The authors have spoken to several workers at the plant. Each recites the same story: Serious damage to piping and at least one of the reactors before the tsunami hit. All have requested anonymity because they are still working at or connected with the stricken plant.  Worker A, a 27-year-old maintenance engineer who was at the Fukushima complex on March 11, recalls hissing, leaking pipes.

“I personally saw pipes that had come apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant.  There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant. There were definitely leaking pipes, but we don’t know which pipes – that has to be investigated. I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for reactor one had come away.  That crack might have affected the reactor.”

The walls of the reactor are quite fragile, he notes.

“If the walls are too rigid, they can crack under the slightest pressure from inside so they have to be breakable because if the pressure is kept inside and there is a buildup of pressure, it can damage the equipment inside the walls. So it needs to be allowed to escape.  It’s designed to give during a crisis, if not it could be worse – that might be shocking to others, but to us it’s common sense.”

WORKER B, a technician in his late thirties who was also on site at the time of the earthquake recalls what happened.

“It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaping, the pipes buckling, and within minutes, I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall. Others snapped. I’m pretty sure that some of the oxygen tanks stored on site had exploded but I didn’t see for myself.  Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate. I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told, and I could see, that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t get sufficient coolant to the core, it melts down. You don’t have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.”

Plus: Fukushima fucked up beyond our wildest nightmares

Richard Handl, a 31-year-old citizen of Sweden was arrested after calling police to ask whether or not possessing radioactive material was illegal.  After all, having convenient access to fissionable material should be a universal right but just in case it wasn’t, I’m sure Handl wouldn’t want to get into any trouble while inadvertently building a dirty bomb.

“the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind“

Same reactor designs, same vulnerabilities. Namely, when the power goes out, and then your backup power, what then? All these designs rosily assume the power will be restored in a matter of hours. Thanks, General Electric!

Plus it’s always been unclear to me why I have to create deadly poison for a hundred thousand years so I can use my laptop. Sign me up for rolling brownouts already.

A pretty stunning visual on why you DO NOT build nuclear reactors 100 fucking meters from the pacific ocean coast of Japan (or near any other major fault line for that matter). Give video a second to really take off….wow.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” -Richard Feynman

Then there’s this:

Japan is a country with 40% of the US’s population and 4% of its land area.  Of that land area, 75% is extremely mountainous; Japan has little arable land to expand into.  Scaling the displaced peoples to US-scale from a purely population perspective, is equivalent to if the US had to evacuate both Los Angeles and Chicago, or perhaps 3/4ths of New York City.  From a perspective of where to settle them, the problem becomes extremely difficult.  Factor in that these people need to be supported instead of contributing approximately $70B annually to the Japanese economy and you have a devastating picture.

Basically, Japan essentially can’t afford to evacuate people within the 50-mile exclusion recommended by US nuclear scientists.  It doesn’t matter that the furthest of those major cities (Fukushima-shi) was, as of yesterday, at nearly 100 times their normal background radiation.  And that unlike most background radiation, the source of this radiation is inhaleable/ingestable particulate matter (internal exposure is orders of magnitude worse than external exposure in terms of health consequnces).

They’re just not going to do it.

How many 50-mile exclusion zones do we have to accumulate every 25 years or so? I’d rather burn coal. There. I said it. I’d rather burn fucking coal.

Irony detectors are off the scale:

The rods, normally surrounded by cooling water, were partially exposed earlier after the engine-powered pump pouring in this water ran out of fuel.

Maybe they should design these pumps to run on the heat of MELTING FUEL RODS.

Still time for a full whole meltdown, but if you add the two partial meltdowns together, this thing could still wind up being a double meltdown.

Here’s some other analysis from a dude at the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The Japanese reactors were designed to withstand damage caused by an earthquake. They also were designed to resist a tsunami. But the one-two punch from an earthquake and a tsunami disabled numerous emergency systems and left operators with few options. The lesson? Designs that fail to take into account all the physical consequences of earthquakes may be inadequate to survive real earthquakes.

This man just got my vote for Energy Secretary.

Call me crazy, but if an earthquake can cause a power source to risk contaminating the world worse than Chernobyl, that power source should be abolished. This appears to have almost happened in the recent Japanese earthquake. No one has ever been able to explain to me how it is worth it to live with that kind of risk. Screw it!

“Given the large quantity of irradiated nuclear fuel in the pool, the radioactivity release could be worse than the Chernobyl nuclear reactor catastrophe of 25 years ago.”

I suppose it may make incrementally more sense to build nuke plants in regions that are not prone to earthquakes. But hey, I’m not an engineer, so what do I know.

Stuxnet vs. Iran:

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

Cooool. Gosh, any downsides to this?

“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.

So in attacking Iran with this cyberweapon, we have simultaneously … given them the same weapon. Cycle of violence, anyone?

Nuclear detonations 1945-1998.

A question: Why does France hate the South Pacific? Must be very convenient for France and Britain to explode so many nukes in, you know, other people’s backyards.

Gulp:

An equipment failure disrupted communication between 50 nuclear missiles and the launch control center at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming over the weekend, although the Air Force says it never lost the ability to launch the missiles.

Heckuva job.

Charles Hawley, editor of Spiegel Online International, joins us from Berlin to explain. Charles Hawley, how much of a problem are these wild boars?

