Fukushima No. 4's cooling system up and running

BY EISUKE SASAKI STAFF WRITER

2011/08/02

Steam rises as the water temperature rises in the fuel storage pool of the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on June 29. (Provided by Tokyo Electric Power Co.)
The temperature in the nuclear fuel storage pool at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant fell 2 to 4 degrees on July 31 in the first seven hours that a circulating cooling system began operating, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said July 31.

Construction to reinforce the No. 4 reactor building was completed July 30, TEPCO said. The building was severely damaged by a March 15 explosion whose cause has yet to be fully explained.

The utility ran a test trial of the circular cooling system early July 31 by pumping water out of the pool and returning the water to the pool after cooling it.

In the afternoon, full operations commenced, bringing the water temperature--which stood at 86 degrees before the full operation--down to between 82 to 84 degrees in seven hours.

During earlier repair work, pipes ruptured in the explosion were replaced.

The storage pool, which cools the intense heat that constantly arises from used fuel rods, became incapable of cooling after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami knocked out its water circulating system.

Initially, it was suspected that the stored fuel rods had melted due to the evaporation of coolant from the pool.

TEPCO plans to start up a similar circulating cooling system at the No. 1 reactor in early August. Cooling systems at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors started operating on May 31 and July 1, respectively.

Prior to the March 11 quake, the No. 4 reactor had been shut down for a regular inspection, and its large fuel rods placed in the cooling pool. The heat output from the cooling pool was about 10 times greater than the pool at the No. 3 reactor and 30 times that of the No. 1 reactor.

On March 15, the No. 4 reactor building that houses the storage pool exploded, raising suspicions that the fuel rods had been damaged and produced hydrogen that triggered the explosion.

However, it was later found by water analysis, after water was pumped into the reactor, that the cooling pool's radiation levels were relatively low. No significant damage to the fuel rods was detected by remote observation using cameras.

02/08 天声人語

2011年8月2日（火）付

　欧州では「ゆっくり行く者が遠くまで行く」と言うそうだ。わが方は「急（せ）いては事を仕損ずる」である。高速列車が脱線転落して１０日、中国政府は東西の格言に挑むかの性急さで、事故を終わった話にしたいらしい▼たちまち運転が再開され、原因究明はおぼつかない。遺族は平均年収の３０倍という賠償金を示され、国内メディアは独自の報道や評論を禁じられた。国家事業の高速鉄道を、長々と滞らせぬ決意とみえる。国策という巨岩は、民のしかばねを越えて転がり続ける▼国外にも累が及ぶ原発をこの調子で造られては困るが、原子力については日本でも、国策の暴走がまさに問われている。なにしろ監視役の原子力安全・保安院が、原発を推し進める黒衣だったというのだから▼保安院に頼まれ、電力会社はシンポジウムに社員を動員したり、住民に「模範質問」をさせたりした。公が手を染めた点で、佐賀県知事が九州電力に促した形の「やらせメール」と同じ罪深さだ▼そもそも、原発推進の経産省に保安院がぶら下がる構造がおかしい。アクセルの横に、ブレーキの形をした別のアクセルがある。そんな欠陥車は、名ばかりのガードレールを突き破るしかなかった▼かの国のように、世界をあんぐりさせて強権を振り回すだけが国家統制ではない。安全神話を創作したのは、より洗練された隠微な世論誘導だ。ブレーキ役になれなかった反省を糧にし、メディアの責任を全うしたい。皆で原発から「遠くまで行く」ために。

08/02 Our new defence blog: A warm welcome to Clausewitz

Feb 8th 2011, 14:47 by The Economist online

LAST month we asked our readers to suggest a name for our new blog, covering defence, security and diplomacy. The very first suggestion, from a user called Tzimisces, also proved to be clear favourite among other readers: Clausewitz. Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz was, of course, a great Prussian military strategist of the early 19th century and the author of "On War", a classic book on strategy that is still studied today. Clausewitz perfectly fits the bill as the name for this blog because of his famous observation that one way to consider war is as "the continuation of politics by other means". But that is not the only way to think of it: Clausewitz declared that war should be considered from an instinctive, an analytical and a political point of view in order to be understood properly. Similarly, this blog will consider a range of interconnected defence-related subjects, from the technical details of new weapons to spy spats and diplomatic negotiations.

Some readers thought Clausewitz was too obvious a choice of name; but sometimes the obvious choice is the right one. Others objected that Clausewitz's book is more owned than read, because it is deeply tedious. But even if you are not a fan of his writing (and 19th-century German can be impenetrable to modern readers, including native German speakers), it is difficult to think of a more suitable alternative. Dreadnought was a popular choice, since dreadnought battleships were as much tools of diplomacy as weapons, but we felt it was too British. There was also support for Machiavelli (not military enough); various classical names (but only Athena, the goddess of warfare, wisdom and strategy, combined military and political aspects); and a selection of British generals and foreign secretaries (but we wanted a more international flavour). So in the end Clausewitz carried the day.

Thank you for all your suggestions. And now let's get things started with our first blog post, a report from the 11th annual Herzliya defence conference in Israel.

Update 9/2: Thank you for your comments. Several readers have pointed out that Clausewitz refers to war as "the continuation of politics by other means" in the course of his discussion of the nature of war, which he considers in several different ways before arriving at the rather more nuanced conclusion that war is the combination of a "trinity" of tendencies, of which politics is only one element. We stand corrected; the text above has been amended accordingly. Readers who wish to see the original context of the quote are invited to consult Clausewitz's original text (English translation).

