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7th Interview with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

Update: There is a little bit of background static and a couple of hiccups in this recording, but I think this is an improvement over simkl (which sped up my voice) and Pamela (which echoed). I am now using VodBurner. Sorry to take awhile to post this. I had to fix some problems with Skype, but hopefully this audio  is better. Thanks so much to Brandon for staying up late last night and chatting with me on Skype to help me with my technical problems! My dad and I will be doing another update around lunchtime EDT today. The interview below was conducted around 7pm EDT on Thursday, March 17th.

Here is the 7th interview I have conducted with my dad, a nuclear engineer. Please see the rest of the blog (sidebar) for previous interviews.

Please keep sending questions and comments to georneysblog@gmail.com. You can also follow me on twitter @GeoEvelyn but please do not send questions via twitter.

Here is the audio file:

 Here is the vimeo video:

Please see the announcement page for more information about these interviews:
Announcement Page

Update: Thanks to Michelle, there is now a transcript after the jump. 

Transcript for Interview 7:
Q: We usually talk in the morning, but we decided that there was so much
information going around, we should do an evening call. Before we begin, let me
just say that my name is Evelyn Mervine, and I am interviewing my dad, Mark
Mervine, who is a nuclear engineer. This is the 7th in a series of interviews that
I’m doing with my father, about the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in
Japan. And I’m just gonna make a couple comments, first I really want to think a PR
representative from Skype, who is trying to provide me with support for clearing
up the call quality and some of the issues that we’ve been having with that. He said
he’ll continue to support me on trying new software, hopefully there are fewer
problems with this one. And my dad says if I don’t get my act together soon, that
he might replace me, so I really need to get going on the call quality. And I also
really want to thank all the people who have been transcribing the interviews, in
particular, Michelle, who has done several of these transcriptions. If you’d like to
help out with transcribing as well, maybe give Michelle a break, send an email or
just post a comment and let me know, thank you very much.

With that said, Dad, could you please give us an update about what’s going on
in Japan?

A: OK, there’s been a lot of activity today. And, just as a reminder for everybody,
at the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant, there are actually 6 reactors. 3 of which
were operating at the time of the earthquake and 3 which were shut down for
maintenance. The 3 that were operating were Units 1, 2 and 3 and Units 4, 5 and 6
were shut down. So we’ve mainly talked about Units 1 through 4 because those are
the ones that have been the biggest concern. And I think it was yesterday, I talked a
little bit about Units 5 and 6. So although these plants are all in the same area, Units
1 through 4 are very close to each other, and Units 5 and 6 are very close to each
other. But there’s quite a distance between Units 1 through 4 and Units 5 and 6.

Units 5 and 6 were also affected in that they lost power, but they were able to
regain one of the diesel generators at Unit 6. When we talked before, we said that
they were trying to run the equivalent of a long extension cable from the diesel
generator at Unit 6, over to Unit 5, to get some power over there. And I’m happy to
report that they’ve been successful in doing that. And so now we have some power
at both Unit 5 and Unit 6. And with that power, they hope to be able to pump
enough water to keep the reactors and the spent fuel pools in those two units
covered and safe. So that’s quite a bit of good news.

Q: Can I ask a quick question, Dad, maybe you can comment on this. Are some of
the workers that are doing this work, are they really risking their own health doing
this? Are there people really going in there – I know that they’ve reduced the staff,
but clearly, there’s still some people working in the vicinity of the power plant?

A: So most of the problems are coming from Units 1, 2, 3 and 4. And because
there are a fair amount of separation between those and Units 5 and 6, I think
anybody working over at 5 and 6, it’s probably a little bit better off. Because the
way radiation works is the farther you get away from it, the more it attenuates and
the lower the dose will be. So we always used to say in the business, in dealing with
radiation, it’s Time, Distance and Shielding. So it’s how much time you spend in the
radiation field, it’s how close or how far away you are, and it’s how much shielding
you have. So it’s very good for those two units, they have some physical separation,
which means the radiation levels will be lower over at those units and I think that
that’s why they’ve been able to be more successful in getting a diesel generator
running, maybe it was less damage, but in any event, very good news to have some
power to both of those units.

I think the other good news is with respect to the reactors in Units 1, 2 and 3.
They’ve been pretty stable today. They’re continuing to pump in seawater, they’re
continuing to periodically vent to keep the pressure down, to allow the seawater to
flow in. They still don’t have the cores completely covered in those three reactors,
but the situation is not getting any worse. It’s at least stable.

Q: And there are people- I guess the radiation levels, other than at that one pool,
which you can mention again, that’s having trouble – people are actually able to get
in there and do things like release steam and monitor the pumps. There are actually
workers in there?

A: So I don’t have any details on the actual radiation levels within the plant. But
I think it would be safe to say that the radiation levels are elevated, due to the fact
that we know that there’s been damage to the fuel in all three of those reactors.

Q: So if there are people working in those – obviously we don’t have information
about the radiation levels, but their health risk is higher, and those people- I mean
in my opinion, if there are people in there working, they really are heroes, to go in
there and to try and get things under control there. At risk of radiation, so OK, go
ahead, Dad, sorry.

A: So we don’t know exactly what the radiation levels are, but we know 48 hours
ago, they had to temporarily evacuate the plant, because the radiation levels had
spiked. We know that the helicopters can only fly so low because of the concern
for the radiation coming from some of those units. So we know there are definitely
places where the radiation is very high and definitely we have people that are
risking their lives to try to bring the situation under control and keep all of us safe.

In any event, let me continue with the status. So the water level and
condition units of 1, 2 and 3 are stable, compared to yesterday. They’re certainly
not where we like them to be, the cores are not completely covered, but the
situation has not gotten any worse in the 24 hours. And I think that’s important,
because up until now, it seemed like the situation was getting worse. Today, we
have improvements – we’re stable in 5 and 6, we have some power to both of those
plants, we have stable water levels in 1, 2 and 3. We don’t worry about Unit 4
reactor because all of the fuel was removed from that one. What we do have
concerns about, obviously, is the spent fuel pools. And the ones that have been of
the most concern have been Unit 3 and Unit 4 spent fuel pools. And we had
reported that the NRC- the United States NRC – has stated that they believe that all
of the water was gone from the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. So there’s some good news
and there’s some bad news, with respect to that pool. The good news is they we
able to see by camera today, that there is still some water in that pool. The bad
news is the side of that pool, the concrete side of it, has collapsed. Fortunately, the
pool has a steel liner, and the steel liner is intact. But that’s obviously a very close
call, to have basically that huge section of concrete, to have collapsed around that
pool. But the good news is that there’s still some water in there and today, they did
two things – they dropped water from helicopters, which was, from the photos
looked to be fairly ineffective, in that because they have to fly so high, most of the
water was carried away by the wind. But they also used those water cannons we
talked about to shoot water into both Units 3 and 4. And when they determined
there was still water in the Unit 4 pool, they turned more of their attention to Unit 3.

Some other good news is they completed running a cable from the electric
power grid over to Unit 2. And according to news reports, they were waiting to
finish spraying water on Unit 3 before they made the final connection on that cable.
And that would allow us to get electric power from the grid to Unit 2.

Q: Only to Unit 2? Now that the electricity has come so far, will it now be quicker to
restore electricity to the other ones or is it only going to be for Unit 2?

A: Well, that was going to be what I was going to say is hopefully that they’ll also
be able to restore electrical power to Units 1, 3 and 4 as well in the next day or so.
So I think it’s very good news because the reason why it’s taken so long is because
of the damage from the quake and the tsunami, they had to rebuild the electric
transmission lines to the plant and then run these news cables over to these reactor
units. So the fact that they’re making this much progress, I think, is a very good sign
and I hope maybe by the morning update, we’ll be able to report that they’ve been
successful – or very close to successful – to getting some power back in Unit 2.

One they get power back to these units, then hopefully, they’ll be able to
work to restore some of the normal and backup pumping systems, to pump water
into the reactor vessels and the spent fuel pools.

Q: Just quickly Dad, and I forgot to do this earlier and I have been trying to do this
at the beginning of the interviews. Today is March 17th and it is currently 7 PM,
Eastern Daylight time.

A: OK. So that’s the update. Like I said, quite a bit of activity, quite a bit of news
from this morning and I wanted to take a few minutes and give people that update.
Hopefully, maybe this evening on the news, there will be even more information, but
that’s the update that I have as of 7 o’clock, Eastern Daylight Time.

Q: The other thing is that we’re going to continue doing these, the daily updates as
necessary, for a couple more days, until things get under control, but we’re really
hoping that the situation stabilizes there. And the other thing that we mentioned
this morning is that we really do think the media is starting to do a better job about
communicating things. Can you expand on that?

A: They’re doing a better job. The one thing that I pointed out in one of our
interviews, and I’d like to point out again, because I see the same comment being
made over and over again – that we should be more concerned about the Unit 3 pool
than any of the others, because of the fact that that unit had mix oxide fuel. And we
explained what that was. That’s a fuel that has a mixture of both Plutonium and
Uranium and the concern is that since the Plutonium is more harmful to humans,
that that is a more significant risk. But as I explained, all reactor fuel that’s been in
the reactor for a period of time has Plutonium in it, because reactor fuel is normally
96% or 97% – the percentage will vary a little bit, depending on the design of the
core and the where that bundle is placed in the core, but approximately 96% of
Uranium-238 and 4% Uranium-235. And only the 235 can be used for reactor
fuel. But what happens in a reactor is the Uranium-238 will absorb a neutron and
become Uranium-239, and then after a couple of decays, it will become Plutonium-
239. And Plutonium will fission and, just like Uranium-235, it’ll release energy. And
so in fact, when a commercial reactor’s operating, a good percentage of the power,
it comes from the fissioning of Plutonium. And any fuel rod that’s been in a reactor
for any period of time, it’s gonna have a significant quantity of Plutonium built up in
it. It may be true that the fuel rods in Unit 3 that had the MOX fuel in it has a higher
percentage of Plutonium, but the point is, all fuel rods that have been in a reactor
have Plutonium. The other thing, I think, to point out is – and the reports that I saw
said that they have only been using that mix oxide fuel since last October. So not the
entire core contains mix oxide fuel, only about a third of it, which would’ve occurred
at the refueling, which apparently they did last October. So I just wanted to clarify
that, a lot has been made in the media of that and I’m just kinda surprised that none
of the commentators and the nuclear experts that they’ve brought in – either on the
news or on the written media – have corrected that point, or made that clarification.
That, in my opinion, there may be slightly more concern about Unit 3, but in reality,
all of that fuel has Plutonium in it and I would consider it all dangerous.

Q: Can you just clarify again, so not all of the pools are in trouble? It’s just pool 3
and pool 4, is that correct?

A: Well, we don’t have the information. As we commented before, we need
the Tokyo Electric Power Company to be more transparent. We don’t have any
information on the spent fuel pools at Units 1 or 2 or the shared one, I think I
explained this morning, there’s actually 7- there’s 6 reactors, but there’s 7 fuel
pools. There’s one in each reactor and there’s a common one. And we’ve only been
provided information on 5 and 6 and then we were provided information on 3 and
4, not because they provided information, but because they became problematic
and started to boil off. And we believe that enough had boiled off on Unit 4 that
hydrogen was formed, which caused the hydrogen explosion. It couldn’t have come
from the reactor because the reactor didn’t have any fuel in it. So they still need to
be more forthcoming and provide more comprehensive information. I would hope
that if conditions allow, that they continue to monitor and check on the spent fuel
pools in Unit 1 and 2, so that they don’t become problematic as well.

Q: So how many explosions have there been now? There’s been so many, I can’t
keep track, have there been 4 major explosions?

A: To my knowledge, there have been 4 explosions. In reactors 1, 2 and 3, it
was caused by the venting of the reactor vessel, in order to lower pressure. We
explained how if the fuel had gotten too hot, it would- the cladding of the zirconium
would interact with water to form zirconium dioxide and hydrogen. And when they
vented steam in the reactor, to reduce pressure to allow the seawater to be pumped
in, they were venting steam plus some radiation particles plus hydrogen, and
apparently there was enough hydrogen that when they vented that into the reactor
building, there was an explosive combination and when that hydrogen mixed with
the oxygen in the air, it exploded. The only possible explanation for the explosion in
Unit 4 would’ve been that hydrogen coming from fuel in the spent fuel pool, because
the reactor itself had had all the fuel removed.

Q: Can you comment on something that you just mentioned to me in a private call,
about the concern that you have about the radioactivity of the water that they’re
using now?

A: I’m sorry, what’s that?

Q: You were mentioning to me that normally, the water systems in the spent fuel
pools, it’s a recycled system, and it goes through piping and normally that water has
a relatively low level of radio activity, but now you’re concerned that that level has
increased?

A: So normally in order to keep the reactor cool when it’s shut down and the spent
fuel pools cool, water is pumped from them through a heat exchanger, and cooled by
a cooler water. It could be the ocean water, or maybe a second closed loop, but any
event, through a heat exchanger, which cools it, and brings it back into either the
reactor or – in the case of the spent fuel pool, back into the spent fuel pool. And
since we have had fuel damage in the reactors – let’s take example of Reactor 2. If
they’re able to get power back to that reactor, and if we can get the pumps working,
we’re gonna take water from the reactor, put it through heat exchangers, put it back
in the reactor. And normally, that water going into those pipes would only be
slightly radioactive. But because we’ve had the fuel damage, and we’ve had the
release of the radionuculides from the fuel, the radiation levels, as the water flows
through those pipes, around those pipes will be much, much higher than normal. So
we’re kinda getting ahead of ourselves, in terms of them being able to restore the
plant. But if they were able to restore cooling, they would have to be concerned for
people working the vicinity of that piping and pumps, because the radiation levels
would be much, much higher than normal. But again, we’re a little bit ahead of
ourselves. They first need to get power back and hopefully, they’ll be able to get
some pumps back and initially, they won’t be circulating the water, they’ll be
pumping in as much as possible to get everything back up. Once they have
everything back up, then they’ll have the consideration for now reforming that
closed loop and cooling the water. And they’ll have to be careful because the
radiation levels will be much higher in those areas.

