8.9 Magnitude Earthquake Hit Japan

[Ace2cool]

President of the United States Barack Obama announced today that America will be supplying technical aid to Japan in cooling the reactors. Saw it on Fox news as I was eating at the galley. We are now offering technical assistance in restoring power to the number two reactor. No link as of yet, because I don't think it has been published.

What do you guys think? Is Obama doing the right thing, or is he only playing in because Californians and Hawaiians are evacuating in fear of radiation, and the whole world is looking to the US? Obama also added that radiation is NOT expected to reach the west coast. He even repeated it to ensure everyone understood his seriousness.

Also, here are some updates.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/queensland/a/- ... -reactors/

Apparently the dollar has climbed to 81.15 : 1 Yen : USD from last weeks' 76.25 : 1 exchange rate. Sounds like things may finally be turning around. I just hope nothing else happens. Are there still tremors happening?

[RCA]

so are californians ready for their nuclear wave of air?

That mass email is fake. It might happen if the reactors explode but right now, nothing like that will happed.

What do you guys think? Is Obama doing the right thing, or is he only playing in because Californians and Hawaiians are evacuating in fear of radiation, and the whole world is looking to the US? Obama also added that radiation is NOT expected to reach the west coast. He even repeated it to ensure everyone understood his seriousness.

I think it's a no brainer.

When it comes to nuclear, it should be a global problem because it can affect a large part of the globe. So I'm all for it as long as we don't stay in Japan for 6 years fighting the war on nuclear fallout.

[Encryptshun]

I'm all for it as long as we don't stay in Japan for 6 years fighting the war on nuclear fallout.

Hey, it wouldn't be 6 years if we could just convince the damned radiations to have free and fair elections.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

so are californians ready for their nuclear wave of air?

That mass email is fake. It might happen if the reactors explode but right now, nothing like that will happed.

What do you guys think? Is Obama doing the right thing, or is he only playing in because Californians and Hawaiians are evacuating in fear of radiation, and the whole world is looking to the US? Obama also added that radiation is NOT expected to reach the west coast. He even repeated it to ensure everyone understood his seriousness.

I think it's a no brainer.

When it comes to nuclear, it should be a global problem because it can affect a large part of the globe. So I'm all for it as long as we don't stay in Japan for 6 years fighting the war on nuclear fallout.

Even when Chernobyl's reactor blew it's top the resulting Earth-Wrapping radioactive death cloud barely registered on our array of detectors. This one's no different. Potassium Iodide manufacturers are making a killing off of people's panic though.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

This made my cry...
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World- ... n_In_Japan_

[Ace2cool]

Wow.... The fact that there are 180 people who are willing to basically just sacrifice themselves to give others a better future is a statement of the country in itself.

[krimsonviper]

I was going through my huge pile of saved/recorded TV shows I havent watched and came across National Geographic's Megaquake which aired in January 2011 and focused on the worst that could happen around the world, including Northern Japan. They talked about how earthquake-proof structures could dampen the flow of a tsunami into a city, and the possibility of a big quake in Japan causing tsunamis that could hit the US west coast.

Spooky.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GcE2VsC1tc[/youtube]

[nissangirl74]

It's been over a week and things are getting worse.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110320/ap_ ... earthquake

Technicians prepared to vent radioactive gas into the air Sunday because of a new spike in pressure at Japan's crippled, leaking nuclear complex, while a safety official said protective iodine pills should have been distributed near the plant days earlier.
Radiation, a danger for days in areas around the plant, already has seeped into the food supply, with the government warning that tests of spinach and milk from areas as far as 75 miles (120 kilometers) away exceeded safety limts. Tap water farther away turned up tiny amounts of radioactive iodine in Tokyo and other areas.

[Razi]

They were thinking of pouring concrete in and sealing it off, but said that would still be risky since it could still explode.

What a fiasco.

[nissangirl74]

The thing that is so scary is that this could continue for MONTHS.

[themadscientist]

Think about a future where Tokyo looks like Pripyat. It's remote, but possible.

[nissangirl74]

That literally made me shudder. How are things where you are? Are you getting any fall out from this or are you far enough away to be safe?

[troskinatior]

How is this compared to the bombs dropped on japan?

[PapaSmurf2k3]

not nearly as bad.

[4cefed]

Hi all, I haven't been around much lately, but I thought I should help out a bit on this one.

The Fukushima nuclear complex has suffered severe damage due to some very poor planning in my estimation. I work at one of these "Identical" boiling water reactors in the eastern US. Not sure if people have seen the timeline of events, but I can give you a few cliff notes.

