Fukushima: Still too hot to touch at two-year mark

On March 21, 2011, smoke rises from the devastated remains of the Fukushima nuclear plant's Reactor 3 building. /AFP image


After visiting the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant last week in Japan, BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes began his report on the two-year earthquake and tsunami catastrophe anniversary grimly:

"It would be reassuring to think that the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl is contained, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is in stable shut-down. Unfortunately a look inside the Fukushima plant suggests otherwise. I was part of a group taken in to the Fukushima plant last week, only the second time foreign TV journalists have been allowed in since the disaster two years ago. Very little that we saw in our brief two-hour tour was reassuring."

Here's what he saw:
- A "race" to get 1,500 highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods out of the heavily damaged Reactor 4 building. The pool holding the spent fuel rods is on the third floor, and engineers fear another earthquake could collapse the weakened structure.
- Reactor 3, which sparked a massive hydrogen explosion that reduced its containment building to rubble, is buried under a pile of shattered concrete and twisted steel. No one knows what's happening inside the nuclear reactor -- the wreckage is too radioactive for workers to explore without risking a fatal dose. The Reactor 3 building also housed spent nuclear fuel rods before the disaster.
- The power plant is innundated with tens of thousands of tons of contaminated water. In addition to the millions of gallons of water plant workers poured on the reactors in the early months of the disaster, ground water and sea water are leeching into the plant through cracks in its foundation.
- The plant manager said the removal and safe storage of nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima's four damaged reactors will take 30 to 40 years.

My Internet identity thief

/Image via parentdish.com

 

I don't have much to go on, but I like the comic book stereotype that fits my Internet identity thief like a burglar's glove.

The Discover card has been getting a workout lately and someone not only swiped the card info but also my cellphone number. With that information in his not quite fully formed hands, my identity thief promptly called QVC and Staples trying to buy a laptop, then he bought a few volumes from an online comic books store.

The profile: male; age 13-19; computer proficient; gets low parental oversight, given belief that he can get away with having a new laptop shipped to his home; he's just getting started, going for laptops and comic books today will be swapped for wide-screen televisions and jewelry tomorrow.

North Korea: Heated rhetoric goes thermonuclear

In this image from North Korea's state-controlled Korean Central News Agency, troops train this week at an undisclosed location in the Hermit Nation. /Image via CNN


The North Korean leadership sounds like it's literally on the verge of going ballistic.

This week's U.N. Security Council vote to tighten sanctions against the Hermit Nation over the country's nuclear weapons program has unleashed a torrent of threats from Pyongyang. The global community has grown accustomed to the spitting of venon from North Korea, but this is different.

This is the newly nuclear-armed North Korea.

On Thursday, Kim Jong Un's regime threatened to unleash pre-emptive nuclear attacks on South Korea and the United States, vowing to turn Seoul and Washington into "seas of fire." Pyongyang's temper tantrum continued today, with breathless declarations on state-controlled media that a military hotline between the two Koreas was being severed and the 1953 armistice pact was being scrapped.

While few experts are predicting an imminent military confrontation, North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons has definitely changed the rules in the Korean Peninsula diplomacy playbook.

South Korea, which has historically tended toward restraint when responding to saber-rattling from the North, appears to be taking the threat of nuclear attack seriously. A South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman offered this blunt comment today: "If North Korea attacks South Korea with a nuclear weapon, Kim Jong-un's regime will perish from the Earth."

And seasoned North Korea experts seem unsettled, too. "I am taking this more seriously," said Daniel Snieder, a Korea specialist at Stanford University. "This is a notch up from anything we have seen before, really explicit threats that go beyond their normal overheated rhetoric."

Playing the fear card in Venezuela

Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro announces the death of President Hugo Chavez during a television address on March 5. /Image via www.washingtonpost.com


Promoting fear of a foreign enemy is one of the most worn pages in the dictatorship handbook.

The possibility that Hugo Chavez was assassinated is worthy of investigation, and the involvement of U.S. covert action wouldn't surprise me too much. But Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro's immediate playing of the U.S. bogeyman card raises an immediate red flag over Chavez's hand-picked successor. Rather than a sincere search for the truth, Maduro's call for a probe of "historical enemies" is more likely playing the politics of division to cement control of his mentor's governing coalition.

