ...

Nowhere it depends on the opinion or a viewpoint.

1.) He argues that the three mile island accident means that the containment vessel will hold now. Even if they were the exact same reactor design, that doesn't logically follow, but they aren't the same design which gives even less credence to this argument.

2.) He says that once the reactor is flooded with water they won't have to do any more pressure releases. Again, I don't see how that follows. As long as there is enough residual heat to boil water, there's certainly a possibility that they will have to do more pressure releases.

2.) The containment structure is quite large, and the residual heat is relatively low. There is a lot of water there, presumably too much for the residual heat to boil. (The water normally flows only in the much smaller reactor vessel.)

Unsurprisingly, the article isn't written by a scientist; William Tucker is a pundit and journalist who writes about energy from a popular and political perspective. In his multiple books and hundreds of articles, he has done no experiments to verify any of his hypotheses.

Personal experience or experimentation are not the only means of acquiring knowledge. In fact, most of our knowledge is gained by other methods (e.g. trusted sources).

Look, I agree with the general viewpoint that we should build more nuclear power. But his points about the article are valid, and I don't see why he should be held to a higher standard than the PR flack getting free op-ed space.

But at the same time they are not completely independent events. Quite the opposite. It is likely that an earthquake will be followed by a tsunami.

If they engineered it so that 2 events: quake and flood are independent, then they made a mistake. Possibly there is nothing they could do but I doubt that.

This is somewhat similar to the birds and airplane engines. It is assumed that once in a while a bird will hit an engine and possibly take it out. No big deal, there are 1,2 or 3 more engines. But the problem is that birds fly in flocks. So chances are that the plane will fly into a flock of birds and all engines will go out. Which is what happened a year or two ago. Now there is probably not much they could do but hopefully at least they didn't assume that invidual engine failure due to bird hits would be completely independent failure events.

Wrong and wrong. Some backup cooling mechanisms have failed, not all safety mechanisms.

The electric backup worked as designed. The diesel backup did not, as I understand it, because it was affected by the tsunami (which is inexcusable in my opinion). And the backup diesel generators brought in from off-site, from what I've read, could not be attached due to incompatible connectors (which if true, is also inexcusable).

No, that is the reason they where suppose to fall back on diesel based pumps. The electrical outage after the quake made the electric pumps fail. The diesel based pumps also failed as we agree upon. After that there was a mechanism simply based on preasure which supposed to push out hot steam, cool it off and feed it back as water. However this mechanism led a decreased level of water (from what I have heard). Which is why they now resort to pumping it in manually. I think it's safe to say that two major explosions at the plant (even though it wasn't the reactor it self apparently) is a sign of failed safety mechanisms.

"Nuclear fuel rods at one of the reactors may have become became fully exposed raising the risk they could melt down and cause a radioactive leak, Japanese news agency Jiji said."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/quake-japan-nuclea...

And then later.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/13/japan-quake-onagaw...

Which at least points to the uncertainty and conflicting messages. But it's good to know that the situation has stabilized and it now is clear that it does not face the same difficulties.

He's just not stating the (true) premise that the seawater will be able to absorb the heat; he's implying it and relying on it. That doesn't make the article illogical, it makes it mildly enthymematic.

How do you compare nuclear radiation/poisoning (apples) to electro-magnetic radiation (oranges)?

There's also a very big difference between radiation and radioactive isotopes, which can be inhaled or ingested.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/uss-carrier-ronald-reaga...

"The maximum potential radiation dose received by any ship's force personnel aboard the ship when it passed through the area was less than the radiation exposure received from about one month of exposure to natural background radiation from sources such as rocks, soil, and the sun," Davis said.

According to 7th Fleet Commander and Spokesman Jeff Davis, the ships were moved away from the downwind direction of the plant as a precautionary measure on Sunday.

These were members of a rescue crew, who were most likely far closer to the incident than the ship itself.

"The helicopters sounded the alert around 60 miles from the coast and the ship’s sensors also sounded when it was 100 miles north east of the plant."

You can't assume an r-squared dependency, as the radiation they were measuring came from the radioactive steam that had drifted out to sea (i.e. the "airborne radioactivity"). It was not from the Fukushima-Daiichi site directly (after all, there's many different radiation monitoring stations nearby that have much better indications of general area radiation levels).

In fact you proved yourself wrong! If being a mile away from the reactor gave you 2 Sv/hour, and no one lives past 7 Sv, that's only 3.5 hours anyone could survive, and there have been workers at the site for days now.

http://www.grs.de/informationen-zur-lage-den-japanischen-ker...

there was a peak at 1.2 mSv/h when the meltdown occured. All in all the values are in the range of 0.4-1 mSv/h. At least a factor 10 lower as I found in the approximation above.

The differences:

- burning graphite was adding energy, in the current water case - the energy is provided only by the core.

- containment structure.

So, while there is obvious similarity to Chernobyl, there is very significant quantitative difference as to the intensity of the process. As long as the core temperature going down, it should be fine. Is it going down?