It turns out there is no water in reactor unit 1 and the operator TEPCO admits the core has melted down. This is from the Estimable Ex- SKF website:

From TEPCO Presser May 12 AM (Part 1): “We Have No Idea Where the Water Went” from Reactor 1 RPV/Containment Vessel

TEPCO’s Matsumoto answering questions from the press, from TEPCO’s press conference on May 12 morning recorded live (in Japanese).

Rough translation from the Question and Answer:

Regarding the water level in the Containment Vessel of the Reactor 1:

“The pressure gauge for the Containment Vessel is working, but we cannot properly measure the water level inside the Containment Vessel. Therefore, we do not know where the water level is.”

About the water that’s been poured:

“We are trying to figure that out. In the initial stage when the reactor core was still hot, the water might have been evaporated and escaped from the Containment Vessel. But now, the reactor temperature is between 100 to 120 degrees Celsius, so the water would remain water. We are assuming most of the water escaped the Containment Vessel into the surrounding reactor building. However, there is no water in the northwest corner of the basement of the reactor building, as far as we can see by the camera. We don’t know where the water has gone. Possibly, it may have gone to the reactor building, the turbine building, or the waste disposal facility. But we haven’t identify it yet.”

This tepid revelation regards reactor unit 1 only. (NEW) TEPCO now admits the reactor units 2 and 3 also “may” have have also suffered total meltdowns. Both of these units are generating large amounts of steam and smoke. This indicates the reactor unit containment buildings are holding at least a little bit of water.

Where does the water go?

• The containments were damaged by the earthquake on March 11 and subsequent aftershocks and cannot hold water.
• The molten cores burned holes through the containment structures.
• The water is leaking into the ground or into interconnected basements and sub- basements.
• Some of the water is boiling off.
• The flow of water through the buildings has created a channel underground that leads directly to the ocean.
• The condition of the spent fuel pool atop reactor unit 1 is unknown. There are almost 200 tons of radioactive fuel rod assemblies in the spent fuel pool. The building roof collapsed directly on top of the containment. This roofing has not been dislodged, concealing conditions within the pool. Presumably, water has been pumped into it by way of a standpipe.

The failure of gauges and sensors in the reactor units after the earthquake and blackout have kept operators in the dark about conditions within. Operators believed the containment was bulging with water when in fact, the water was flowing from holes in the bottom as as fast as it could be pumped in @ the top. Water flows carrying radioactive material with it, contaminating what … exactly?

TEPCO reassures us that everything is just fine:

(NHK News)

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that the reactor appears to be stable because it’s been steadily cooled for a long period. But he said the condition of the reactor must be reassessed as some figures from the gauge are contradictory.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that if the latest data is accurate, it seems parts of the fuel rods have melted and accumulated at the bottom of the reactor. But it added that it believes the fuel rods are being cooled.

That’s good to know, I really feel a whole lot better about the situation, now. After all, it’s how I feel and those persons like me feel … that matters. To hell with those pesky facts …

Meanwhile the other three reactor units are boiling away with yet more radioactive releases into the air and water. Here is a still from Tokyo Broadcasting System by way of ENENews:

Figure 1: this is a screen shot from the video camera. The same photo is enhanced below:

Figure 2: This looks like a picture postcard: “Greetings from Hell!” Notice the tilt of the reactor building on the far right, this is reactor unit 4.

Here are temperature readings from reactor unit 3: (Please click on the images for a larger view)

Figure 3: the temperatures here are from sensors on the reactor pressure vessel. There is little to indicate whether these are working correctly. Temperatures rise steadily then fall, either as gauges are ‘recalibrated’ or sensors are covered with water.

Presumably, when the gauges/sensors are underwater the temperature will drop. If the water level drops and the sensors are exposed to steam the temps will increase. In any event, the temps have been rising continually. This is not a signature of decay heat, rather it indicates increasing reactivity taking place with the building.

It is likely the core of this reactor unit melted down completely on March 14th triggering the now- famous unit 3 explosion.

NHK indicates highly radioactive water is leaking out of reactor unit 3. Water pumped into the unit has to go somewhere.

New radioactive leak raises questions

Highly radioactive water was found leaking into the sea from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Wednesday. It’s now been revealed that contaminated water levels in the No. 3 reactor’s turbine building were already alarmingly high by Sunday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company plugged the leak with concrete after it found highly radioactive water flowing into the sea through a pit.

Radioactive cesium 620,000 times higher than the government-set safety limit was detected from the leaked water.