And that would not be a concern to anybody off-site, that wouldn’t only be a
concern right there, at the plant. I mean, it would be very, very good news if they
got the power back, to get the reactor vessel and the pool- fuel pools filled back up
and be in a situation where we now could restore some of the normal shut down
cooling systems. We’re not there yet, we’re probably a long way from there, so…

The only other thing that I would like to point out is yesterday, the radiation
levels at the site boundary were quite high. Again, it’s difficult to piece all the
information together, but the news report that I saw said they were between-
somewhere between 30 and 40 millirem per hour. Today, they reported as being
between 2 and 3 millirem per hour. So to me, that means that some of the work
that’s being done in the 24 hours has been effective. Even though it didn’t look
like we got a lot of water on those pools from the helicopters. Hopefully, the
combination of helicopters and water cannons were effective in getting a little more
water in those pools, which apparently has knocked down the radiation levels.
And that’s very, very good news. 2 to 3 millrem per hour is certainly well-above
normal – it should normally be barely detectable, but those are quite tolerable
levels. Now obviously as you get closer to the actual damaged power plant, those
radiation levels are going to go up. But the fact that those went down by a factor of
10 hopefully means that also, within the plant, the radiation levels have dropped
substantially. Maybe not by a factor of 10, but maybe at least a factor of 2.

Q: That’s very good news. So I’m gonna ask this question, and I know I keep asking,
but the situation keeps changing. I know this morning, you had mentioned that the
US was preparing to evacuate US citizens, just in case. Do you recommend at this
point, that US citizens, if they can, if they have any means, should they try and leave
Japan still or do you think that this situation is stabilizing?

A: Well, I’m not in the position of making a recommendation as to what people
should do. I’ll go back and- because I don’t have the information. The Japanese
government has an order in for people to evacuate up to 30 kilometers. The US
government yesterday made a recommendation that people should evacuate for a
distance of 50 miles, or approximately 80 kilometers. And they based that
information on the information that they had, and they believed that there was
absolutely no water in the number 4 reactor spent fuel pool. Photographic evidence
today indicates that there is still water in there, so maybe that was a bit of a over-
estimate on the part of the NRC, but as we discussed this morning, part of the
problem has been the lack of information and I- there may be people that point to
our government and say that we did an overreaction, but the purpose of the
government is to protect its people. And they made, I’m sure, what they felt was the
best recommendation, based on the information that they had or based on the fact
that they didn’t have information. We also know that they’ve recommended people
to evacuate- Americans evacuate from Japan – and they’re offering flights to
evacuate. But as we talked about this morning, the radiation levels, outside of that
immediate plant area- I should say outside of the 30 kilometer zone, have not been
high enough to cause concern from a human health perspective. And certainly the
levels in Tokyo, although there has been some elevated levels, are not to the point
where any kind of evacuation or panic should be taking place. And the biggest
concern and panic, I think, was just coming from the fact that there’s no
information. But in terms with the recommendation, my advice is follow the
recommendation of the government. If you’re an American citizen and where
you’re at, the government is recommending that you move out of that area or
evacuate, then I would follow that advice and if you’re a Japanese citizen, I would
follow the advice of your government. And I’m just gonna leave it at that, because I
don’t have access to that information.

Q: Thanks very much. And again, just to point out, there’s not an immediate risk in
the United States, there’s still many people panicking about possible radioactivity
being in the US, but-

A: I’ve only heard a small portion, because I was driving, but the president made a
statement today and he said what we said this morning, which is the- there is no risk
right now, unless the situation becomes a lot worse, to anybody in the United States
of America. There’s no reason to be concerned, there’s no reason to panic, there’s
not reason to be hoarding batches of iodide pills, there’s no reason for any of that.
We’re 5 thousand miles away and there’s absolutely no concern whatsoever.

Q: I’m glad that we can echo our president and I’m glad that that information is
getting out there to the American people from a source that I’m sure has many
more listeners than we do. So I’m just gonna end- we’re actually just gonna ask
one question tonight, and I’ve been receiving many questions and many emails and
I want to thank you for those emails, they do mean a lot to my dad and I, there’s a
lot of people who’ve been saying thank you and we really appreciate those emails,
and keep sending them. We have been receiving a lot of questions. Many of those
questions we’ve received we already answered, so if we don’t answer your question,
maybe check some of the previous recordings and transcripts, we’re not gonna
duplicate questions and we can’t answer every question, so we apologize if we don’t
answer your question. The one that I wanna to address tonight is a question that
came in from a few different listeners. And they wanted to know about shielding,
because I guess people always think that things like lead and concrete can shield
radioactivity. And they wanted to know why you couldn’t just go pour concrete over
things to keep the radioactivity from affecting humans?

A: OK, well, that’s a good question. And the problem that we have right now is the
radiation levels around the damaged plants have been quite high and anybody that’s
had a chance to watch the pictures on TV of the helicopter dropping the water could
see that they’re having to fly fairly high, which if they could fly a little bit lower, they
would’ve been able to be a little more accurate with the water drop and the wind
would’ve carried less of it away. But they were flying the height that they were in
order to protect themselves from the radiation that were coming from those plants.
And the reason why they brought in water cannons, instead of normal fire trucks is
because of the power of the water cannons and the ability of them to shoot the
water farther, so they could be father away from the plant. And again, for the same
reason, the radiation levels around the plant were really too high for them to get any
closer. Again, it’s time, distance and shielding. You want to minimize the time
you’re exposed to radiation, you want to maximize the shielding and maximize the
distance. So the question about shielding is a really good suggestion. The problem
you’d have is, in the case – say if somebody wanted to say, “why don’t we put up
some lead or whatever?” Lead is very heavy and you would need heavy equipment
to move it, and you would have to get very close, and so that would be a problem
right now. The same problem would be to pour concrete. In order to pour concrete,
we’d have to put up some forms and usually installing forms is a fairly manual
process, and then you’d pour the concrete and then you remove the forms. We just
wouldn’t be able to get close enough right now to be able to do anything like that.
The best solution is water. If we can refill those pools, which are apparently intact.
The side of Unit 4 pool is damaged, the concrete has fallen away, but the steel liner
is still in place and that should still- it is holding water. So our best solution is to
refill those pools and water is the other really good radiation shield. And if we can
refill those pools, the radiation levels will certainly be higher than they normally
are, because of the damage to the fuel, but the water will do an excellent job
attenuating that radiation and bringing the radiation levels down. And then,
depending on the long-term situation of the plant, and what they’re able to do and
how much the damage was, it would become necessary to do any type of radiation
shielding construction, they would be in a better position to do that because the
water would be attenuating a lot of the radiation and the dose rates would be much
lower, which would allow people to do two things – get closer and also spend more
time in close proximity to the plant.

So, I think those are really longer-term solutions and not solutions that could
be put in place in the short-term. And that would be- y’know, you asked the
question about water flowing through the pipes, once we’re able to get cooling
restored. Those are the type of things that they would do in the areas of the plant
where the water’s flowing, but the radiation levels are maybe very high. They
would bring in some additional lead shielding or some additional concrete blocks in
order to attenuate that radiation and allow people to get a little bit closer to that
area.

Q: Just to clarify a point that maybe I’m a little bit confused on, so even though I
know you’ve explained this before. It’s important to add not just water, but water
plus boron, is that right? I mean, if you just pour plain water on it, that is not
necessarily the best thing to do, is that right?

A: So normally, you would not have to add Boron, you would just be able to add
water. But what we explained- and again, this is starting to run together, we’ve
done so many interviews – I think we explained it this morning, but- ‘cause there
was a question about would the fuel pool achieve criticality. The- in the reactor and
in the spent fuel pool, the geometry is really important. So in the spent fuel pool,
the rods are- the spent rods are kept- and actually in this type of plan, it would be a
fuel assembly – are kept separated at specific distances in a grid pattern. And that
spacing is important because we don’t want to have enough neutrons to actually
cause any type of fission or reaction. We want everything to be, what’s called “sub-
critical”. The same in a shutdown reactor, we insert the control rods and the
control rods in this type of reactor go up in a cross-shape fashion, in between 4
fuel bundles. And they absorb the neutron and shut down the self-sustaining chain
reaction. What can happen when the fuel is damaged – and we don’t know the
extent of the damage, because we’re not able to get inside the reactors, of course,
and we’re not able to get to the spent fuel pools at this point in the game, to see the
actual condition of the fuel. But if it’s very damaged, it could be losing its shape,
it could be melting, essentially. And when you melt, you could lose the geometry
and therefore, they haven’t just been adding water, they’ve been adding water with
boron. Boron is a good absorber of neutrons and all that is to make sure that if you
have lost geometry of the fuel, in either the spent fuel pool or the reactors, that the
boron would absorb the neutrons and prevent a self-sustaining chain reaction, or
criticality.

Q: OK, I think that that’s all for this evening. And we plan another update around
lunchtime, maybe early afternoon tomorrow. And as I’ve said, we’ll continue to do
these updates on a regular basis as the information comes in, as there’s something
important to discuss. And hopefully, it sounds like they’re getting the situation
under control now, so hopefully in a few days, we will be able to- we won’t have
to do as many of these, certainly not every day. And I know that, Dad, you have a
business trip coming up, so in a few days, we probably won’t be able to do these
anyway. But we will continue, even after this, to try and update you on a regular
basis, we might just switch to every few days instead of every day.

A: The only comment that I would add is in the case of most of these types of
things, as long as there is something happening and it’s fairly sensational, it gets a
lot of attention in the news. The situation we have at the plants is something that
hopefully in the next few days, can be brought under control. But there will be many
days, many weeks, many months of work ahead to completely stabilize and restore
power and cooling at these plants. So probably long after the cameras and the news
crews are gone, there will still be a lot of work and a lot of concern going on at these
plants. And the only reason I say that is I don’t want everybody to think, oh, they’re
gonna get power back tomorrow and then everything’s gonna be OK. They’re going
to get power back and that’s going to improve the situation. And then hopefully
they can get some higher-pressure pumps and completely fill those reactor vessels.
But because of the radiation levels, because of the difficult working environments,
because of the damage to the plant from the explosions, from the tsunami, there’s
probably many days, many weeks of work ahead before they’re able to restore
enough systems to actually be completely bring the situation at these plants under
control.

6th Interview with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

Update: Again, there is an echo starting partway into the recording. Not sure how to fix- I am using Pamela Call Record to record skype-to-landline. I have tried two different call recorders, and I do NOT recommend either simkl or Pamela Call Record. However, I am happy to announce that a PR representative from Skype just contacted me and is providing me with free software and trying to help me. Thank you, Skype! I cannot recommend Skype enough. Unfortunately, we were not able to set up the new software for the call today, but tomorrow should go better hopefully. Fortunately, my dad does most of the talking and he does not echo. Please volunteer to transcribe if you are able. If you can transcribe everything except where I echo, I will fix the transcript when I have time.

Here is the 6th interview I have conducted with my dad, a nuclear engineer. Please see the rest of the blog (sidebar) for previous interviews.

In the interview today, we address many questions from listeners. Please keep sending questions and comments to georneysblog@gmail.com. You can also follow me on twitter @GeoEvelyn but please do not send questions via twitter.

Please see the announcement page for more information about these interviews:
Announcement Page

Update: Thanks to Maria, there is now a transcript after the jump. Because of the echo, the transcript isn’t perfect. I will try to fix it when I have time.  

