What's the worst-case scenario of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant?
News reports are saying it's being elevated to Level 7. What's the worst thing that can happen? How likely does that seem?
Posted Apr 12, 2011, 12:56 AM UTC
1947
This is already worse than anyone ever expected. If it is upgraded to INES 7, it will be based on releases that already happened. Things seem to be under control now. With offsite power restored, and more infrastructure and manpower, they seem to have core cooling under control. The radiation releases are still a huge issue though. After it is all over, they will try to quantify the amount of fission products released, and classify it based on that.
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9
Is the true danger that one problem area gets out of hand enough that no one can get near the other problems areas, so they all get out of hand?
2
Yes, we have a cascading sequence of failures.
1
this is already worse than anyone ever expected.
... really? Newspapers around the world were essentially screaming that this was a doomsday scenario. As far as I can tell, what most laypeople expected, based on what they saw in the news, was for thousands and thousands of Japanese people to die, and for neighboring countries to have huge problems. A significant portion of people surveyed in Germany were worried about nuclear material being carried to Germany (meaning, a disaster far, far worse than Chernobyl). In that light, this doesn't seem "worse than anyone expected".
2
I wasn't counting those as credible fears. No one that knew anything about nuclear power ever believed in any scenarios where more than a handful of people die.
Most nuclear people I know never thought that it would be possible to breach containment. They also thought a meltdown would never occur, and that there would be no radiation release to the public. And now there is a core breach that is somehow releasing water from the core to the ocean.
Also I tend to get burned every time I say anything on reddit. If you look through my comment history you will probably find a lot of "predictions" about what could never happen that ended up happening.
4
Ah okay, that makes perfect sense.
1
Do you have a citation for "things seem to be under control"? I was under the impression that cooling remained an ongoing struggle (though improving), and contaminated water leaks are still a problem.
1
Sorry, I was replying to your post last night and the power went out. The cooling appears to be under control since they established power and some infrastructure to the facility. The radiation release is NOT under control, which I was not aware of. Thanks for pointing that out. I haven't been following it as closely in the past week or so.
3
As a general rule, as time goes on, things get better because the reactors cool off.
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-1
The material generating heat decays fairly quickly, so after a few more weeks there should be barely any activity left.
/Not a nuclear physicist, basing this on high school physics.
1
I believe the INES scale is based only on the extent of releases of radioactive material. It doesn't take into account the type of trouble the plants are in (loss of external power, loss of coolant, containment failure, meltdown etc.). The Mayak waste tank explosion of 1957 was classified as level 6 and that contaminated a huge stretch of land in the East Ural. I guess the Fukushima releases are greater, but fortunately a lot of them have ended up in the Pacific. The worst case scenario is molten fuel being involved in an explosion and getting thrown in the atmosphere, which is still not ruled out, although the reactors and fuel pools are being cooled now.
7
I'm not an expert on this, but the INES scale seems to be being applied oddly inconsistently as well. If we calibrate it as Chernobyl=7, Kyshtym=6, the only two previous >5 events, it seems odd to put Fukushima at a 7, when its radioactive release and impact on health are both significantly lower than at Kyshtym. On the other hand, it's significantly worse than 5=Three Mile Island. The scale seems to be sort of a mess.
1
The scale seems to be sort of a mess.
It's trying to squeeze very complex events into one number, so not so surprisingly, the number ends up being meaningless. I suppose the whole thing is mostly just meant for journalists to use in putting things in a perspective, but it seems to be backfiring in some ways.
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1
What's the end game? Bury the plants under a mountain of concrete like Chernobyl?
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If it were just the reactors, I think the general goal would be to patch together a closed cooling loop to continue cooling the cores (without flushing out more fission products in the process) until they can be decommissioned ala three mile island, presumably with some concrete structures erected around the damaged buildings.
The spent fuel pools present another layer of difficulty entirely though, especially at unit 4. You have fuel material that was supposed to be decaying down to safe enough levels for dry cask storage (or maybe reprocessing?) that's now buried under rubble, but otherwise exposed and in need of cooling. At 4 the core was offloaded for maintenance (a very unusual practice, I've heard). I have no idea what could be done about them.
9
Erect 4 huge piles of sand covering the reactors, stick probes into them to measure what's going on. Leave it there.
1
5 Years later 300ft tall antlion terrorizes Tokyo.
3
Sand wouldn't do anything but cause more harm. In Chernobyl, the sand they dumped on the resulting fire from the disaster, had melted into radioactive water that was caught in its basement. If this happens at Fukushima, we'd need a lot more sand and that means a lot more lava. We need boron. We need to piss boron all over those reactors.
1
By coincidence, here's a CBS report touching on the endgame.
