- Prime Minister Noda’s declared the three damaged reactors at Fukushima have achieved cold shutdown. All Japanese Press outlets have articles on the declaration. Noda cites two specific criteria behind the announcement. They are all three RPVs having sustained temperatures well below 100oC and whole body radiation levels at the power plant boundary below one millisievert per year. Nuclear Disaster Minister Hosono said several experts told him to declare cold shutdown weeks ago, but the government felt delaying the announcement until the stabilized conditions had continued for a longer period was the more appropriate timing decision.
- As might be expected, the cold shutdown announcement has raised the hackles of nuclear critics in Japan. Perhaps the most scathing, irresponsible reporting comes from Japan Times where anonymous experts say “the declaration is little more than political grandstanding”. The Times also believes the declaration should not have been made until individuals can confirm the physical status of the RPVs with their own eyes, “…radiation levels are still too high to visibly confirm the actual conditions of the molten fuel believed to be at the bottom of the containment vessels.” In a more responsible example of reporting from Asahi Shimbun we find Fumiya Tanabe, director of the Sociotechnical Systems Safety Research Institute, saying the cold shutdown announcement is being used as a political message, which he explains by adding, “A cold shutdown is usually used to indicate that a reactor has been shut down on a stable basis in a normal operation control. I feel uncomfortable with the phrase being used when nuclear fuel has not maintained its original form.” We wish the Times had taken the same accountable path as the Yomiuri.
- TEPCO has announced that their newer waste water decontamination system has been given a major upgrade. Instead of the original zeolite filtration material used for reducing Cesium concentrations by a factor of 10,000, the new material is a ferrocyanide compound that is more absorptive and should have a decontamination factor of 100,000. The new filtration medium will reduce Cesium concentrations as efficiently as the tandem operation with the original system that experienced repeated problems. The old system is now shut down and will no longer be needed. TEPCO also reports that the Cesium concentration of untreated waters still in the turbine building basements is 700,000 becquerels per milliliter. Thus, the decontaminatedwaters should be below 10 becquerels per ml.
- Under Japan’s Special Law of Emergency Preparedness for Nuclear Disaster (Law #156, December 17, 1999), Articles 10, 12, and 17 designate the local and national officials who are to be in charge of nuclear emergency actions. At the head is the Prime Minister who acts as “Superintendent General”, or in his absence an appointed Minister of the cabinet. The Prime Minister during the first five critical days at Fukushima was Naoto Kan and the designated Minister was Haruki Madarame. In Thursday’s news we find that both Kan and Madarame refused to use a sophisticated system for predicting the spread of radioactive releases from Fukushima Daiichi, known by the acronym SPEEDI. As it turns out, SPEEDI correctly predicted where the highest concentrations were heading and where the greatest level of contamination would occur, beginning March 16. However, Madarame told Kan to reject the March 16 SPEEDI projections because there was no input on the volume of radioactive releases from the accident due to the station blackout. As a result, the initial 20km radius evacuated early-on was essentially arbitrary and there was considerable delays in evacuating the region we now call the northwest evacuation corridor, outside the current no-go zone. Evacuations from the northwest corridor did not begin until April 22nd, with some towns not until late June. If northwest corridor evacuations had occurred when the initial SPEEDI projections were submitted to the Tokyo government, the radiation exposures reported previously would have been much, much less…perhaps as low as those exposures estimated for the no-go zone evacuees. (Japan Times) While the estimated exposures pose absolutely no risk to any of the evacuees in either of the zones, the Press’ penchant for radiophobic hyperbole makes it sound like Kan and Madarame subjected the northwest corridor evacuees to potentially mortal risk. While Kan and Madarame were literally ludicrous in ignoring SPEEDI, their decision didn’t actually harm anyone due to exposure. But, Press reports make it sound otherwise.