Transcript for Interview 6: 
Q: Good morning Dad. My name is Evelyn Mervine and this is a series of interviews with my Dad, Mark Mervine, who is a nuclear engineer. This is the sixth in a series of interviews, and if you’d like to listen to any of the previous interviews, I encourage you to do so, on my geology blog, Georneys. That’s G-E-O-R-N-E-Y-S, georneys.blogspot.com. And because this is a series of interviews, I would like to state that it is currently the 17th of March, and it is 9:15 AM, Eastern Daylight Time.
So to start off with, Dad, can you please give us an update about what’s going on at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan?
A: OK, so, we’re talking about the Fukushima One Nuclear Power Plant, which consists of six separate reactors. And in the interest of time, because I’m a little bit limited on time today, I’m only going to cover the difference between the status from yesterday and today. So I would encourage people to at least listen to the first part of yesterday’s interview, where we had a little bit more time to give a more comprehensive status.
So in the past 24 hours, to the best of my knowledge the actual condition at the plant hasn’t changed a lot. They’re still in the process of trying to get outside electrical power to the site. And today’s report I saw said that TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company, hopes to be able to do that at some point today. But given their track record so far, I guess we’ll have to say that we’ll believe it when we see it. What they have been doing in the past 24 hours is using military helicopters to drop water on top of reactors 3 and 4. Unfortunately, it appears from the videos that they were having to fly quite high, probably due to the radiation levels, and as they tried to drop the water most of it was carried away by the wind and very, very little of it actually was dropped on the reactors buildings.
I normally try not to make a statement unless I’ve gotten it from a couple different sources but they were in the process of bringing at least ten or eleven police water cannons to the site. And I saw one report where they indicated that they had used those water cannons to put water onto the building. Again they were limited as to how close they could get, and how much time they could pour the water on because of the radiation levels.
Probably one of the biggest news items was that the US nuclear regulatory commission announced that they believe that there was no water in the number 4 spent fuel cooling pool and they recommended that the evacuation zone be extended to 50 miles, which is significantly larger than the 30 km evacuation zone that the Japanese authorities had recommended.
Q: Just to check, that’s 50 miles not 50 km, right?
A: 50 miles, that’s correct. That would be something on the order of 75-plus km. About 80 km.
Q: OK.
A: The other, I think, very interesting news item this morning is that the US government is chartering flights to fly American citizens out of Japan. I’m not sure that because they have more data than the rest of us relative to radiation levels in the environment, or whether like the rest of us they’re growing concerned with the lack of information that’s being provided and they’re taking the conservative route of just getting American citizens out of there given the loss of confidence in the data that’s being reported from this event.
I was happy to see that the mainstream media has stepped up their coverage. Their coverage is more comprehensive, and in particular I was glad to see Anderson Cooper really take the Japanese government to task yesterday evening for the lack of information that’s being provided. It’s, again, I think important to be transparent, to treat people as if they’re intelligent and given the information upon which they can make decisions and this is not happening in this case. And I realize that there’s obviously a lot of chaos and the status is probably changing hour by hour, but nonetheless it seems like they could do a better job with the information. With that being said I think it’s important that we keep in mind that that’s not a reflection in the people who are actually on that site, who at great risk to their own lives are trying to keep that site as safe as possible and bring this horrible situation to an end. I think we owe those folks a debt of gratitude.
Q: OK. So it sounds like there’s a couple of different things that have changed that we have been talking about over the past few days. I asked a few days ago if you would recommend that American citizens leave Japan. And now it sounds like the United States government is recommending that people ???. It probably sounds like if you can leave it isn’t a bad idea. Would you agree with that statement?
A: Well it’s a difficult question to answer in that the data that we have is just not comprehensive. You know, based on the data that was provided it wouldn’t seem that that was necessary. But like I said my assumption at this point is either the US government has more information, or in the absence of information have decided to be conservative. And as we talked yesterday, people asked the question about, should we be concerned about California? I made the statement that I thought our government would be more forthcoming, more transparent. And I think that’s the case here. You know, given the information they have, or the lack of information, they’re being very conservative. There have been no reported numbers of radiation levels in Tokyo that would cause I think a significant alarm, but I think this is a very conservative action. Again, my recommendation is to do what the government asks you to do
Q: The United States government in particular.
A: In particular, if you are an American citizen I would do what the American government asks you to do.
Q: OK. Is there anything else you want to say before we move on to some questions?
A: No, I’m ready for some questions.
Q: Alright. We have received many questions, probably more than we can answer, particularly because we are also have so little time. We’ll ask as many as we can, and you just let me know when you need to go. And I encourage you, if you would like to send in questions. Again, we may not be able to answer all of them but we really will try because I feel that it’s important for people just to get some answers to their questions. If we can provide those answers we’ll be happy to do so. ??? that the mainstream media is doing a better job, because maybe we won’t have to keep doing this. Because it is a lot of work for us and it’s tiring. The first question was actually ???????? MIT??? Can you comment on where you go for information and where you would recommend that people go to get some good reliable information?
A: Well again that’s a difficult question to answer because although there’s a lot of information out there, it’s in bits and pieces. I’m not aware of any one site that’s comprehensive enough for people to go look at, unless they have some engineering expertise in this area. So in particular I think there’s been an excellent effort by the world community to keep the Wikipedia article for the accident up to date. but it’s, as Wikipedia is, it’s a collection of little bits and pieces that people have put together, and if you are, I think, an average citizen without a lot of knowledge of nuclear power, you would have a difficult time of reading that article and putting together a status. But I do look at that article. Also, obviously look at any press releases from TEPCO, which are few and far between, I would add. Releases from the Nuclear Energy Institute. The International Atomic Energy Agency. Obviously the news reports: CNN, MSNBC and other places that do a pretty good job at least providing some real time information. And again, with my background then I’m able to assimilate all that, and put together as best as possible a more comprehensive picture of what’s going on. But it is difficult for the average person.
Q: And I like what you said there, ??? you try not to answer things here unless you’ve seen it in multiple locations, because you know, although people are trying to do a good job of reporting information, there will be errors, so if you see something in multiple places that is more likely to be true.
A: Yeah, as you know sometimes people copy reports from other places so you may see it in more than one place and it may not be correct. One advantage we have here is we’re not in real time, so I have the opportunity to get up early in the morning and spend time looking at all these different reports. We’re not obviously live, so we have a bit of advantage over a live news report in that we have some time to assimilate the information and put a more complete picture together. But the mainstream media is doing a better job. There are still some mistakes being made. I saw a very well respected journalist last night make a pretty big mistake. They held up a ??tiebeck?? like radiation suit and claimed that it would prevent people from receiving gamma rays. A gamma ray is like an x-ray, so we all know that an x-ray will go right through your clothing. That suit is very good at preventing particulates from getting on your skin and that kind of stuff, but it’s not going to stop a gamma ray.
Q: Ok. Let’s move on to the next question. I’m going to paraphrase the question actually. Basically the person was commenting that many of these power plants were built ??? during a war. Basically there was a concern about a bomb attack. And this person was wondering if a bomb attack could inflict damage to a nuclear power plant, and you know, basically what would it take to inflict damage to a nuclear power plant?
A: ok that’s an interesting question, and I think the answer is pretty apparent that if you look at what’s happened to the secondary containment for these reactor buildings, with these internal hydrogen explosions you can see that they can be pretty easily damaged, and then the spent fuel would be exposed to the environment. And once the water drains on the spent fuel then begins to heat up, release radiation to the environment. But I think the big thing there is if you had a nuclear bomb explode, that in and of itself would release radiation and contaminate the environment so any effect that you would get from a nuclear power plant that was within that radius, I don’t think really would matter. It’s a good question, but clearly the outer buildings would not survive that, assuming it was in close proximity, but again I think the impact of the nuclear bomb itself would far exceed any additional that would be added from the nuclear power plant
Q: Alright. Moving on a few people have asked about radiation and radioactivity. Yesterday we decided we didn’t want to go into this because it is sort of a longer explanation. I don’t know if there’s a good place in the internet that ??????
A: Well just briefly, you know radiation. For instance the gamma rays, or x-rays when you go to the doctor and you get an x-ray. That radiation exposure is cumulative, and there are limits as to how much you should get in a year. And radioactivity is more in reference to a material that would be decaying off. So there are a number of commonly occurring radioactive materials like Uranium. People have become aware obviously of Radon, and it’s not uncommon when you buy a house to have the house you’re buying tested for Radon, because it’s a naturally occurring gas that comes out of the rocks on the ground in the US. So, again we don’t have time to go into a lot of detail, but hopefully that helps a little bit.
Q: Thanks dad. Here’s a question that I actually received from a few people. They were wondering if it was possible for engineers??? to use an ROV, remotely operated vehicle, like those used by bomb squads for instance, to deliver some water to the reactors. It sounds like that may be sort of a complicated procedure, but is that the sort of thing that might work, and perhaps, I don’t know, if you could speculate about something that could be designed ???? nuclear plants.
A: That’s a good question, and I think the problem we would have is in navigating the path that it would take to get up to where the spent fuel pool is. From the drawing you see that it’s quite high up in the building, and so there would be a series of doors and stairs that would have to be navigated and of course you would need to bring a fire hose with you. So given the state of robotic technology today, I would say that would probably not be realistic.
Q: OK. And this is a question we ???don’t have time for today, but again please keep sending questions and  you really want to know the answer send it again??? This, actually this person sent in two questions, and we’ll answer both of them. And this is related to the spent fuel pools again. Now it sounds like there is no water in one spent fuel pool. I wanted to know, what would happen if they can’t get water?? And it would be sort of a worst case scenario. Would there be a chain reaction? Would there be a big explosion? Or would there just be a massive and long lasting release of radioactivity? What would happen?
A: OK. Let me clarify. It was the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that stated they didn’t believe there was any water in that pool. The Japanese authorities have refuted that, and on the International Atomic Energy Association website they have reported that the temperatures in some of those spent fuel pools… So it’s not clear whether there is, how much water is in those pools, but it’s also not certain that there’s none. So again that goes back to, I think you need to corroborate more than one source. But to answer the question, the way the fuel is installed in those pools, it’s kind of similar to the question that I asked about the fuel melting, the geometry is important. If you were to damage the fuel to the extent that it begins to melt, and the geometry changes, and you were able to get enough Uranium together in one place without any of the materials that are designed to remove the neutrons, then it would be possible for that blob to go critical. Again, the goal here obviously is to prevent that from happening, and you know the water that they’re adding is a water-boron mix, and the boron would absorb neutrons and hopefully keep that from happening.
Q: And, critical just means that it’s a self-sustained reaction, and that’s how the power plant normally operates. Obviously you don’t want that to be happening in a spent fuel pool, where you’re storing, you’re not meant to be controlling a nuclear reaction.
A: That’s correct, that would be something that you definitely don’t want to have happened. Again, the way fuel pools are designed and the way the fuel rods are placed, there’s spacing and geometry that would prevent that from happening. But when you lose that, it… obviously then that becomes a concern. I don’t personally know what the probability would be, but I think the answer that was given was the probability is not zero. So it’s not, certainly not a hundred percent, but it’s not zero, and it’s important to have water and boron to prevent that.
Q: OK and actually I wasn’t going to ask this question, but it think I will because it relates. Also about the spent fuel pools. I was wondering ??? Spent fuel pools in a larger earthquake. I’m wondering if the water ??? like it’s a swimming pool. Is water ??? flush out? If there is an earthquake and would an earthquake, would you expect that to cause any sort of cracks, ??? leak the pool?
A: So, I guess depending on the exact height of the water, I guess it would be possible if the ground shook enough, or maybe if because of one of the explosions the building shook enough that a little bit of water  could have flushed out. But if it was that full then – there’s something like fourteen feet of water above the fuel rods, and I don’t think that would be too much of a concern. A bigger concern might be if there was some damage to the fuel pools. Again, these are designed to survive the maximum expected earthquake for that plant. You know, it does not appear that any of these pools were cracked or damaged, that the loss of water is due to the heating up and evaporating, and not because there’s a crack in it. So I would say that that reflects a pretty good design, because the earthquake was indeed larger than the plant was designed for. It’s good design, good quality workmanship, and hopefully we can get some electricity back, we can get some water in there, and get these pools cooled back off, and covered back up.
Q: And I think we’ve said this before but these pools are not affected by the initial earthquake, they are actually being affected by the explosions. And correct me if I’m wrong Dad, but there have been three explosions now that were pretty serious, and I think we don’t know what effect those might have had on any of the spent fuel pools. And correct me if I’m wrong, there are spent fuel pools at each of the reactors. Is that right?
A: There are actually seven spent fuel pools at that site. One at each of the reactors, and then there’s a common one that they all share that is located in a separate building. So there are a total of seven spent fuel pools that ultimately we need to make sure get water and cooling.
Q: OK, that’s all we have time for today, unfortunately we do have some work constraints today, you may notice that we’re doing this interview earlier. But we will ???continue to do these daily interview updates at least through the weekend and hopefully at that point  ???should be under control. Hopefully also the mainstream media will start to do a better job so perhaps we won’t need to do these updates every day. After that maybe we can do an update every few days or so. Do you have anything else you want to say before we end?
A: I think one last comment that I would have is that the work that’s being done to get outside electrical power into that plant is probably the most important thing that needs to be accomplished. There may be other issues that arise when individual plants are reconnected to electricity there. Obviously from the photograph there’s a lot of damage, and there may be things that don’t work, but hopefully… I shouldn’t say hopefully, there are multiple redundant systems that were build at these plants, and my hope, my sincere hope is that once they get electricity back, that we can at least get enough pieces and parts from the various different redundant systems functioning to get water and cooling back to these plants. And that, in my opinion, is the most important thing, getting power back to be able to begin to restore some of these systems.
Q: OK, actually I just want to ask a question again. You know, we talked about Japan, but in terms of the US there really ??? are precautions that we should be taking. I know that people are panicking, but I think it’s really encouraging that the US government is taking an active role in this. Please make a final comment about what US citizens, since we are from the United States, should be concerned about?
A: I don’t think anybody in the US should be concerned at this point in time. There’s approximately 5000 miles distance between Japan and the United States, as we explained yesterday. As any radiation that would be released travels it disperses geometrically, and therefore the amount that you would see in any given volume decreases the farther that it travels. It’s very heartening to see our government being proactive, and the one precaution that they have taken is we have a number of portable environmental monitoring stations, and some of those have been moved to California, and they’re setting up additional stations to monitor just in case. But I think any scientist would tell you that at this point in time the probability of having any detectable radioactivity is very, very, very slim, and there’s no concern. But it’s very heartening to see our government being proactive and I’m absolutely positive that if there was a concern that they would let us know, and again we have the luxury of time. It will take some time for the winds to carry that to the United States, so we don’t have that concern that you have in Japan, where if the winds were to shift and the radiation release was to get larger, that they would only have an hour or two, we should have many, many hours, if not days, to take care of any precautions that we’d need to take care of. But again, I think the probability is extremely low, but it’s very heartening to see our government step up.
Q: I agree with that. I feel certainly comforted by that. I’m also comforted by talking to you dad, even though this situation ??? it makes me feel a lot better to actually get the facts, and get them all in some sort of a cohesive story, and get some questions answered, and I hope this makes our listeners feel better too.
A: I hope it does. I wish there were more information available so we could do a little bit better job, but were trying to do the best that we can with the information that we have and with the time that we have.
Q: Alright thanks dad, I know you have to go to some meetings so I’ll let you go.
A: Alright, thank you!
Q: Alright, bye.

A Quick Note: Please Take My Dad’s Interview Transcripts & Audio

I just wanted to make a quick note here that although my geology blog Georneys is copyright protected, I really want people to take the information in my dad’s interviews and distribute it as widely as possible.

People are already posting links and taking excerpts, which is great. If you want to take the audio files & full transcripts and post them anywhere else– on your website or blog– please do so. If you can link back to this blog and send me an email (georneysblog@gmail.com), that would be great. But don’t wait to hear back from me– just take away.

These interviews are not about me or my dad or this blog– they’re about providing, to the best of our ability, information to the general public about the nuclear disaster. 

Also, I am very sorry about the echos in today’s interview. When I tested the software, everything worked great. I don’t know what happened. Hopefully this won’t happen tomorrow. Again, the transcript will be up later today.

5th Interview with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

Picture of a Boiling Water Reactor Nuclear Power Plant like the Fukushima Plants. My dad refers to this image in his interview.

Update: All the interviews are now available on a vimeo channel. Here’s the vimeo channel:

Update: Announcing Daily Updates from My Dad

Update: Sorry about the echo starting partway into the recording. Not sure how to fix– I am using Pamela Call Record to record skype-to-landline. Fortunately, my dad does most of the talking and he does not echo.

Here is the 5th interview I have conducted with my dad, a nuclear engineer. Please see the rest of the blog (sidebar) for previous interviews.

In the interview today, we address many questions from listeners. Please keep sending questions and comments to georneysblog@gmail.com. You can also follow me on twitter @GeoEvelyn but please do not send questions via twitter.

Link to vimeo:

Announcement: Daily Updates from My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer

Update: All the interviews are now available on a vimeo channel: 

For those who do not know, on the morning of Saturday, March 12th I decided to interview my dad Mark Mervine about the Fukushima nuclear disaster because he is a US Navy Commander (USNR, Ret.) and nuclear engineer with decades of experience on both nuclear submarines and nuclear power plants, including a plant very similar to the Fukushima plant. My dad doesn't have specific involvement with the Japan disaster, but I think he has good insights. You can find a full description of my dad's qualifications here. Please note that my dad is retired from nuclear power, so he can speak freely about the matter. Over the past four days, we have conducted four interviews about the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: 

Interview 1: Morning of Saturday, March 12th, 2011 
Interview 2: Morning of Sunday, March 13th, 2011

 
When I first asked my dad if I could interview him on the morning of Saturday, March 12th he was extremely reluctant. He said no at first, then after some coaxing by my mom and myself, he agreed. He said, "Oh, all right. But only because you're my daughter."