When the earthquake struck, the three operating reactors were automatically tripped by ground vibration sensors. All control rods in. Due to a loss of offsite power, the emergency diesel generators started to provide electricity to the plant to maintain cooling. This would have taken the form of either Reactor Core Isolation Cooling (RCIC) or Low Pressure Coolant Injection. (LPCI or ECCS). Not sure if Residual Heat Removal (RHR) would have been running yet, usually that would start running at lower vessel temperatures. Other critical systems running would have been Spent Fuel Pool Cooling and Reactor Building Component Cooling Water. (SFPC and RBCCW). I'm not positive if they were lined up to draw water form the main condenser hotwell or the torus (suppression pool) yet.

When the tsunami hits, the fuel tanks powering the emergency diesel generators were swept away because they were stored above ground. At this time, vital A/C would kick in. This system uses large battery banks converted to A/C power to provide a temporary back-up for electricity. I've also heard that the switchgear room was flooded. They reported this was in the basement of the turbine building. This room houses most of the main relays and large current switches to control plant systems.

About 8 hours later the batteries are drained and all core cooling stops. Main Steam Isolation Valves that were probably closed after loss of power are holding back reactor steam pressure. Heat in the core builds up and produces more pressure in the system. Normal operating pressure is about 1000 psi. I heard the pressure climbed to about 1500 psi. After seeing first hand the robustness of design, I' sure the vessel could withstand pressures way higher than this, but now they must vent steam to reduce pressure or risk a rupture somewhere. As steam is released, water level in the core drops eventually exposing the core.

In water moderated reactors, the cooling water is also the neutron moderator, when this water goes away, the fuel will locally heat up and eventually melt. This process will take several hours. In the RBMK mark IV reactor at Chernobyl, this reaction is moderated by graphite blocks. With the cooling water gone there the moderator is still allowing the core to build up massive levels of heat energy, this led to a "violent mechanical separation of the core" (It exploded)

When the Zirconium alloy of the fuel cladding reacts with steam, hydrogen gas is produced in greater levels. This gas along with the steam is vented to the secondary containment known as the reactor building. They hydrogen gas builds up at the top of the building an eventually detonates blowing apart the reactor building. The vessel and recirc systems are housed in primary containment or the "Drywell" This is still intact.

With no ability to move water in the plant, water level in the cores and in the spent fuel pools begin to go down. Water provides enormous shielding to gamma rays. As the water levels drop in the core and the spent fuel pools, radiation dose rates can reach lethal levels. Workers have to be careful where they can go inside the plant. I imagine dose rates would prohibit going near the spent fuel pools.

Hydrogen detonations have blown off the roofs of units 1,2, and 3. And I heard a hydrogen detonation inside the torus of unit 2 has ruptured that too. The torus is considered part of primary containment, but is in the basement of the reactor building inside secondary containment.

So now they begin dumping water on the buildings to put out any fires and try to fill the spent fuel pools. If spent fuel is left in open air long enough, in theory is can start to burn itself. Not sure if this has happened. Unit 4 was in cold shutdown for refueling and the core was offloaded to the spent fuel pool. This is a precarious position as the time to boil the water in that pool is significantly shorter with no SFPC.

If they get enough water back into the pools, the dose rates will drop significantly inside the buildings allowing workers into more places. Not sure what the dose rates will be from an empty reactor vessel though, less fuel and more shielding in the form of concrete, but I'm assuming that dose rates will be high enough to limit stay times or prohibit entry all together.

Steam carrying radioactive material drifts away from the plants. On the grand scale of things, there is little health danger of this "plume". It is a nuisance at most. Eventual, this material will be detected around the globe as was Chernobyl and to a lesser extent, Three Mile Island ( I've worked there too.) These levels are a drop in the bucket compared to the myriad of radiation we are exposed to in daily life.

I'll write more on this later after digesting this unholy wall of text. Only the people in this business really understand what happens at these things, and it sounds like TEPCO isn't releasing any useful information. I know they are in a bad way and this is realistically the worst nuclear disaster we can sustain at this point. To answer a question, Yes, fuel can melt into a pool and settle at the bottom of the reactor vessel. This happened at TMI and none of this pool breached the vessel. In this state of meltdown, energy stored in the fuel will dissipate relatively quickly and burn itself out, maybe in a few days. (I'm guessing on that one.)

