The Gate Notes: Nuclear Energy after Fukushima (click on the link, video can not be embedded here)

The Gate Notes: An Energy Briefing with Daniel Yergin: Nuclear Energy

And here are two videos embedded.

A powerpoint presentation made by professor Majia Holmer Nadesan is getting some attention around the web, in the presentation she claims that the Japanese authorities, among others, lied and covered up information about the Fukushima accident. So let's have a look at it.

But first things first; who is professor Nadesan? From her web page at Arizona State University we can read:

Majia Nadesan is a professor of communication in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.  She received her Ph.D. in communication studies in 1993 from Purdue University after earning her B.S. and M.S. in the same subject from San Diego State University.  Prior to joining the faculty at ASU's College of Human Services in 1994, Dr. Nadesan was an assistant professor at Syracuse University.

At ASU's West campus, Dr. Nadesan teaches courses in gender and community; theory and research in organizational communication; rhetorical, interpretive and critical methods in communication; and rhetoric of social issues.

The title and abstract of her presentation is

“Lessons From Fukushima: Governments and the Media Will Deceive the Public and Withhold Vital Information, Leaving Citizens to Create Informal Information Sharing Networks”

This paper will demonstrate that the Japanese and U.S. Governments withheld vital information from their citizens about the direction and risks of Fukushima radiation plumes and the degree and consequences of radioactive fallout. Second, the paper will demonstrate that the mainstream news media, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, were complicit in hiding information about fallout levels, dispersion, and plant conditions. The U.S. media are commonly recognized as more independent from government than Japanese media. This disaster demonstrates that the U.S. mainstream news media censor information, even when public safety is at issue. Finally, this paper examines the spontaneous creation of information sharing sites and the subsequent development of a robust network of citizen-supported information sites in Japan and the United States.

She has divided the presentation into three "lessons learned" and the three lessons are:

Lesson 1: Democratic governments may elect to withhold vital information in the event of severe disasters

Lesson 2: The Western media may censor vital information

Lesson 3: Spontaneous citizens’ networks can emerge in response to government censorship and these networks have multiple functions, benefits, and drawbacks

I will focus on lesson 1 and look at lesson 2 and 3 in later blog posts.

Before I start going over the points she makes in the presentation I want to highlight one thing; Professor Nadesan has no background in engineering or hard science. Normally I would say that it doesn't really matter what kind of education someone has, it is what they say that matters. But it matters in this case because she is a professor, and it is likely people will refer to her as a professor, without specifying in what field that she does research. Secondly, if a person has no background in a field that they want to examine, it becomes very hard to separate the junk from the facts. To expand on this point, we take a look at page 5 of her presentation and find that as her references she cites:

Enenews, Fairewinds,, Fukushima Diary, Ex-SKF, Enformable, If You Love This Planet, NukePimp,etc

Now let's consider these sources. Ex-SKF is a blog that has repeatedly spread the claims of people like Busby and Gundersen. He has made blog posts where Busby claims the reactor 3 explosion was a nuclear explosion etc. Fairewinds is Arnie Gundersen's homepage. The same Gundersen that spices his resume and that claims one of the spent fuel pools exploded in a prompt criticality explosion (obviously Busby and Gundersen are not satisfied with good old fashion hydrogen explosions). After taking a quick glance, Enenews and NukePimp look no better than Ex-SKF. The greatest surprise to me is "If you love this planet", which is a weekly radio program with Helen Caldicott of all people! So let's consider this lineup; Busby is a guy that seriously claims that the Japanese government is intentionally spreading radioactive material around Japan to hide future cancer clusters around Fukushima. He is also a 9/11 "truther", claiming America was dropping neutron bombs over Fallujah and that such a bomb brought down the World Trade Center. Caldicott is not much better. She claims, among other things, that the IAEA, WHO and the UNSCEAR are involved in a big cover up of the health consequences of Chernobyl. So there is the grand lineup of sources that professor Nadesan gets her information from. To put it bluntly they have a history of spreading outrageous claims. For more on Busby see our earlier posts (here, here, here and here).

Is this character assassination? To some extent perhaps, but if someone uses the above people as sources it is warranted, it highlights that professor Nadesan has gotten her information about nuclear engineering and radiation sciences from sources that have no formal qualifications in the fields and that are known to be less than strict about staying truthful. This sets the stage for all that is to come. So now let's go through some of the points in the presentation itself. I will try to evaluate Nadesan's arguments by judging its truthfulness, i.e was the information really hidden; and importance, i.e was the information of any importance for the general public.

Lesson 1: Speedi Censored

SPEEDI is a network system that gathers local meteorological data from around nuclear power plants and combined with estimates of radiation release can create a map that shows radiation dose rates in different regions. The SPEEDI system also collects gamma dose rates from different monitoring posts run by the local authorities in each prefecture. SPEEDI is coordinated by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). From all accounts it seems true that SPEEDI information was not given freely and the Atomic Energy Society is quite correct in its critique. But what was the reason for withholding this information? If one reads through the English summary of the report, from the "Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations", on page 9 and 10 it is written:

The communication links were disrupted and inoperative due to the earthquakes, and the SPEEDI could not receive the basic source term information of released radioactivity. It was therefore not possible for the SPEEDI to estimate atmospheric dispersion of radioactive materials on  the basis of the basic source term information. Nevertheless, it is possible for the SPEEDI to estimate the course of dispersion of radioactive materials, making assumption of the reference release rate of 1 Bq/h. And actually those estimates were then calculated by the system.  Such calculation only predicts the direction of dispersion and relative distribution of radioactivity. But, if the information  had been provided timely, it could have helped local governments and population to choose more appropriate route and direction for evacuation.