As some of you know, this is normally a geology blog where I talk about rocks, my thesis research, fieldwork, geology books, geology words, and so on. When my dad and I did our first interview, we thought that my usual readers– generally 100-200 pageviews per day– would be the only people who would listen to the interview. Well, the traffic on my little blog has increased significantly since I started doing these interviews with my dad. For that, I thank you. My dad and I are both honored that you want to listen to us. We hope that this is a place where you can find scientific, honest, clear, and neutral information about the nuclear disaster in Japan and expert analysis of this information by a very experienced nuclear engineer– my dad.

Originally, after the first interview my dad said he would not do any more. But something happened that changed his mind: he watched the mainstream media coverage of the nuclear disaster on Saturday night. He was appalled at the coverage. He found the coverage full of inaccuracies. And he noticed that even when nuclear experts were interviewed, many of them were very biased– often they were very pro-nuclear. Other people interviewed were very anti-nuclear. Other people interviewed had dubious qualifications to discuss the disaster as so-called “nuclear experts.” Very few reports have been politically neutral, which is understandable since this is an emotionally-charged issue. However, we believe that reporters should strive to be neutral and avoid sensation, even on an emotional issue such as this.

My dad and I have also noticed that much of the information on the nuclear disaster comes in soundbites. We believe that this nuclear disaster is too complex to be discussed in soundbites. We also believe that the general public is smart enough to be given the facts and to make their own decisions about the nuclear disaster. To be fully informed about this situation, you need more than a soundbite. We realize that our interviews are somewhat long, but you need more time to understand this situation properly. Thank you for having the patience and dedication to read and listen to these lengthy interviews.

We are also disturbed at the lack of cohesive information being provided– my dad discusses this more in Interview 4. There are so many bits and pieces of information flying around, it’s difficult even for my dad– a nuclear expert– to figure out exactly what’s going on. It must be extremely difficult for the general public to make sense of what’s going on. When good information is not available, false rumors abound. False information is dangerous– people need the correct information, at the correct time, to make informed decisions so that they do not under- or over-react to the nuclear disaster.

Our goal with the interviews on this blog is to provide information and expert analysis of this information in close to real time– on a daily basis. We will strive to present the information in simple English that makes nuclear engineering accessible to the general public. Of course, no reporter can avoid all bias, but we will strive to stick to the facts. We will remain committed to answering as many questions from listeners as possible. When my dad is not qualified to answer a question, he will say so and will not answer it. If we or any of our listeners find an error in anything that we have reported, we will strive to post a quick, honest correction.

To the best of our ability, we commit to this: 

Until the mainstream media is able to do a better job, we will continue to provide daily interview updates about the nuclear disaster. We will take a break from our regular jobs around lunchtime each day (this may be a little flexible depending on work obligations) to become citizen journalists and to record these interviews and post them here. You can look for an interview here every day around lunchtime (Eastern Daylight Time), until announced otherwise. I am officially taking a break from my normal geology-themed posts, which will resume in a few weeks.

One final note: my dad and I are not professional journalists or media experts. I am a busy graduate student and my dad has a full-time job (in private industry, but not nuclear power). We will do our best. We appreciate your suggestions for improvement and your help. I am working on improving the audio– I realize that I am too loud and high-pitched and my dad is too quiet in some of the audio. We will try to get these uploaded to YouTube as well. We do not have time transcribe the interviews, but we will continue to post transcriptions done by readers. I will send pretty rocks to everyone who has transcribed so far, but I’m afraid I will not be able to send rocks to future transcribers. All that my dad and I can commit is to keep reading the news and to take a lunchtime break– every day– to update you to the best of our ability. We appreciate your patience when this site is less-than-perfect.

My dad has also agreed to be interviewed on some podcasts– we will keep you updated about that as well.

If you would like to help our effort, I have a list of tasks below. To those who have already offered help, thank you.

Ways to Help Us: 
-Continue to send us your questions, comments, and news links. Email these to georneysblog@gmail.com. You can follow me on twitter @GeoEvelyn.


-Volunteer to transcribe an interview. Post a comment below the interview that you are transcribing so that there are not duplicate efforts. 


-Upload videos to YouTube. Brad Go has been doing this so far. Perhaps he would like help?


-Improve sound quality. I have received a zillion suggestions for improving interview sound quality. I am currently working with a professional on this. 

-Make a better website for my blog? I think I need a better website. A professional may be willing to do this already, but shout out if you’d like to help as well.

-Advertise these interviews, if you find them helpful. Post links on twitter, Facebook, your blog, your website.  Email your friends and family. Suggest the interviews to news outlets you believe are doing a poor job of covering the news on the nuclear disaster.

4th Interview with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

Update: All the interviews are now available on a vimeo channel. Here’s the vimeo channel:

Update: Announcing Daily Updates from My Dad 

Here is a vimeo video of the interview:

Update: I have cleaned-up the original transcript.

Update: Thanks to Michelle, transcript is now available after the jump. 

Interview 4: Tuesday Morning, March 15th, 2011
4 Days Since Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami

EM= Evelyn Mervine
MM = Mark Mervine

EM: Good morning, dad.

MM: Morning.

EM: All right, are you ready for Interview Number 4?

MM: I hope so.

EM: Okay. We’ve got our work cut out for us with all these interviews. So before we begin, I just want to let people know, who might not know, that this is actually the 4th in a series of interviews that I’ve done with my dad, who’s a nuclear engineer. I am not going to go into his credentials again in this interview, but if you would like to see what his credentials are and listen to the previous interviews, I encourage you to do that. They’re located, the previous interviews – both audio files and actually, now transcripts, thanks to some listeners— they’re located on my geology blog, Georneys (georneys.blogspot.com). You can also find them on the Skepchick website (skepchick.org).

So, I’m just going start right out because there have been quite a few developments in the last 24 hours or so since we’ve spoken. And I was wondering if you could just give us an update on what’s going on in Fukushima.

MM: I’ll do my best. It’s extremely difficult because information is very hard to come by, and there are different bits and pieces available from different sources. But it’s very difficult to put together a complete picture.

EM: Okay.

MM: Let me start first with a little bit of good news, which is that, as we explained yesterday, there’s actually two sets of power plants: Fukushima 1, which has been the one that’s really been in the news, that has the serious issues that we’ll talk about in a few minutes, and Fukushima 2, which is a few miles away to the south. That site [Fukushima 2] has 4 reactors. They were also experiencing difficulties with loss of power. But the latest report from the Tokyo Electric Power Company website indicates that all 4 units there are now in cold shutdown. So that’s very good.

EM: That’s very relieving news. Do you know how far away the two plants are? Are they sort of close together and affected by the tsunami similarly?

MM: They’re about 7 miles apart.

EM: Okay.

MM: Now, with respect to Fukushima 1— which again, to remind everybody, has 6 nuclear power plants— it’s been a very challenging 24 hours. As best can be determined from the various different news reports, there was an explosion in the Number 2 reactor building, which, according to some reports, may have caused some damage within the primary containment of the reactor, in the suppression pool, at the bottom of the reactor. So, if you look at that picture that you posted yesterday, there’s kind of a doughnut-shaped tube that goes around the bottom of the reactor that holds water.

The purpose of that pool of water is to condense any steam that’s in the containment building and release the pressure. And, again, reportedly, there may be some damage to that suppression pool. The reports indicated that before the explosion, the containment building had about 3 psi [pounds per square inch, a unit of pressure] and afterwards, it was 1 psi.

EM: And yesterday you said that there was a possibility that there actually might be an explosion that could affect the containment itself. And you were saying that was because of the type of pump that they had to use? Is that what happened? Were they not able to actually get the normal pump running or do we not know?

MM: Well, what they’re trying to do, which is what they did at the 1 and 3 Reactors, is pump seawater into the core, to try to recover the core. In order to do that, because these pumps that they would be using for pumping seawater would be relatively low-pressure pumps, they would need to reduce the pressure in the reactor by venting the steam— initially, to the containment building and then, obviously, they have to worry about pressure in containment building, so eventually, whether they do it into the containment building or directly to the atmosphere, it’s going to get into the atmosphere of the reactor building.

And, as we saw in Units 1 and 3, based on indications that we have of cesium and iodine being in the atmosphere, based on the fact that we had an explosion, it was probably a hydrogen explosion, which was created by the overheating of the fuel, and H2O, or water, interacting with the zirconium cladding of the fuel and causing zirconium dioxide to be formed and hydrogen gas.

So, they had an explosion in Reactor 2, but the news reports are very scattered, and it’s very difficult to get any kind of complete information as to the extent of the damage.

EM: Okay. So, maybe this is something that we’ll have to continue and update on a little bit later, when information is more available.

MM: The other thing that’s happened is there was a fire in Unit 4.

EM: Yes.

MM: Unit 4 was shut down for maintenance at the time of the tsunami and earthquake and had not been experiencing any problems cooling the core because they were already shut down and in cold shut down.

 But, if you remember yesterday— and part of the reason I asked you to put the picture of the Mark 1 Containment up is because of the potential that lots of water [could have been lost from] the spent fuel pools. And again, it’s very difficult to determine exactly what’s happening because the reports are very scattered. One report I’ve seen said that the fire was in the spent fuel pool, that potentially it was caused because the water level had lowered and fuel had started to melt and hydrogen had formed, which caused an explosion, which tore two holes in the building. Another report I saw said that the fire was in a lubricating oil system.

But then I also saw a report that they’d been unable to get water to the spent fuel pool. So it’s really unclear exactly what’s happening. And I think this is an important point that—you know, obviously these folks at these plants are under a lot of pressure and I’m sure a lot of people are working real hard and doing the best that they can, but the transparency, with respect to the communication to the public, is terrible. I mean they’re not providing any kind of real-time updates and the updates are not very detailed. So, it’s difficult for anyone to determine what’s actually going on at this plant.
And if, in fact, they did allow the water level of the spent fuel pooling cool— excuse me, the spent fuel cooling pool at Unit 4 to get below the top of the pool, in my opinion, that’s inexcusable. There should have been an operator that toured that building once an hour; at first that they noticed that they were having troubles, they should’ve gotten water up there and covered it, as we talked about, just with a fire hose, if necessary, yesterday. So, they really need to work on the transparency, and I think that the Japanese government has got to ensure that that happens and [that] they’re transparent with the general public.

EM: Well, I think that’s especially important. Because if you’re not transparent, then there’s going to be all sorts of false information that’s circulating around, and you don’t want that, because you don’t want people either to under- or over-react to a situation. You want them to have the proper information so that they can make an informed decision. Wouldn’t you agree with that, Dad?

MM: I think if there’s someone like myself, that has, you know, a significant understanding of how these plants work and you’re having difficulty piecing together the different pieces of information that are available, then I don’t know how you would expect someone in the general public to be able to know what’s going on. So again, I think that there’s got to be more transparency and more communication relative to this event that’s occurring at the Fukushima Plant.

EM: Okay. So, this question actually is perhaps somewhat related to this, this concept of the media and somewhat transparency. I don’t know. I know that you’re not really on Facebook or Twitter or anything, but maybe you have some idea of what Twitter is, Dad. So Twitter is this- basically this sort of social media, short messaging site, where you can—

MM: I’m fully aware what Twitter is, I just—

EM: Okay, I don’t know, you don’t even have Facebook, so—


MM: I just don’t have the time everyday to Twitter, so—

EM: Okay. Well, anyway, there was a Twitter user, and he actually, I believe, is a nuclear engineer. And he went on Twitter, which is kind of interesting that we can do this now on Twitter. His username is “arclight,” and he actually went on Twitter, and he was giving people these short updates about what was happening at Fukushima and his perspective on it and trying to inform them a little bit about nuclear power and basically just give people information because a lot of people go to Twitter for information these days. And he actually was given a Cease and Desist order from his employer, which is presumably a nuclear power plant. And they actually said that he cannot continue with Twitter, or they would threaten to terminate his employment. And so he actually had to stop posting his updates, which I think was disappointing for the public, and for people who were relying on him for some information. And I can’t comment on the accuracy of the information, but he was trying and he was a nuclear engineer.

Do you have any comments on that? Do you think that if you were currently in nuclear power, if you weren’t retired from nuclear power, would you be able to conduct an interview such as this?

MM: Well, obviously I can’t comment on what may have, or may not have transpired there. I’ll just go back and say that there needs to be more information provided, more often about what’s happening at Fukushima. And I think that the Nuclear Industry Organizations, such as the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, need to also be more transparent and provide more updates on their websites as to what’s
happening.

EM: Okay. Thank you for commenting on that. Do you have any other comments about the current situation today in Fukushima?

MM: I basically told you everything that I can. I think that today has been one of the more difficult days to pull any information together. Ee do know that, either due to the event at Unit 2 or the event at Unit 4, there was a fairly significant release of radiation to the environment. And it caused the radiation levels at the plant to go up significantly. And, again, I can only rely on the reports that I saw, but the radiation levels within the plant were to the point where they evacuated most of the workers at the plant.

And they were also— I saw one report that the [radiation] levels spiked quite high at the site
boundary and then came down. And even after— a couple of hours after the events yesterday, they were around 240 millirems per hour.

EM: Can you explain what that means?

MM:  That’s about as much radiation as the average person would get in an entire year from just normal background sources.

EM: Okay, but to get that all at once, does that pose a health risk?

MM: Well, at that level, if you were there for an hour, it would not. The disconcerting fact would be if it stayed at that level and you were there for a longer period of time. The dosage is cumulative. So, after 4 hours, you would’ve received almost a thousand millirems. And after 20 hours, or less than a day, you would exceed the limit for a radiation worker in the US.


EM: For what time period? For a year?

MM: For a whole year.

EM: Okay, so that’s quite serious, because if those radiation levels continue to stay that high, if they actually are that high, then the workers can’t even get in there to really deal with the situation, is that correct?

MM: Right. I believe the radiation levels have come back down. The fact that they went up that high does indicate that there had to be a fairly significant event that occurred.