I can't begin to imagine the general devastation in Japan and I hope friends and family are reunited quickly and they can start to recover.

[themadscientist]

Thanks for the straightest scoop yet on this situation. I'll have to pass this on locally.

[PapaSmurf2k3]

Thanks for the straightest scoop yet on this situation.

I was thinking the same thing.

[4cefed]

Ok, more on this. First a breakdown of radiation types:

Alpha - Essentially a helium nucleus, two neutrons, two protons, +2 charge. Only present in systems with failed fuel. Very damaging radiation but not penetrating. Can be shielded by the layer of dead skin on the outside of your body or a piece of paper. It is common in Radon gas which comes from radium that is very abundant in the earth's crust.

Beta - Essentially an electron. -1 charge. Not penetrating and slightly damaging. Can be shielded by a layer of plastic or thin aluminum.

Gamma - This is an energy ray like light. Very penetrating and least damaging. However, high levels will be damaging. Can be shielded by many inches of steel, lead, tungsten, or by feet of water or concrete.

Neutron - Extremely damaging and penetrating. Neutral charge. Only found near a reactor core at power. Only fuel undergoing a sustained chain reaction will emit neutron radiation. Can be shielded with many feet or water or concrete.

I think there is a lot of confusion between radioactive contamination and a radiation dose rates. Contamination is defined as radioactive material in an undesired location. I deal with contamination all day long. While it is detectable by sensitive instruments, it poses little health risk. Radiation dose can come from many sources. Primary sources inside a power plant would be from fuel itself, and activation products. As pipes, pumps, and valves wear, tiny bits of metal circulate through the core where there are retarded levels of gamma and neutron present. These rays and particles can literally transform materials from one thing to another. For example, Nickle-58 (not radioactive) can be activated to form either Cobalt 58 (weak gamma emitter) or Cobalt 60 (strong gamma) This is the closest thing to alchemy you will ever find. So as plants run this material will build up in filters, clean up systems, valves, and even bends or welds in the piping.

When these systems are opened for maintenance, it is expected that some material will escape into the immediate surrounding. Work areas are prepared ahead of time with boundaries and work protocols that include some kind of protective clothing be worn. Occasionally HEPA air filtration will be used to limit material escaping into the air. At the boundary of this work area, a "Step-off-pad" will be placed indicating the exit point. Protective clothing is removed in specific order and a clean worker will step onto this pad. After working, he will then go thorough two different whole body monitors that check for gamma radiation and another that detects mainly beta. You may have seen people on TV wearing dosimeters. These track radiation dose. While it is possible to pile up so much contamination that you can receive a radiation dose form it, that doesn't happen often. Those dosimeters will not tell you if you are contaminated. You can be contaminated to all hell and those things will never register it. That is how little contamination actually affects health. I've been contaminated plenty of times. Simple things like changing clothes, washing hands, or even showering will get rid of it. Think of it like this. If you have a bunch of glow sticks in front of you, the light would be like radiation. If one of them is broken and leaks a bit, that small faint glowing smudge would be like contamination. Move the glow sticks further away and you get less light. Wipe up the smudge and the contamination is gone.

Numbers. They have been throwing around a lot of numbers on TV and in the news. Once again the US has to be different and we use a different measurement system then the rest of the world. We use the REM scale in this country and every one else uses Seiverts. 1 Seivert = 100 REM. In daily life, we measure does in thousandths of REM or milliREM (mR) I might receive 1- 5 mR a day form work. An acute dose of 10 REM or 10,000 rem would increase your risk of cancer by 0.8% My lifetime dose to this point is about 7 REM, that's been acquired over 11 years and poses virtually no risk to me. In the US we are allowed to receive 25 REM to save vital plant equipment in an emergency and 75 REM to save a life. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this. Those are both acute doses, or dose received in the span of minutes to hours. Not days or weeks. The human body is an amazing machine and repairs itself quickly. A dose around 100 to 200 REM. will induce some type of radiation sickness. Vomiting, nausea, fatigue, possibly hair loss. A dose of 450-550 REM will usually result in death in 60 days even with medical attention. I even saw one report in micro-Grays. A Gray is equal to a Seivert. Contamination is measured in counts per minute or CPM. Most of the time, contamination monitors are detecting beta since it is found in most types of radioactive decay. I think the Japanese were using 13,000 CPM as a threshold for being contaminated. I could be wrong, but that's how I was reading the information. Plant workers here are considered contaminated at 100 CPM. If I remember, contamination at 100,000 CPM has a dose rate of 2.5 mR per hour. That's a lot of contamination and not much dose. So at Fukushima, the area surrounding the plant is now contaminated, growing vegetation will become contaminated too. If it comes to hunger vs. contamination, eat the crapped up lettuce and drink the milk.