1
worst case: meltdown thru the dry well and huge steam explosion, blowing the tons of high level radioactive shit (pardon me if I don't use the euphemism "spent fuel") stored on site all over hell
4
I’m not sure that that’s even possible now that the fuel has had weeks to cool.
Disclaimer: I am not a nuclear engineer, but I’m sure someone here is.
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1
There is no evidence that there will be a large exclusion zone. This is the BBCs most recent update on the issue.
3
What's the worst thing that can happen?
A supervillian uses a giant robot to pick the reactor core material and spent fuel material up and place it in a rocket, launch it into the atmosphere, and then blow it up with thousands of pounds of C4 in the jet stream to ensure maximum harm.
Even worse, the supervillian steals the spent fuel, runs it through a plutonium production reactor, makes ICBMs out of it, and launches it on major world cities.
How likely does that seem?
Not very.
Here is a more likely worst case scenario:
There will continue to be some large radiation releases and parts of the area around Fukushima will have to be made into an exclusion zone due to Sr-90 and Cs-137 contamination. And some people could get acute radiation sickness and some people get cancer over the next twenty years (with most surviving). But overall it won't be as bad as Chernobyl because the radiation release was slow (allowing the I-131 to decay away before getting out there) and the Japanese government used precautions to limit I-131 exposure like evacuations and food rules.
More likely scenario:
There will continue to be some radiation releases, the area around Fukushima will be off limits for a few months while the I-131 decays away and assessments are made. The Sr-90 and Cs-137 released mostly goes into the ocean and dissipates to below background levels. No one dies and maybe a few people get treatable cancer down the road.
Best case scenario:
Radiation releases are done, the area around Fukushima will be off limits for a few months while the I-131 decays away and assessments are made. Almost all of the Sr-90 and Cs-137 is found to have gone into the ocean and dissipates to below background levels. No one dies and no one gets cancer down the road.
1
Warning: Layman...
Realistically, I think the worst case scenario that they are most worried about is a large scale release of highly contaminated water into the ground/ocean.
-1
IMHO
Everything explodes sending radiation everywhere (killing lots of people), all the animals gain superpowers, godzilla comes out of the sea and starts eating the irradiated survivors...
-1
It gets so hot it ignites the atmosphere, causing a fireball that extinguishes all life on Earth!!!
-4
It's been raised to a 7 on the INES...this whole ordeal is now on par with Chernobyl, except this time, the problem will persist for months and months on end. This is going to be a disaster on a scale that no one could have imagined.
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Request to those that voted down the parent. Please give your justification.
Thanks.
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I've read every single report put out by TEPCO about the radiation release
You should read every report put out by BP about the Gulf spill--you seem to like light fiction. And TransOcean might give you a bonus for highlighting their exceptional safety record.
0
Fukushima is not tame. Not is the slightest. You are being grossly misleading to claim so. I predict that there will be millions of premature deaths caused by this incident (mostly cancers). We are witnessing one of the worst disasters in modern times. At least you have the decency to be upfront about your nuclear industry ties.
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Calling this "on par" with Chernobyl is still a bit premature. There hasn't been the mass release of radiative material into the biosphere we saw with Chernobyl.
This doesn't mean it can't happen, but it hasn't happened yet and is still quite unlikely.
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If by "a bit premature" you mean "thoroughly baseless" then you're quite right.
2
This is going to be a disaster on a scale that no one could have imagined.
That's odd, I get the impression that this is a disaster that practically every single media outlet in the world overestimated in terms of severity. You should have seen the headlines in Germany, good lord.
on par with Chernobyl
Now that's just crazy talk.
1
As for worst case scenario, no one really knows. They could, by some miracle, get it under control but that seems very unlikely at the moment. If they don't....the core will melt through everything, and then it will release massive amounts of radiation. If that core melt hits the sea, then it will just be hell, a whole lot of hell.
0
If that core melt hits the sea, then it will just be hell, a whole lot of hell.
Can you define hell for me please?
0
I'd imagine it'd irradiate vast amounts of marine life, rendering most seafood in the area unfit for human consumption in an area where the population lives on a diet of seafood and has a very large fishing industry.
2
Well, I think fukushima has full potential to go into dirty bomb mode. But this would be worst worst case scenario. Now, imagine some small explosion happens in one of reactors, and it spits out enough material to fry human beings around the plant. This would be doomsday, because, it wouldn't be possible for humans to go to plant, and try to fix. Well, but that's not possible.
-8
A CO2-induced, Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect that happens because people stopped building new nuclear power stations, and instead accelerated coal-burning.
thanks, nuclear apologist.
edit: I don't disagree or anything, I just jump at every chance to use the word 'apologist'. I don't think it's really a word, but people on TV news say it all the time.
I think the cat's out of the bag on old school nuclear designs, although I'm still keen to see if Thorium or Pebble bed reactors are a viable replacement.
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