Nuclear crisis in 140 characters

By Rogier Brussee on 24 March 2011

As a child I used to be obsessed by the “Thunderbirds”, a mid 1960 British cult series, produced with puppetry animation (aka supermarionation) and filmed in glorious Videcolor. The episodes, supposedly taking place in 2065, reflect the technological optimism as well as the fears of the space age and the height of the cold war laced with some very British class stereotypes.

The episode “the Mighty Atom” (part 1, 2  3  4 5 6)  is typical. Like most episodes it starts with a showcase of the technological wonders of the 21st century, when disaster strikes due to natural causes or the terrorist activity of “the Hood”, a villain with telepathic powers looking like the king of Siam but speaking with a heavy Russian accent. Spectacular tabletop explosions ensue, innocent people get in grave danger, and a distress call is made to International Rescue (IR), a secret rescue organization run by the all American Tracy family and an übergeek called Brains. They live on a tropical island in a futuristic luxury house that doubles as the launch site of the Thunderbirds: mighty, rocket-powered flying machines designed and built by Brains, full of high tech rescue and communication equipment. The distress call is picked up by IR’s stealthy space station, and the Tracy sons pilot the Thunderbirds to the “danger zone”. There, they perform an heroic act of digging through rubble, opening valves, cooling tanks before they explode, pushing regulator rods into nuclear reactors (by hand!), and of course gallantly carrying unconscious girls out of harm’s way.  Everybody is saved at the very last moment, the Thunderbirds return to base F.A.B.

The comparison is frivolous given the tragedy that took place, but the events in Japan of the last weeks have everything of a classic Thunderbirds episode: a massive earthquake, a giant tsunami destroying cities and killing at least 15000 people, causing fires and explosions in refineries. Finally, of course, it caused a power-out at the Fukushima Daiichi plant setting in motion the second or third most serious nuclear accident in history. Nuclear accidents on this scale have everything for drama (and sadly, real victims): reactors running the risk of melting down, buildings exploding life on television while “experts” are speaking comforting words, the “Fukushima 50” of engineers and firefighters sacrificing themselves to save the rest of Japan from radioactive contamination, a radioactive cloud contaminating the area, the Tepco electricity company risking postponing emergency measures to protect their plants, information that is held back and last not least our own latent fears that things go very badly wrong with a nuclear power plants near us. If you watched the thunderbirds episode (especially part 1 and 5) it will be strangely familiar except ofcourse there is no saviour ex machina coming down from a silvery hypersonic aircraft.

Explosion at Fukushima Daiichi reactor 3 March 14 2011

I would normally have been glued to CNN, but a while ago our family cancelled its cable subscription to kick the big screen habit. Instead I developed an addiction to Twitter. Somewhat to my surprise, Twitter and the links it contained, turned out to be a good and timely source of information. Like many people, I was particularly helped by the tweets of Diederik Samsom (@Diederiksamsom). Before joining Greenpeace and becoming a member of Dutch parliament, Samsom studied reactor physics in Delft and he has obviously not forgotten what he learned. He has not only been doing an excellent job explaining what has been  going on on television, (Paul en Witteman is on uitzending gemist), he has also been scouring the internet and other sources for information and has obviously been getting help from other people probably including former colleagues.  He has been frantically twittering his results, answering peoples questions and trying to be as objective as possible, although he is obviously a politician with a stated political goal to abolish nuclear energy. The twitter streams he was following (e.g. @W_Nuclear_News)  have also been very useful. I soon started following them myself, combining them with retweets from various people, @focusfusion (on which perhaps more some other time) and @Newscientist.  As a result I knew that the reactor 1 had exploded, and seen the explosion on Japanese TV when NOS 24 (also on the internet) was still interviewing an expert that said everything was under control.

So how bad is it? I am not a reactor physicist, but I do have a degree in physics, and I would say it is pretty bad: much worse than three mile island, hopefully better than Windscale, but fortunately the situation is much, much, less bad than Chernobyl. I think it is also important to remember that unlike the Tsjernobyl and the Windscale acidents, the casualties and damage of the Fukushima accident are a result of this much larger disaster. From a (cynical) perspective, the casualties and danger in Fukushima are a relative side show.Given the circumstances, if all that had happened was controlled venting of steam with a bit of short lived radio activity there would not have been much of a problem even if technically there is a meltdown.  This is what happened in the three mile Island reactor in Harrisburg. We are continuously bombarded with low levels of radiation from outer space which your body knows how to repair like it knows how to repair the damage done by UV radiation and aggressive chemicals like Oxygen. Even a 1000 times more radiation is individually still low risk (if you expose a million people to that radiation it will cause a few cases of cancer, but likewise if you keep a million people in the freezing cold, it will cause some people to die from pneumonia).  Therefore, since radiation gets weaker with the square of the distance to the source (just like light or the heat of a stove) the main problem with the levels of radiation on the reactorsite is that it makes for very difficult and dangerous working conditions severely hampering the work to get things under control. Just imagine the problems when all the most knowledgeable people get “burned up” in a few hours because they have received the maximum halfway safe dose of 250 mSv. In this infographic on radiation doses you can get some perspective. Note how the amount of radiation from Chernobyl right after the explosion goes off the scale in 10 minutes.

What is actually much worse is if radioactive material becomes part of your body. This is because you get exposed for a long time and the radiation has a very good chance to hit you.  Therefore, radioactive particles escaping is much worse than just a bit of local radiation or some very short lived material escaping. You can measure radiation with exquisite sensitivity and so people look for that contamination by measure radiation but it is really the contamination that counts. Unfortunately the loss of cooling has resulted in hydrogen explosions, and overpressure that has damaged the reactor containment which is a seriously strong bunker designed to keep radioactivity inside.

Source http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/images/spent-fuel-pool-820.jpg

Above all the lack of cooling due to the lack of power and the devastation caused by the explosions has resulted in the boiling off of cooling water and  fires in the relatively unprotected pools with radio active waste. Especially the pools in reactor 4 contained a lot of relatively recently used fuel material and it is the only of the 3 newer shutdown reactors where a hydrogen explosion took place. Once the fuel rods overheat they start leaking there volatile radio active decay products especially Iodine and Cesium. 

Source : Reported 17 March by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry

If the New Scientist  and the international atomic energy agency (IAEA) are right  there is indeed a very substantial contamination, eventhough  most of the radio activity landed in the ocean due to favourable winds Most of the contamination is with relatively short lived material (mostly Iodine which decays with a halflife of 8 days and so is reduced by a factor of 256 in 2 month time). It is dangerous because the body scoops it up in the thyroid, especially with young children, which is why people have to swallow iodine tablets. It really helps. What remains will be bad enough, but incomparable to Tsjernoby not to mention Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. One can only wish the Japanese well.

Twitter is 5 years old, and I don’t hope to have to follow an event like this in the next 5 years.  The #middleeast anyone?

tagged with: history of the future, energy, fukushima, twitter, social media

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