Now It's Time To Worry

Apparently I was too optimistic yesterday about the chances of Japan's nuclear reactors - I thought they would do better then they did. While they are still subcritical, I did not anticipate that they would blow up the containment building on Fukushima One in a cooling accident (although, in retrospect, it should have been an obvious possibility).

So for people looking for a silver lining, here's some relatively good news:

• The reactors were SCRAMed immediately - they are considered subcritical (i.e., the internal reaction is decelerating, not accelerating)


• It's been almost a full day since the reactor building exploded, and no further complications have been reported. That can either be scary or good, depending on what you think of their transparency.


• It's been over twelve hours since they pushed the panic button and started pumping seawater into Unit One. In theory, it should be starting to cool down. They won't know, of course (they're not going to touch it), but the fact that things have not yet escalated may be good.


• The Unit One reactor vessel itself seems to still be intact.


• It's possible that there may be a sealable containment vessel still intact around Unit One - I'm unclear on the nature and status of Unit One's Mark I drywell.

Here, of course, is the bad news:

• The number of people with possible radiation contamination has ballooned to 160.


• They still have a leak somewhere in the coolant system for Unit One - or it's venting into the air naturally. Without the containment building this could be a rather considerable leak. And that radiation may now be as far away as Tokyo (or not - nobody knows).


• They tell the Japanese government more then they tell us, and the government keeps widening the evacuation area.


• They've lost cooling on Unit Three.


• So far, three layers of safeties they've assured us were intact are now mostly useless - so their claims that "Thing are under control" look increasingly threadbare. TEPCO is earning their bad reputation.

It's not impossible that things could be under control. In fact, under normal conditions I would say that it's more than likely. But this seems to be the week for once in a lifetime occurrences, all at the bad end of the scale. I'm going to go to bed hoping that tomorrow morning looks much like today at the reactors, but I'm no longer as confident as I used to be.