Fukushima Update and a Few Final Words on the Issue

Contrary to what intuition might tell you, the reports of the amount of radiation being detected around Fukushima are actually quite calming to those in the industry.  It seems that everyone is once again starting to breathe normally instead of seeing my professors walk around with that big vain popping out of their forehead and their eyes slightly bulging.  The stress is subsiding, and it is noticeable when looking at how those in the industry are behaving.

There are of course reports of large amounts of radiation being released into the ocean and into the area immediately surrounding the power plant.  Some places are reporting levels upwards of 5 million times greater than the regulatory limit.  A good article on the situation is given here if you are interested.  There is contaminated water all over the sight, and I would venture to guess that some of it is leaking.  I mean, if you have been paying attention to how much water they have been dumping over the reactors as well as to the methods they are using to do it, one would be crazy to think that there was not going to be any contaminated water hanging around when all was said and done.

Why would this in any way be relaxing?  Well, it is indicating that the worst is over.  I would think of it this way:  we have started to worry about the secondary issues that a few weeks ago we did not even care about.  They knew that there would be left behind material that would be contaminated due to the efforts to cool the reactor, but at the time, it was what had to be done.  We gladly went with the efforts because they were what was necessary to get the situation under control.  It is kind of like in the movies when the hero has to use force to get the villain under control.  At that moment, they aren't worried about the well being of the walls in the house or the furniture in the living room when they are in mortal combat.  In the end though, if somebody wants to continue to use the space where the violent rumble took place, it must be eventually cleaned up.  They knew that dumping that much water over the reactor like that would make a mess, but it was necessary.  Now they need to clean it up.

Like it says in the article above, the releases of contaminated water into the ocean so far have been controlled releases of low level radioactivity.  Why would they do this?  Well, as the article points out, they are finding some highly contaminated water at the sight.  At the moment, it is not known where it came from or if there is more coming.  It could be due to a leak in a valve somewhere, maybe the spent fuel storage pools, or even be coming from a breach in the reactor containment vessel itself.  The truth is that nobody knows.  As an aside, it is now not such a big worry if the containment vessel has been breached since cooling has been restored to the cores.  Anyway, the reason the low level waste is being pumped to sea is to make room in the storage tanks to store the contaminated with the higher level of radiation.  It is not a dire type situation though, which is signaled by the fact that they are containing it.  If the situation was so bad that this stuff was going to leak out and contaminate all the water in the area, they would have already started pumping the highly radioactive water out to sea.  In the long run, it is much less dangerous out there than it would be at the Fukushima sight.  After all, we aren't going to form a Godzilla from the stuff.

Talking to Dr. King (the nuclear engineering department head here at CSM), he seems to think that the biggest priority still to be attended to is fully restoring the cooling systems to the spent fuel pools.  Though he seemed to think that if something was going to happen to the pools, it would have happened there already.  This is very calming as it means the worst is confirmed to be done with.  To me, it seems that they are now transitioning from disaster containment mode at the sight to starting to worry about cleaning up the sight.  For those of us that have been closely following the events, this is the moment where we can finally start to relax.

There were reports as well as plutonium being found in the soil near the power plant.  I don't want to dwell here, but let me tell you that it was an extremely small amount.  The levels being detected were less than 1 Bq per kilogram of soil.  I know, again with the weird units, but let me explain.  1 Bq is an extremely small unit of activity.  1 Bq means that there is one radioactive event going on per second in that kilogram of soil.  To be of any concern, we would need to see levels hundreds of thousands of times higher than the levels being detected.  The levels being detected are roughly equivalent to filling your nalgene water bottle one one-thousandth of the way with food coloring and trying to use this to color nearly 400,000 Olympic size swimming pools (h/t to Dr. King again for this one).  You are more likely to have negative effects from radiation due to somebody peeing in the pool than from the trace amounts of uranium being detected.  In other words, we are very good at detecting radiation and sometimes this causes alarm.  We can't detect any other types of contaminants with these low of levels.

I have devoted a lot of time over the last few weeks toward educated and learning about what is happening at FukushimaFukushima incident for a while as I think dwelling on it too long just causes me to rant, and nobody wants that.  I do encourage any who have questions about what is happening to feel free to ask.  I will be happy to tell you what I know and find out what I don't know.  For those of you who are really hooked and want to really keep a close watch on the situation there, I reference you again to Dr. King's facebook page on Fukushima.  I do have to thank you guys for listening to what I had to say about the situation.  It was probably way more therapeutic for me than it was informative for you guys!  Time for therapy is over now though, so lets get back and do some more learning.  I think it is time for me to support all the statements I have been making the last few weeks, so here we go!