Mr. CHARLES HAWLEY (Editor, Spiegel Online International): Well, the wild boar problem has certainly been growing in recent years. The population has been skyrocketing. The number of wild boars is estimated to be around 2.5 million in Germany, and the numbers of those shot by hunters has more than doubled in the last two years.

So there are certainly a lot of wild boars, and as they multiply, they come into contact with humans more often.

BLOCK: What kind of contact?

Mr. HAWLEY: Well, there are stories of them bursting into supermarkets. Occasionally, they’ll break up a church meeting. Quite often they’ll be causing car accidents, that kind of thing.

BLOCK: And they’re radioactive to boot.

Mr. HAWLEY: Quite a few of them are indeed radioactive, mostly in southern Germany. That was sort of the major fallout zone of the Chernobyl disaster, and so as a result, there’s quite a bit of radioactivity still in the ground.

I can’t wait for the movie.

Every nuke ever.

From the always exceptional folks at Counterpunch comes this photographic essay on the human cost of Chernobyl.

1. UK nuke waste a big-ass problem

2. Indian nuke plant spill

But remember, nuclear power is clean!

It’s about time:

Nearly 40 years after the first of its 210 nuclear tests, France is preparing to compensate people affected by the fallout. The move leaves the UK isolated in its policy of rejecting liability for illnesses suffered by test participants, reports Aidan Lewis.

Just so everyone’s aware that this hasn’t gone away, I’m going to keep you updated as the story of the “mystery barrels” unfolds.  This is the most comprehensive list of info on the subject I could find (courtesy of Nukewatch).  I’ve also included a pdf from the MN Dept. of Health which is chock full of tasty info including maps and pictures.  Hopefully they’re just full of zombies…

I saw more oversight working at Hardee’s.  What the hell is going on?  Is ANYONE in charge?

And that was pretty bad.

How, you ask, do high-tech nuclear subs collide? From the article:

…submarines don’t always turn on their sonar systems, or make their presence obvious.

“The whole point is to go and hide in a big chunk of ocean and not be found. They tend to go around very slowly and not make much noise,” Saunders said.

I’m guessing windows would be more impractical than the current high-tech anti-collision system, which apparently is : hoping you don’t run into stuff.

11 renewable energies ranked.

The losers: biofuels, nuclear.

More wind farms please. Put ‘em everywhere - I want to see them everywhere I look. Count me among those who can think of nothing more beautiful.

On purpose.

Turns out nuclear power still sucks.

Yet more evidence the most dangerous technologies on earth need to have a wee bit better security.

Time to find all the lost nukes:

The crash of a B-52 aircraft, armed with nuclear warheads, in north-west Greenland back in 1968 has left a lasting legacy … One of the weapons melted through the ice and sank into the bay below where it was abandoned, after a submarine search failed to locate it.

There’s more of these out there, and the fact that they haven’t been located and cleaned up yet is a moral stain on those nuclear states that lost them. Who lets themselves off the hook for losing the most dangerous weapons ever created?

Automatic firefighting system goes haywire, suffocates many on board. Shades of HAL. Kind of the opposite of the “robot cannon goes haywire” incident in that one is a robotic weapons system that killed a bunch of folks and one is a robotic safety system that killed a bunch of folks.

Wikipedia article on Asimov’s Laws of Robotics here, from which we learn,

Before Asimov, the majority of “artificial intelligences” in fiction followed the ‘frankenstein‘ pattern, one that Asimov found unbearably tedious: “Robots were created and destroyed their creator”.

Related.

It’s been great knowing you all.  I love each and everyone of you beyond any words I could possibly express verbally or mentally.  I believe each and everyone of us is here for absolutely no purpose, whatsoever; and for that very reason, I consider everyone who has played a part in making who “I” am to be that much more significant.  I would especially like to give a shout out to my parents, all the friends I had growing up, my friends in the Twin Cities, and my good friends here in the Twin Ports.  When you look out at the stars at night, it’s really hard not to think about how goddamn unimportant everything we do is.  I love you.  Oh, and by the way, you can keep up on the end of it all here.

This one outside New York City. Is anyone keeping track of these?

Or better yet, is anyone who is planning to build a new nuclear plant looking really hard for fault lines first?

Link here. Money quote:

“What Sibel revealed to us, and has been revealing little by little since January, is that she has heard that there was a nuclear procurement ring operating inside the US to procure nuclear designs and parts for the AQ Khan network, and it was done not through Pakistani intelligence directly, but through the Turkish embassy.

Turkish businessmen who got the information and gave it to Turkish military attaches, who then turned it over to the ISI, and from there went on to the nuclear black market. To procure these parts and designs, high government US officials helped facilitate Turkish-Israeli PhD students to get into nuclear facilities in the US, they worked with the RAND corporation as well, some moles with RAND to help get this information. There was at least one American company, Giza Technologies, that was helping with parts, probably there were others, and this thing went on from 1995 at least until 2002, and it could still be going on - when this operation was shut down by the Dept of Defense and the State Dept.

Now, Sibel tells us that high government officials inside those two departments - Defense and State - were involved in this ring. She has named them on her website - at least, she has not named them, she has photographs of people - other bloggers have named them.”

This site is a few years old but still freaks me out.