So did the government withhold information that could have mitigated the consequences? The committee's conclusion is not clear and SPEEDI could not give any absolute dose rates, only an estimate of how the radiation will spread, i.e. a map that shows fractionally how much will go where, for instance 0.01% goes to Ibaraki, 0.03% to Fukushima etc. It is hard to evacuate based on that information because it gives no clue if any dose rate limits are exceeded or not. Now after the incident it seems clear that one could have used the map given by SPEEDI combined with the gamma measurements to extrapolate where doses are likely to be high, but this was probably not thought of in the heat of the moment. This kind of oversight might have caused the delayed evacuation of Iitate. It is a bit strong however to suggest the government withheld information to the public , simply because the information the government had did not give dose rates, only the fractional distribution. Releasing that information would not clarify the situation.

Nadesan further states that the government did not go public with the location of a hot spot in Namie. But Namie was evacuated during March 12 - 13, the days after the tsunami. Releasing that information would not have made any difference. We of course do NOT agree with withholding such information. However, in this case it seems like withholding the information had no consequences and there is no reason to assume there was any malicious intent or an attempted cover up of the whole issue. Regarding dose rates, MEXT did release information about dose rates around the evacuation zone weeks before before mid April. On this blog for instance we posted this picture from MEXT on March 23. Measuring spots 31, 32 and 79 is in Namie and its clear that it is hotter than the rest of the points. The information of the Namie hotspot was then clearly open to anyone. I do not know at which date MEXT started publishing such maps, and the MEXT homepage has apparently been redesigned and I can't find any archive. It is clear that information was released sometime in mid March, not mid April.

In summary, information about dose rates outside the evacuated areas was available earlier than Nadesan claims, but exactly when it became available we can not tell. It is not good that MEXT withheld SPEEDI data and the critique from the Atomic Energy Society is warranted, but it doesn't seem like it has had any consequences. Within two weeks clear information about where the fallout was deposited was publicly available.

Japanese Officials Failed to Dispense Potassium Iodide Pills

Fukushima area municipal entities had supplies of potassium iodide pills but the Japanese disaster manuals stipulated that local officials wait for orders from the national government to distribute.
Tokyo waited 5 days after Mar 11 before ordering distribution
WSJ writes: “The failure to disburse the preventive pills follows other examples of how the Japanese government failed to implement available measuresaimed at protecting local residents from the harms of radiation”

According to the IAEA, iodine tablets where distributed to evacuation centers already on March the 14th (Tokyo didn't wait 5 days, it was rather 3 days) but no decision to give the pills to the evacuees was taken. Why was this decision not taken? We do not know, naively it would seem prudent to give such pills as soon as possible, but without full information about the circumstances it isn't easy to judge. The recommended prophylactic iodine dose by WHO for people over the age of 12 is 130 mg and 65 mg for kids under age of 12. This is close to 1000 times the normal nutritional need and in the range for where adverse side effects can take place. The benefits of iodine has to be weighted against the adverse side effects. It is certainly plausible that the authorities judged that the side effects of iodine might outweigh the benefits in this particular case.

A better question to ask is: Did the Japanese government follow guidelines regarding iodine? The WHO guidelines regarding iodine states this:

In regions where only the likelihood of stochastic effects is a cause for concern, stable iodine prophylaxis should be considered for sensitive population groups if potential exposure to radioactive iodine by inhalation or exposure by ingestion is expected to approach the reference levels given in Table 1, and cannot be prevented by sheltering or food and milk control.

The table they refer to gives these values:

• Children under age of 18 and pregnant and lactating women: 10 mGy avertable dose to the thyroid
• Adults under 40: 100 mGy avertable dose to the thyroid
• Adults over 40 years: 5 Gy projected dose to the thyroid

IAEA guideline (table 3 in the document) is to give iodine if the dose might exceed 50 mGy.

The main purpose of taking iodine pills is to stop the uptake of radioactive iodine by inhalation. Regarding radioactive iodine in food the WHO writes:

Stable iodine could also be used as prophylaxis against ingested radioactive iodine from contaminated food. However, because the risk of exposure from ingestion of iodine will remain for a longer time, iodine prophylaxis will also be required for a longer period of time, leading to a need for repeated doses. The side effect rate from multiple doses would be higher, but the frequency is not known. It is probably low in children but may be significant in adults, especially in areas with dietary iodine deficiency. Exposure by ingestion can also be considerably reduced by agricultural countermeasures such as removing grazing animals from contaminated pasture or by the imposition of appropriate controls on agricultural products. In general, food controls would be easier to implement and more effective in the long term in reducing the collective dose than stable iodine prophylaxis (note emphasis added). Therefore, agricultural and food control measures are preferable to repeated doses of stable iodine.

According to an article in The Asahi Shimbun (22 February 2012) the Japanese Nuclear Safety Comission released a report where they had screened 1080 children from the Fukushima prefecture, out of those 11 kids under the age of 15 received a dose between 5 - 35 mSv to the thyroid. The second highest dose was 25 mSv and the third highest was 21 mSv. Thyroid doses in the Tokyo region was around 1 mSv. Based on the available information it was justified not to give out the iodine pills, less than 1% of the evacuated kids received a thyroid dose high enough to justify iodine pills according to WHO guidelines and none exceeded the IAEA guidelines. Giving out the pills could possibly have caused unnecessary damage. It is hard to find any concrete information regarding scanning of food from the Fukushima prefecture, the earliest mention I can find of any stopped food shipments is from the 19th of March. Edano's wording suggests they were monitoring food and dairy products before that date.