I heard the "Fukushima 50" were authorized to receive a lifetime dose. Not sure what numbers they are, but these workers will be OK in the long run. Perhaps a slight risk of cancer. No doubt brave souls though. A simple broken meter or miscalculation could lead to injury or death.

Some differences I've noticed already from Fukushima to the US. They don't seem to have a genuine secondary containment building. Most of their square reactor building seems to be sheet metal. Ours are reinforced concrete completely surrounding the primary containment or drywell. Only the very top floor is sheet metal. It's there to keep the rain off. That would limit the amount of radioactive material escaping into the air. Our first two safety systems, HPCI and RCIC are coolant pumps driven by a small steam turbines. So in the event of total loss of electric power, we can use these to cool the reactor. In Japan, apparently these two systems are powered by electric motors. That doesn't help much when you've lost electric power. Our fuel tanks for the emergency generators are sealed underground and waterproof. Theirs were above ground and washed away. After Three Mile Island we learned about the hydrogen problem. Every plant in the US installed a "hard vent line" that can directly ventilate primary containment through carbon filters and to the plant stack. That eliminates any hydrogen building up in either primary or secondary containment.

In the coming months I'm sure full details will come out about this tragedy. I would like to let everyone know that our plants apparently are held to a higher standard. I'm sure we will learn things form this accident and make some upgrades. But I see nuclear continuing to be an environmentally friendly source of mass produced electricity. Oh, and I'm an ANSI 3.1 senior radiation protection tech with 11 years experience between RP and being a decontamination tech. I thought we had a few members that were plant operators. I would love if they chime in about plant status, line-ups, or modes of operation. While I've received training on plant systems, I'm no expert on that topic.

[Ace2cool]

Yeah, that's the most definitive stuff I've heard about this ordeal this whole time. Good stuff to know.

[Encryptshun]

4cefed, that is a fantastic overview.

I feel like we should all get some sort of continuing-eduction credits for reading this.

[drksolest]

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ ... 322a3.html

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

I heard the "Fukushima 50" were authorized to receive a lifetime dose. Not sure what numbers they are, but these workers will be OK in the long run. Perhaps a slight risk of cancer. No doubt brave souls though. A simple broken meter or miscalculation could lead to injury or death.

So, five deaths and 21 injured is considered "OK"? Granted it doesn't detail what exactly happened to them...

[Razi]

I heard the "Fukushima 50" were authorized to receive a lifetime dose. Not sure what numbers they are, but these workers will be OK in the long run. Perhaps a slight risk of cancer. No doubt brave souls though. A simple broken meter or miscalculation could lead to injury or death.

So, five deaths and 21 injured is considered "OK"? Granted it doesn't detail what exactly happened to them...

I think he was talking in terms of radiation.

[4cefed]

I heard the "Fukushima 50" were authorized to receive a lifetime dose. Not sure what numbers they are, but these workers will be OK in the long run. Perhaps a slight risk of cancer. No doubt brave souls though. A simple broken meter or miscalculation could lead to injury or death.

So, five deaths and 21 injured is considered "OK"? Granted it doesn't detail what exactly happened to them...

It is my understanding that the deaths were attributed to either the tsunami or the explosions, not from any radiation exposure.

I got a bit more info today. The area where the fire trucks are spraying water is reading about 1-2 REM per hour. I hope the firefighters are able to set up the truck and then retreat for a bit. That dose rate is manageable, but hopefully can be avoided for long periods of time. There are a few areas next to the plant that read 30-40 REM per hour.

I was thinking of something else today. In the Three Mile Island accident, the control room operators refused to believe they had damaged the core. After four hours being partially exposed, the fuel and cladding heated to melting point, then the reactor coolant pumps were started again to start cooling. The introduction of this "cold" water thermally shocked the fuel and shattered the cladding. This meant loose fuel pellets began circulating through the plant systems. TMI is a pressurized water reactor and has different systems, but spreading the fuel throughout the plant made a huge nightmare clean up job. I got a tour through the Auxiliary building (not containment) and I was just in amazement at every turn. I have never seen so many lead bricks and shielding in my life. This will be quite the project when they figure out how to decommission that unit.