Fear is featured in the rogue political leader's toolbox. The North Korean leadership has been hammering its population with fear for decades, portraying the United States as a menacing foe. Iranian leaders have called the United States the Great Satan since the 1970s.

Where's the love in Venezuela?

Wall Street: Riding the 2013 bull market

 

The value of IBM stock has increased 80 percent over the past five years. The computer industry giant, which is the highest valued company traded on Wall Street, generates about half of its revenue outside of the United States.


U.S. stocks have hit an all-time high on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones market closing Tuesday's trading at 14,253.77.

A month ago, when the Dow rose above 14,000 points for the first time in five years, this blog predicted a bull run in 2013 as opposed to the stock market collapse that followed the Dow's previous all-time high, 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007.

While Bullwork remains bullish on 2013 and the Dow has already gained 8.8 percent this year, economy watchers at home and abroad should remain cautious about Wall Street:
- Beware of irrational exuberance: The U.S. economy has come a long way in recovering from the Great Recession, but economic growth and the job market remain sluggish with no indication of brisk growth on the horizon.
- There is nowhere else for investors to go: With historically low interest rates driving down bond yields and the housing market still lifting itself off the floor, stocks are the best bet for investors looking for a significant rate of return in the U.S. economy. Even overseas markets look worse than Wall Street, with the European Union riding out its debt storm, growth uncertain in China and India, and corruption casting a shadow over the Russian economy.
- Watch out for Washington: The ongoing congressional gridlock over the U.S. federal budget is going to catch up with the national economy eventually. The longer the ineptitude and self-serving politicking continues, the higher the risk.
- Consumers remain key: Consumers drive the vast majority of U.S. economic activity. Most consumers have more money in their homes than in the stock market. Until the housing market is in full recovery, U.S. growth will be restrained.

Hanford: U.S. nuclear weapons legacy leaching into Columbia River basin

The "K-Basins" area of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is only 400 yards from the Columbia River. For more than two decades, thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods were stored in a pair of massive underground concrete structures at the riverside site. Millions of gallons of contaminated water leaked from one of the basins before it was razed in 2009. /U.S. Department of Energy image


The K-Basins, a pair of underground White House-sized reinforced concrete structures built in the 1950s near the banks of the Columbia River, are among the worst contaminated sites at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

When the plutonium factory closed down operations in the 1970s and 1980s, the basins became the depository of convenience for the most hazardous reactor material: Thousands of spent uranium fuel rods bearing plutonium that was never harvested. The "infamous" K East Basin was removed in 2009 but the full extent of the groundwater and river contamination from its faulty fuel rod storage may never be fully known.

GlobalSecurity.Org paints a grim picture of the storage of spent nuclear fuel in the K-Basins. Here are excerpts from a GlobalSecurity report on the K-Basins before fuel rods were removed from the site at the turn of the century:

"Nearly 80 percent (2,100 metric tons) of the DOE's nationwide inventory of spent nuclear fuel is in the K Basins, located adjacent to the K East and K West Plutonium Production Reactors, which were shut down in 1970 and 1971. The function of the K Basins is the safe storage of irradiated reactor fuel until it can be disposed or transferred to a safer location. The fuel in the K West Basin is encapsulated; the fuel in K East Basin is not. ...

"The indoor basins ... were built in 1951 and designed for a 20-year life. They were not designed for long term storage of spent reactor fuel, and they do not meet commercial nuclear or DOE safety and quality standards. The rectangular, reinforced concrete basins are 125 feet long, 67 feet wide, 21 feet deep and are divided into three sections. Each basin holds almost 1.2 million gallons of water. Nominal water depth above the fuel is 16 feet. The water provides a radiation shield for facility workers. ...

"The fuel was not designed for long term storage. It was to be stored for a short period of time (a maximum of 180 days) before being transported to PUREX, dissolved, and reprocessed to extract uranium and plutonium. The K West basin was drained, cleaned, and given an epoxy coating before spent fuel from N Reactor was placed there. The 1,000 metric tons of fuel in the K West basin were encapsulated in leak-proof canisters. ...