In summary, the inhalation doses were below IAEA limits and possible dose due to ingestion was excluded due to monitoring of food and dairy products which means thyroid pills were not necessary. There is no sign that iodine pill distribution was delayed in order to downplay the severity of the accident. One can criticize the emergency preparedness procedures based on the fact that no iodine pills where available for three days, in case they would have been needed earlier. But we don't see how any information was withheld regarding iodine pills.

Lesson 1: Governments Censor Risk: Leading to Inadequate Evacuation

On March 11, the Japanese government ordered persons within a 1.9 mile radius of the Fukushima I plant to evacuate and recommended that those within 6.2 miles stay within their homes.

On March 12, the evacuation was extended to 20 kilometers.

On March 13, after the first explosion, the World health Organization reported that the risk from the reactors was “probably quite low.”

On March 17, the U.S. declared that U.S. citizens and troops should stay atleast 50 miles from the Fukushima reactors.

March 25 the Japanese government declared a voluntary evacuation for people within 30 kilometers of the plant while the official evacuation zone remained 20 kilometers, or approximately 20 miles.

On April 4, The Wall Street Journal reported that Japanese authorities had finally acknowledged that the evacuation zone needed to be expanded beyond the 20 kilometer zone.

April 8 Evacuation zone still at 20 kilometers intends to limit exposure to 50 millisieverts

Let's again ask the question if the Japanese government was following evacuation guidelines. The IAEA guidelines (table is to, immediately following an nuclear accident, evacuate a zone with a radius of 5-30 km. The Japanese government choose to evacuate an area of 20 km and make a voluntary evacuation area out to 30 km. Further IAEA guidelines (table 3) for evacuation is to immediately evacuate areas where the dose might exceed 50 mSv in the first week and to gradually relocate people from areas where the dose might exceed 100 mSv in a year.

The important question then is, are there any areas outside of the 20 km evacuation zone that have received cumulative doses above 100 mSv since the accident, or where residents were exposed to more than 50 mSv in the first week? If we look at the latest MEXT map of integrated air gamma dose we see this (click on it to make it more clear).

Measuring point 32 clearly has an accumulated dose larger than 100 mSv. Together with measuring points 31 and 79 it is located in the town of Namie. Namie was promptly evacuated despite being outside the 20km zone. Measuring point 33 clearly exceeds 50 mSv and is in Iitate village. Iitate was not evacuated immediately but the government asked the people to evacuate on the 22 April (one month and 11 days after the accident). Iitate is a borderline case. It would certainly not have been bad to evacuate it earlier and the dose rate two weeks after the accident was actually higher in Iitate than in Namie, but it is also plausible that the area did not exceed 50 mSv in the first month. The guidelines for temporary relocation is if the dose will exceed 30 mSv during first month and 10 mSv the following month. Likely Iitate fell under this category and evacuating sooner than the first month would have been advisable. Regardless if Japan followed international guidelines or not it is still surprising that they did not evacuate in an area that more closely resembles the fallout plume from the accident. The shape of the area affected by fallout was known quite early, the map below shows the dose rates currently. Evacuation could easily have been expanded into the entire yellow area outside of the 30 km zone. Why this was not done is not known, but it might be because of the unreliability of the SPEEDI network.

Nothing in this however indicates that the government censored risk and due to the censorship failed to evacuate areas. The Japanese government appears to have followed standard guidelines with the possible exception of Iitate village. It is also worth mentioning this section from the IAEA guidelines:

Typically, following a nuclear or radiological emergency a number of people (not all of whom may be experts) will make estimates of a radiation induced increase to be expected in the incidence of cancers and other effects (e.g. birth defects) that may appear among those population groups who were exposed to radiation as a result of the emergency. Such stochastic health effects would not be individually attributable to radiation exposure (as they could not be distinguished from health effects with other causes). Estimates of consequences for a population may be made on the basis of the collective radiation dose (i.e. the sum total of all individual doses in an exposed population, expressed in man-sieverts) and levels of radiation health risks derived from observations made on exposed population groups who received high radiation doses (e.g. survivors of the atomic bombing in Japan). However, health consequences to be expected are generally estimated for people who have received only low radiation doses. In estimating such health consequences certain assumptions have to be made because of scientific uncertainties concerning the biological effects of radiation exposure at low doses and low dose rates. For the purposes of the system of radiation protection the assumption is made that there is no threshold level of radiation dose below which there is no associated radiation risk. This is only an assumption, however; data on radiation health risks that are yielded by studying the effects of exposure at high doses are not directly applicable for low dose exposure. Moreover, the very small projected increases in the incidence of cancers among those people exposed with such low levels of dose would in any case be undetectable epidemiologically against the fluctuations in the spontaneous incidence. Incautious estimates of the health effects of low dose exposures have led to what many consider is an exaggerated view on the part of the public of the risks associated with radiation, and consequently in inappropriate and, in some cases, counterproductive and harmful ‘protective’ actions being taken by the public and by officials. Risks of stochastic effects occurring as a result of low radiation doses (e.g. lower than 100 mSv) that are quantified for the purposes of radiation protection should therefore be interpreted for and communicated to the public with great caution, if at all. Any such quantification should be accompanied by a plain language explanation that makes it clear that, for such low doses, any radiation induced increase in the incidence of health effects in a population would be inherently very difficult, if not impossible, to detect (note - emphasis added). This plain language explanation should also discuss the risks and consequences of any actions taken to reduce the risks associated with exposure. If others (e.g. official or unofficial parties within or outside the State) make such estimates, consideration should be given to providing a clear explanation that puts these estimates in perspective.