08/02 Israel's view of Egypt: Feeling understandably twitchy

Feb 8th 2011, 15:02 by M.J.S. | HERZLIYA

THE mood at the 11th annual Herzliya conference, where Israel’s top policymakers come to debate strategy and diplomacy with invited international experts, is understandably twitchy. The events in Egypt hang over the conference like the threatening grey clouds. And yesterday those clouds unleashed a savage hailstorm, in the form of a stinging attack on the Netanyahu government by Tzipi Livni, the former foreign minister who now leads Israel’s fragmented opposition. Nobody here claims that they saw the upheaval in Egypt coming, and few think that President Hosni Mubarak's regime will be replaced by one that Israel will find anything like as easy to live with.

Members of the government have taken a vow of silence not to comment, even off the record, on the unfolding situation in Egypt. But if you talk to people here privately, they suggest there are three possible scenarios. The first (intended to sound incredible) is that Israel’s biggest neighbour will be transformed into a peaceable, pluralist democracy. The second is that Egypt will become something like Turkey, either with an army-dominated government as in the past or with a government a bit like the present one in Ankara that has a quite a strong Islamist flavour (either more or less intense, depending on the role within it of the Muslim Brotherhood). The third is that something similar to the Iranian revolution in 1979 is played out “with dramatic consequences”. If the third scenario were to be realised, the psychological impact on Israel will be such that any conceivable land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians will have to be accompanied by much more rigorous security arrangements on the ground. That said, the emergence of a moderately Islamist government that remained committed to peace with Israel could, after the initial shock, prove quite positive.

Perhaps inevitably, the turmoil in Egypt is only entrenching people here in their existing positions. The right is saying that it goes to show how quickly things can change in the unstable Arab world. Even if you could do a deal with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who anyway only speaks for half the Palestinians, how confident can you be that the peace would hold? For its part, the pro-peace camp says that the situation in Egypt means that there may be only a narrow window to get a settlement negotiated and that a new urgency is required. Realistically, few people here expect this Israeli government to do very much given Mr Netanyahu’s dependence on the support of parties ideologically hostile to the whole idea of “land for peace”. 

Yet neither the possibility of an Egyptian repudiation of the 32-year-old peace treaty with Israel nor the remote prospect of progress on the Palestinian front are the biggest security concerns among those at the Herzliya. Iran’s nukes are still seen as the overwhelming existential threat to Israel, but the difficulties that the Iranian nuclear programme is thought to be having, thanks to tighter sanctions and the disruptive effects of the Stuxnet computer virus, are widely believed to have pushed the timeline for acquiring a bomb out to at least a couple of years from now. And that may be affecting the strategic calculus of at least some within the Iranian leadership. 

A veteran of the Sharon and Olmert governments suggested to me that if only America was prepared to do as foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested last year—and impose on Iran the kind of far-reaching sanctions that have applied to Cuba for half a century—the regime in Tehran, which is already under severe economic pressure, would not last for more than 12 months. The fact that the Castro brothers are still in power seems not to weaken the argument. Generally speaking, there’s a view here that America needs to get more serious about regime change in Iran, as that may be the only thing that will lead to any alteration in the country’s determination to press on with becoming a nuclear power able to bully the region. As usual, however, the details of how to do it are a bit sketchy.

Of more immediate concern even than the menace of a nuclear Iran is the growing threat from Lebanon since Hizbullah’s bloodless coup last month. With up to 50,000 missiles of increasing accuracy and technological sophistication having been supplied by Syria and Iran, government sources here claim that the Shiite guerrilla force (which for most practical purposes should now be regarded as Lebanon’s real army) has around four times the missile power it had when it unleashed 4,000 projectiles at Israel during the bloody five-week war in 2006. The Israeli military believes that Hizbullah has also learned lessons from the conflict in Gaza two years ago and that in any future confrontation IDF soldiers will sustain significantly more severe casualties.

Despite large investments in anti-missile defences with the help of the Americans, there are fears that Tel Aviv is still vulnerable to attack from salvoes of 200km-range Zelzal II guided missiles fired from south Lebanon and cruder devices, such as the 50km-range Fajr-5 missile, that could be launched by Hamas from Gaza in the event of hostilities. In a speech yesterday General Gabi Ashkenazi, the outgoing chief of the IDF general staff, warned that while Hizbullah and Hamas could not take territory, the battlefield had now shifted to the home front. No missile shield can be fully effective, especially when the missiles fired cost a tiny fraction of the interceptors used to stop them. Israel will still need superior intelligence and the ability to put boots on the ground to defend itself.

Israelis often feel the need to remind their critical European and American friends that they live in a pretty tough neighbourhood. Special criticism among most of the people you meet at Herzliya is reserved for Barack Obama. After the row over settlement building, which many Israelis thought was the wrong fight to pick, and what is seen here as shameless flipflopping by the administration over the fate of Mr Mubarak, the kindest description of the president you will hear in Herzliya is that he is naïve. Others are harsher, saying that he is a serial blunderer who is presiding over a rapid waning of American power and influence within the region. In particular, there is both puzzlement and anger over what is seen as the very public betrayal of Mr Mubarak, which, it is claimed, will cause every moderate Arab government to review its security relationship with America. As one source puts it: “They could have told him in private that his time was up, while sticking outwardly to a position of neutrality. But by saying they supported all the aims of the protesters and telling Mubarak he must go immediately, they took a very serious, very dangerous risk.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post got the names of its missile-defence systems in a twist. This has now been fixed.