Earthquake in Japan....9.0...ouch!

Lucero said:
You've missed the point. How is it going to help the people who have already been 5 days without food or water? You do know how long you live for without food / water right? What good is a road (to those people) when it's 5 days too late?
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People can actually live quite a while without food.
 
Regarding the food, at least we can thank evolution for the fact that mothers can breast feed so we know babies will get fed ok, and yeah adults and even children can go ages without food, though I doubt they're going without food for more then 48 hours in this situation as supplies are going in from all over the world...(hopefully!)...but as for water, water is the key really, and I heard on the news that its been raining there so you'd think they'd be ok for water too, but then all the talk of radiation coming down in the water droplets, I guess a lot of people are going to be too scared to drink it perhaps? Am not sure I'd want to either.

EDIT: If there is radiation in the water can they boil it or do something to the water to purify it? so it's drinkable? not quite sure how to get radiation particles out of water but usually in life they say boil water to get rid of germs but obviously this might be more complicated, does anybody know the science behind that question and can answer with facts?

EDIT 2: Did a search online, apparently you can use "distillation, reverse osmosis" (Reverse Osmosis household drinking water purification systems are commonly used for improving water for drinking and cooking.) But those machines cost like £150-£250 and obviously they wouldn't have one of those on hand in this situation.
 
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jesus, just watching NHK tv, as of 7am there, which is what, 2 hours ago, they hadn't started spraying water into the reactor's spent fuel pools. SO it would seem at the moment reactor 2 3 and 4 are sporadically spurting out steam, and reactor 3 steaming all day probably means the pool is running almost completely dry now.

The truck is on site, its got a huge cannon, sea water is abundant, what with the sea right there, the only reason they can't have started when they can see basically 3 pools in serious condition, is radiation has to be too high around the reactors to get in there, because the truck has been there for, 5-6 hours at least, maybe longer since we saw reports the police truck got there.

I'm not even sure how they are getting water into reactor 2's spent fuel pool because the building is largely intact, the other two have gaping ruddy holes so shoot enough water in and they'll hit the target eventually. Of course theres a slight problem there shooting lots of water onto zirconium clad rods isn't the best idea as it will turn to steam quickly and zirconium reacts with steam in a fairly exothermic reaction to oxidise, but that extra heat could be the thing that pushes the zirconium and then the rods into melting. The longer they wait the worse it would be surely though?
 
drunkenmaster said:
Live update very recently is no 2, 3 and 4 reactor have white steam coming out of them...........

Could be they've got back on site and established cooling, cool something hot and it will steam, or it could be uncontrolled boiling of water somewhere.... which would not be good.
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I've been wondering about the steam topic. According to this post reactors 2 & 3 should be producing ~12MW and reactor 1 ~7MW today. This energy is being dispersed by boiling water but there hasn't been very much steam visible for most of the time since cooling loss.

I wonder if they are pumping cold water into the suppression pool, condensing reactor steam then releasing hot but not boiling water into storage or back into the sea.

Lucero said:
You've missed the point. How is it going to help the people who have already been 5 days without food or water? You do know how long you live for without food / water right? What good is a road (to those people) when it's 5 days too late?
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So you're saying helping the masses should be suspended because there are some unreached survivors. Say we do stop clearing/repairing roads. Now the masses are worse off and the unreached are still unreached. In fact the unreached are worse off as the helicopters now need to support people just a couple of miles up a blocked road knowing the road will not be coming to them.
 
American officials at the moment are saying this has now escalated into something as serious as Cheynobl. They are telling all US citizens anything under a 50mile radius is dangerous to health. This is in condradiction to what the Japanese are saying. They say 12miles, however the experts the US sent, carried out some tests and as soon as their readings showed the severity of the situation they evacuated and informed the White House the situation is a lot worse than the Japanese goverment is making out.
 
yes, its also a touch worrying that there was an "official" update to the embassies, I think a proper meeting, and that was only yesterday sometime, since then quite a few countries have been telling their people to leave and/or giving larger evacuation zones.

As I said, they gave us reactor area readings yesterday, today they didn't, it is worrying and adds to the conspiracy theory. The problem is the Japanese government/power people especially really have been hiding crap on nuclear power plants, safety and faking reports for years so there is a realistic chance of that, how realistic, I have no clue.

Horrible news, 14 people were evacuated from a hospital in one of the badly hit towns(not sure if it was THAT hospital left standing in the worst hit town). Mostly elderly, 2 died en route to a shelter, and 12 more died at the shelter due to lack of equipment :(

Elderly are at such high risk, stress, literally having their homes of decades washed away, bad conditions, so sad.
 
thedoc46 said:
Link?? I dunno maybe cnn.com I'm watching live TV.
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Tv's so last decade :p

http://edition.cnn.com/video/

Got both the guy you talked about, but a bit abrieviated, and a response over people suggesting it was excessive. Theres live footage aswell if you go to the homepage and look down the left, give syou NHK tv, which is really "the" channel for updates, showing the main press conferences asap from the Tepco guys, the government guys, the health and safety guys.
 
All sorts of experts on at the moment and it doesn't look good. Some guy called Gilinsky, and now another expert talking about the spent fuel being exposed.. Saying Japan is in for a very grim time. They are saying a very horrific release.
 
CNN is on the channel after skynews on freeview.

Do the Japanese have to keep the reactors cooled indefinitely or is there a timeframe when the rods or pool, etc will 'wind down'?
 
mithrandir said:
CNN is on the channel after skynews on freeview.

Do the Japanese have to keep the reactors cooled indefinitely or is there a timeframe when the rods or pool, etc will 'wind down'?
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They will drop further and further in terms of heat output, they should be well below 2% maximum heat output, and after a few weeks it should be closer to 0.3%, I don't know however how damaged rods, potentially broken zirconium cladding around the rods, and any potential melting changes that, I would suspect it could change it a lot.

Theres issues like what can happen with partially melted rods, like where the melted material ends up, blocking cooling channels between rods, dropping to the bottom of the reactor alongside other melted rods, I would suspect it would almost certainly change the speed with which the reactor cools down.


Sounds like they've finally started to spray water into the spent fuel ponds, they might continue with the water cannon AND the choppers, which again suggests to me they were waiting for very dangerous radiation levels to drop before they go in and chuck literally everything they possibly can at it.

Actually, it sounds like they are flying a chopper over pretty high to check radiation levels, to see if they've dropped enough to get closer.
 
They will cool down on their own eventually but that takes a very long time, hence the need for water. They probably want to avoid sea water due to the salt content. I'm not sure this is near Chernobyl on scale though. Some serious radiation sickness is probably guaranteed for some though, how bad that will be is probably still too early to tell.
 
SkScotchegg said:
Regarding the food, at least we can thank evolution for the fact that mothers can breast feed so we know babies will get fed ok, and yeah adults and even children can go ages without food, though I doubt they're going without food for more then 48 hours in this situation as supplies are going in from all over the world...(hopefully!)...but as for water, water is the key really, and I heard on the news that its been raining there so you'd think they'd be ok for water too, but then all the talk of radiation coming down in the water droplets, I guess a lot of people are going to be too scared to drink it perhaps? Am not sure I'd want to either.

EDIT: If there is radiation in the water can they boil it or do something to the water to purify it? so it's drinkable? not quite sure how to get radiation particles out of water but usually in life they say boil water to get rid of germs but obviously this might be more complicated, does anybody know the science behind that question and can answer with facts?

EDIT 2: Did a search online, apparently you can use "distillation, reverse osmosis" (Reverse Osmosis household drinking water purification systems are commonly used for improving water for drinking and cooking.) But those machines cost like £150-£250 and obviously they wouldn't have one of those on hand in this situation.
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Soil dug from atleast 8inches below the surface can be used to effectively filter out radiation, ideally clay like soil, if its then filtered through another layer of sandy type soil it should remove most bacteria/germs too. Obviously you need to change the filtering soil regularly (best just abandoned after the water has past through as it will become quite radioactive).
 
The water dumping/chopper action is going on, though they are replaying just a few drops several times over, they basically keep missing, but after every slight hit there seems to be steam coming up straight after, I do wonder if its not just pouring the smallest amount of water on super hot rods, its basically instantly turning to steam, problem being that feeds the zirconium reaction which just adds more heat.

THey've slowed down a bit and are seemingly getting more water in but , a lot seems to be going nowhere useful at all, hopefully the water cannon will be much better. Seems they unsurprisingly didn't want manned water cannon in the firing range, couple tonnes of water washing over a highly radioactive building and then falling all over them, doesn't sound like a great idea.
 
Tummy said:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/16/fukushima_wednesday/

Another good article.
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Is that not the guy who claimed only midday yesterday the danger is passed, catagorically, and everyone else was just spouting rubbish, this wasn't that bad, blah blah blah. Problem being, almost every "new" situation he's covered had happened the best part of, well reactor 2 primary containment failure he mentions happened well over a day before he wrote his last, upbeat, everyone else is wrong piece, the 3rd reactor's containment breach was suspected 12 or so hours before he wrote it.

Basically the guy is repeated what most other people are, 1-2 days late, while claiming everyone else is wrong.
 
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