Regardless of whether one agrees with that or not, the Japanese communication strategy might have been lifted straight out of the IAEA guidelines. We don't agree with avoiding to discuss risk from radiation doses below 100 mSv, it just opens the field for people like Busby. But one should certainly point out that there is no evidence of damaging effects from such low dosages and keep that in mind when examining the media handling of the accident by the Government.

Japanese Government Understated Radiation Threats and Set High Standards for Exposure

Toshiso Kosako resigned from the Japanese Government’s panel of nuclear experts on April 30 in response to the government’s ceiling on “unacceptable” standards of radiation levels in schoolyards.
Dr Kosako claimed that the Japanese government understated radiation risks and was slow to test for risks posed by contaminated seawater and seafood “Hayashi, Y. (2011, July 2-3). Ex-Advisor Says Tokyo Understated Radiation Threats. The Wall Street Journal, p. A7

Professor Kosako's reason for resignation from the panel can be found in this link. Regarding the children he wrote this:

This time, upon discussing the acceptable level of radiation exposure for playgrounds in primary schools in Fukushima, they have calculated, guided and determined a level of "3.8μSv per hour" on the basis of "20mSv per year". It is completely wrong to use such a standard for schools that are going to run a normal school curriculum, in which case a standard similar to usual radiation protection measurement (1mSv per year, or even in exceptional cases, 5mSv) ought to be applied, and not the one used in cases of exceptional or urgent circumstances (for two to three days, or at the most, one to two weeks). It is not impossible to use a standard, perhaps for a few months, of 10mSv per year at the maximum, if the public is rightly notified of the necessity of taking caution, and also if special measures are to be taken. But normally it is better to avoid such a thing. We have to note that it is very rare even among the occupationally exposed persons (84,000 in total) to be exposed to radiation of 20mSv per year. I cannot possibly accept such a level to be applied to babies, infants and primary school students, not only from my scholarly viewpoint but also from my humanistic beliefs.

You rarely come across a level of 10mSv per year on the covering soil if you measure the leftover soil at a disposal site in any uranium mine (it would be about a few mSv per year at the most), so one needs to have utmost caution when using such a level. Therefore, I strongly protest the decision to use the standard of 20mSv per year for school playgrounds, and ask for revision.

Professor Kosako's protest seems to have been heard, the target dose rate for this fiscal year for schools and other places that children occupy will be 1 mSv according to MEXT.

With a basic stance to reduce the exposure of pupils and others to radiation as much as possible, using the annual dose of 1–20 mSv indicated in the interim policy as a guide level, MEXT will aim to reduce the annual dose that pupils and others receive in school to 1 mSv or less this fiscal year. MEXT will consider possibilities of additional measures, while continuing to seek the opinions of experts, etc. about the physical and mental health and development of pupils and others.

Getting into a discussion if 20 mSv/year is an unacceptable dose or not is tricky business and it is not a discussion we will delve into now. It involves arguments from all fields of science, from physics to biochemistry and it is not known if small radiation dosages do any harm or not. As the quote from IAEA guidelines states, it is assumed there is no threshold and that damaging effects can occur all the way down to zero dose. Professor Kosako's opinion is clearly that 20 mSv/year is unacceptable and his own moral code did not allow him to stay in the panel if they accept that dose limit for children. It is however worth mentioning that 20 mSv/year is not outside of what occurs naturally in certain areas of the world. One such startling example is the black sand beaches in South America. The dose rates on those beaches can be as high as 50 microSievert per hour. If a group of kids play on the beach 1-2 hours per day on average they would get a yearly dose of 18 to 36 mSv per year. In some densely populated areas of India dose rates can go as high as 35 mSv/year. It would be interesting to discuss those areas with professor Kosako and find out if he would advice Brazil to close of the beaches and India to evacuate areas of Kerala. We don't write that to be callous, it is an honest curiosity. It is however clear that a discussion regarding the dangers of 20 mSv/year is not needed since the target goal is to get doses down to 1 mSv/year in areas occupied by children.

Lets' again ask the question if the actions of the Japanese government follows international standards  The IAEA guideline for permanently resettling an area is if the cumulative life time dose in the area is less than 1 Sv. Assuming all of the dose is caused by Cesium-137 (a conservative assumption since part of the radiation is due to Cesium-134 which has a shorter half life) and assuming a initial yearly dose of 20 mSv/year it is trivial to calculate that the life time dose (assuming a person lives in the area for 70 years) would be about 0.7 Sv. Once again the Japanese government was following international guidelines and then choose to go beyond them and adopt a much stricter limit for playgrounds and schools. Professor Kosako's opinion is thus not shared with the majority of the worlds radiation experts. It is also interesting to observe that, according to the "1 Sv/lifetime" standard, the aforementioned areas in Kerala and Brazil should not be considered fit for occupation.

