March 17, 2011 1:43pm
Tokyo, Japan
Hey guys,
It has been a couple of days since my last update so I am writing to say that despite all the chaos, I have managed to stay safe and sound. I left Tokyo yesterday and I am now staying at a relative's place in a city called Toyohashi (550km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant). Heaps have happened since my last email so I will try to provide a brief summary of what is actually happening here. I have added a few more people to the list so if you missed my first two emails, please refer to the emails below.
As I have explained before, there are actually two nuclear plants in state of emergency: one in Fukushima and one in Ibaraki, 250km and 150km from Tokyo respectively. So far, the plant in Fukushima has been getting a lot of attention from the press because it has undergone explosions that resemble some of your favorite action movies except that instead of sitting on the front row, you are actually inside the screen. At one point, after the explosion of the second reactor, the radiation level has reached harmful levels, which is equivalent to ten years worth of radiation in one hour. To put this in another perspective, levels of 400 millisieverts/hour had been recorded. Exposure to over 100 millisieverts a year is a level which can lead to cancer.
The latest news is that 750 workers were pulled out from the plant leaving behind just 50. We never found out who they actually were, but we know that they are working hard to save the country. Over 170,000 people were evacuated after officials voiced the possibility of a meltdown, and a 30-km no-fly zone has been imposed around the reactors.
The nuclear plant in Fukushima was built in 1971 and had three layers of emergency cooling procedures. The first cooling procedure is activated automatically whenever an earthquake is detected in Japan. It is basically an electric pump that sends water into the inner core of the reactor to cool down the nuclear fuel. If the first cooling procedure fails for any reason, the second procedure kicks in. The second cooling procedure is pretty much a diesel engine that does the same thing as the electric pump. If all that fail, the third procedure, which is a long tube that operates by passing the water from the tank through a radiator (just like in a car) and sending it back to the tank.
When the tsunami swallowed the nuclear plant, all three emergency cooling procedures failed miserably. The electric pump stopped due to a massive blackout in the region, the diesel engine was completely immersed in water after the tsunami and the radiator just wasn't efficient enough to cool down the reactor. When they realized that the reactors were overheating despite the triple layer of cooling procedures, they started to pump sea water into the tank in an attempt to prevent complete meltdown of the nuclear core.
There are (or were) a total of six nuclear reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi plant, conveniently named 1-6. By coincidence, reactors 4-6 had been turned off a few days before the earthquake for an annual maintenance procedure.
The explosion of the reactors 1 and 3 (Saturday and Monday respectively) were caused by an accumulation of hydrogen in the building surrounding the nuclear core. Since the core itself did not get penetrated, no radioactive leakage was detected after the blast. The explosion of the reactors 2 and 4 (Tuesday), on the other hand, was due to a partial meltdown of the nuclear fuel within the core and led to substantial radiation leakage. Pathetically, reactor 2's explosion was caused by one of the operators who did not realize that the engine that was used to pump sea water into the tank had run out of fuel.
When a nuclear reactor undergoes maintenance procedures, the remains of the nuclear fuel rods are moved to a suppression pool located within the tank until they cool down while trapping majority of cesium, iodine and strontium. This time, since they had diverged attention from reactor 4 in an attempt to save reactors 1-3, they did not notice that reactor 4 started to overheat. Reactor 4 ended up blasting with a fire break-out releasing significant amount of radiation. Currently, there have been rumors that reactors 5 and 6 have also "awaken" and are now starting to overheat.
It is predicted that in the event that reactor 2 undergoes a complete meltdown, people within 20km radius will not survive and people within 50-100km will suffer severe health disorders. If the explosion spans multiple reactors, it will resemble Chernobyl in 1986 and the radioactive cloud will cover the entire country.
I had decided after first explosion on Saturday that I would leave Tokyo and find shelter somewhere further west if another reactor exploded. When I woke up on Monday, I found out that the train system in Tokyo wasn't operating in its entirety due to the planned power outages, and queues extended a few hundred meters. I didn't think it was worth spending a couple of hours in the queue in order to squeeze myself in a train just to get to school for which I was already late so decided to skip school and started to head back home. When I dropped by the supermarket on my way back home, I found out that people had already beaten me to buying basic survival items such as water, instant food, and toilet paper. I got home, had enough time to put away my purchases and the second nuclear reactor popped.
I didn't allow myself to wait for details of the explosion since it was already a premeditated thing. I picked up a backpack that had already been packed and left the house. On the way to the station I remembered that taking the train was not going to be an option so I redirected my path to a car rental shop and rented myself a nice little economy car. The plan was to leave Tokyo for a couple of days until dust settled. Already on the freeway, I called a couple of relatives to see if I could crash in their houses for a few days finally deciding to go to Toyohashi.
In the past couple of days, however, a sequence of unfortunate events made me believe that "a couple of days" wouldn't suffice. Not only things were not improving, but they were falling apart so quickly that I felt like I was never going to be able to return to Tokyo. I planned at some point to drive back to Tokyo to return the car and take the bullet train back, but another magnitude 7 aftershock stopped all trains and blocked the road leading to Tokyo. I decided to lie to the rental company and tell the Toyohashi branch that I had already asked the Tokyo branch if I could return the car there.
So far there has been 168 magnitude 5 aftershocks, 45 magnitude 6, and 3 magnitude 7. Our level of paranoia has reached a point that we start clinging on things when we feel what before was considered an insignificant tremor. We are constantly watching the news on TV and following tweets related to the earthquake despite knowing that it just gets us stressed out.
Leaving Tokyo was definitely not an easy decision to make. I am still a full-time student, work part time in a patent office and I do volunteer work (and didn't tell anyone, but I was trying to start up a company). I left Tokyo against the recommendation of the Japanese government which is telling people to refrain from moving. Today, life in Tokyo had returned to normal and I received several work-related emails from many places. I still haven't gotten a single email from my school checking if I am ok or suggesting me on how to cope with the situation.
Today, the radiation level in Tokyo reached 1.62 uSv/h (over 10x higher than the normal background radiation level of 0.04 uSv/h). Tomorrow, no one knows...
I will keep you guys updated.
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