The only thing that is certain about the Fukushima situation right now is that both the operating company (Tokyo Electric Power Co. aka TEPCO) and the Japanese government have been ridiculously slow to provide information. They may or may not be actively concealing what they know, but they’re taking far too long to share what they do know with the rest of the world.
Inline update: New Scientist has a timeline of Japanese nuclear cover-ups and accidents. [end update]
wormme is a radiological control technician, so he’s very well informed about the overall picture — in a way non-specialists are not — and he’s had an epiphany about Fukushima:
See the light bulb above my head? Lesson Learned!
My first post on Fukushima is still the most widely read. Alas. I’m a radiological control technician who wasn’t paranoid about a radiological situation. Never good. Never acceptable. So I’ve been “hotwashing” myself ever since.
Where did I go wrong? What was the first cause, the primary mistake? I had to know in order to answer the most important question of all:
How do I never make that mistake again?
I turned a nifty phrase in “incalculable danger”, got generous links . . . then steam began venting and cores melting and hydrogen exploding and fuel pools leaking and spent fuel smoldering, all at once, with my brain sprinting like a hamster on a wheel and making about as much progress.
How did Fukushima have several quiet days after the event and only then have the Hellmouth open?
No lesson learned.
Then a couple of days ago we learned the site went six days without electricity. That monstrous tsunami took out the electrical backups, the backup-backups, and the backup-backup-backups in one fell swoop.
And I thought, ”well, that explains most everything”.
But still, no lesson learned.
It’s only now, right now, the realization: I wrote the post assuming that they had electrical power.
Not even an assumption, really. It wasn’t even a consideration. Of course they had power. They couldn’t possibly not have power.
But they did not have power.
Lesson Learned: the Japanese are different from Americans.
He also has interesting and highly informative posts (earlier than the one quoted above, so perhaps to be read with that in mind) on radiation poisoning, stuff that can cause a meltdown, some crappy radiological terminology, characteristics of radiation(s) and shielding(s), why the spent fuel is a bigger problem than the reactors, nuclear triage, time, distance, and shielding, spent fuel pools, first notes on the “Event Summary” file, and how NOT to wear a respirator.
