I mentioned earlier in the thread that evacuations are much harder than people envision on first blush. Katrina was a prime example of this. Evacuations are a hedge for public health safety, not an elimination of all risk, and that should be kept in mind for the future of nuclear power debates that packing up and moving people in a 20-50mi radius is not a trivial effort.

This is neither here not there, but if you have a car, America is probably the best place to GTFO of a certain place quickly, but it's by no means full-proof, and I bet people familiar with their locales could quickly pinpoint a handful of certain bottle-necks on their local roadways that might be difficult/impossible to get through in the event of a disaster. A few broken down cars/accidents + strain on civil services to clean them up and you're stuck. Put lots and lots of people on the road in a panic, and you're certain to have that stuff happen.

People picture orderly traffic jams when they think of an evacuation, not the genuine chaos that would absolutely envelope someplace like NYC if something happened at Indian Point. Lots of people would not be able to get out. That's of course worse case scenario, but the long and short of it is evacuations are hard.

Re: evacuating NYC -- it would not really work during a disaster. People would pretty much have to exit Manhattan on foot. (Just getting the commuters home has been tricky during emergencies.) I'm sure there are really nice-looking emergency evacuation plans somewhere...the optimism in them must be terrifying.

The only news from Tokyo Electric is bad news, today, although no one believes them, bad news or good. It seems it will be a long time before this is sorted out.

wat

I'm sure most of them are pretty frank. it's not like people don't know what a problem this is.

Of all of the things to be sure about...

If there are public plans describing how to evacuate a 50 mile radius of Indian Point, I'm sure we can look at them and have a good laugh.

If you think that evacuating NYC would be difficult then LI would be outright impossible...not without massive help from US navy anyway.

The NYT ponied you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/nyregion/21towns.html

Sure. (See: Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant.) And evacuation of NYC if Long Island is not an acceptable destination is an even more complete nightmare.

Well, it doesn't count unless they post it here. Interesting, though:
Do you know if that report is available publicly? I didn't find it in a quick search...

Radiation now being emitted from pooled water at a rate of 1 Sievert per hour, 100,000 times normal limit:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapc...ex.html?hpt=T2


Category 7 yet?

Reactor 2 was evacuated yesterday, radiation levels 10 million times higher then normal because of core container damage/leak, talk of fuel rods meltdown this morning.

lol nice spin.

100,000 vs 10 million is an enormous difference lol, it's two orders of magnitude. It's the difference between 30 millisievert per hour (tolerable for a period of up to 8 hours without even breaching the legal radiation exposure limit for the workers) and 3,000 millisievert per hour (certain death in two hours). That's not spin.

Edit: Not saying those are the actual readings, just that that is the kind of difference we're talking about.

btw, I think there's a lot of nonsense ITT about what we're likely to see from TEPCO here. You might see reluctance to give out information and/or spin, but I really don't expect to see outright lies from them. Their ass is on the line big time here, and any lying could well mean the destruction of the company and/or directors doing hard time in jail. I think we're going to get the truth and nothing but the truth, but not so much the whole truth.

Calling something 100,000 times normal "Mere" = cast iron irrefutable spin. Also I dont get what you are saying above about lying, spin =! lying.

cnn.com now reporting plutonium found in soil samples

That actual reading was 1,000 millisieverts per hour (aka 1 sievert). In other words, death after a few hours.

1Sv/hr in the turbine building is weird to me. It definitely means there's fuel failure. It also means they are bleeding steam into the turbine building (which is not something that is wise unless it's absolutely necessary).

The turbine building is set up as a containment building, so unless that building is also compromised that radiation will stay within the building.

no, I wouldn't think so.

As for the Plutonium, that could be coming from any of the reactors. Large levels of Plutonium would indicate it's coming from #3, but all Uranium reactors breed Plutonium to some extent.

A fine read... But clearly that author didn't absorb our Earl thread, where half a dozen "nothing to see here" contributors asserted that an evacuation of greater Manhattan/Long Island would be a breeze. ... because, "there are many ways off the Island."

You realise that that "mere" part is written by the author of that article, it's not a quote from Tepco. So your contention is... that the media are spinning this on behalf of Tepco to make it seem less scary than it is? Really?

Maybe the "merely" was written tongue-in-cheek? Cute journalism ftw?

Yeah I think it was tongue in cheek. "100,000 times normal" is a hopeless measure though when "normal" isn't specified. I understand that by "normal" here they mean normal for water which has been used to cool the reactor core, but if by "normal" they meant (for example) normal background radiation level, then 100,000 times that would be about 40 mSv/hr, an amount to which "mere" would be a completely reasonable adjective to apply, especially in comparison to 10 million times, which would be a deadly 4,000 mSv/hr.

Yea I miss read that article as a direct quote. So will retract that spin accusation, still think tepco are being conservative with the facts/truth.

Anyway another consequence no one has mentioned yet seems to be rearing its head.

Could be messy, buts what's a mere 61 billion these days?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...188073102.html

bump

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...uclear-reactor

Quote:

"The reason we are concerned is that they are detecting water outside the containment area that is highly radioactive and it can only have come from the reactor core," Lahey added. "It's not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it's not going to be good news for the environment."

To me, FWIW, the spin has been that this isn't that bad but the news keeps getting worse so I remain unconvinced that we've seen the worst from this.

The only question that really interests me is whether it will get worse than the disaster that caused it. According to a UN report Chernobyl caused 4000 deaths. Obv this is very controversial and Greenpeace did a study and claimed the death toll would reach 100,000. I'm actually shocked they went with a number that low. For comparison The Boxing Day Quake killed 250,000.