Sea water has now been replaced with fresh water for cooling reactors, and, apparently, spent fuel storage pools. Work continues on restoring power and repairing cooling systems, but the cooling systems remain unrepaired. An interesting development overnight (overday in Japan): A very high radiation reading in Reactor 2 showed what apparently was high enough radiation to cause workers to immediately evacuate, as well as a high enough rate of short-lived radioactive isotope to make it a certainty that fission was happening, if not currently, within the previous few hours, and that radioactive stuff was leaking, according to the engineers, from the core.

Then, later, it was determined that the reading was a mistake. The person who took the reading ran away the moment the reading showed this high level. That may be because the workers who were injured in the radioactive “puddles” in Reactor 3 suffered those injuries in part because they did not believe the high readings they were getting. Policies and procedures were updated, we were told, so that would not happen again.

In the case of last night’s reading, however, it is normal that a second reading would be taken, but that did not happen because the first reading was so astoundingly high that, apparently, running away seemed to be the best thing to do.

At present, we don’t have any reports of new readings that are lower than the very high reading taken some time ago. What we have is the engineers deciding that the very high reading was too high to be believed. I’m not sure how to interpret that. Probably, it was just a bad reading.

Now that you have the necessary background, I give you Ana’s Feed and the usual links to recent news reports and commentary, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) update. Ana is asleep right now, and has not heard about the retraction of the high reading.

Continue reading Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 11 … overnight spike was false reading? →