- We find some more disturbing Prime Minister Kan information in today’s Yomiuri Shimbun. At 2pm on March 12, some ten hours into the accident at Fukushima, Koichiro Nakamura of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told a press conference, “It’s a core meltdown. We believe the fuel has started to melt [in the No. 1 reactor].” In hindsight, Nakamura’s statement was correct and timely. However, staffers at the Prime Minister’s Office were taken aback by Nakamura’s remarks when they watched live coverage of the press conference on TV. Upon reporting this to their boss, he became infuriated. The Prime Minister ordered NISA to no longer hold independent press conferences and all information in the future would be presented after the Prime Minister’s staff had approved it. The Prime Minister no longer trusted NISA to be speaking for the government. Two days later, a humbled Nakamura apologized for saying there was a meltdown in the unit #1 reactor and retracted his initial statement, and there can be little doubt he was under orders from the Prime Minister. Kan’s government finally admitted there was a meltdown of unit #1 on June 7, nearly three months after the fact!
- Government reports show evacuation patterns caused a variety of exposures during the first four months of the Fukushima accident. When combined with the disclosure of the government rejecting SPEEDI projections, many evacuees are quite angry. One evacuee, Hiroe Yaguchi, was used as an example. She evacuated from within the 20km zone on March 12 and relocated to the Tsushima district of her hometown (Namiemachi) which was outside the 20km radius. This was still in what would eventually become the northwest evacuation corridor. Over the next two days he heard from local officials that the radiation readings in that area were high, so she moved her family to a shelter in Nihonmatsu on March 15. She says, “If I knew radiation levels in the Tsushima district were high, I would have evacuated to some other place. I wanted to be notified of the fact much earlier.” After she was told the estimated exposure for her and her children was below five millisieverts, she said it didn’t make her feel any better, “I can’t judge whether we should feel relieved even after seeing the numerical figures. I fear the baby in my womb was affected [by radiation]. Because my children are small, I wish not only estimates but also checks on actual figures will continue to be done.” (Yomiuri Shimbun)
- The government committee investigating the nuclear crisis has found the obvious by reporting that TEPCO had been ill-prepared for the catastrophic tsunami of March 11th. But, they are also suggesting that the ongoing disaster may have been caused by human error. As previously reported, TEPCO had no emergency procedures for a complete station blackout, so plant personnel had to literally create them as the accident progressed. But, the new committee statement makes the first public allegation of human error as a possible cause of the accident, pointing to the unit #3 operators stopping High Pressure Coolant Injection (HPCI) flow to the RPV on March 13 without first getting permission from the plant manager. The committee indicated that this was a mistake and was a possible reason for the unit #3 meltdown and the hydrogen explosions of units 3&4. (Mainichi Shimbun) We are shocked by the human error allegation! Control room records show that the operators in unit #3 did shut down HPCI at 2:42am on March 13 because battery power to keep the system running was almost depleted. Personnel outside the control room later attempted to restart HPCI and found that the batteries had indeed been drained of all power. Thus, the operators did the correct thing in the interest of sound engineering practices, which makes the allegation of human error decidedly questionable.
- The Ministry of the Environment has issued rules as to who is responsible for costs due to decontamination. The central government will bear the cost of decontaminating areas with whole body radiation exposures in excess of 0.23 microsieverts per hour. The government will also cover the disposal costs of sludge and other debris with Cesium contamination levels above 8,000 becquerels per kilogram. Decontamination costs below these two criteria will not be the responsibility of the government. The Ministry says there are ~100 municipalities in the Tohoku region and around Tokyo that qualify, based on current estimates, which meet the criteria. These municipalities will be announced next week. (JAIF)
- Three more “stress test” results have been submitted to the Tokyo government. All three submittals are for reactors owned by the Kyushu Electric Company. They are two units at the Sendai power complex in Kagoshima Prefecture, and one at Genkai in Saga Prefecture. Kyushu Electric says all three can withstand earthquakes in excess of the Great Japan Quake of March 11, and tsunamis with waves up to 15 meters high. Genkai mayor Hideo Kashimoto says the stress tests alone will not be enough for him to allow the plants to be restarted. He also wants Kyushu Electric to “enact full disclosure practices”. (JAIF)
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