Lesson 1: Japanese Government Censored Disaster Report

Cabinet Kept Alarming Nuke Report Secret
Japan Times January 22
Japanese Government buried a worst-case account of the Fukushima disaster by treating it as a personal document of Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency. The report projected that in the worst case scenario the plant would intermittently release radiation for about a year.
The report was buried in part because the Japanese government recognized it could not successfully evacuate citizens the necessary 170 kilometers out.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120122a1.html

An interim report produced by the Japanese Government found that the government delayed relaying vital information to the public about the seriousness of the meltdowns and the radiation releases

*********************************

Relevant blogs and articles (mixed Swedish and English).

Cornucopia Lögn, förbannad lögn och Fukushima
ASPO Sverige Håll ögonen på block 4 i Fukushima

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/Johan

Where do we stand today after all these promises? Pretty much exactly where we were 5-10-20-40 years ago.

So - dear Mr./Ms. Anti-Nuclear Activist - You promise me gold and green forests... but You don't deliver. Maybe this wasn't Your fault. Maybe You'd like to blame Big Oil or lazy politicians or a public that just won't see things the way You do. It's allright... You can try to shift the blame any place You want. But it doesn't matter whose fault it is, becasue assigning blame does not alleviate the problem.

So when You - dear Mr./Ms. Anti-Nuclear Activist - today, yet again, try to tell me it's allright to renounce nuclear power, it means I cannot trust You, because things might no go they way You promise me they will.

What will You - dear Mr./Ms. Anti-Nuclear Activist - need to do to gain my trust again?

Well it's easy: get the replacements up and running. Get full replacements for fossil fuels and nuclear power up and running, hooked to the grids and pumping GigaWatthours of energy into them, and I'll trust You again.

So... dear Mr./Ms. Anti-Nuclear Activist.... get to work. We're eagerly waiting for You.

Oh... and one last thing: while we wait for you to get this work done, You do not get to say we cannot make any new nuclear power if we want to, at least on the "We're not gonna need it in a while"-argument alone.  Just saying this FYI...

Power firms should invest massively in coal and gas-fired power technology and renewable energy sources, Harry Voigtsberger, economy minister of Germany's most populous state North Rhine Westphalia, said in the Financial Times Deutschland.

The original article can be read here (in german).

Angela Markel seems to be agreeing...

In a document from Friday's meeting obtained by Reuters, Merkel and her ministers laid out a six-point plan that includes a 5 billion-euro credit programme to support renewables.

It will also require building new gas and coal plants, Merkel said. "Gas and coal power plants were discussed... an accelerated exit from nuclear energy will lead to replacement power stations," she said.

Why? So they can get rid of nuclear power...

This is about as stupid an idea as to say that in order to prevent paper cuts to your finger you should cut off your arms!

Sure... you achieve what you aimed for... but did you really concider the side effects before you took a knife and started carving?

Diese dummen Deutschen...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world

The article is only about 30 years overdue... but I cannot stop smiling when I read this. Monbiot did what everyone should do: check the facts, think for yourself, dare to think you may have been either right or wrong.

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all

I've discovered that when the facts don't suit them, the movement resorts to the follies of cover-up they usually denounce

Thank yo so much for this George. Along with Mark Lynas and Patrick Moore, you have shown that "green" does not have to mean "unscientific zeal".

What are these equations?

This is a comparison between two estimated values... what are they?

Update: we have a winner! Tony scored a perfect bullseye. I'm quoting him here:

‘a’ is the number of iodine atoms that would fill the known universe, if the iodine were at ‘normal’ temperature/pressure.

the second number is the number of radioactive iodine atoms you would have needed, when Chernobyl exploded, in order to have one radioactive iodine atom left today.

An added trivia is that the estimated number of atoms in the known universe is approximately 10^80.

The upshot of all this is this: there is not a single atom of Iodine-131 released by Chernobyl in existence today. The last atom decayed in no more than 4 years after the accident.

/Michael

NISA has released their update, link 1, link 2, link 3. I have also reattached the earlier JAIF figures at the bottom of the last update to see if it will fix the bug that gives an error when one clicks on the pictures.

As usual the NISA figures are between (). The NISA data is 3 hours older than the JAIF data.

Reactor 1:
Water level in the core: 1.65(1.65)  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Flow rate of injected water: 7.2 cubic meters per hour
Core pressure: 476 (477) kPa
Containment pressure: 270 (270) kPa *note, in the last update I misstakenly wrote 370 kPa as containment pressure.
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 195.3 Celsius
Core temperature(bottom head) 146.3 Celsius
Dose rate within containment: 35.1 Sv/hour

Reactor 2:
Water level in the core: 1.1 (1.1)  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Flow rate of injected water: 18.6 cubic meters per hour
Core pressure: unknown
Containment pressure: 116 (115) kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 107 Celcius
Core temperature(bottom head): 100 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  43.4 Sv/hour
Spent fuel pool temperature:  57 Celsius

Reactor 3:
Water level in the core: 2.3  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Flow rate of injected water: 14.5 cubic meters per hour
Core pressure: 139 (139) kPa *note, I wrote the wrong pressure in the last update
Containment pressure: 106.6 (106.6) kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 37.6 Celsius (sounds like an error on equipment)
Core temperature(bottom head): 106.1 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  36.1 Sv/hour

Due to my error with containment pressure in the last update I withdraw my speculation that its hard to control the pressure in number 1. Rather it seems like the situation is fairly stable. Otherwise not much new information.

The US Department of Energy has done some arial surveys around Fukushima Daiichi and released the data. I have one pictures from it below(hats of to http://neutroneconomy.blogspot.com/ where I found the pictures). The dose rate unit used on the picture is millirad. 1 millirad=10 microgray =* 10 microsievert
*that equality between gray and sievert is only valid for gamma radiation. Gray measures the energy deposited while sievert is weighted in such a way that it expresses a cancer risk.  For gamma the weighting factor is 1.