Fukushima officials know they have core damage, so I'm assuming when they restore normal cooling functions they will figure out how to do this and not spread any loose fuel through the plant. Some good news today, I hear that units 1,2,5, and 6 are in some kind of stable condition. They expect to have 3 and 4 under control soon.

[nissangirl74]

Mike,

I was wondering if you could chime in on this one since you are our closest source. You're also now the only person I know who is over there. Is this really happening?

In other natural disasters that I've covered, steady streams of local and international aid have usually converged upon the stricken area within four days of the event. This has happened even in developing-world countries with far less infrastructure than Japan has. But in Tohoku, as Japan's northeast is called, aid has trickled in agonizingly slowly, despite the mobilization of 100,000 Japanese soldiers for the relief effort. It took more than a week after the earthquake, for example, for the region's highways, which are reserved for emergency vehicles, to be filled with the kind of aid convoys that typically race to disaster scenes. (See Japan's history of massive earthquakes.)
One major bottleneck has been Japan's fondness for red tape. "In special times, you have to do things in a special way," says Kensuke Kobayashi, an IBM employee in Tokyo who has tried to organize relief efforts to Tohoku from the Japanese capital. "But in Japan, there is a legal wall that stops everything." Japanese shipping company NYK offered to provide a container ship for helicopters to land on when ferrying in relief supplies to coastal areas. But the government rejected the offer because the NYK shipmates lacked the proper licenses to help with such work. After some wrangling, volunteer foreign doctors were told that because they didn't have Japanese medical licenses, they could conduct only the "minimum necessary medical procedures" in the disaster zone.
Some medicine donations from overseas haven't reached the many elderly suffering in the earthquake's aftermath because Japanese regulatory agencies have not yet given the drugs approval. Local logistics companies have complained - off the record, for fear of angering the bureaucrats whom they depend on for future licensing - of days-long waits for permission from the central government to deliver donated goods. Only when their trucks get the magic pass can they start moving toward Tohoku. Until then, the boxes of relief goods, some of which were donated just hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit, sit in Tokyo warehouses.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110322/w ... 9206077300

[bcar240]

4cefed, you have a lot of great info, thanks for sharing it! I do not work in the field, but I have a small amount of formal education on nuclear engineering and what I've picked up since.

For anyone who is wondering why it is still hot after they shut if down (kind of cliffs notes for that PopSci article): The fission process extracts energy by breaking the fuel down into smaller elements, creating heat in the process (which is used to make power). But many of these new elements (fission products) are themselves highly radioactive and will decay on their own with or without the reactor operating, continuing to generate heat. After scramming, the decay heat of the core will rather rapidly fall to about 0.5% of the thermal design power. This may sound low, but 0.5% of ~800 megawatts, is still a LOT of heat. After some time, months to years IIRC, most of the fission products will go through enough half-lives to be "cold" enough to not need active cooling and the spent fuel can be placed in permanent storage (buried/etc.)

I also heard another problem was that the contractor who built the plant there poured the foundations for the reactor and some of the aux/backup equipment as separate concrete pads as a cost saving measure. This caused some problems during the earthquake when some of the piping and connections between the equipment and the reactor were damaged as the foundations shifted.

Like 4cefed said, The levels of radiation are really not that significant right now for the general populous. For comparison, you can get a couple REM just in diagnostic tests in the ER after a moderate injury such as a car wreck (a single full-body CT scan can be as much as 1 REM or more). Not something you want to do frequently, but not particularly dangerous. Also, the concern is not so much getting radiation through external exposure, "beaming through the air" or something like that (although at high levels it can be a problem), it is ingesting/inhaling contamination that will stay inside you emitting radiation for a while. This happens a little naturally all the time, but the increased levels are still not a legitimate concern for anyone except the emergency workers right now. Although, if the contamination is bad enough, even moderates rates might start to show increased long-term sickness in the local populations who could spend their entire lives in a heavy contamination zone.

Anyway, I'm pulling for the whole country. They need every little bit of support they can get right now.

[4cefed]

I also heard another problem was that the contractor who built the plant there poured the foundations for the reactor and some of the aux/backup equipment as separate concrete pads as a cost saving measure. This caused some problems during the earthquake when some of the piping and connections between the equipment and the reactor were damaged as the foundations shifted.

Holy crap.... that's not good.

