Honestly. Does anybody really wonder why the public fears nukes and distrusts the mob… er, the utilities… who own and operate the nukes? This Keystone Kops Komedy of callous indifference and criminal incompetence is getting very old, and more disgusting every day.
After more than two months' worth of logistics planning and careful practice at Fukushima's supposedly undamaged unit-5 plant plus a bazillion yen in super high-tech equipment, the endoscopy of unit-2 has "failed" due to adverse conditions inside the long ago breached containment vessel. Aw.
Mainichi reports today that TEPCO was unable to 'find' the reactor core or any remnants thereof where they had previously surmised it to be (in the containment drywell, in a state of "cold shutdown" covered by several meters of not-boiling water), and are now at more of a loss as to where it might be than they were back when they were just guessing off the top of their shrunken little heads.
Seems the radiation was too high for their super-techy 360º fiber optic camera, which is rated to be able to withstand 1000 Sieverts gamma (100,000 Rem) without diminishing its optical acuity. It was also discovered that there was no water in the vessel or the torus at the level of the drywell grates, well below where they assumed it should be, given how much they're pumping onto the mess every hour of every day. There was instead, "Massive Steam". Oops. Seems their confident pronouncements of water level and temperature inside containment all these months were just gratuitous bullshit. Who could have guessed?
TEPCO announcement of "cold shutdown" now doesn't look so great either. Steam? The water was supposed to be covering the melted corium to a certain depth, and NOT boiling - hell, they repeated even as they released the few pictures they did take that the temperature of the water they said they 'knew' was inside containment (in order to justify the "cold shutdown" proclamation) was a mere 44ºC, [cx] ~122ºF. Which, come to think of it, isn't "cold shutdown" at all...
There was water coming down from above in sheets and drops, disappearing below whatever's left of the grate they photographed, to some unknown depth before encountering something hot enough to send much of it back up as steam so thick and radioactive the camera was rendered nearly useless. That would likely be what's left of the core somewhere in the bowels of the plant (or below by now), which TEPCO was unable to catch a glimpse of with their nifty endoscope.*
[ * An originally invented version of the "industrial endoscope" for use in radioactive environments was used in 1982 to examine the interior of the reactor vessel at Three Mile Island unit 2. Its pictures were quite clear enough to show the damage. And that was with an extended lens on optic fibers to a video display/camera, well before the invention of digital photography.]
Oops. They've misplaced the corium. And no, what's hot enough to be sending superheated, highly radioactive steam up from the abyss below is most definitely NOT in "cold shutdown."
At this point I'm not going to opine about how much of this procedure or its results is staged for PR benefit, will wait to see how TEPCO and the rest of the nuclear gang paints the "failure" that shouldn't have happened. Because they may have learned quite a lot before fuzzing and snowing the handful of pix destined for public release.
For reference purposes, unit 2 was the first to have suffered containment vessel failure, according to the timeline of 'official' revelations back in mid-March. It did not suffer as big a hydrogen explosion as unit 1 or as nasty a lower interior explosion as unit 3, its Rx building roof merely busted up and collapsed. But we were told there was a "sound" early on that indicated an explosion in the conduits from the containment vessel to the torus below and surrounding (where the grating is - or used to be). Why the endoscopy operation did NOT drill into the torus is a mystery. Since that's where it is most likely to have gone, and would have been no more trouble mechanically.
TEPCO says it can't afford a better camera. Maybe that's true, so where is the Japanese government on that? Areva? Our very own NRC/DOE? NEI? Don't THEY want to know where the corium might be? Seems to me the whole world has a vested interest in obtaining information about the state of these corium flows, where they are and where they might be headed. So I can't quite grok why the proper equipment isn't right there on site and in use.
Last but not least, we now know not only that the core and the water being poured onto it is not where they hoped it would be, but also that the sensors and gages TEPCO has been using for more than 10 months to tell us the condition of this reactor and its containment are busted beyond redemption.
That's something, I guess. We shall see how that gets spun.
All photos available per TEPCO press packet at Enformable:
Reactor 2 Endoscopy Failed…