Yup, it's quite serious...
WASHINGTON Â An explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Japan on Saturday blew the roof off one building, brought down walls and caused a radiation leak of unspecified proportions, Japanese officials said, after FridayÂs huge earthquake caused critical failures in the plantÂs cooling system.
Television images showed a huge cloud of white-gray smoke from the explosion. Soon afterward, government officials said an evacuation zone around the plant had been doubled, to 12 miles.
The chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, confirmed earlier news reports of an explosion at the Fukishima Daiichi nuclear plant, 15o miles north of Tokyo, saying: ÂWe are looking into the cause and the situation and weÂll make that public when we have further information. He was speaking amid fears that a disastrous meltdown could be imminent after critical cooling failures at that plant and another nearby, Daini, after both were shut down.
Images on Japanese television showed that the walls of one building had crumbled, leaving only a skeletal metal frame standing with smoke billowing from the plant. The Associated Press reported that the damaged building housed a nuclear reactor, though that report was not immediately verified by nuclear officials. The cause of the explosion was unclear, with some experts speculating that it may have resulted from a hydrogen build-up.
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Officials said even before the explosion that they had detected cesium, an indication that some of the fuel was already damaged.
In the form found in reactors, radioactive cesium is a fragment of a uranium atom that has been split. In normal operations, some radioactivity in the cooling water is inevitable, because neutrons, the sub-atomic particles that carry on the chain reaction, hit hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the water and make those radioactive. But cesium, which persists far longer in the environment, comes from the fuel itself.
Naoto Sekimura, a professor at Tokyo University, told NHK, JapanÂs public broadcaster, that Âonly a small portion of the fuel has been melted. But the plant is shut down already, and being cooled down. Most of the fuel is contained in the plant case, so I would like to ask people to be calm.Â
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People shouldn't panic, but these officials and nuclear experts need to stop talking as if what is happening is no big deal. It is a big deal.
Brad Friedman has a running blog on the issue with pictures, etc. http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8391 Don't take initial reports as being Gospel.
Japan's Nuclear Safety Agency has a web page with lists of incidents, failures to follow procedures, etc., for their plants up through 2010. Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima plants are here:
http://www2.jnes.go...._power_index.html
http://www2.jnes.go...._power_index.html
While the listed issues usually aren't frequent, they don't give one a great feeling...
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.