PLS watch following news video.

“Bleak condition of Fukushima workers blocks to solve the nuclear accident”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHLdOsGq1G8

After your watching, PLS expand this news to all over the world. Because Japanese government and TEPCO DO NOT understand that improvement of worker’s environment is necessary . Japanese gov ,TEPCO and even Japanese need some pressure from foreign countries.

Regards

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78352.html

Radiation levels are too high for workers to safely add water.

As for whether the video is an explosion, it’s clear at the outset that for the simplest definition of explosion, this is the case. The question is really what kind of explosion was it, and what danger does/did it pose? Could very well have been a steam explosion, and what danger that poses depends on what the source of the steam was. There was some talk of it being a hydrogen explosion (plain old chemical hydrogen, not a tritium fusion explosion, obviously).

Clearly there is no danger of a nuclear explosion at the plant. But steam/mechanical explosions of the Chernobyl type within the reactor vessel itself are scary scary stuff. Steam explosions elsewhere may be equally dangerous if the water is contaminated with lots of reactive byproducts. Cesium is not your friend. And there are some isotopes of iodine that you do NOT want in your salt.

This whole time since the first reports of reactor problems started turning up Friday or Saturday, I’ve had Kurosawa’s creepy (and wildly unscientific) sequence from the end of “Dreams” going through my head.

Clearly, the threat of tsunamis to the integrity of the plant was underestimated. Does the US have any nuke plants on vulnerable coastline locations? The only ones I know are much further inland, so they’d only need to be secured against flash flooding (especially from potential dam failures), high winds (either from hurricanes or tornadoes), and from earthquakes.

Should the US military order our personnel to expose themselves to early death spraying water on Japan’s reactors and burning fuel storage tanks (open and boiling) which will relight every time the water goes down?

Maybe the effort should be getting our fuel casks in dry vaults that don’t need water for centuries. Bomb and earthquake proofing decades of spent fuel piled around every single nuclear plant in the country could be a better stimulus project than new plants.

If Pawlenty and others call the deficit immoral–presumably for it’s effect on future generations–how are they so pro-nuclear? Bought off by corporate interests?

If the water is boiling off, the increase in radation levels could be due to the loss of the depth of water shielding on top of the spent fuel and not due to leaking radioactivity. Refilling the pool will make that source of radiation stop.

If radiation exposure at hazardous levels becomes more than a local problem (which likely includes a HUGE local problem), then the risk analysis was either seriously flawed or the accepted level of risk was too high (unless this earthquake really was an exceedingly rare event, but I don’t think that’s likely). I haven’t heard that that’s the case. But it is still ongoing.

I apologize to Ana and everyone else for not being engaged in over he last several hours. Our household is in a state of disruption (nothing bad, just disruptive) and I was teaching last night. Aside from a brief check of the blog and Facebook during class last night, this is my first moment on the Intertubes since mid PM yesterday.