Monday, May 2, 2016

Fukushima Daiichi Looking Rather Steamy


Fukushima is looking steam this morning:







I don't know if the ice wall has anything to do with the level of steam visible but I did observe a DECREASE of the steam that coincided with the activation of the ice wall, as illustrated by my post from April 7, 2016: http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/visible-fukushima-emissions-down.html

The visible level of steam has been building back up recently. Is it because of leaks in the ice wall? I don't know....
Fukushima plant’s ice wall not watertight, says architect THE ASSOCIATED PRESS April 28, 2016 at 18:45 JST http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604280098.html

But even if the frozen barrier built with taxpayers' money works as envisioned, it won't completely block all water from reaching the damaged reactors because of gaps in the wall and rainfall, creating as much as 50 tons of contaminated water each day, said Yuichi Okamura, a chief architect of the massive project.  "It's not zero," Okamura said of the amount of water reaching the reactors in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week. He is a general manager at Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, which operates the facility that melted down after it was hit by a tsunami in 2011, prompting 150,000 people to evacuate.


5 comments:

  1. Think of the heat decay going on and radiation emmisions at Fukushima probably fission underground too.
    Atomic hearts: A decade of US government-sponsored development
    Shelley McKellar
    May 2016, page 38
    "As the public attained a heightened awareness of the risks associated with 1970s-era medical technologies, it increasingly perceived nuclear-powered artificial heartsas too dangerous to support. If there’s a chance, any chance at all, that problems caused by technology could outweigh the benefits, we should stop. Trouble is, I hardly know any scientists who will dare stay, ‘Stop.’
    > —Dr. William Bradfield in Heartbeat.1
    Published in 1978, Heartbeat is a medical disaster novel by Eugene Dong and Spyros Andreopoulos that foretells the perils of an atomic heart. It is a story of William Bradfield’s daring efforts to save the life of a dying patient through the implantation of a mechanical heart powered by plutonium. His patient, Henry Gray, survives the experimental procedure, makes an impressive recovery, and is discharged from the hospital to resume his life. Both Bradfield and Gray enjoy their newfound celebrity as guest speakers describing their experience with the radioisotope-powered artificial heart, and Bradfield goes on to implant more hearts with similar success. But then Gray is kidnapped by a madman who intends to remove and spray the heart’s hundred grams of Pu into the air, exposing thousands of people to dangerous levels of radiation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police begin a manhunt, while the National Heart Institute, government officials, and emergency-services personnel discuss contingency plans in the event that Pu contaminates the area. A life-saving technology for one person has become a threat to society at large.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Heartbeat is fictional, but the technology it depicts is not. Between 1967 and 1977, medical researchers and engineers in two separate, federally funded US programstackled the technological complexity of designing a mechanical heart whose primary power comes from the heat generated by radioactive decay. It was an ambitious and controversial undertaking. Project scientists claimed that atomic hearts were feasible and practical, but political and social forces challenged that medical assertion throughout the development. The novel’s speculations reflected public anxiety about the risks associated with atomic power, which significantly contributed to the failed development of such devices.
      A nuclear-powered pacemaker was implanted in Beagle Brumhilda in 1969 at the National Heart Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. (Courtesy of the US Department of Energy.)
      scientific community with assertions of future benefits for Americans. One federally funded project was the development of atomic hearts to save the increasing number of Americans dying of heart failure during that period. It was industrial scientists, not academic ones, who first proposed exploring radioisotopes as energy sources for artificial hearts. Their timing was ideal, given the recent establishment of the Artificial Heart Program in 1964, at the National Institutes of Health, which sustained the potential and promise of early yet crude device research of the 1950s and early 1960s and the federal government’s support for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.2 For researchers, the two largest challenges were to build a mechanical pump that was biocompatible—that is, one that a human body could tolerate and that did not damage red blood cells or induce blood clotting—and to incorporate a mechanism for safely and efficiently driving the pump.
      The Thermo Electron Engineering Corp of Boston proposed a radioisotope power source both to the National Heart Institute (NHI), later renamed the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), and to the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The corporation hoped to tap into funding from both agencies. AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg was engaged in developing isotopic power units; the most common of them was the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which produces electricity from the heat of radioactive decay. Chief of the AEC’s thermal applications branch, William Mott, explained: “We were always on the alert for new problems to match with our solutions.”3 And the radioisotope thermoelectric generator was a solution looking for a problem as industry sought applications beyond spacecraft and remote navigation beacons."

      Delete
    2. Very interesting. Thank you.

      Delete
  2. They sure as heck did not have flying sparks, massive amounts of radioactive steam, strange emmission anomolies, spider web distortions, stange explosions noted in the area around Chernobyl, oddly colored fog, etc.for years around Chernobyl.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yet they have has these things going on around Fukushima for 5 consecutive years with no end in sight.

      Delete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.