EM: All right, so now I’m going to be asking you some questions and I’ve actually—as I said yesterday, I’ve been really surprised at how many people are listening to these interviews. I hope that they’re helpful to people. If people have any feedback on them, please let us know. If you have questions, send them in.  So, I have been receiving lots of questions and comments from different places. So, if I miss your question, I’m sorry, send it again. But we’ll just do our best.

MM: And a comment from my side is I hope the information that we provide is helping people. We’re trying to do it in a neutral way, just trying to explain what’s happening to people. And I hope we’re able to answer your questions this morning.

EM: And I just want to say thank you so much, Dad, for doing this and taking the time to do this, and I feel very fortunate that I can call you up and I can get my questions answered. And rather than just have you answer my questions, I thought it would be great if you can answer other people’s questions as well.

So, let’s start in on this. So, one question that I had from a few people, particularly people who are living in Tokyo, is people, especially [people] who are foreigners, are wondering if it would be an overreaction to actually consider leaving Japan for a couple of days, to actually get out of the country, in case there is more of a problem with the nuclear power plant. Do you have some advice on that?

MM: So, if somebody was in Tokyo, I would not be too alarmed. After yesterday evening’s events— US time, that is; it was morning obviously in Japan— the radiation levels, according to the government, did go up in Tokyo, but not anything that would be of any concern whatsoever. They were just maybe double the normal background levels. And we do know that a few hours after these events of the radiation levels around the plant have dropped. And I would not be overly concerned to be as far away as Tokyo. Now, of course, if you were closer to the plant, it may be more of a concern, but I think the destruction of the infrastructure due to the tsunami is probably more significant than any, any threat of radiation today. Now, the caveat is the unclarity with respect to what’s happening to the spent fuel pool in Reactor 4. The big concern, obviously, there is if they’re not able to keep that covered and if that melts, then releases radiation to the environment, there’s no containment to keep that in.

EM: So, how far could that potentially spread, if that were to happen?

MM: That depends…

EM: Okay. But that could be a serious concern?

MM: …on the amount of radiation released. But this point in the game, there haven’t been radiation levels in Tokyo that would cause any alarm.

EM: And they have evacuated, as you said, or they’ve tried to evacuate—

MM: They’ve asked people to either shelter or evacuate at a distance of 30vkilometers from the plant.

EM: Right. And there are still a few people within that zone. I’m not sure if they’re forcing people to evacuate, but at least yesterday when I read one news report—so this is from the news— there were some people who were refusing to evacuate, so I don’t know if any of those people are listening to this, but please, please do evacuate if you are close to the plant and the Japanese government has requested it.

MM: I would follow the request of the authorities to either evacuate or shelter.

EM: Okay. Let’s continue. So another— I think we’ve sort of addressed the radiation levels— another reader was wondering, sort of how long Japan is going to still need to be worrying about this and the nuclear disaster. And, again, I think it depends on what’s actually happened. But as you mentioned yesterday, this is something that is not just going to be today or next week, this is something that’s going to be weeks and perhaps years to actually deal with this. How long do you think it’s going to take them to actually fully clean up and decommission and decontaminate everything?

MM: Well, to fully clean up and decommission and decontaminate the site, you’re talking years and years. I think what we’re more concerned about is how long until the situation is stable, and can we be assured that no more explosions or meltdowns— partial meltdowns or radiation leaks— are going to occur? And that’s a hard question to answer because if the radiation levels at the plant are such that they have to evacuate most of the workers, then until they can get that under control, they can’t even do any work.

EM: So, how do they do that? How do they bring radiation levels down when they cannot bring workers close to the plant?

MM: The way to do that is to make sure that the cores of these reactors are completely covered and to make sure that the spent fuel pools stay completely covered. Water  will cool; it’s also an excellent shield of radiation.

EM: So, they need to get water on these as quickly as possible?

MM: And so I think the most critical thing that they need to accomplish at these plants, beyond making sure that all of the fuel is covered by water and that all of the spent fuel is covered by water, is to try to restore power, so that they can begin to restore cooling and water flow to all of the 6 spent fuel pools[1] at this site. Because there’s 6 reactors, And obviously if they get power back, then they would be able to use more systems, which will help them control the situation at these plants.

EM: And they’ll have better monitoring equipment as well, so they’ll be able to have more warning when something’s going on, presumably. And, I mean, the good news is that Fukushima 2, as you said, is under control. Are they [Fukushima 2] operating? Is part of the problem here that there’s a power shortage— I mean, somehow, they must be able to get power to this Fukushima 1 site from a different power plant.

MM: As far as I can determine, the power that they have is from generators. I think that’s because of the damage to the electrical grid.

EM: Okay. All right, so I’m going to move on to another question. This one’s a little bit complicated, so hopefully my dad can help me interpret the question. So, a reader sent in something that he had read, and I’ll try to post the link up here, it’s from something called- it’s a commenter on something called “Next Big Future[2]”.

And the question was: “Someone cited a Sandia report, the GE BWR MK1 containment design has been estimated as having a potential 40% failure rate in the event of a full core meltdown. With pooling fuel having the capability to melt through the sides of the reactor containment walls.”
Can you, first of all, translate that question into English and [then] answer it?

MM: Okay. So, what he’s talking about is the Mark 1 Containment Design, which you posted the picture of on your website yesterday. And 5 of the 6 reactors at the Fukushima 1 site have a Mark 1 containment. Um, the first 5 units – 1 through 5. Six is a newer plant and has a little bit newer design. And what he’s saying is in the event of a full core melt that the core would melt through the reactor vessel and would have a 40% chance of melting through the containment structure, which in the case of this plant is a concrete and steel liner that surrounds the reactor. As long as they’re able to continue to get water into these reactor vessels, then that’s not going to happen. This would only happen in the event of not being able to get any water whatsoever into either the reactor vessel or the containment building.

EM: So, I guess a good point here is that although we should be reassured by the containment buildings, to a degree, they’re not magical boxes that contain all radioactivity. You do have to monitor the pressure in them, you do have to add water. There are some controls that are really important in making sure that those containments stay secure. Would you agree with what I just said, Dad?

MM: I agree. And, therefore, I go back to what I said a couple minutes ago that the priority needs to be on getting electrical power back to these units, so they can restore some of these systems that will allow them to better control what’s happening. I’m sure it’s a very difficult task, because the seawater, obviously, from the tsunami, flooded where the diesel generators were, which is also probably where a lot of electrical switch gear is. Seawater and electrical switch gear do not mix well. So, there’s probably a lot of work to restore the electrical switch gear and other things, but again, that would be, I think, a top priority, to try to get power back. You don’t need to repower the whole plant; you need to try to get it back to the most critical pumping systems.

EM: I see. Okay, moving on to the next question. This is actually a question that I’ve seen circulating around the internet, and someone did send this into me. They wanted to know if you could comment on the possible danger to US residents and if there’s any precautions that a reasonable person might take in the United States at this point.

MM: At this point in time, I don’t think there’s a concern, unless the situation gets worse. I think our biggest risk, based on what’s happened in the past 24 hours—and again, what we commented on yesterday— was making sure that the spent fuel pools stay covered at these site, so that would include the 6 spent fuel pools[3] at Fukushima 1 and also Fukushima 2. If they’re still struggling with electrical power there [at Fukushima 2], they would have the same issues with respect to cooling and water for the spent fuel pools there.

EM: Can you, can you give me an idea, Dad, because, I mean, my idea of one of these pools is kind of a giant swimming pool. How much water do you have to add to one of these pool— say, on an hourly basis, or a daily basis— to keep that [water] level at a good level to make sure that things are safe?

MM: So, that’s a good question. And the answer is: it’s going to depend. So, these reactors are refueled—and I don’t know the specifics of the refueling schedule at these particular plants— anywhere from every 12 months to every 24 months. So, depending on when it [the reactor] was last refueled will depend on how much heat generation there is in the spent fuel pool. So, for instance, at Unit 4, which was in an outage, they might have just recently removed the spent fuel from the reactor in the spent fuel pool, which means it’s still quite warm and generating quite a bit of heat. So, you could expect that, in that particular case, that you would have to provide more cooling to that spent fuel pool than you might for a reactor that, you know, last time it was refueled was 18 months ago, and the fuel has cooled way down already.

So, you can’t answer the question specifically, unless you know the specifics of when the last refueling was, how many fuel bundles were taken out of the reactor and put in the spent fuel pool, because they don’t replace all of the fuel all at the same time. They’ll replace approximately a third of the fuel every refueling outage. But depending on any other work that was going on, they might have been doing other work, either inspections or repairs to the reactor vessel. They might have taken all the fuel out, temporarily, from Unit 4, to do this work, and planned on putting two-thirds of it back, along with one-third of new fuel. So, without knowing the details, it’s hard to answer the question.

EM: I guess in over the past few days, we’ve [felt] sort of relieved that some of these plants were shut down for maintenance, but, actually, if there were a number of spent fuel rods in the pools, it sounds like that could actually be a problem and that may be what contributed to the fire.

MM: Well, [it would be a concern if there were] a large number of spent fuel modules that had recently been in the reactor. That  spent fuel [pool] could be full, but if all the fuel is 10 years old, it’s already pretty much cooled off. It’s really a function of how many of those fuel bundles were in the reactor most recently.

EM: Okay, I think that those are all the questions for today. Actually, Grandma had one question, but I’m about to run out of time, so I might have to call you back[4]; we’ll see if we make it. Grandma— my Grandma— wanted to know: Why do we build nuclear power plants next to the ocean? Is that necessary? Is that because we need, we need water? Can you answer that really quickly?

MM: So, as the steam goes through the turbine, it then needs to be cooled and turned back into water. You have three ways of doing that: either from a river or a lake, from an ocean, or from cooling towers. And in a lot of cases, power plants of all kinds— not just nuclear power plants— are built next to large bodies of water, because we need a lot of cooling to get the steam back into the water and pump it back into the boiler or the reactor, depending on the type of plant that it is. So, in this case, these plants were built along the coast. A lot of the nuclear power plants in Japan are built along the coast.

[1] As my dad discusses in subsequent interviews, there are actually 7 spent fuel pools at Fukushima 1: one for each reactor and also a large, common spent fuel pool.
[2] Look for this reference when going through past emails & comments.
[3] Again, there are actually 7 spent fuel pools at Fukushima 1.
[4] Originally, I used free recording software with a time limit. Shortly after this interview, a representative from Skype contacted me and generously gave me free recording software with no time limits.

3rd Interview with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

Picture of a Boiling Water Reactor Nuclear Power Plant like the Fukushima Plants.
My dad refers to this image in his interview.

Cross-posted on Skepchick.

Update: All the interviews are now available on a vimeo channel. Here’s the vimeo channel:

Update: Announcing Daily Updates from My Dad 

My dad refers to this article in today’s interview:

Here is a vimeo video of the interview:

Update: I have cleaned-up the original transcript.

Update: Thanks to Kirsten and Gregg for transcribing!

Interview 3: Monday Morning, March 14th, 2011
3 Days Since Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami

EM = Evelyn Mervine
MM = Mark Mervine
EM: Hello? Dad?

MM: Hello.

EM: Hello. Are you ready for Part III of our nuclear power interview?

MM: I am.

EM: Okay. Before I begin this interview, I just want to quickly say that this is the third in a series of interviews with my dad, who is a nuclear engineer. I encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to listen to Interviews 1 and 2, which can be found at my geology blog Georneys (georneys.blogspot.com) or they can be found on the Skepchick blog (skepchick.org). I’m not going to introduce my father again. If you want to see his qualifications, please look at the first interview— listen to it or read the transcript— but I’m actually just going to start off, and I guess I’ll start with asking you to maybe give us an update on what’s going on at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. There has been a second explosion, as I understand.

MM: So, let me give some good news first. The plant that we’ve all been focused on is the Fukushima 1 plant. There’s also a Fukushima 2 plant which is a few miles away which has 4 nuclear reactors. And the good news there is they’ve been able to completely cool down one of the reactors, and they’ve been able to restore normal cool-down to two others. So, the situation at that site has dramatically improved over the last 24 hours.

EM: Excellent. That’s very good news.

MM: Now, with respect to the Fukushima 1 site, the situation has gotten dramatically worse in the last 24 hours. So, as was seen in the news— and I’m sure people have seen the video or the photos— they had a similar explosion in Reactor 3 as to what they had in Reactor 1, due to the pressure that they were relieving from the containment, primary containment, into the secondary containment. As we explained yesterday, when the fuel cladding reaches 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, it will interact with water to form zirconium dioxide and H2O [water].

And the venting of the steam in order to reduce pressure in the reactor and in the containment obviously included enough hydrogen to set off an explosion which has destroyed the top of the Unit 3 reactor building.

EM: And the other thing that I read in the news— I don’t know if you can confirm this— is that that explosion actually damaged some of the cooling systems for another one of the reactors at Fukushima 1.

MM: Correct, and that’s where the situation has gotten dramatically worse, In Unit 2, which is adjacent really in between Units 1 and 3, they had been able to cool the reactor using their core isolation cooling system. Whether it was a result of the explosion in Unit 3 or just a coincidence of timing, shortly after that explosion, the core isolation cooling system failed for that unit, and they have been unable to maintain cooling or water levels in that unit. And it has been reported that the fuel in that unit has been exposed.

EM: Oh, it’s actually above the water level. And can you explain why that is bad?

MM: That’s bad because if you don’t have water to cool the fuel, it will heat up and start to melt.

EM: Now, from what I understand, they were actually using sort of one of their normal cooling systems for that Number 2 reactor?

MM: That’s correct, and they’ve now shifted to pumping seawater and boron into that reactor, but at the moment, according to the latest report I’ve seen, they are unable to do that because of the pressure buildup in the reactor and the valve that they need to open to relieve the pressure which would allow them to pump more water in there has failed.

EM: Yes. That doesn’t sound very good.

MM: They’re in a situation where the pressure needs to be relieved, and to explain a little bit, the pump that they would be using to pump the seawater in is a low pressure pump. So the pressure in the reactor has to be below the output pressure that that pump can produce in order for the water to flow.

If the pressure in the reactor is higher, then obviously you can’t pump water into the reactor. So, they need to relieve that pressure. And again, the latest news report that I just saw indicated that they’re having problems relieving the pressure in the reactor.