That's the stuff that concerns me about the Japanese plants. "Cost saving measure" and "Nuclear power plant" should not be used in the same sentence. The companies here make so much money they can afford to do everything the right way and do it safely. I've seen people get fired for using a regular old utility knife, not one of the "safe" new ones. When it comes to industrial safety, they are second to none. We also have a strong culture of trying to find problems with things or find something that isn't in compliance with procedures or standards. You are actually looked on in great standing for finding "problems". There really is no such thing as the whistle blower anymore. For example, some carpenters I was helping yesterday noticed a protective jacket over some cables that came lose from a junction box. I reported it to the control room and they sent an operator out to look at it. Instead of being "something they had to fix now" or trying to blame a work group for breaking it, they were very thankful to the carpenters that they found it.

Another thing about shutting down a reactor from full power. The thickness of the steel in everything from the vessel to the pumps, to the pipes retains so much heat. Boilers typically run about 1000 deg F and 1000 psi. When we shut down for an outage, it takes two or three days for the piping to cool off to room temperature.

To add to what bcar240 was saying, it takes about 5 to 6 years for spent fuel to hang out in a spent fuel pool before it can be stored in a "dry cask" or an onsite storage container. Even these casks are warm to the touch for several years after that. Not to dump on the government, but the DOE promised all the utilities at the time of construction that by the year 2000 they would have a repository for spent fuel. Obviously that date is long gone, and a lot of pools here in the US are pretty crowded. Plants are now getting funds to build onsite storage facilities. I'm still voting for recycling, then we wouldn't' have to bury it at all. I noticed in one report that Units 1,2,and 3 at Fukushima only had a few hundred spent fuel assemblies, but unit 4 had like 1400. I'm sure the water started boiling in that pool in hours with that many assemblies in there.

[Ace2cool]

Wow, and these are the same people that protest our carriers going to ports near major cities because they are afraid of OUR nuclear reactors that power our ships.

[4cefed]

Not very good news : http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiap ... rs/?hpt=T2

I'm very confused reading though this. Remember what I was saying earlier about the fuel spreading out of the core when the coolant pumps are started again? Looks like that's what happened. If the water they were sloshing through was reading 40 R per hour, the beta dose rates must have been incredible. Beta isn't very penetrating so it can affect only the skin layer of the body. The only true cases of beta burn I've ever heard of have come from serious accidents. If you look at pictures of workers that received fatal doses at Chernobyl, their skin is blackened in some cases.

This same scenario has happened to me on a few occasions. I've been slogging through contaminated water and had water leak into my boots. Nowhere near the same contamination levels obviously, but I have an idea of what is going on here. The thickness of the boots is enough to shield a lot of the beta radiation from reaching the skin, when the water leaked in I'm sure the workers were contaminated pretty badly. Not sure what kind of contamination control they have in place, there's no such thing as a clean area there anymore. Washing the skin doesn't always remove all contamination. On rare occasions here, if a worker contaminates a hand, we would have him put on a cotton glove liner, then tape a rubber glove on him. In a few hours, a lot of material will be sweated out of the skin and come off with the gloves.

Depending on what levels of material are still stuck in the skin, they probably sent them to the hospital to try other methods of removing stuff. Our procedure on personnel contamination lists some strange concoctions, not all of which I'm familiar with. The three workers received between 16 and 18 R a piece. That's a significant amount, but still below the threshold to detect any changes to the blood forming organs. If they weren't "burned" too badly, they will be ok.

"Tokyo Electric officials were asked why the workers did not evacuate the area amid rising radiation levels, as their dosimeters, which measure radiation exposure, are set to trigger an alarm when the level of 20 millisieverts is reached. Officials said that workers are told to leave, but ultimately it is their decision to do so."

They are operating under emergency conditions so I can see this. Normally, there is no way you are allowed to work when you've hit the alarm point here. In fact, if you do alarm, something has gone wrong. Either some high dose rate not previously identified somewhere, or the worker not paying attention like he's supposed to. That alarm was set to 2 R, that's the maximum dose for an entire year I'm allowed to get here. I've gotten half that in my worst year. Looks like their annual limit is 25 R, that's five times the federal limit here.

I photocopied a list of dose received vs health affect today at work. I could list a few here if anyone is interested. No doubt all these workers are courageous and should be treated as heroes. They are fighting against something they can't see, feel, or hear.

[themadscientist]

Oh, I don't know, maybe PUT ON SOME DAMNED PROTECTIVE GEAR YOU IDIOTS! IT'S A BROKEN NUCLEAR REACTOR AND YOU'RE ROCKIN A PAIR OF COVERALLS AND SAFETY BOOTS!? Cripes man, use your friggin melon.