Update 12:00(UTC)/13:00(CET)/21:00(JST)

No NISA updates have been released yet today, JAIF has released their update as usual(one hour old as of writing this).

Reactor 1:
Water level in the core: 1.65  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: 476 kPa
Containment pressure: 370 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new data
Core temperature(bottom head) no new data
Dose rate within containment:  no new data

Reactor 2:
Water level in the core: 1.1  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: unknown
Containment pressure: 116 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new data
Core temperature(bottom head) no new data
Dose rate within containment:  no new data

Reactor 3:
Water level in the core: 2.3  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: 202 kPa
Containment pressure: 106.6 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new data
Core temperature(bottom head) no new data
Dose rate within containment:  no new data

All 3 reactors are now cooled with freshwater instead of sea water. It seems hard for them to get the pressure in the number one reactor under complete control. In JAIF's written update they say lights are on in all control rooms now. Levels of radioactive materials in the seawater around the plant is climbing. TEPCO is releasing updates on activity in both sea and air, I have attached levels as pictures in the bottom of this update.

The ground deposits of I-131 the prefectures around Fukushima ranges from less than 1 to 16 kBq per square meter. The cesium ground deposits ranges from less than 0.1 to 1.9 kBq per square meter(here are the last 3 MEXT updates on ground deposts link 1, link 2, link 3). The data form the worst effected prefectures are however omitted, we hope MEXT will make those figures available asap! As a comparison the ground deposits of cesium due to Chernobyl ranged from a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousand kBq per square meter.

Update, March 26, 12:00 (UTC) / 13:00 (CET) / 21:00 (JST)

Not much to add today. The radiation levels in the sea outside Fukushima I are sky-high. The long term effects are hard to predict now since a sea contamination is entirly different from a land contamination, where land is basicly a 2D area, which leads to a thin and high concentration on the surface, and where rains soon concentrate the contamination to "hotspots".  The sea on the other hand is a 3D volume where currents quickly dilute any contaminant by dispersing them over very wide areas.

The JAIF updates from 10:00, 16:00 and 21:00 (JST) for March 26 are pretty much uniform. The big news is that freshwater injection to the cores of 1, 2 and 3 has started as opposed to using salty sea water. Apart from that nothing new. The radiation readings at the main gate (1 km out) has stayed at 170 μSv/h all day. The west gate read 147 μSv/h at 13:30.

NISA has not said anything new since last night.

Links(english):
BBC We should stop running away from radiation
Hufftington post US brings fresh water to japan nuclear plant
NY Times Japan presses nuclear plant repair as more damage is found
Rod Adams Shaken, flooded, stressed by power outages, Fukushima Daiichi moves into second place
The Independent Fear and devastation on the road to Japan's nuclear disaster zone

Links(swedish):
Röda berget
Dr Angels blog
DN Radioaktivt jod tusen gånger tillåten nivå i havet
Aftonbladet Strålningen ökar runt Fukushima
SvD Radioaktivt vatten i reaktorer
Tänkvärt? Eller inte!
Grön horizont

There has been no further info yet on the status of the exposed workers or the status of the reactors. Only news about the reactors is that both number 1 and number 3 have now switched to fresh water injection into the core and number 2 was supposed to follow promptly. I end todays updates with a few video clips of the explosion in one of the refineries that was hit worst by the earthquake and tsunami. This disaster has struck so many lifes, so many industries and so many towns that it is hard to fathom.

Uppdate 16:30(UTC) / 17:30(CET) / 00:30(JST)

The 2 workes taken to hospital reportedly got a dose to their feet and lower legs between 2-6 Sieverts from beta radiation.  They also got close to 200 mSv from gamma and an unknown internal dose.

They have not shown any signs of acute radiation sickness so far.  But the dose to the legs are very worrying and in the worst case might mean amputation.

Update 14:15 (UTC) / 13:15 (CET) / 22:15 (JST)

New updates from JAIF and NISA(link 1, link 2, link3). JAIF status is from 15:00 JST and NISA updates from 10:00 and 12:30 JST. As before the first number is from the JAIF update and the number within () is from the older NISA update.

Reactor 1:
Water level in the core: 1.65 (1.65) meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: 450 kPa (450 kPa)
Containment pressure: 295 (295) kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 197.8 Celsius
Core temperature(bottom head) 153.6 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  38.9 Sievert/hour

If one looks at the JAIF status updates one can see a very encouraging piece of information, they have switched from seawater to fresh water injection into the pressure vessel! That is one significant step in the direction of stabilizing the reactor since seawater injection could never be a permanent solution. They are still not using the internal pumps however. The temperature of the core seems to have been brought under control and the high containment pressure is on a slowly declining trend. We can only keep our hopes up that they will be able to avoid venting the containment.

Reactor 2:

Water level in the core: 1.20 (1.2) meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure:  unknown
Containment pressure: 120 (120) kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 107 Celsius
Core temperature(bottom head) 105 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  45.6 Sievert/hour

Reactor 3.
Water level in the core: 2.3 m below the top of fuel assemblies.
Core pressure: 139 (139) kPa
Containment pressure:  107 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 42.8 Celsius (probably junk)
Core temperature(bottom head) 111,6 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  51 Sievert/hour

Preparations are being made to switch from seawater to fresh water for reactor 2 and 3. If it goes as quickly as for number one it should be done within half a day. Work with electrical equipment on going.

