Category: Disastrous
Fracked
I suspect Mother Nature at some point will simply hit the reset button on our foolishness:
So 780 million gallons later, we finally know what many of us suspected for years: The fracking process pumps deadly chemicals into the earth, which can contaminate wells and other drinking water sources.
Mr. Urbina reports that “…some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said.”
So, literally everything from instant coffee to benzene is in this stuff. And that’s just what we know so far. Now we’ll see the industry scramble to set up “voluntary” disclosures, in the hope of stalling Congress in its efforts to make the chemical disclosures mandatory. Honestly, are we being too hard on the drillers in demanding that they tell us what they’re injecting into our backyards? Is it too much to ask?
The problems tied to fracking continue to get worse – at least the problems we’re being told about. And we’ve noted before that the NYT coverage tends to ripple through the big regional and local news organizations across “Frackland.” So this new report will no doubt usher in at least another really bad week or two for the frackers.
I would add that, clearly, a spate of state and federal laws are being broken here – even with the Clean Water Act exemption – but nobody is ready to enforce anything. Yet.
Want to see something really scary?
It’s called “liquification,” and it’s a real problem in Japan in the area around Tokyo Bay:
‘A ticking time bomb’
Japan nuclear crisis:
NRC
The cat’s on the roof
From Tyler Durden at zerohedge:
It had been a while since we had a factual update (as opposed to just lies and spin) from Fukushima. Courtesy of Kyodo, we now know that what was speculated by some as true, and rebutted by most as mere scaremongering, is in fact, fact. “Some of the spent nuclear fuel rods stored in the No. 4 reactor building of the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi power plant were confirmed to be damaged, but most of them are believed to be in sound condition, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday.”
Naturally, in one month we will learn that most of them are damaged, and in two months, that each and every one has been demolished. “The firm known as TEPCO said its analysis of a 400-milliliter water sample taken Tuesday from the No. 4 unit’s spent nuclear fuel pool revealed the damage to some fuel rods in such a pool for the first time, as it detected higher-than-usual levels of radioactive iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137.”
These confirm an ongoing fission reaction. In a tremendously ironic development, the No. 4 reactor, halted for a regular inspection before last month’s earthquake and tsunami disaster, had all of its 1,331 spent fuel rods and 204 unused fuel rods stored in the pool for the maintenance work. Unfortunately, the entire pool ended up being damaged following the quake and the subsequent explosion, in essence nullifying any protection that the containment dome would have provided.
As the picture from the Asahi Shimbun below shows, the damage from overhanging structures which have subsequently fallen into the fuel pool likely means that there could well be an uncontrolled, if weak, fission reaction currently going on in the reactor 4 SFP (where the water temperature is currently 90 degrees) unprotected by the elements due to the complete destruction of the Reactor 4 shell.
Nuclear power plants
What they’re not telling us
Fire in reactor 4, crisis now at Chernobyl levels
Not mentioned in this Washington Post story is the news that there is now a fire in the No. 4 reactor at the site. (Note: It’s been updated.) The Japanese people are taking one shock after another:
TOKYO — Japanese authorities raised Tuesday their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Officials with Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.” The reassessment comes at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency says the plant is showing “early signs of recovery” but still in a critical condition.
The plant’s debilitated reactors face constant threat of strong aftershocks, and the latest on Tuesday morning — a 6.2-magnitude temblor — caused a brief fire at a water sampling facility near Daiichi’s No. 4 reactor. The Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the power plant, said that the critical process used to cool the hot fuel rods had not been interrupted, and radiation levels showed no signs of change.
A level 7 accident, according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, is typified by a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.”
[…] Radiation leaking from Fukushima Daiichi amounts to about 10 percent of that from the Chernobyl accident, a Nuclear Safety Commission official, who was not named, said on national television.
[…] According to the Kyodo news agency, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reported Monday that the plant, at one point after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, had been releasing 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactivity per hour. The report did not specify when those radiation readings occurred. A release of tens of thousands of terabecquerels per hour, though, correspondents with the radiation leakage level that the IAEA uses as a minimum benchmark for a level 7 accident.
“This corresponds to a large fraction of the core inventory of a power reactor, typically involving a mixture of short- and long-lived radionuclides,” an IAEA document says. “With such a release, stochastic health effects over a wide area, perhaps involving more than one country, are expected.”
And of course, we are still avoiding the world “meltdown” — although, according to Rep. Ed Markey, the nuclear core has already melted through the reactor vessel.
Fukushima
The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan released a preliminary calculation Monday saying that the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been releasing up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour at some point after a massive quake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan on March 11.
The disclosure prompted the government to consider raising the accident’s severity level to 7, the worst on an international scale, from the current 5, government sources said. The level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale has only been applied to the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.