Thursday.... JAIF data and comments related.

In a press release that we find to be not altogether unamusing, given our previous posts here regarding Newsweek and the Boston Globe, the JAIF news commentary relates that the Japanese Foreign Minister publicly complained about foreign news media making "exaggerated and excessive" reports. He added that they should make objective and cool-headed reports, and correct errors.

I'm entirely positive he hasn't seen this blog. (Note: Speaking of foreign nationals reading this blog, we added a YAHOO translator box to allow people everywhere to easily read this blog.... except in China, where we, like anything else technical from the West, are blocked.)

Buried down further in the daily JAIF press reporting is the fact that the water level in the trench at No. 2 plant ... and by this we mean the pipe tunnel outside ... has risen 5 centimeters (about two inches) in the last 24 hours. Clearly, this has something more to do with the stoppage of the leak by the sodium silicate injection at the shore than anything else. There is one meter to go (about one yard) before the trench would overflow. Time and again we've said here that the real solution to the seawater contamination (which by the way at the same spot which was so famously measured at 7.5 million times the limit is now 140,000 times the limit and decreasing exponentially all the time) is not the stoppage of this, or of that, leak, but rather the cessation of feed and bleed cooling methods and the substitution of normal recirculating cooling flow.

Note: We keep saying that, and soon we'll put up some diagrams to show just what kinds of systems this uses. TEPCO really needs reliable AC power throughout the plant, not just for lighting and remote I&C but to run large electric motors before this method is actually workable. Further, it needs piping integrity for primary coolant and seawater system integrity to take the heat load from the primary and give it off to sea, since there are no cooling towers or air-blast coolers at the site.

5:00 PM Eastern Thursday 4/7
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW