Understanding Japan's nuclear crisis

By John Timmer | Last updated 2 days ago

Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan has been challenging. At
best, even those present at the site have a limited view of what's going on inside the reactors
themselves, and the situation has changed rapidly over the last several days. Meanwhile, the
terminology involved is somewhat confusing—some fuel rods have almost certainly melted, but
we have not seen a meltdown; radioactive material has been released from the reactors, but the
radioactive fuel currently remains contained.

Over time, the situation has become a bit less confused, as cooler heads have explained more
about the reactor and the events that have occurred within it. What we'll attempt to do here is
aggregate the most reliable information we can find, using material provided by multiple credible
sources. We've attempted to confirm some of this information with groups like the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy but, so far, these organizations are not
making their staff available to talk to the press.

What goes on inside a nuclear reactor

Nuclear reactors are powered by the fission of a radioactive element, typically uranium. There
are a number of products of this reaction, but the one that produces the power is heat, which the
fission process gives off in abundance. There are different ways to extract electricity from that
heat, but the most common way of doing so shares some features with the first steam engines:
use it to boil water, and use the resulting pressure to drive a generator.

Radioactivity makes things both simpler and more complex. On the simpler side, fission will
readily occur underwater, so it's easy to transfer the heat to water simply by dunking the nuclear
fuel directly into it.

In the reactor design used in Japan, the fuel is immersed in water, which boils off to
generate power, is cooled, and then returns to the reactor. The pressure vessel and primary
containment keep radioactivity inside.

Unfortunately, the radioactivity complicates things. Even though the fuel is sealed into rods, it's
inevitable that this water will pick up some radioactive isotopes. As a result, you can't just do
whatever you'd like with the liquid that's been exposed to the fuel rods. Instead, the rods and
water remain sealed in a high-pressure container and linked pipes, with the hot water or steam
circulated out to drive machinery, but then reinjected back into the core after it has cooled,
keeping a closed cycle.

The water recirculation doesn't just let us get power out of the reactor; it's essential to keeping
the reactor core cool. Unless the heat of decay is carried away from the core, its temperature will
rise rapidly, and the fuel and its structural support will melt.

The fission reaction

Uranium ore

Marcin Wichary

On its own, the uranium isotope used in nuclear reactors will decay slowly, releasing a minimal
amount of heat. However, one of the decay products is a neutron, which can strike another atom
and induce that to split; other neutrons are produced as the products of that split decay
themselves. At high enough densities, this chain reaction of neutron-induced fission can produce
a nuclear explosion. In a nuclear reactor, the fuel density is low enough that this isn't a threat, and
the rate of the fission can be controlled by inserting or removing rods of a material that absorbs
neutrons, typically boron.

Completely inserting control rods to limit uranium's fission, however, doesn't affect what's
happened to the products of previous reactions. Many of the elements that are produced
following uranium's split are themselves radioactive, and will decay without needing any
encouragement from a neutron. Some of the neutrons from the reactor will also be absorbed by
atoms in the equipment or cooling water, converting those to radioactive isotopes. Most of this
additional radioactive material decays within the span of a few days, so it's not a long-term issue.
But it ensures that, even after a reactor is shut down by control rods, there's enough radioactive
decay around to keep things hot for a while.

All of which makes the continued operation of the plant's cooling system essential.
Unfortunately, cooling system failures have struck several of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.

Surviving the earthquake, but not the tsunami

Because cooling is so essential to a plant's operation, there are a few layers of backups to keep
the pumps running. For starters, even if the reactors themselves are taken offline, the coolant
pumps can receive power from offsite; this option was eliminated by the earthquake itself, which
apparently cut off the external power to Fukushima. The earthquake also triggered a shutdown of
the reactors, removing the obvious local source of power to the pumps. At this point, the first
backup system kicked in: a set of on-site generators that burn fossil fuels to keep the equipment
running.

Those generators lasted only a short while before the tsunami arrived and swamped them,
flooding parts of the plant's electrical system in the process. Batteries are in place to allow a
short-term backup for these generators; it's not clear whether these failed due to the problems
with the electrical system, or were simply drained. In any case, additional generators were slow
to arrive due to the widespread destruction, and didn't manage to get the pumps running again
when they did.

As a result, the plants have been operating without a cooling system since shortly after the
earthquake. Even though the primary uranium reaction was shut down promptly, the reactor
cores have continued to heat up due to secondary decay products.

A set of ugly possibilities

Without cooling, there are a number of distinctly ugly possibilities. As water continues to be
heated, more steam will be generated within the reactor vessel, increasing the pressure there,
possibly to the point where the vessel would fail. The reactor vessel would burst into a primary
containment vessel, which would limit the immediate spread of radioactive materials. However,
the rupture of the reactor vessel would completely eliminate any possibility of restoring the
coolant system, and might ultimately leave the reactor core exposed to the air.

And that would be a problem, since air doesn't carry heat away nearly as efficiently as water,
making it more likely that the temperatures would rise sufficiently to start melting the fuel rods.
The other problem with exposing the fuel rods to air is that the primary covering of the rods,
zirconium, can react with steam, reducing the integrity of the rods and generating hydrogen.

To respond to this threat, the plant's operators took two actions, done on different days with the
different reactors. To begin with, they attempted to pump cold sea water directly into the reactors
to replace the boiled-off coolant water. This was not a decision made lightly; sea water is very
corrosive and will undoubtedly damage the metal parts of the reactor, and its complex mixture of
contents will also complicate the cleanup. This action committed the plant operators to never
running it again without a complete replacement of its hardware. As an added precaution, the
seawater was spiked with a boron compound in order increase the absorption of neutrons within
the reactor.
The second action involved the bleeding off of some pressure from the reactor vessel in order to
lower the risk of a catastrophic failure. This was also an unappealing option, given that the steam
would necessarily contain some radioactivity. Still, it was considered a better option than
allowing the container to burst.

This decision to bleed off pressure ultimately led to the first indications of radioactivity having
escaped the reactor core and its containment structure. Unfortunately, it also blew the roof off the
reactor building.

From hard choices to bad results

As seen in some rather dramatic video footage, shortly after the pressure was released, the
buildings housing the reactors began to explode. The culprit: hydrogen, created by the reaction of
the fuel casing with steam. The initial explosions occurred without damaging the reactor
containment vessel, meaning that more significantly radioactive materials, like the fuel, remained
in place. Larger increases in radioactivity, however, followed one of the explosions, indicating
possible damage to the containment vessel, although levels have since fluctuated.

However, the mere presence of so much hydrogen indicated a potentially serious issue: it should
only form if the fuel rods have been exposed to the air, which indicates that coolant levels within
the reactor have dropped significantly. This also means that the structural integrity of the fuel
rods is very questionable; they've probably partially melted.

Part of the confusion in the coverage of these events has been generated by the use of the term
"meltdown." In a worst-case scenario, the entire fuel rod melts, allowing it to collect on the
reactor floor, away from the moderating affect of any control rods. Its temperature would soar,
raising the prospect that the material will become so hot that it will melt through the reactor
floor, or reach a source of water and produce an explosive release of steam laced with radioactive
fuel. There is no indication that any of this is happening in Japan at the moment.

Still, the partial melting of some fuel does increase the chances that some highly radioactive
material will be released. We're nowhere near the worst case, but we're not anywhere good,
either.

An additional threat has recently become apparent, as one of the inactive reactors at the site
suffered from an explosion and fire in the area where its fuel is being stored. There is almost no
information available about how the tsunami affected the stored fuel. Hydrogen is again
suspected to be the source of the explosion, which again suggests that some of the fuel rods have
been exposed to the air and could be melting. It's possible that problems with the stored fuel
contributed to the recent radiation releases, since there isn't nearly as much containment
hardware between the storage area and the environment.
Again, plans have been made to add sea water to the storage area, both by helicopter drops
attempted earlier today, and through standard firefighting equipment.

Where we stand

So far, the most long-lived radioactive materials at the site appear to remain contained within the
reactor buildings. Radioisotopes have and continue to escape containment, but there's no
indication yet that these are anything beyond secondary decay products with short half-lives.

Although radiation above background levels has been detected far from the reactor site, most of
this has been low-level and produced by short-lived isotopes. Prevailing winds have also sent a
lot of the radioactive material out over the Pacific. As a result, most of the problems with
radioactive exposure have been in the immediate vicinity of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors
themselves, where radiation has sometimes reached threatening levels; it's been possible to hit a
yearly safe exposure limit within a matter of hours at times. Areas around the reactors have been
evacuated or subject to restrictions, but it's not clear how far out the areas of significant exposure
extend, and they may change rapidly.

All of this is severely complicating efforts to get the temperatures under control. Personnel
simply can't spend much time at the reactor site without getting exposed to dangerous levels of
radioactivity. As a result, all of the efforts to get fresh coolant into place have been limited and
subject to interruption whenever radiation levels spike. The technicians who continue to work at
the site are putting their future health at risk.

There is some good news here, as each day without a critical failure allows more of the
secondary radioactive materials to decay, lowering the overall risk of a catastrophic event. In the
meantime, however, there's little we can do to influence the probability of a major release of
radioactive material. Getting seawater into the reactors has proven to be hit-or-miss, and we don't
have a strong sense of the structural integrity of a lot of the containment buildings at this point;
what's happening in the fuel storage areas is even less certain. In short, our only real option is to
try to get more water in and hope for the best.

What this says about the nuclear option

Nuclear power plays a big role in most plans to limit the use of fossil fuels, and the Department
of Energy has been working to encourage the building of the first plants in decades within the
US. The protracted events in Japan will undoubtedly play a prominent role in the public debate;
in fact, they may single-handedly ignite discussion on a topic that the public was largely
ignoring. The take-home message, however, is a bit tough to discern at this point.

In some ways, the Japanese plants, even though they are an old design, performed admirably.
They withstood the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, and the safety systems, including the
automatic shutdown and backup power supplies, went into action without a problem. The
containment systems have largely survived several hydrogen explosions and, so far, the only
radioactive materials that have been released are short-lived isotopes that are concentrated in the
plant's vicinity. If things end where they are now, the plants themselves will have done very well
under the circumstances.

But, as mentioned above, ending where we are now is completely beyond our control, and that
highlights some reasons why this can't be considered a triumph. Some of the issues are in the
design. Although the plant was ready for an extreme event, it clearly wasn't designed with a
tsunami in mind—it is simply impossible to plan for every eventuality. However, this seems to
be a major omission given the plant's location. It also appears that the fuel storage areas weren't
nearly as robustly designed as the reactors.

Once the cooling crisis started, a set of predictable issues cropped up. We can never send humans
inside many of the reactor areas, leaving us dependent upon monitoring equipment that may not
be working or reliable during a crisis. And, once radiation starts to leak, we can't send people to
many areas that were once safe, meaning we've got even less of an idea of what's going on
inside, and fewer points to intervene at. Hardware that wasn't designed for some purposes, like
pumping sea water into the reactor vessel, hasn't worked especially well for the emergency
measures.

On balance, the safety systems of this reactor performed reasonably well, but were pushed up
against a mixture of unexpected events and design limits. And, once anything starts to go wrong
with a nuclear reactor, it places the entire infrastructure under stress, and intervening becomes a
very, very difficult thing to do.

This latter set of issues mean that the surest way to build a safe nuclear plant is to ensure that
nothing goes wrong in the first place. There are ways to reduce the risk by adding more safety
and monitoring features while tailoring the design to some of the most extreme local events. But
these will add to the cost of a nuclear plant, and won't ever be able to ensure that nothing goes
wrong. So, deciding on if and how to pursue expanded nuclear power will require a careful risk
analysis, something the public is generally ill-equipped for.

Article at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/03/understanding-japans-nuclear-crisis.ars/