EM: So, I have two questions for you related to that. The first one is, if they are unable to get seawater in there—I know that, fortunately, in the explosions that have happened, the containment has, has stayed intact for the other two plants, which is very good because it means that there shouldn’t be a large radiation leak. In this case, with Reactor Number 2, is there any danger that if there is an explosion this might be different? That this actually might affect the containment? Or should that containment remain intact?

MM: They need to reduce the pressure in the reactor and in the containment in order to prevent damaging that primary containment structure.

EM: So, there is a risk— a potential risk— that that primary containment could be damaged?

MM: Correct.

EM: In your opinion?

MM: Normally there is a pump that would spray water into the containment that would reduce the temperature and pressure.  But those have not been available since about an hour after the earthquake. So, they need to be able to open these valves and release the pressure as they did in Units 1 and 3, and I’m sure they are furiously working on that as, as we speak.

EM: And so if that primary containment is breached, then the situation could become much more serious, in your opinion?

MM: It could, but at this point in the game, let us hope that they are successful in reducing the pressure and that we don’t have to go down that path as to what could happen.

EM: Okay. A follow-up question that I have for you, related to the same thing, is we’ve been seeing in the news that they’ve been pumping boron and seawater into Reactors 1 and 2, and clearly that didn’t work perfectly because there were explosions in these auxiliary buildings. The containment did stay intact, so that was good, but there were these explosions so clearly that strategy isn’t working perfectly. Can you comment on maybe why that we are having these explosions, why we had the explosion at Number 2 even though they were trying to provide the seawater and boron?

MM: Okay. So to clarify, the explosions have occurred at Units 1 and 3.

EM: Sorry. That was my error.

MM: Not Unit 2. And also they have been pumping seawater into all three of those units. And the seawater is working. What I explained yesterday is if the fuel gets partially uncovered, it’s going to heat up, and when it reaches 2200 degrees, it’ll interact with water to form zirconium and hydrogen. When they release the pressure— and they’ve got to keep the pressure down in order for these pumps to have enough pressure to pump water into the reactor.

So, when they relieve that pressure, which is primarily steam, they’re also releasing some hydrogen, and if there’s enough hydrogen, then the hydrogen will interact with oxygen in the secondary containment building and cause the explosion that we’ve seen in Units 1 and 3.

EM: I see. Do you have any other comments on the current situation?

MM: I do. I sent you a picture earlier this morning that I was hoping you would post instead of another picture of me.

EM: Sure.

MM: For two reasons. I wanted to clarify something that I said in the previous interview [note: in Interviews 1 and 2] where I referred to the building that exploded as the auxiliary building. Not technically correct. It would be correct in a typical pressurized water reactor and also a newer generation boiling water reactor. But in these, these generation boiling water reactors they have a Mark 1 containment structure. And, in fact, the reactor building and the auxiliary building are all combined into one. The correct term with respect to the buildings that have exploded are the “reactor buildings.”

EM: Okay.

MM: And the picture shows kind of the cut-away design of that building. The other reason I wanted to have that picture to talk about is something that really hasn’t been talked about too much in the press. While the containment buildings have held, we also need to keep in mind that outside of the primary containment building— and the secondary containment or reactor building which has been seriously damaged in both Units 1 and 3— is the spent fuel storage pool, where the fuel that had previously been in the reactor has been taken out and is stored longer term until it completely cools. So, one of the considerations that they have is that the heat exchangers and the pumps for the spent fuel pooling cool, pool, excuse me, [spent fuel cooling pool] probably have also not had any power for a significant period of time and could have been damaged in this explosion. And they’re going to have to take steps to make sure that they maintain water in those pools, in these buildings that are now exposed to the environment.

EM: Do you think that they should be providing fresh water to those pools? I know that they’ve been putting seawater into the reactors, and, and from what I’ve heard from you and from what I’ve heard on the news, that’s actually not a very good option because seawater and boron are corrosive. And basically they’re sort of giving up on those plants and saying, “Okay, we’re just trying to keep this from being a nuclear disaster. We’re not actually going to reopen these, these plants. We’re going to have to decommission them.” But in the case of, of a pool where you have long-term storage of nuclear fuel, would it be a problem to add seawater? Would that cause problems later on?

MM: So, the good news is the pools are fairly deep, and they have quite a bit of water over the top of, of the fuel. And it will take some period of time for— assuming the pool is not damaged— for that water to evaporate or boil away.

So, they have a lot more time, probably, than they do given the current situation with, with Unit 2. But at some point they’ll need to make sure that they do keep that covered. And if there is no freshwater, then they should absolutely use saltwater because water does two things: It helps cool the fuel; It also provides shielding against radiation. It’s not ideal to use saltwater, but if there is no other water, then that’s what they should use.

EM: If they do use saltwater— I mean, these pools from what I understand, they need to have the fuel sitting in them for quite a long time, and, I guess, that’s one of the big problems with nuclear power is what do you do with the spent fuel rods? So what sort of problems might this entail, not just tomorrow or next week, but sort of ten, twenty years in the future for those spent fuel rods? Should there be a problem if they add seawater or no?

MM: I think it’s going to, uh, I think it’s going to depend on the amount of water that’s added and the time before power is restored. Once power is restored and normal cooling and filtration systems can be restored, then they would be able to clean up the water in those pools and get the salinity out of them.

EM: Okay, so it doesn’t sound like that should be a major problem as long as the explosions are not damaging the pools themselves in any way.

MM: It’s a problem, but not, not an immediate problem.

EM: Okay. All right, now I’m going to ask some questions that have been sent in by email or by comments by some people who listened to the first two interviews. And please do continue to send in these comments and questions that you have. I am a graduate student with other obligations, and my dad also has a full-time job, so we may not be able to answer every question, but we will certainly do our best. So, to start off with, the first question was someone wanted me to ask my dad about the contamination that’s being reported by the U.S. Navy, and he wanted to know sort of how far away that is from the plant and he heard something about U.S. Navy sailors requiring some kind of decontamination. Can you speak about that? Do you know anything about that?

MM: No, I don’t know any direct details, only what I’ve seen in the news. And my understanding was that there were some military personnel that had gone inland on a helicopter, and when they returned to the Ronald Reagan [their ship] they were able to detect some radioactive contamination on those folks, and they had to be decontaminated.

EM: Okay. And do you think that— I mean that probably wasn’t any kind of major contamination because, as we’ve discussed the containment units for Fukishima number 1 and 3—although there have been explosions in this outside building, the containment has stayed intact, so there shouldn’t be any kind of major radiation, so this is probably a more minor radiation…

MM: Correct.

EM: …in your opinion or… okay.  I just wanted to confirm that; so it’s nothing we should panic about yet, but it is there, and it is a situation that Navy did have to deal with.


MM: So, as we talked about yesterday, that’s one of the indications that to me that they actually have a partial fuel failure in those reactors because of the fact that they were able to detect Cesium and Iodine in the environment. The levels, relatively speaking, will be low. These personnel have been decontaminated, and they should be fine. And the amount of contamination that can be expected probably is a lot dependent on the direction of the winds. Up until now, I think they’ve been relatively lucky that most of the winds have carried the exhaust from the plant out over the ocean. But there will be some found inland, no doubt.

EM: So, clearly the U.S. Navy is testing for this and they’re able to detect this contamination. I don’t know if you can comment on this; I don’t really know anything about it personally. I imagine there must be other people— civilians—who are affected by this as well, and hopefully the Japanese government is making an effort to actually detect that sort of contamination as well.

MM: They are. They’re constantly monitoring, and that’s why they’ve evacuated people in a radius around the plant of 20 kilometers.

EM: Excellent. Okay, a second question that I have was—well, there’s a lot of people who’ve been saying—actually I’ve gotten this from more than one listener—that they want to hear about your worst-case scenario. I don’t know if you want to discuss that; maybe that’s a bit premature?

MM: It’s really hard to speak to what a worst-case scenario would be. I think you mentioned it just in the last part of this interview that the worst-case scenario would be for one of the primary containment structures to fail.

EM: In that case, would we have more… I mean again it’s [crosstalk]

MM: Yeah, I’m sorry. If one of the primary containment structures was to fail then we would have a lot more radiation released to the environment.

As long as they’re able to maintain some water in the reactor vessels and in the containment area, then eventually the fuel that’s in there will cool, but any of the fuel that’s overheated can potentially blister or fail or even melt; and the more that that happens combined if a containment unit was to fail would cause a lot more release of radiation to the environment.

EM: Okay. So a last question that a listener sent in is there has been a study and I’ll post a link[1] to this—I guess it’s not really a study, it’s some thoughts from an MIT scientist who’s an engineer and whose dad worked quite a bit in nuclear power. There’s an article, and it’s been circulating around the internet, and some people asked me what your opinion was on this article, and I wonder if you can just comment on that.

MM: Yeah, I took a look at it and I think there’s a lot of good information there.I think he does a good job of—like we try to do—explain what’s going on.

It’s very difficult, I think, for a member of the public to understand what’s going on because the information is just scattered about in little pieces here or there or, you know, you’re only able to get a sound bite off of the television. So, if there’s somebody that’s really interested [in Fukushima and nuclear power], I would encourage them to go ahead and read that and, I think, combined with these interviews, [it] provides a pretty good picture.

EM: Okay. Thank you so much, Dad! That’s all for today and again, as I said, we both have other obligations so we may not do these interviews every day, but perhaps in a few days we can do a follow-up interview on the situation. And again please do send in any questions that you have. My dad seems happy to answer them. So, thanks, Dad.

MM: Okay, you’re welcome.

EM: Okay, bye.

[1] The MIT scientist is Josef Oehmen, who wrote a letter titled “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors”  to reassure his friends and family about Fukushima. The letter was intended for friends and family only, but went viral on the internet when a relative of Oehmen’s posted it on a blog. While the letter at first received much praise, particularly from pro-nuclear advocates, as the situation at the Fukushima reactors worsened, Oehmen and his letter were severely criticized. There were some errors in the original letter, which was moved to a site hosted by MIT, which was tried to carry out damage control.  Oehmen was also criticized for his background as he is not a nuclear scientist
Here are some relevant websites:
-Original blog website hosting Oehmen’s letter:
http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/
-MIT site hosting a corrected version of Oehmen’s letter:
http://mitnse.com/
-Joseph Oehmen’s website:
http://oehmen.mit.edu/
-Articles on the Oehmen fiasco:
New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20266-how-josef-oehmens-advice-on-fukushima-went-viral.html
Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/15/josef_oehmen_nuclear_not_worried_viral
Genius Now:
http://geniusnow.com/2011/03/15/the-strange-case-of-josef-oehmen/

2nd Interview with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

A recent photo of my Dad and one of his favorite trains– he is a high speed train buff.

Update: All the interviews are now available on a vimeo channel. Here’s the vimeo channel:

Update: Announcing Daily Updates from my Dad

Here is the audio file for today’s interview:

Here is a vimeo video of the interview:

Update: I have cleaned-up the original transcript.

Update: There is now a transcript for after the jump. Thank you, Chris!

Interview 2: Sunday Morning, March 13th, 2011
2 Days Since Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami
EM = Evelyn Mervine
MM = Mark Mervine
MM: Good morning.
EM: How are you, dad?
MM: Okay.
EM: Good. Are you ready for a second interview?
MM: I am.

EM:  Okay. Before we start on today’s interview, I just want to thank everyone who listened to yesterday’s interview. My dad and I are really happy that we could provide you with some basic information about nuclear power and also some specific information about the nuclear disaster in Japan. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to listen to yesterday’s interview. You can find it— with a full transcript— at my geology blog Georneys (georneys.blogspot.com) or you can find it on the Skepchick blog (skepchick.org). The purpose of today’s interview is for my dad to give an update on the situation in Japan, and also to answer some additional questions, including some questions that were sent in by people who listened to the first interview.

So, just to start off with, dad, could you just introduce yourself again, and very briefly describe some of your background in nuclear power. And I just want to mention that if you want to get a full description of my dad’s backgrounds, please listen to the interview from yesterday.

MM: Good morning. I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981 and worked in the Navy nuclear power program. I worked at two different Navy nuclear power plants and was an instructor in the program. After seven years of active duty, I went into the Reserves and initially went to work for Wisconsin Electric, which at the time owned the point Beach Nuclear Plant, which is a Westinghouse two-unit plant in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. And after a few years there I went to work at Vermont Yankee, which is a boiling water reactor in Vernon, Vermont.

EM: Excellent. I think that’s enough for today. So, to start off with, could you please give us an update about what’s happening at the Fukushima nuclear power plant since you talked to us yesterday?

MM: Okay. Well, again, I have to rely on news, just like everyone else, either from reports from the internet, TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company], their website, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and, of course, television. And what I’m able to piece together— I’m kind of doing an analysis of all the different reports— is, as we talked about yesterday, we have a serious problem at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, Unit 1. And in taking some time to reflect on all the different reports after our conversation yesterday, it’s pretty clear that we’ve had a partial failure of the fuel rods in that reactor. And let me explain a little bit. So, as most everybody knows from the news now, there was an explosion at that plant yesterday, which destroyed the building surrounding the reactor, which is typically known as the auxiliary building[1]. What they were doing was they were venting pressure from the reactor into that building. And that steam also contained a mixture of hydrogen, which— when it interacted with the oxygen in the atmosphere— exploded.

Where would the hydrogen come from? Well, the fuel rods are – the fuel pellets, I should say— are encased in fuel rods which are made of zirconium. And zirconium, when it gets to approximately 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, will interact with water, or H2O, to form zirconium dioxide, and hydrogen is released. So, in order for there to be a significant amount of hydrogen, it’s pretty clear that at least a portion of the fuel had reached 2200 degrees, and we have zirconium oxide being formed and hydrogen being released.

 

Also, it has been reported that in the environment they’re able to detect cesium and iodine. Yesterday, I mentioned that when uranium fissions, it breaks apart into smaller elements and releases energy. A couple of the smaller elements that are formed are cesium and iodine. Normally, those would stay within the fuel rod, and the only way they would get out is if there was a failure of a fuel rod. That doesn’t mean that there was a complete failure, but— in conjunction with all the other things we know, the radiation readings, the fact that there’s cesium and iodine in the environment, the fact that we had hydrogen released— does indicate that we’ve got at least some fuel failure in that reactor.EM: So, does that mean that we’re in a meltdown situation? And, if so, can you please explain what a nuclear meltdown is?

MM: So, a meltdown, as it typically would be referred to, would be a complete meltdown of the reactor core. That’s probably not happening. In order for there to be hydrogen generated, then there was obviously some water. We know that they’ve been injecting seawater mixed with boron into that plant. So, there’s some water in there, and I would agree with most folks that a complete meltdown is probably not likely at this point. But again, it does appear that probably the upper part of the fuel was exposed, and some damage has occurred. And the release of iodine and cesium to the environment from those fuel rods has occurred.

EM: So yesterday we were mostly talking about the Fukushima Plant Number 1. And the news reports seem to be saying today that there are some additional reactors that are in trouble at Fukushima and perhaps other places. Do you have an update on that?

MM: So, if you recall yesterday, there are six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima 1 Site. Three of them were shut down for normal maintenance and had already cooled down substantially and are not an issue. Units 1, 2, and 3 were operating at the time of the earthquake and shut down automatically. What’s occurred in the last 24 hours is: at Unit 3, which is a newer plant and slightly larger than Unit 1, they have lost the normal shutdown cooling and emergency cooling systems, and they are also attempting to inject fire water [water sprayed from fire trucks], which I assume is seawater, and boron into that reactor as well. They are also saying that they’re going to need to or are venting pressure from that reactor, so again it does appear basically a very similar scenario to Unit 1, where they are going to be releasing steam. They probably had a partial uncover of that core [at Unit 3], and there probably is some fuel damage from that reactor [Unit 3] as well.

EM: Okay. But have they made progress, have they managed to get battery power and generators in there? It sounds like if they’re able to have some kind of cooling system, they’ve done that.

MM: It does sound like, even at the time that we spoke yesterday, that they had gotten power. The updates that I’ve seen indicate that they do have power at those sites, and that’s what they’re obviously using to pump the seawater and the boron into both of those reactors.

EM: Excellent. Another question I have for you is: yesterday there were reports that people were actually testing positive for radiation, and in the news I think there were people both over- and under-reacting to that. Can you give your perspective on that?

MM: So, it wasn’t 100% clear how many people, or whether these were workers from the plant or members of the public. Because they are releasing some radiation, even if there was no fuel failure, when they’re venting this steam from these reactors, there would be some small amounts of radioactivity. So, it would be possible for a worker from the plant to pick up some radioactive contamination from these particles. And of course they travel up into the atmosphere. They said generally the prevailing winds were taking it out over the ocean, but there may have been some members of the public before the evacuation that were in close proximity to the plant that may have had some of these particles fall on them from the atmosphere.

EM: Do you think that poses serious [radiation] exposure? I mean, there were some experts they were interviewing that said that it wasn’t really very bad, the level of exposure so far, do you think there could be any health problems from the exposure that’s happened?

MM: Hopefully not. Again, it’s very difficult to get exact details of what’s happening and what the actual readings are. But we know that the Japanese government has evacuated people approximately 20 kilometers from the plant. So, I would say that the concern for major health risk— assuming that the conditions at these reactors don’t get any worse— is probably very, very minimal.

EM: And presumably the people who are actually working there are wearing some kind of safety gear so that they’re minimizing their exposure?

MM: That would be correct.

EM: And also they were distributing iodine tablets to people as a precaution to help with radiation exposure, so hopefully that will reduce the exposure level as well, and I guess the cancer response to that level.

MM: So, let me explain that. So your thyroid will absorb iodine, and the purpose of the tablets is that you take those, and then your thiodine— I’m sorry— your thyroid absorbs that iodine. And then if there is radioactive iodine in the atmosphere from the nuclear power plant, if you’ve already taken the tablet, your thyroid has absorbed as much iodine as it can, and it won’t absorb the radioactive iodine. And that’s important because your thyroid is one of your more active glands, and if you can prevent that from absorbing any radioactive iodine that’s a real help in a situation like this.

EM: Excellent. So, the last question I want to ask you is something that I know you mentioned to me personally, is that many of the nuclear officials who are reporting on the nuclear disaster in Japan are using this so-called “safe language” when describing the disaster, and this is one of the keys to you that this situation might be more serious than at first they were revealing. What do you think this means? And also, you’re not currently in the nuclear power industry. Do you think that this enables you to speak a little more frankly about the situation?

MM: It’s really hard to determine whether information is being withheld or not. First off, in the media, I’ve just been kind of appalled at some of the reporting that I’ve seen.

EM: Me, too.

MM: I won’t mention the person or the network, but on a major news network, a so-called expert, who I watched last night, when was asked about the cesium, said cesium was used to control the reactor. Well, cesium is not used to control the reactor. Control rods are used to control the reactor. As I explained yesterday, boron can be injected to control the reactor. But cesium is a radioactive byproduct of uranium fissioning, and normally should not be in the reactor, or— I should say— not be in the reactor water; it should obviously be in the reactor fuel rods.

EM: It should not be in the atmosphere as well!

MM: It should not be in the atmosphere, but it’s not used to control the reactor. The other thing that was appalling to me was the pictures posted on the website of this news organization and shown on TV were of a pressurized water reactor, and this [Fukushima 1] was a boiling water reactor.

EM: Hah! That’s not even the right type of plant.

MM: Right. They’re similar, but they’re different, and if you’re going to be a quote “expert,” you need to get it right. Now with respect to public announcements, I think the biggest thing that I’ve seen is, they have this currently rated as a Category 4, which is one level below Three Mile Island. In my opinion, if we’ve got a partial core melt, and all— any, I think, engineer or scientist given all of the data that’s available, even as limited as it is, would conclude that here has been at least a partial core failure— then clearly this is in my opinion not less than Three Mile Island, it’s at least equal to. And the fact that we have multiple units at the same site involved, I would think really this is worse.

EM: Well, that’s good to know. Because people have been looking at that number and feeling relieved by it, but I think it’s too soon to really feel relief in this situation. They really need to get things under control.

MM: And I think the other thing to point out is, this is not something that’s going to go away tomorrow. This is going to be something for days. They’re going to— even if they’re able to get a significant amount of water in those containment buildings, it’s going to take days for these reactors to cool down.

EM: I wanted to ask you some questions that people had sent me either in comments or by email when I posted this interview yesterday. I was actually quite surprised at how many people listened to the first interview, and I’m very happy that we’re able to address some of their questions.

So, the first question I had from a reader was basically asking about the power, and they asked: “If the nuclear power plant is still generating steam after a shutdown, I assume that the steam is still turning the turbines. So why can’t or don’t they use the electricity that they’re generating to power the cooling pumps that they need?”

MM: Okay. Well, that’s a very good question. So, the turbines on these power plants are very large. And once the steam goes through these turbines, it goes into a condensing system, where water from a cooling tower or river or the ocean, which is much cooler, condenses the steam back into water, and then it’s pumped from there back into the reactor. So a couple things: first off, we had an automatic shutdown of the reactor and the control rods were inserted. So the heat that we’re talking about removing is not the full power heat. It’s the residual heat. Which is very substantial but not at the same level that’s required to turn the turbine.

The second thing is that since we don’t have any power, we don’t have any of the cool water to cool the steam, we don’t have any pumps to pump the water back into the reactor. So it would not be possible, in the situation that they were in, to continue generating electricity. The plant was shut down, there was no power, that wasn’t a possibility. There is an emergency system where they can use some of the steam from the reactor to turn a pump, so it’s a steam driven pump to pump water into the reactor, but that apparently failed.

EM: Okay. Well that’s good to know. And then a second reader actually had three questions. So I’ll ask those three questions. The first thing that he said is: “Your father mentioned the best-case scenario. What would he see as the worst case scenario? For example, could radioactivity possibly spread to Tokyo or even beyond Japan’s shores, to other parts of Asia?” or the Pacific, I guess.

MM: Okay, as far as a worst case scenario, as long as they’re able to continue to pump water and boron into these containment buildings and as long as they’re able to release the pressure in the containment buildings in small amounts then there should not be a lot of radiation released. With that being said, the radiation is going to go up into the atmosphere, and depending on which way the winds are blowing, it may be detectable as far away as Tokyo or other places. But the farther away you go, the more it’s going to disperse, and the levels will be much lower and again as long as the situation doesn’t get any worse, I would not expect any concern except for in the immediate vicinity of the plant.

EM: Okay, that’s excellent to know. The second question that this reader had is: “If your father were asked to advise on US energy policy, would he recommend that we continue building nuclear reactors?”MM: That’s a good question. [Long pause] When we design nuclear reactors, and we design the safety systems for nuclear reactors, we calculate the probability of reactor accidents of the types that we’re seeing in Japan. And the systems have to be designed in such a way that that probability is extremely low. Clearly, what’s transpired here in Japan was beyond what was taken into account in design of the plants. And I think it has to be looked at— because if the probability of failure of a reactor is, you know, one in a million or one in a billion, the fact that we now have two, at the same time, at the same facility, probably calls some of those calculations into question. With that being said, these reactors are relatively old. The Unit 1 reactor is actually 40 years old. And the designs for nuclear power plants have been improved dramatically over the last 40 years, and the next generation that would probably be built [would] have a lot more passive safety systems that don’t require electricity and don’t require pumps.

EM: Isn’t that a problem in the US, for instance, that so many of our nuclear power plants are aging? And partly that’s maybe because of a fear of nuclear power— there hasn’t been a lot of motivation to build new ones— and so we’re relying on these older plants when really maybe we should have newer technology?

MM: Well, again, you know, I think you have to look at certain situations individually. What we had here was an 8.9 magnitude earthquake [later upgraded to 9.0 magnitude], which apparently the plants withstood and safety systems functioned correctly, the diesel generators came on, and everything was working as it should. Then we had a tsunami of anywhere from 20 to 30 foot waves. And the thing I think that has to be looked at is: is that possible for other power plants in the world, that if there was an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami, are any of those plants at risk?

EM: Okay. Well, even basic things. I mean, I’m not sure where the generators were located, but in a tsunami situation perhaps those should be located higher up on the building and not at ground level. Things like that maybe they could take into consideration when reviewing power plants that are located close to the ocean.

MM: Correct.

EM: All right, so a final question that we have is also from the same reader, Patrick: “Just out of curiosity, would nuclear reactors in US submarines have similar safety measures to the Fukushima plant in order to keep a core reactor from meltdown? Are there on a submarine additional power sources, some sort of containment unit, things like that?”

MM: All right. Well, I’m not going to be able to comment on the design of Navy nuclear reactors. The design of Navy nuclear reactors is classified. Let me just say that they are a different design than commercial nuclear power plants, and the Navy has never had a nuclear accident in all the years that they’ve been operating nuclear power plants. But the design I cannot speak to because it’s classified.

Q: All right. Thank  you very much, Dad, I think that’s all for today.

A: You’re welcome.

Q: Okay, I’ll talk to you later, bye.

[1] Actually, this building is called the “reactor building.” See Interview 3 for the correction and explanation.

Full Transcript Now Available for Interview with my Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Japan Nuclear Disaster

I just wanted to post quickly that thanks to two kind and hard-working readers, there is now a full transcript for my interview with my dad, Commander Mark L. Mervine, US Navy, about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.

The transcript can be found here:
A Conversation with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

I asked my dad if I could interview him later this week as more information about the nuclear disaster becomes available. He said he would be happy to be interviewed again. If you have any specific questions, please post them below and he will try to answer them.

And, just because I can, below is another adorable picture of my dad & me when I was a child. I’ve asked my mom to send some more recent pics of my dad & me as I don’t have any on my computer for some reason. The picture below was taken when I visited Scotland, where my dad was working on nuclear submarines.

My dad & I, circa 1987 or so.

A Conversation with My Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan

My dad and I, circa 1984.

Update: All the interviews are now available on a vimeo channel. Here’s the vimeo channel:

Update: Audio 1 is now corrected so that I sound much better (less high pitched). Thank you to Michael, a professional who volunteered his time to improve the audio.

Update: Announcing Daily Updates from my Dad

My dad does not usually swear. He’s usually a reserved man of few words. When my dad starts swearing and talking on and on about something, you know that he’s upset. All day yesterday, my dad kept saying “Ohhhh s&*t” when he heard the news about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant being hit by an earthquake and then a tsunami.When I interviewed my dad earlier today, he had much to say.

My dad- Commander Mark L. Mervine, USNR (Ret.)– is a nuclear expert who has worked on both nuclear submarines and nuclear power plants. I wanted to find out why my dad is so concerned about the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, so I called him up just a few minutes ago and recorded the call. I asked my dad all of the questions I had about the nuclear disaster. I hope this phone interview answers some of the questions you have. If you are at all concerned about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, you MUST listen to this conversation.

Here is the audio recording:

Interview with My dad
Here is a vimeo video of the interview:
http://vimeo.com/21186538

 

Update: I have cleaned-up the original transcript.

Update: Transcription after the jump! Thanks to Ashlyn and Jesse who transcribed.

Interview 1: Saturday Morning, March 12th, 2011
1 Day Since Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami
EM  = Evelyn Mervine

MM = Mark Mervine

EM: Are you ready for the interview?

MM: I’m ready.

EM: All right.  I was hoping that we could start out— I know who you are, since you’re my dad— but if you could just introduce yourself quickly and describe some of your background in nuclear power.

MM: Sure, my name is Mark Mervine. I graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1981 and went into the Navy nuclear power program. I was in submarines, and while I was in the Navy I qualified on two different types of Navy nuclear power plants and served as an instructor in the  Navy nuclear power program.

EM: Okay, and then after you got out of the Navy?

EM: After seven years of active duty, I went into the Reserves, and I stayed in the Reserves, and I retired as a Commander in the Navy Reserves.  I went to work, initially, for Wisconsin Electric, which at that time had a 2-unit Westinghouse pressurized-water reactor in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.  While I was there, I completed my SRO [Senior Reactor Operator] certification, which allowed me to do senior review and oversight as a member of the plant management staff.  And I also qualified and served as a shift technical advisor, which is a position that was added in the nuclear power industry after Three Mile Island that is a degreed engineer position, that’s available to the on-shift crew on a 24-hour basis.  Some plants do it on an 8 hour watch. At that time, Wisconsin Electric did it on a 24 hour watch, so I would actually stay at the  plant for 24 hours. We had a place where we could sleep, and my job was to advise the crew whenever they needed advice on what was happening with the plant.

After a few years at Wisconsin Electric, I went to work for Vermont Yankee, where I also completed the SRO certification, Senior Reactor [Operator] Certification, which allowed me to do senior level reviews as a member of the plant management staff, and I also served on the Outside Review Committee, which is a very high-level committee for the Maine Yankee Nuclear Plant, until it closed, and also Vermont Yankee.

EM: Excellent. So, you’re qualified to talk a little bit about nuclear power, it sounds like.

MM: I can talk a little about nuclear power, yes.

EM: Okay, excellent. So, my first question for you is really basic— since maybe people are not familiar with this— but what, can you just describe quickly, what is a nuclear power plant?

MM: Yes, I can. Maybe what I should do first is explain what a power plant is.

EM: Sure.

MM: The vast majority of power plants in the world generate steam, by some method: some by burning oil, some by burning coal, and [they] heat up water, and make steam, that steam then powers a turbine, and attached to the turbine, you have a generator, and that generator generates electricity, and through transformers is connected to the electrical power grid.

So, in that respect, a nuclear power plant is a lot like other power  plants, in that you have this turbine, that’s steam driven, with a  generator, that’s attached to a transformer and then to the grid. The difference is, what a nuclear power plant does, is it generates,  depending on the type of the plant, hot water or steam, by the fissioning of uranium.

EM: Right. And that’s providing the power, basically.

MM: So, there are two major types of nuclear power plants in the Western world. One is a pressurized water reactor where the water’s kept at high pressure and doesn’t boil, and there’s a heat exchanger, and on the other side of the heat exchanger, that water is allowed to boil, which generates the steam. And then you have a boiling water reactor, where the water in the reactor actually boils and generates steam directly, and that steam is used to power the turbine.

EM: So, another question I have for you, is one of the main problems they’re having in Japan is that they’re not able to cool the power plant. So, can you explain why a nuclear power plant needs to be cooled?

MM: Absolutely. So, what happens in a nuclear power plant is the atoms fission or split in half, and that generates heat.  There’s also other materials that are created—I don’t want to get into too much detail and confuse people— that continue to decay and that also generate heat. So, for some period of time after you shut down a nuclear power plant you have to continue to cool the reactor core. Because you’re still— I mean, to begin with, it was very warm because you were generating either hot water under a lot of pressure or steam and it needs to be cooled, obviously, down and because of the decay of these materials in the fuel— they also continue to generate heat for some period of time until the decay trails off.

EM: So, they’ve actually shut down the plant in Japan, is what you’re saying, and they’re just trying to cool it?

MM: Okay, well if you’re talking specifics, the plant that we’re aware of that is in the most difficulty right now is the Fukushima Plant, Unit  One. That plant is a General Electric boiling water reactor. It first achieved criticality in 1970. It’s similar to a couple of other plants that we have here in New England. It’s very similar to Pilgrim, which is down in Massachusetts, and Vermont Yankee, in Vermont.

And, that plant was automatically shut down, when the earthquake occurred, and for about the first hour, they were running on their diesel generator. Once a plant shuts down, it has two ways to get electricity, one [way] is from the grid, and another [way] is from emergency diesel generators that they have on site. In this case, because of the magnitude of the earthquake, the grid basically went dark, so they were operating on their diesel generators, and everything was functioning as it should be. But then, based on news reports, about an hour after the  earthquake and the shutdown, the tsunami hit, and flooded the plant, where the diesel generators were, and that caused them to lose their diesel generator power and reduced them to their emergency battery backup power only.

EM: And that wasn’t quite enough to have the cooling capability that they needed?

MM: The emergency backup on the batteries gives them, you know, very, very limited capabilities, so they were having a very difficult time keeping the plant cool.

EM: Do they sort of have to go to a smaller cooling system, smaller pumps and that sort of thing, that can be run off the battery? Not their normal cooling system?

MM: I don’t know the specifics of that plant and what they might have done in Japan. Obviously, Japan— being in an earthquake zone— probably had additional requirements for the plant that we wouldn’t have to have in other places around the world. But, in any event, based on news reports, they did have some type of cooling capability using their battery power. The problem, of course, is the batteries are only good for a few hours.

EM: And the news reports said that the Japanese military was actually trying to get in replacement batteries to cool the plant, I’m sure they’ve continued that effort, but I haven’t heard any update on that in the news.

 

MM: So, the reports that I saw on the news said exactly that: they were trying to supply the plant with additional batteries and a portable diesel generator.

EM: Right. I hope they’re successful soon. So, how are nuclear power plants in general built to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis? You maybe don’t know about this, since you worked on power plants that are in more tectonically stable regions, but are there some specific requirements for natural disasters?

MM: There are, and, depending on what the worst case scenario would be anticipated for an earthquake, the requirements are different. So, probably the best example I could give is: I once participated in an inspection of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, which was in Oregon. That plant has been shut down now, but compared to the plants that I had worked in Wisconsin and in Vermont they had a lot more requirements on them for earthquake protection. So, the way you do that is there is a lot more supports for all the equipment, all kinds of hydraulic dampers which allow the equipment to move back and forth without breaking. I know in Japan they have a requirement that all the plants have to be built on bedrock, so, they actually have to go down to bedrock in order to begin to build the supports of the plant. So, yeah, there’s numerous precautions that are taken and, like I said, there were probably additional backup system requirements that were required by the Japanese government for those plants, being in an earthquake zone.

EM: But this was just such an enormous earthquake. I don’t  think they’ve [the US Geological Survey and other geology organizations] released the official report yet, but this is probably in the top five biggest earthquakes[1]. So even if they prepared for the absolute worst, this is something that really stressed all of their systems and backups, I imagine.

MM: Well, I think really the key here was not so much the earthquake. By all reports, the plants functioned exactly as they were supposed to do in the earthquake: they shut down automatically, when the grid was lost their diesel generators started, and everything was fine. What really put us in the situation we’re in now was the tsunami as a result of the earthquake, but not the earthquake itself.

EM: So, what happened with the explosion that occurred earlier today? Do you know anything about that?

MM: Well, I can only comment on what I’ve read in news reports and a little bit of speculation based on my knowledge of how nuclear power plants work.

So, again, in this case, this is a boiling water reactor. So, when it’s operating, normally the reactor is full of water to a certain point, and then above that, steam. So, the core is kept covered in water, but above that steam is generated, and that steam goes through pipes, normally, and turns the turbine, and then is cooled and returned back to the reactor.

Because they’re on a very limited backup capability, only to get,  probably, a small percentage of the water that they would normally be able to pump into the reactor to cool it, they were probably allowing the water to boil, which you wouldn’t do normally during a shut down.  But by allowing the water to boil, you’re taking heat away from the reactor and thereby cooling it.

Because of the lack of power, they wouldn’t be able to use their normal and backup systems to remove this steam and cool it and return it to the reactor, because there was no power. So, they were probably trying to vent this steam into the buildings at the plant. If they could vent a little bit of steam, add a little bit of cool water, they could keep the reactor cool enough to keep it from melting down.

EM: I see. And I guess the big question that everyone has today is: has the explosion or any of the damage— I guess there hasn’t been a lot of damage to the plant, it’s just overheating— do you think any of this is causing nuclear leakage and if so, is that a big problem?

MM: So, I’ve actually looked at the before and after picture from the explosion that’s available on the news, and, in my opinion, they have an extremely serious situation at this nuclear power plant. So, my speculation is they were venting the steam in order to try and cool the reactor. Unfortunately, without power they don’t have a lot of their normal instrumentation that they would have.

EM: So they can’t monitor things to the same degree—

MM: They don’t even have their backup power. I mean, they basically have the bare minimum instrumentation provided by whatever battery power they have left. My guess is— and it was reported in the news— that they had a hydrogen explosion. So, they obviously had hydrogen and other gases that were generated, that built up to an explosive level, and if you look at the photos the entire building surrounding the reactor, the only thing left of it is the steel frame. The entire building has collapsed.  That would normally be called the auxiliary building[2], and that building actually does house a lot of the emergency systems for the reactor. So, I think we have a very, very serious situation at this power plant where the entire auxiliary building has been destroyed.

According to the reports, the containment is intact, so if there has been any release of radioactivity, it has been very minor, to this point. But they have got to find a way to get some electricity and cool that reactor. And the last report I saw said that their plan was to use seawater. So, obviously, they’re going to get some temporary pumps, they’re going to use seawater, mixed with boron. Boron is a substance that will absorb neutrons— very similar to borax that you could go buy to wash your clothes with— that will keep the reactor from going critical again when they add the cold seawater. Even though the control  rods have been fully inserted, when you add cold water, cold water is  denser than warm water, and it can cause the neutrons that are still  bouncing around the reactor to moderate— so moderate means slow down— to a speed at which they could strike the fuel and cause a fission.

We obviously don’t want any more fission because that generates more heat, and we certainly don’t want the reactor to go critical because that generates a lot of heat. And critical is not the bad word that you see in the news, where you say “Oh, reactor’s going critical!” When it operates, it’s normally critical; all critical means is it has a self-sustaining reaction, which is what you need to operate. What we wouldn’t want it to do is to go to a terminology called super-critical, that would be really bad. But in any event, when you add the cold water— if you don’t add the boron, then you have the potential of causing the fission level to go up in the reactor and more heat to be generated, which you don’t want to do. This is beyond the last resort, to do this, at a nuclear plant.

EM: To use sea water to cool it—

MM: They’re basically down to their last option here.

EM: So, what do you think is the best case scenario for this plant? And added to that question, what is the worst case scenario?

MM: I think the best case is that the military gets the generators on-site with some emergency pumps, and they’re able to rig up a cooling system to cool that reactor, to keep it cool, and they’re going to have to cool it for several days before it gets to the point where the heat is decayed off.  Obviously, the plant is destroyed, and I’m sure it will have to be decommissioned. The question is: how much additional damage is there at the site? Because there’s actually six nuclear reactors at that same site, and two more that were planned or are under construction.

 

 

EM: I see. So, this is just one that’s been failing.

MM: This is just one of six reactors at that site that were in commercial operation.

EM: Oh, that’s scary. So, there could be trouble with the other ones.

MM: The question is: as a result of this explosion, has any damage occurred in any of the other, adjacent, reactors? And also what is the situation of the additional reactors?

EM: Right. If they don’t cool them, it seems like this same thing could happen to them.

MM: They would have the same problem. So, a couple of the plants were shut down for maintenance, so they’re probably less problematic because their cores would have cooled down. But the ones that were operating at the time that the earthquake occurred could all be a concern.

EM: So, I guess a final question I have for you is: do you think that nuclear power plants should be built in an earthquake prone area such as Japan?

MM: Well, I think it’s important for the nuclear industry to be unemotional about what has happened here. So, like I said, it does appear that all of the design features that were required for the earthquake functioned, and the plant was going through a normal shutdown sequence. Obviously, when the tsunami came, that was something that was not designed for because it flooded the location where the emergency diesel generators were and caused them to lose all power, and we’re now in a scenario that’s well beyond any design contingencies that were designed for that plant.

 

So, I think the nuclear industry has to take a serious look at what has occurred in Japan. And, although nuclear power is an important source of electricity, we have to seriously question any plants that are located next to the ocean and the worst case scenario for this type of event— an earthquake followed by a tsunami— as to the impact it would have on that plant and the emergency backup system.

Clearly, in this case, this was not taken into account, and the net result is we have a nuclear plant that appears to be very, very close to a core meltdown.

EM: And what would a core meltdown lead to? I mean, is this going to be contained? Is there any chance that this is going to be like a Chernobyl type situation? I mean, I know that’s a different scenario, but is there a potential for a large radiation leak here?

MM: So, you ask a good question, and probably one that is on the mind of the public. So, the first thing is, this is a different scenario from the one that happened at Chernobyl. And let me just explain a little bit. The Chernobyl reactor was a completely different type of design than those that we typically have in Western society. That was a graphite moderated reactor, and probably the big difference between either a pressurized water reactor or a boiling water reactor like we have in the West [and the Chernobyl plant], is that a water cooled reactor is what we call inherently stable.

So, in this boiling water reactor even though it’s not good that the core would not be cooled, as the water level drops, and you generate steam, the steam is less dense than the water, so that means that there’s less  molecules of water to moderate or slow down the neutrons. So, when a steam void forms, it actually causes the power level to drop in that vicinity, or the heat generation to drop in that vicinity. The problem you have, of course, is you do need to cool the reactor because you have all this residual heat, but a pressurized or boiling water reactor is  inherently stable as opposed to the Chernobyl design, which is  inherently unstable.

The other big difference is all Western reactors have to have a containment building. And so, according to the news reports, although the auxiliary building has been destroyed, the containment, or steel liner, has not been destroyed. So that’s still intact. So, in theory, as long as they can maintain the pressures in that [containment], and there should be relief valves on that, to maintain the pressure, even if the core was to melt, the vast majority of the radioactivity should be contained within that containment building. At Chernobyl we didn’t have that, so when the core melted and caught on fire, all the radioactivity was spread to the atmosphere and to the countryside. In this case, that should not occur. However, again we’re beyond the worst case scenario here, where the last resort now is to try to rig something up to use seawater to cool the plant and the auxiliary building, with all the safety systems having been destroyed.

EM: Well, we’ll just keep our fingers crossed, and I hope that there are a lot of nuclear engineers and military people really working hard to keep this from being an even worse disaster than it is already. Thank you very much Dad, for— Oh, sorry did you want to say something?

MM: Yeah, I was going to say it’s obviously a very grave situation. However, the one good thing is that Japan has many, many nuclear power plants, and they have a lot of nuclear experts in that country. So, in addition to the help and expertise that they can get from the US and other folks who have a lot of nuclear experience, they have a lot of their own people who have a lot of expertise. And I’m sure that they’re doing everything they can. But, again, I do have to emphasize that I think this is an extremely serious situation.

EM: Okay, thank you so much, Dad, for all of your insights.  I’m really glad I have a dial-a- nuclear engineer in my family.

MM: You’re welcome.

EM: I’ll get this posted, and hopefully this will answer some questions that some people have been having.

MM: You’re welcome. Thank you.
EM: Okay. Bye dad.
[1] According to the US Geological Survey, as of June 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake is the 4th largest earthquake recorded on Earth since 1900. The earthquake is a magnitude 9.0.
Reference: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/10_largest_world.php
[2] Actually, this building is called the “reactor building.” See Interview 3 for the correction and explanation.