We have earlier warned for the possibility that molten material in the core can be lying on the bottom of the vessel and eating its way through, now that seems unlikely considering how low the bottom head temperatures of the vessel are. All of them are below 200 degrees.

Dose rate at main gate around 200 micro sievert per hour.

Update 12:30 (UTC) / 11:30 (CET) / 20:30 (JST)

TEPCO is preparing to switch from salt water to fresh water for the core cooling. From NHK:

TEPCO says it intends to switch over from pumping sea water to pumping fresh water into the 3 reactors, as salt in the sea water could cause corrosion and buildup, hampering the smooth flow of water inside the structures.

The company has been pumping seawater as an emergency measure.

The power company also says preparations to switch to fresh water were completed at the No.1 reactor on Friday afternoon.
Operations to pump fresh water into reactors No.2 and No 3 are expected to start later in the day.

Update 10:00 (UTC) / 11:00 (CET) / 19:00 (JST)

Here are the status tables from the JAIF update described below and summary.

Reactor 1:
Water level in the core: 1.7 meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: 465 kPa
Containment pressure: 310 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new info yet today
Dose rate within containment:  no new info yet today

Pressure has decreased by about 60-80 kPa in both vessel and containment since yesterday.

Reactor 2:
Water level in the core: 1.10 meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: unknown
Containment pressure: 120 kPa
Core temperature (feedwater nozzle): no new info yet today
Dose rate within containment: no new info yet today

Reactor 3.
Water level in the core: 2.3 m below the top of fuel assemblies.
Core pressure: 139 kPa
Containment pressure:  107 kPa
Core temperature (bottom head): no new info yet today
Dose rate within containment: no new info yet today

Containment damage is again suspected on number 3, otherwise no major changes since yesterday. Let's hope the containment is not damaged! Luckily the reactors in the possibly damaged containments are behaving more stable than the number one reactor (that has a undamaged containment).

Picture of reactor number 3 building

Update 08:45 (UTC) / 09:45 (CET) / 17:45 (JST)

The 16:00 JAIF update for March 25 has been published. Two changes:

...so far seventeen workers have been exposed to more than 100 mSv of radiation.

100 mSv is the limit where an increase in cancer risk has been proven. At 100 mSv, the lifetime risk of getting cancer increases from about 25-32% to 29-36%.

Keep in mind that this does not say whether or not any of these workers will actually get any cancer, much less die from it. It is safe to assume that just as after Hirosima/Nagasaki, the medical authorities will keep those exposed under very close watch, meaning their chances of getting diagnosed early and thus surviving any cancer will be quite good.

The other change is that the radiation reading at the main gate has gone up again:

The Main Gate: 259.0μSv/h at 11:00, Mar. 25

The pressure in the #1 containment vessel is moving up and down.  #2 is stable. The #3 pressure is slowly decreasing. With the worries of a leak from #3, this may have more than one explanation, not all of them good.

Update 07:20 (UTC) / 08:20 (CET) / 16:20 (JST)

The 10:00 (JST) JAIF update for March 25 has the following new entries:

Monitoring results of seawater sampled at the coast near the Fukushima Dai-ichi NPS on Mar. 23rd showed that radioactive Iodine, Cesium, Ruthenium, and Tellurium exceeding the regulatory limit were detected. Also, monitoring results of seawater sampled at coasts within about 16km from the Fukushima Dai-ichi NPS in Mar. 23rd showed that radioactive Iodine and Ruthenium exceeding the regulatory limit were detected.

Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan reported the result of preliminary calculation of exposure dose in the surrounding area of Fukushima Dai-ichi NPS.

The dose rate mesaured at the main gate has dropped slightly, from 209.4μSv/h at 12:00, Mar. 24 to 193.8μSv/h at 06:00, Mar. 25.

The high exposure of three workers in the number three turbine hall suggests that #3 may have a leak after all, says the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Water supplies continue to show taints of Iodine-131, but the readings fluctuate and it's still hard to make out a general trend. Tokyo is no longer under a recommendation not to drink the tap water, but concerned citizens continue to use bottled water to some extent.

Following the latest findings, the Tokyo officials said it will no longer warn against consumption of tap water in the metropolitan area.

''I believe readings will go up and down. But even if levels exceed standards temporarily, it will be no problem as long as they stay (most of the time) within the range throughout the year,'' Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said at a news conference. ''I hope people in Tokyo would act calmly.''

Still, people in the capital area -- located about 220 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant -- and elsewhere continued to buy up limited supplies of bottled water from shops and vending machines.

The government has asked that people in the 20-30 km zone around the crippled Fukushima plant to evacuate volontarily out of concern for supplies for daily necessities.

The Japanese government has encouraged people living within 20 to 30 kilometers of the troubled nuclear plant in Fukushima Prefecture to leave voluntarily, with concerns over access to daily necessities rather than resident safety prompting the advice, top government spokesman Yukio Edano said Friday.

Länkar:

SvD mycket troligt en läcka i 3an
Flute
Kommunisternas blogg
Martin Mobergs blogg
Röda berget
Aktieskolan
Cornucopia
Röda malmö
Divage

DN Kärnan kan vara skadad (den person som valde den här rubriken borde sluta använda google translate....)
DN cesium i grönsaker i Tokyo
Aftonbladet hotet i japan är osynligt

I realised that I forgot to counter the 5th argument by Takahashi. I have now added it.

