Workers enter No. 1 reactor building for 1st time since accident

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Workers entered the No. 1 nuclear reactor building at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant Thursday for the first time since the complex was damaged by the March 11 mega earthquake and subsequent tsunami, as part of efforts to install a cooling system at the No. 1 reactor, Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials said.

Tokyo Electric, or TEPCO, seeks to remove air contaminated with radioactive substances from inside the reactor building by connecting it to a ventilating device installed at the adjacent turbine building

Yeah, yeah, yeah. TEPCO screwed up in lots of ways, but I'm impressed with the technological innovation that's going on to make these reactors safe enough to bury.

My heart goes out to those people who lived in the exclusion zone. I hope the contamination isn't as bad as has been suggested, and that those people can eventually return to their homes and farms.

Workers divided into groups of 3 with each group working 10 minutes to install air filtration ducts. Then 3 days to remove radioactive particles from the atmosphere. Will be interesting to see how much they can lower the radioactive levels inside the building with air filtration. Think I read they want to lower the radioactivity levels by a factor of 20.

Workers enter reactor building

“Pretty amazing how resilient to radiation we are.”

I am not sure why, but for some reason - propaganda? - people have no idea of the health consequences of radiological exposure. The field is technical, of course. They call it “health physics”.

Radiological exposure is not some unmanageable bogey man. Sure, 5 Sieverts of gamma radiation will kill but a simple Tyvek suit taped to gloves and boots, with coveralls underneath, a correct respirator correctly fitted taped to a Tyvek hood, a terry cloth under hood, with the Tyvek hood taped to the Tyvek suit, will give adequate protection from 5 Sieverts of alpha and beta emissions. This is what the Fukushima Daiichi workers appear to be wearing. The gamma emissions at Fukushima are probably much less than 1% of the total.

The robots did the site survey, which is probably accurate since TEPCO was so embarrassingly lax in survey procedure earlier; with a 250 milliSievert dose limit over one year this procedure should be as safe as lying in your bed at home.

No one really knows the health consequences of relatively small radiation doses. The curve fitting was run through zero, so that only a zero exposure had zero increased risk, and a straight line fit to the data was forced; I suspect that the curve would look more like half a parabola rather than a straight line.

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