"Of greater concern is the 1,100 metric tons of spent N Reactor fuel in the K East Basin. K East Basin was not refurbished, and the fuel in K East Basin is stored in open canisters. Some of the fuel has been stored at the K East Basin since 1975. Thousands of the spent fuel assemblies have broken cladding, allowing the basin water to reach the uranium metal fuel, which contains plutonium and highly radioactive fission products. Water corrodes the fuel, and the corrosion products are released into the basin water. Many corrosion products have been distributed around the K East Basin as sediment. Enough sediment has accumulated over the years to form a sludge on the basin floor.

"Between 1974 and 1979, an estimated 15 million gallons of contaminated water from K East Basin leaked into the soil through a construction joint in the discharge chute area of the basin. The construction joint was repaired in 1980. Another leak of about 50 gallons per hour occurred in February 1993. It continued for several months and leaked an estimated 94,000 gallons of water before it stopped on its own."

Last month, The Daily Beast reported a lengthy update on the cleanup effort at Hanford. Here's the status of the K-Basins, according to the Beast: "Crews spent a decade removing the 2,100 tons of as-yet-undissolved rods, and then three more years vacuuming 47 cubic yards of sludge out of the more damaged East Basin and dumping it in the less-damaged, and now retrofitted, West Basin. Today, the rods are sitting in a building at Hanford, awaiting vitrification and eventual storage at a national repository to be determined."

Sea level rise: Global warming impact hits home

With a sea level 7.5 feet above standard high tides, a flood map shows large areas of Greater Boston under water, including Logan International Airport, half of South Boston, and most of Back Bay, East Cambridge and the South End. In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy brought 10-foot storm surges to New York City at high tide, inundating the metropolitan area, knocking out two airports and causing flood damage estimated in billions of dollars. /Boston Harbor Association image

A recent research effort attempted to forecast areas likely to experience the most severe impact from 21st century sea level rise linked to global warming. The primary finding of the research is that sea level rise will not be uniform around the globe.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact report predicts the worst sea level rise in the next 100 years will hit coastal areas in low latitudes such as the Western Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, including India, Bangladesh, Japan, Argentina, Australia and South Africa.

There are variables that will affect the study's conclusions. A key factor will be the relative melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. For the North Atlantic Ocean, the rate of Greenland ice melt will largely determine the severity of sea level rise. Ironically, while Greenland is much closer to where I live in New England than Antarctica, the gravitational effect of losing the Greenland glaciers will partially offset the sea-level impact of ice melt pouring off Greenland into the North Atlantic.

Hurricane Sandy's pummeling of New York and New Jersey in October 2012 as well as Boston Harbor Association flood maps released in February 2013 illustrate a more stark reality: The sea level rise and increase in severe storms that we have already experienced from global warming pose an immediate threat to the vast majority of coastal cities.

Most of Boston's Inner Harbor neighborhoods would be underwater with a 7.5-foot increase in sea level above an average high tide. An increase in hurricanes and nor'easters makes this kind of flooding a prime climate change risk factor for cities along the U.S. East Coast. /Boston Harbor Association image

Curiosity rover mission faces first glitch on Mars

 The Curiosity rover scoops its first sample of Martian rock last month. /NASA image

Looks like NASA is having its first OMG moment since landing the Curiosity rover on Mars last year. Due to a flash memory problem last week, the rover's main computer has been switched into a "safe mode" and a backup computer has been activated while NASA engineers try to figure out what's wrong.

March 5 Update:
- NASA reported progress in the effort to overcome a problem in Curiosity's primary "A-Side" computer. The Mars rover came out of computer "safe mode" March 2 and reactivated its high-gain antenna March 3. Curiosity could return to full operation this weekend, after engineers program the one-ton rover's "B-Side" computer to carry the mission.
- Computerworld.com reported the switchover of the operational software to Curiosity's backup computer is nearly complete: "At this point, NASA engineers are looking to keep Curiosity running on the B-Side system, while repairing the A-Side so it can be on stand-by as the new backup. NASA is on a deadline to get the rover fully functional before April 4, when communication with all Mars rovers and orbiters will end for about a month.

NASA press release

Venezuela: Democracy vs. autocracy

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's ongoing health crisis is loosening his 14-year grip on power in Caracas. /Reuters photo


A new political era appears to be dawning in Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez's cancer battle has set off jockeying for the country's next election, which could come soon if illness claims the Latin American autocrat.

At the very least, the Chavez cult of personality will never be the same. In the former army paratrooper's last public address three month's ago, an emotional Chavez said he faced a mortal fight against cancer.

Although it was fascinating watching how a dictator operates, I will not miss hours-long television displays of Chavez lording over government officials and ordering tank deployments in front of a national audience. Whether or not Chavez can hold on much longer, it will be fascinating to watch whether change in Venezuelan politics will be democratic or autocratic.

Hanford: Mother of all toxic waste cleanups

A nuclear fuel rod disintegrates underwater during the ongoing environmental cleanup at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. The radioactive sludge created in this incident is part of 53 million gallons of radioactive goo stored at the decommissioned plutonium factory. There are thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods stored at Hanford. /U.S. Department of Energy images

Shuttering the world's first plutonium factory is a deadly serious job. And it comes with a $112 billion price tag.

Plutonium, which was produced from uranium-fired reactors at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation during and after World War II to make nuclear weapons, is among the most toxic substances known to science.
- Plutonium is most dangerous when inhaled.
- Once lodged in lung tissue, plutonium particles can kill lung cells, leading to scarring and terminal cancer.
- Plutonium can enter the bloodstream through the lungs. Plutonium circulating in blood concentrates in the liver, spleen and bones, where it causes cancer.
- Plutonium is produced when an atom of uranium-235 is fissioned, or broken, in a nuclear power plant reactor.

Uranium is also hazardous. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control list the following symptoms from radioactive uranium exposure: "dermatitis; kidney damage; blood changes; [potential occupational carcinogen]; in animals: lung, lymph node damage. Potential for cancer is a result of alpha-emitting properties and radioactive decay products (e.g., radon and plutonium)."               

Here are some U.S. Department of Energy images from the ongoing cleanup effort at Hanford:

Racks for locked plutonium deliveries to U.S. nuclear bomb plants have been dismantled as part of the cleanup of the Vault, a complex of a half-dozen structures next to Hanford's Plutonium Finishing Plant (X marks the spot below). /Department of Energy images

An excavator places barrels for collection of toxic materials at "618-10 Burial Ground," one of the most hazardous sites at Hanford. /Department of Energy image

A welder installs a cap on one of the new radioactive waste storage cannisters at Hanford. Nearly 400 of the Multi-Cannister Overpacks are housing thousands of spent, fragmented or unused nuclear fuel rods. The cannisters are designed to hold the fuel rods until a U.S. nuclear waste depository is established. /Department of Energy images

The Mobile Arm Retrieval System is designed to help empty more than 100 single-hulled radioactive waste storage tanks at Hanford. MARS, shown above in a DOE test, uses pressurized water to loosen sludge and tar-like waste for removal, speeding the cleanup process. Tank T-111 is reportedly leaking as much as 300 gallons of material per year./Department of Energy images

 



As part of the cocooning effort at Hanford's N Reactor building, a new roof is installed to seal and waterproof the structure. The N Reactor produced plutonium and generated more the 65 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity from 1963 to 1987. The building will be sealed for 75 years, then radiation levels should be low enough for cleanup and dismantling work to continue. /Department of Energy image

In August 2011, the DOE removed "D10 Tank" from the U Plant, the first of Hanford's five plutonium processing plants slated to attain "remediated" status. The 7-foot-tall, 15,000-pound tank contained dangerously radioactive materials. A heavy-duty tractor-trailer removed D10 Tank from the U Plant building. /Department of Energy images

The D10 Tank was removed from the U Plant's "Canyon," a cavernous space designed at several Hanford plutonium processing buildings for harvesting plutonium from uranium fuel rods. The image above shows the U Plant Canyon before all processing equipment was removed. The image below shows the stripped facility. /Department of Energy images