flying cuttlefish picayune

Japan Reactor Flooding Plan Assessed Amid Explosion Concerns (???)

Tokyo Electric Power was attempting to determine the quantity of water needed to flood the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s No. 1 reactor, an operation intended to avert potential new radiation releases from the crippled facility, the Asahi Shimbun reported on Sunday (see GSN, April 29).

The six-reactor Fukushima facility was severely damaged by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and devastating tsunami that hit Japan on March 11; the confirmed death toll from the events and aftershocks has been reported to exceed 14,000 people.

The plant operator for 48 hours last week increased its water insertion rate for the reactor to 10 tons each hour, and the system’s heat by Friday morning had fallen to 113 degrees and its pressure to 1.1 standard atmospheres. Oxygen could seep into the system and potentially cause a new hydrogen blast if the pressure level fell below one standard atmosphere, according to the newspaper.  . . .

http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20110502_1013.php

Power cut doomed fallout computer

Kyodo

The nation’s system for predicting the volume of radioactive materials to be released into the environment failed amid the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant due to the power supply cut following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, sources said Monday.
The Emergency Response Support System is designed to collect data about the state of a plant’s nuclear reactors, such as pressures and temperatures, from remote locations and to analyze the suspected development of a nuclear accident to predict how much radioactive material will be released.

The malfunction of the ERSS, coupled with “insufficiencies” attribued to SPEEDI, the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, which projects the dispersal of radioactive fallout based on ERSS forecasts, is likely to have delayed the evacuation of Fukushima residents. Japan sent SPEEDI data to the U.N. but withheld it from the public. [!!!!] . . . (more)

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110503a3.html

(on the radiation exposure of kids)

….After 13 factual articles on Fukushima Daiichi at GLG News, this is closest I’ll get to an “Op-Ed” about Toshiso Kosako quitting in protest over Japanese relaxation of schoolchildren dose limits. The reason this news is so troubling is that children are required by law to attend school. If child exposures are forced, this would be first time ever that law, not secrecy, forces high radiation exposures to the second-most vulnerable “cohort,” with the most vulnerable being second-trimester fetus.  

http://www.glgroup.com/News/Why-Is-This-Accident-Different-From-All-The-Worlds-Other-Nuclear-Accidents–53780.html