So far they aren't showing any ill effects, but that may change in a week to a month though.

2 of 3 radiation-exposed workers suffer internal exposure | Kyodo News

If they were exposed to 2-6 sieverts vice 183 millisieverts that changes everything and is very very serious. Further reading that article says they did not wear rubber boots. That is just plain dumb.

The Safety manual they are operating from does not require boots becasue it assumes the ground is dry. How dumb do you have to be to willing stand in 15 centimeters of radioactive water and not ask for boots?

From NHK:

"The company says 3.9 million becquerels of radioactive substances per cubic centimeter were detected in the water that the workers were standing in. That is 10,000 times higher than levels of the water inside a nuclear reactor in operation."

Fresh coolant injected, high-radiation water leaks in nuke crisis | Kyodo News

Pools of water that may have seeped from either the reactor cores or spent fuel pools were also found in the turbine buildings of the No. 2 and No. 4 reactors, measuring up to 1 meter and 80 centimeters deep, respectively, while those near the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors were up to 40 cm and 1.5 cm deep.

****

there's no end in sight is there? is the situation just going to deteriorate until it ends in catastrophe?

This is the problem I foresaw earlier. It's fairly obvious that if they're needing to inject water this fast it is leaking somehow. They can keep pumping water, but how on earth will they plug that leak?

Not an engineer, but the containment shell is essentially just concrete, so I would think they can just patch it. They have already given up on using these reactors again, so once they are cool enough they might just bury them anyway. They can't bury them while they are still hot.

Right but with radiation spewing out constantly and needing to pump vast loads of water in how would you set up the infrastructure to do this without killing all the workers? Offer kamikaze deals where your remaining family gets paid millions?

The air radiation is within acceptable limits for the workers to be working there. These workers were injured because they were standing in radioactive water WITHOUT protective footwear. If they know the radiation levels, the workers can be properly protected.

Since this is an 'anonymous' source, take it for what it's worth:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/wo...n.html?_r=3&hp


*A senior nuclear executive who insisted on anonymity but has broad contacts in Japan said that there was a long vertical crack running down the side of the reactor vessel itself. The crack runs down below the water level in the reactor and has been leaking fluids and gases, he said.


*But Michael Friedlander, a former nuclear power plant operator in the United States, said that the presence of radioactive cobalt and molybdenum in water samples taken from the basement of the turbine building raised the possibility of a very different leak.

Both materials typically occur not because of fission but because of routine corrosion in a reactor and its associated piping over the course of many years of use, he said.

Nice, when I click on this thread I get an ad trying to sell some sort of anti-radiation pill.

We should totally be scraping the labels off aspirin pills and selling them online.

it's insane that anyone in the US would be buying those

Right, I understand that, but having to repair a scalding hot reactor vessel, with decaying fuel in it, with radioactive water being pumped in constantly, and the threat of hydrogen explosions seems like one would need more than just a special suit.

I still like my "fill the reactor with eggs" idea.

They are playing it down a lot.

I think the black smoke is individual fuel rods cooking off and catelizing.

Most of the cooling water was seperated into gasses a log time ago and blew off the tops of the buildings. I figured it was pretty bad when that happened.

I assume there has been some direct leakage from those 3 cores since then, and the cooling pool also.

We'll have to see how bad it gets. I gues we could resettle a couple million Japanese in the central valley.

This would instantly improve the valley tenfold.

That's because you have people like this fear mongering:



That's only part of it. She was insisting that the Japanese government has been lying about the severity of the crisis and that the west coast is in imminent danger and something needs to be done about it! After the guy explained to her multiple times that the US is in NO danger she just started getting pissy and telling him he's wrong and to stop lying and whatever :lol:. Watch the entire episode to see more.

Honestly I don't know how these reporters get away with this ****.

You're straight up inciting fear needlessly and providing false information about a catastrophe.

How the **** is that not against some law? I'm all for free speech but, wow.

Too bad for the people of Japan they're not just dealing with radiation exposure like having an x-ray but are ingesting the **** from the water, food supply and most likely breathing it in the air.