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.

I used to do that in the bath tub with my matchbox cars brown water and every thing.

That would freak me out. I'd be thinking the water was going to rise over the roof of the building or something. :scared:

Wow, the water kept rising.
I thought, oh, it won't get much higher than the roof of that bus stop looking thing. Then it won't get higher than that building the cars were stacking up against.

staged by george bush and the CIA.

Woes deepen over radioactive water at nuke plant, sea contamination | Kyodo News

Japan on Sunday faced an increasing challenge of removing highly radioactive water found inside buildings near some troubled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, with the radiation level of the surface of the pool in the basement of the No. 2 reactor's turbine building found to be more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour.

Exposure to such an environment for four hours would raise the risk of dying in 30 days. Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman for the government's nuclear safety agency, said the figure is ''quite high'' but authorities must find a way to pump out the water without sending workers too close to push ahead with the restoration work.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said early Monday the concentration of radioactive substances of the puddle was 100,000 times higher than that usually measured in water in a reactor core, correcting its earlier analysis of 10 million times higher.

*Radioactive iodine-131 at a concentration 1,850.5 times the legal limit was detected in a seawater sample taken Saturday around 330 meters south of the plant, near a drainage outlet of the four troubled reactors, compared with 1,250.8 times the limit found Friday, the agency said.

Radioactivity at the surface of the puddle at the No. 3 unit was 400 millisieverts per hour as of Thursday, still far below the more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour detected at the puddle of the No. 2 reactor's turbine building.

*Tokyo Electric was not able to confirm how much the actual amount of radiation was at the No. 2 reactor because the radioactivity level was too high for workers to continue measuring.

At a radiation level of 1,000 millisieverts per hour, people could suffer a decrease in the number of lymphocytes -- a type of white blood cell -- in just 30 minutes, and half of the people could die within 30 days by staying in such conditions for four hours.

6.5 quake with another tsunami advisory

finally watched the tsunami video on this page (havent seen any of them before)

holy
****

Magnitude-6.5 quake off Japan; small tsunami alert


NEW YORK ***8211; A magnitude-6.5 earthquake shook eastern Japan off the quake-ravaged coast on Monday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reported, prompting Japan to issue a tsunami alert.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries, but the Japan Meteorological Agency announced that a tsunami of up to 1.6 feet (a half meter) may wash into Miyagi Prefecture.

The alert was prompted by a quake that the U.S. Geological Survey measured at 7:23 a.m. Monday Japan time (2223 GMT Sunday) near the east coast of Honshu.

Magnitude-6.5 quake off Japan; small tsunami alert - Yahoo! News

Welp, slow moving trainwreck continues.

Plutonium is now detected outside the plant.

Plutonium detected in soil at Fukushima nuke plant | Kyodo News

Plutonium has been detected in soil at five locations at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday.

The operator of the nuclear complex said that the plutonium is believed to have been discharged from nuclear fuel at the plant, which was damaged by the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

*Meanwhile, high levels of radiation exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour have been detected in water in a trench outside the No. 2 reactor's building at the nuclear plant, with the contaminated water suspected to have come from the reactor's core, where fuel rods have partially melted, authorities said Monday.

:|

10 sieverts in water outside the reactor wtf

thats nuts

also how the hell did they manage to discharge plutonium?

well the going theory is that there's a leak at one or more of the reactors and a partial meltdown and water inside the reactor vessel escaped.



According to CNN:

Three types of plutonium have turned up amid the radioactive contamination on the grounds of the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, its owner reported Monday.

The plutonium is a byproduct of nuclear reactions that is also part of the fuel mix at the damaged No. 3 reactor.

It was found in soil at five different points inside the plant grounds, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said late Monday.

Plutonium can be a serious health hazard if inhaled or ingested, but external exposure poses little health risk, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.



Worth noting that Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,200 years.

It's all good

http://juvo.se/ehnd.jpg

They're starting to acquire super human abilities from the radiation exposure.

CUE NINJA TURTLES

I'll take Immature Radioactive Samurai Slugs any day over the Turtles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Cl7AM9Fdc

Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor | World news | The Guardian

Radioactive core has melted through the containment vessel

Green terrorists are gonna have a field day with this one.

It's like the ultimate dirty bomb.

Tokyo Electric to scrap 4 reactors at troubled nuclear plant

Tokyo Electric to scrap 4 reactors at troubled nuclear plant | Kyodo News

pretty sure they should have decided this days ago

radioactive core cannot melt through the 3rd and final containment chamber

nice try, the guardian