Hey Stan -
Hope you’ve been well. Probably not too many "new" lines of thought, but perhaps some new ways of looking at them. I just needed a break.
It looks like I’ve got some thread surfing and reading to catch up on.
Hey Steve -
It was a much needed and very beneficial break, but I’m glad to be back on the site.
I’ve got lots of thoughts on Fukushima, and they’re still very much in line with what I was saying back in March. Anything specific you had in mind?
I did see Jake Shimabukuro a while back and was stunned…the kid is a one man cluster pluck!
Dogs- you got Alpha Mike in that sub with you?
Regards Fukushima, it’s just been off the mainstream radar for a while but it seems it’s still a potential (ongoing) catastrophy. Any recent info you’d like to explore or critique (as if there wasn’t enough to worry about…)?
The radio station I work with did a "Talk Story" interview CD with Jake. PM me your address and I’ll mail you a copy.
Aloha, Steve.
As Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz would say…there’s no place like home…
Glad to see you came back to the site - and it was great to see you, Cat and Davos this weekend. I gotta work on getting both him and Cat back on too.
As for the range…I may have broken it, but you gotta admit, that was a hell of a shot.
Welcome back DIAP! You’ve been missed…
[quote]As for the range…I may have broken it, but you gotta admit, that was a hell of a shot. 
[/quote]
OK, dish, what happened?
OK, dish, what happened?
[/quote]
Okay, I’m dyin’ to hear about this great shot. Tell us already; it ain’t like it’s bragging if we begged you to tell!
P.S. Glad to see you’re back, Dogs.
I threw Joe under the bus enough over it this weekend. Davos almost aspirated his food while I was retelling the story - with only a few embellishments.
I leave this one up to Joe to explain, but if he doesn’t fess up in a day or so, you can rev up the Greyhound…
Duplicate post
[quote=robert essian]Maintaining this complex system is imperative or the chaos that will ensue will be a horror show.[/quote]That may be so but if this complex system can’t be maintained (and I can’t see how it can) it either becomes a moot point or we have to ensure that chaos doesn’t ensue. It is my opinion that as long as we try to maintain it, the collapse will be even more severe. Also, in trying to maintain it, we will ignore environmental consequences which will be a double whammy, with a collapsed system and a degraded environment, making recovery to a different system all the more difficult. Whilst the environment is my current focus I realise that there are certain short term considerations that have equal short term weight but the environment is definitely part of the narrative and is so grossly missing on these pages.[quote=robert essian]Tony, I feel you have been unduly harsh towards Professor Martenson, and Americans in general. I mean it when I am not coming to his defence but many of your words obviously were to incite a negative response.[/quote]There were intended to elicit a discussion about a very serious issue that Chris, as far as I can tell, always sidesteps. I accept that some of my words could have been better chosen but I’d really like to know Chris’s views on environmental degradation, in general, and AGW, in particular. At this point, I have no idea what they are and am left to, possibly incorrectly, deduce his position from the absence of his words on the matter. What else can I do?
[quote=robert essian]My focus has been, and always will be on Peak Oil. An energy source that must be preserved to carve out whatever future we may have.[/quote]Preserving that energy source means not using it. If we use it, it can’t be preserved. So we have to live a different way. I think we have a lack of visionaries that can see a world where sustainable lifestyles is the norm. I struggle with that vision constantly, which is why I seek it elsewhere. However, there is one overriding feature - if it isn’t sustainable, it can’t be sustained. Richard Heinberg distilled some thoughts on sustainability in his "Five Axioms of Sustainability", which can be summarised as 1) not consuming any resource beyond its renewal rate and 2) not degrading our habitat. Seems simple but will be very difficult to achieve with anthing like our current society and economy, as far as I can tell, so a wholesale change is needed. I don’t think that comes out in Chris’s articles or on this site.