The contaminated water was streaming from the outlet of a pipe for electric cables.

The leak is thought to have stemmed from pooled water in the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor.

Highly radioactive water has also leaked out of reactor unit 2.

TEPCO has as much a clue about its own business @ Fukushima Daiichi as Bozo the Clown!.

• The reactor units 1- 3 appear to have melted down completely within the first few days after the tsunami; these meltdowns were the cause of the various explosions. TEPCO has only grudgingly admitted the meltdowns.
• The reactor containments were compromised along with essential plumbing by the earthquake and by subsequent explosions.
• TEPCO has not been forthcoming about the nature of the reactor explosions.
• TEPCO apparently ‘forgot’ about the spent fuel in reactor unit 4 allowing the water level in that spent fuel to drain out or boil away causing a large explosion that has compromised that building.
• TEPCO has failed to grasp the implications of the information it has been able to obtain, such as the likely cause and effects of the four explosions at the reactor units. Instead, it has wasted valuable time pretending to produce ‘solutions’ that cannot possibly work such as reconstructing emergency cooling … within leaking, heavily irradiated buildings for reactor cores that do not exist in forms that allow water cooling!
• TEPCO has never ‘prepared for the worst’, instead has relied on ad- hoc measures which are clearly inadequate.
• TEPCO’s lackadaisical approach to safety and plant operation has reaped the outcome of multiple core meltdowns on a single site where increasing levels of radiation makes occupying the site less likely over time.
• TEPCO evades the issue of ongoing criticality when comparative measurement of isotopes and rising temperatures — along with obvious increases in steam production — indicates criticality is taking place. The best outcome of increasing criticality is a large increase in radiation emissions. The worst outcome is a prompt- criticality event: an explosion and fire, with both outcomes requiring the abandonment of the Fukushima site for an extended period.
• Rising temperatures in reactor unit 3 indicate the core material cannot be cooled despite the flood of water into the unit. As is the case with unit 1, the water may be flowing out of the containment as fast as it can be pumped in.

Observing the various meter-readings and revelations from TEPCO and the Japanese news media there is a lot more going on in these reactors than meets the Western eye.

TEPCO has proven completely incompetent. The situation at Fukushima is out of control. The reactors are not healing themselves. TEPCO is mired in a management culture that cannot give direction or adequately scale its response. TEPCO has acted on wishful thinking and self- deception. The reactor emergency management role must be given to the Self- Defense Forces while the Japanese government seeks resources from overseas. Someone who understands the physics must be put in control and an all- out effort launched to entomb the cores and stifle the outflow of radioactive material.

This is common sense.

There is no further update on conditions @ reactor unit 4 and its increasing lean. Some sort of ‘stabilization efforts’ — whatever these might be — are supposed to be taking place. What is the cause of the lean in the first place?

There is a large reactor vessel within the containment. It is difficult to imagine the building collapsing without severe damage to the reactor pressure vessel, which has concrete walls several meters thick.

It is possible the building foundations were undermined by soil liquifaction due to ongoing earthquakes shaking water-saturated ground under the reactors: (From the University of Washington)

Liquefaction is a phenomenon in which the strength and stiffness of a soil is reduced by earthquake shaking or other rapid loading. Liquefaction and related phenomena have been responsible for tremendous amounts of damage in historical earthquakes around the world.

Liquefaction occurs in saturated soils, that is, soils in which the space between individual particles is completely filled with water. This water exerts a pressure on the soil particles that influences how tightly the particles themselves are pressed together. Prior to an earthquake, the water pressure is relatively low. However, earthquake shaking can cause the water pressure to increase to the point where the soil particles can readily move with respect to each other.

Figure 4: this is the outcome of soil liquifaction under Nagoya after the 1964 earthquake. Nobody has any information whether the reactor complex was built on fill dirt or not. It is possible that the quakes have created many fissures in the soil as well as in the reactor buildings. There have been over 900 aftershocks to date after the March 11 super- quake.

It is also likely the explosion in the spent fuel pool(s) and the powerful explosion in the unit 3 building compromised unit 4. The spent fuel pool and its cargo of water makes the containment structure ‘top heavy’. There are almost 1,500 fuel rod assemblies in the spent fuel pool: (from CWSX World energy information site)

Types and Amounts of Materials at the Site

There are five loaded reactor cores, six spent fuel storage pools and one large common fuel storage pool on site. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) stores 11,125 fuel rod assemblies in the pools, with each assembly holding either 64 or 81 fuel rods for a total of approximately 800,000 fuel rods. 1,479 assemblies are at the Unit 4 pool, of which 548 are from the ‘core load’ removed for maintenance in December. At Unit 3, 32 assemblies in the pool are made of mixed plutonium-uranium or MOX fuel, as is the entire core load.