In the Huffington post Patrick Takahashi flaunts some misconceptions about nuclear and the technological impact the Fukushima accident will have on future new builds.  We will take a look at some of the flaws here on his 4 point list.

1. Economics
Patric states that due to increasing regulatory demands on nuclear after this accident the price of nuclear will escalate into the industries oblivion. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case and should not be the case of the issue is treated rationally by the regulatory bodies.  What Fukushima has shown us is that one can not rely on emergency diesel generators for core cooling and that spent fuel pools are sensitive. Let's look into those two issues.

Emergency core cooling, a core needs to be cooled even after shutdown due to the decay heat from fission products. The typical way to design a plant is to have several redundant diesel generators that can supply power to the coolant pumps. The vulnerability is if one accident can take out all diesel generators at the same time, like the tsunami did in Fukushima. The solution to this problem is not to build dramatically expensive sources of back up power that will rack up costs, the solution is to design the core itself so that it can be cooled passively by natural convection etc. This solution will reduce cost since it reduces the need for piping and backup generators. Both the AP1000 and the ESBWR are already designed with that in mind. The EPR however might be dead in the water.

Spent fuel pools, the cooling needs of a spent fuel pool is smaller than for a reactor and the possibility of rigging up a passive cooling system is easier. One can also easily increase the safety by putting up a sturdy roof above the pool that can handle terrorist attacks. This change will not dramatically increase cost. Having centralized spent fuel pools deep under the rock, like in the Swedish CLAB facility, also ensures safety and limits the necessary changes to the on-site pools. In short make pools passively cooled and move spent fuel assemblies to a centralized location as soon as possible.

2. Liability
For some unknown reason Patric mentions the cost of the entire Tsunami disaster in his discussion about liability. I have a very hard time understanding what impact the 200 billion dollars in tsunami damage will have on nuclear insurances. A better comparison would be to point at TMI. The clean up after TMI cost around 1 billion dollars. The cost of the Fukushima accident per reactor should not be vastly much more than this unless the situation deteriorates significantly.  Any rational insurance company would treat nuclear like anything else, do a probabilistic assessment and figure out a cost per kWh produced. This number is very small based on any reasonable analysis. The problem is that the total cost of an accident might very well overwhelm an insurance company. But that is no different from a major accident in hydropower(banqiao), refineries, chemical plants(Bhopal) etc. The insurance model used for those industries should also be used for nuclear. For reactors that are meltdown proof like pebble bed reactors or molten salt reactors the insurance cost would be very low indeed.

3. The attitude of the public

This is a tricky issue, the attitude of the public usually is very distant from reality. Right now we don't know if the public will see this as a spectacular failure of nuclear and as proof of its danger, or as a spectacular demonstration of how nuclear can withstand the worst of accidents without causing large scale damage to its surrounding.  The real environmental and public health impact of the Fukushima accident is likely to be much less than the fire in the Japanese refineries. China's decision to halt approval is a completely rational response to new data, its unlikely that they will downsize their nuclear ambitions.

4. Freshwater
This point is, I am sorry to say, absurd. Patric states that the French nuclear reactors together consume half of the fresh water of France. However we have to separate between plants using cooling towers where water is acctually evaporated and plants using once through cooling where water is passed through and then returned to the river or lake a few degrees hotter.  32 plants in France use cooling towers and 26 use once through cooling. Patrick links to this article by Chellaney which states that the rectors in France use 19 billion cubic meters of water per year. According to WNA the water consumption for a plant with cooling towers is roughly 4 liters per kWh of produced electricity. Thus one can with some simple arithmetic see that 19 billion cubic meters of water is enough to produce almost 4750 TWh of electricity. That is the power production of almost 550 1GWe nuclear reactors. Obviously the number claimed is utter nonsense since France only have about 50 reactors and if even a fraction of those 19 billion cubic meter is actually used by nuclear then most of it is returned to the body of water it was taken from.

5. Worst case scenario.

Patrick speculates on what would have happened if Fukushima had exploded like Chernobyl. In my eyes this is a question that invites to fearmongering and requires some attention. First and foremost the accident in Chernobyl was a criticality accident, the chain reaction itself got out of control and the power of the reactor increased by orders of magnitude. In essence one had a nuclear explosion. In Fukushima such an even is physically impossible, the problem there is to take care of the decay heat from the reactor and the worst thing that can happen are various forms of hydrogen or steam explosions. Not nearly as powerful or catastrophic as the Chernobyl explosion. There is no conceivable way for plutonium to spread out of the reactor in large amounts. In Chernobyl the main problem was iodine in the short term(the weeks following the accident) and now cesium, strontium and other fission products, even though Chernobyl certainly did have plutonium in its core, any nuclear reactor creates plutonium during its operation. Plutonium and other transuranic elements simply do not spread very well, they are not soluble in water, they tend to form particles to heavy to be spread by wind and in the form of oxides(like nuclear fuel is) they don't chemically react with much of anything. Plants can not easily incorporate them either so there is no natural pathway for plutonium to end up in food. IAEA explains this very well in their Chernobyl legacy report. Cesium-137 is the issue in Chernobyl and any other reactor accident, plutonium never had, and wont in the future have, any significant impact. For some reason plutonium has turned into the nuclear bogeyman without any factual reason for such fear.

On a more positive note George Monbiot is turning into a very outspoken voice of reason.

Still... I think we are going to see lots more of this sentiment like the one he posted in The Guardian, headlined "Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power":

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.