Steve -
Sorry for the delayed response, been busy catching up. No Alpha Mike on Das Boot, but I have it on good authority he’s around…
About Fukushima? It’s pretty much where I figured it would be at this point. Cleanup is plodding along in a painstakingly slow process. There are still issues with keeping the core covered and keeping cooling flow going, and there are reportedly some occasional flareups of spontaneous criticality occurring in Unit 2 - suspected due to the detection of certain Noble gases, specifically Xenon. Fortunately, the decay heat rates in the cores of the striken buildings are thankfully pretty low, so even in the event of a total loss of coolant or flow, there is time to restore coolant/flow and the margins are increasing. Injection systems were installed on Units 1, 2 and 3 to be able to inject borated water into the cores to help suppress and shield the spontaneous events (boron is a very efficient neutron absorber) but since the spontaneous flareups are occurring almost solely due to fuel particle geometries due to fuel matix damage, the borated water won’t stop the spontaneoous criticality from occurring, but they will help shield and absorb the neutorns preventing them form causing fission in adjacent fuel elements. I have read conflicting reports about the system on Unit 2 having some trouble, but so far, they have been able to run the system as intended. I haven’t read anything about Units 1 or 3.
There are some ongoing issues with the spent fuel pools in Unit 2. There is some kind of temporary desalination/coolant system installed on the pool and occasional reports about "high flow differentials" and temporary flow stoppages, but without knowing the specifics about the system I would only be able to offer an educated guess. If I had to guess, I’d say they were aving clogging issues with debris, salt and corrosion particles as the system is operated. In any event, the decay heat rates in the spent fuel pools are much lower and therefore more manageable than the core.
They aren’t out of the woods by any means but the immediacy of action is not anywhere near as dire as they were at first. The big issues now are what to do with the contaminated water pumped in to cover the cores that pooled and collected in places it wasn’t intended for. There’s a lot of it (water) and there was a lot of entrained debris that clogged the filters at first requiring more frequent shutdowns of the system to flush and/or replace the filter elements. I have read in several credible sources that the amount of cooling water being used in Units 1 and 3 are decreasing - which is certainly good news, but Unit 2 is still a concern. The good news is that things have stabilized to the degree that they have been able to remove some of the spent fuel from the pools for transport and storage at a "safer" place.
As far as external contamination this is now a localized event - as in accident site out to 12 to 20 miles depending on the distribution pattern of the radioactive contamination. A very significant event, but very local. Credible sources are hard to find. I read that the Japanese Ministry of the Environment has commenced a study to measure the impact of radioactive contamination released into the environment on the reproductive elements of plant and animal life located within the immediate accident area and at areas at increasing distances from the site. The study looks to be fairly comprehensive in that it is going to look for levels of cesium as well as detectable changes in the DNA of the sampled plant and animal life. Like Chernobyl, there will be areas surrounding the accident site that will not be habitable for many years to come, and increased risk of developing cancers in areas that were contaminated, but deemed livable. The difficulty is that it will be very hard to determine with certainty that any cancers were unequivocably caused by radioactive contamination released in the accident. I maintain that it will be equally hard to prove they weren’t. So if at all possible, pending detailed radiation and contamination survey results, I would seriously rethink any thoughts of reinhabiting an area within 12 miles of the accident. That may not be an option for some and is a pretty shitty dilemma to face.
What Fukushima is not right now is a threat to Hawaii or the Left Coast. And the likelihood of it turning in to a threat to the US is remote and growing remoter (I do not know if that is a real word).
I read a report a month or so ago where Arnie Gunderson stated that if another earthquake were to occur, and the cores cracked open, and the spent fuel pools caught on fire again it would be bad. (I paraphrased a bit)
No shit.
We should also worry about a meteor strike that hits Unit 2? I think not. Gunderson provided a wealth of accurate information, but he also provided a lot of shrill noise. Separating the nuggets of good info from the tailings can be a challenge with someone who has an agenda that sometimes clouds objectivity.
Short answer - I wouldn’t be too concerned about Fukushima contamination if I lived in Hawaii.
Hope this helped - feel free to fire any additional questions if they come up. We should probably shift them over to the Fukushima thread since we have otherwise thoroughly hijacked this one…