The cores themselves contain various numbers of fuel assemblies depending on the size of the units. Units 2, 3 and 4 are each 784 MW in rated electrical capacity, and each holds 548 fuel rod assemblies. So for perspective, each spent fuel pool holds about two core loads’ worth of fuel rods, while the common fuel pool on site holds about 1.5 times again as many as Units 1-6 combined.

Setting aside the common fuel pool, then, there are roughly 18 core loads in the reactor buildings, counting both the reactor cores and the spent fuel pools. If we assume that Units 5 and 6 are stable, we can deduct six loads and discuss 12 loads in the badly damaged Units 1-4. Note, however, that the common pool and Units 5 and 6 remain dependent on timely cooling, which could be in question if an event forces workers to evacuate again for an extended period.

We can be more precise about the nuclear materials in the reactor buildings for Units 1-4. According to TEPCO, the total number of fuel rods in those buildings’ spent fuel pools is 2,060 plus the core load from Unit 4, or 2,508 assemblies, or roughly 180,000 rods.

At 0.127 tons per assembly, this implies 431 tons of uranium within the damaged buildings’ pools. There should be another 534 assemblies in the cores of Units 2 and 3 which are the same size as Unit 4, and about half that number in Unit 1. Adding these 1,335 assemblies brings the total to 3,843 assemblies, 280,000 rods, and 488 tons of uranium in the damaged units. The MOX fuel rods are about 3% plutonium which does not materially alter the analysis of fission products, our main concern here.

There is 187 tons of reactor fuel in the spent fuel pool of unit 4 plus the weight or water and building debris atop the structure, which is of unknown integrity.

Without a realistic containment approach all the energy contained within the fuel on site will flow to the rest of the world. The Department of Energy and NNSA has released information on radiation effects: (Please click on image for a larger version)

Figure 5: A Japanese version of map showing radiation levels at distances from the reactor complex: (Japan Probe)

A joint survey conducted by the Japanese and U.S. governments has produced a detailed map of ground surface radioactive contamination within an 80-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant:

After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, those living in areas with more than 555,000 becquerels of cesium-137 per square meter were forced to relocate. However, the latest map shows that accumulated radioactivity exceeded this level at some locations outside the official evacuation zones, including the village of Iitate and the town of Namie.

“I am surprised by the extent of the contamination and the vast area it covers,” said Tetsuji Imanaka, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute. “This (map) will be useful in planning evacuation zones as well as the decontamination of roads and public facilities.”

The map confirms in greater detail what was already known: most of the leaked radioactive material went to the northwest, with relatively high amounts reaching areas slightly outside of the 30-kilometer evacuation zone. Iiitate, which is outside the original evacuation zone, yet is covered with a streak of red on the map, is in the process of being evacuated.

Contamination is being found at high levels in the Tokyo area:

Radiation Detected in Tea Leaves in Japan, (Wall Street Journal)

A prefecture just south of Tokyo said it had detected higher-than-permissible amounts of radioactive material in tea leaves, in a reminder that Japan’s radioactive-contamination problems are far from over. […]

According to Kanagawa officials, a sample of tea leaves collected May 9 from the city of Minamiashigara, in the western part of the prefecture, was found to contain 550 becquerels of cesium per kilogram in the first test; the second test of the same sample detected 570 becquerels. […]

Kanagawa tested tea leaves for the first time because local farmers were about to start shipping this year’s tea leaves they had just picked. […]

As a consequence the Japanese nuclear industry is in the process of shutting down:

35 Japanese reactors are soon to be out of line

Japan is shutting down so many nuclear reactors because of the earthquake and other reasons that only about a third of its 54 reactors will be operating by late May.

The earthquake and tsunami on March 11th has led to the suspension of operations at 14 reactors, including those at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant. 19 other reactors are currently offline. They are currently undergoing regular inspections or plan to be inspected soon.

Later this week Chubu Electric Power Company will shut down 2 of its reactors at the Hamaoka plant. The move follows a government request to do so, due to concerns about the plant’s earthquake readiness.

All told, 35, or about two-thirds, of Japan’s commercial reactors will have been shut down by the end of May.

Watch this space because there will be more events to take place @ Fukushima Daiichi and a lot more radiation to come.

Coming soon: ‘More on QE’