This image of Fukushima Daiichi is a page (and a third) from my sketchbook. In addition to being a place for capturing artistic plans, visual expiraments, personal action items and practice drawings, my sketch book also contains imagery about things that are currently going on. Sometimes those things are within my sphere of influence and sometimes they are more global.
For anyone who doesn't follow disaster news it might seem that the tsunami–damaged nuclear power plant in Japan is no longer anything to worry about. At the point where it didn't immediately send up a television news-worthy spectacle in mid-March it dropped off the horizon. More immediate and flashy events (i.e. Gadhafi, bin Laden, the Rapture, Mississippi River flooding, Icelandic volcanoes and Mega-tornadoes) all got top billing.
Meanwhile quietly boiling away on a back burner amidst misinformation Fukushima Daiichi is in critical condition. Tepco is generating so many reports on the state of their reactors that it is apparently easy to miss a press release confirming the nearly complete meltdown of unit number one. This is news that wasn't in the news for about a week. Unexplained discrepancies between temperature readings from the bottom of the reactors and be insertion points for water was being injected into them were finally brought to light. Its not clear yet whether anyone really understands how low the water levels inside the reactors are at any given point. It was clear that radioactive water was leaking from the number of points at the plant. Once that leak was repaired it was discovered that Unit 1 had melted nearly all of its fuel down below the water line. Unit 1 now joins Chernobyl's Reactor Number Four in needing a New Safe Confinement structure. How long before the others do too?
"Cold Shutdown" is a really bad term for something that needs to be kept at 37 to 95°C. Water boils at 100°C. Hot beverages are typically served at 52 to 92°C. The famous McDonald's coffee lawsuit involved coffee that was served at a temperature over 80°C. Beef cooks to medium rare at 54°C. The lower end happens to be the same temperature as the human body: 37°C is 98.6°F. In short cold shutdown isn't cold. Since spent fuel keeps generating heat it needs to be kept in cooling pools for 5 to 10 years before it can be safely moved to concrete cask storage. Otherwise it catches fire, melts and has the potential to release large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. None of the reactor temperatures have been consistently in the safe zone for “cold shutdown.”
Reactor number four was described as being in “cold shutdown” because it was off-line during the quake and subsequent tsunami. Unfortunately it didn't mean it was empty, cold or safe. Unit 4 still has spent fuel and is affected buy the heat being emitted by the other reactors and the frail state of the plant's infrastructure. It was considered less critical than the other three even though it has been periodically catching fire and putting out clouds of smoke. Did the misnomer “cold shutdown” mean no one was monitoring the temperatures to make sure it stayed that way?
In a disaster there are so many things that go wrong that it is not necessarily possible to point to even a small number of causes. It is a disaster because everything that was planned for was not sufficient to avert it. At Fukushima Daiichi it may not have been possible with the information available at the time to contemplate all failure scenarios and plan for them.
I titled this post “Four good reasons to be anti-nuke." Each of the four damaged reactors is a reason in itself to be against expansion of nuclear energy. Unit 2 is believed to have core damage and is leaking radioactive water. Unit 3 may also be in the same state that has the added disadvantage of the much more dangerous uranium/plutonium mix of fuel. "Cold shutdown" doesn't really mean cold or shut down and the custodial responsibility for something of this magnitude lasts for 10s of generations.