Gov’t Experts: Fuel rods were melting 75 minutes after tsunami hit Fukushima; Reactor core no longer covered with water 10 minutes after power blackout — Plant Worker: Before explosion Unit 1 “filled with what looked like steam or dust… a series of large bangs… noise never heard before” (VIDEO)
ENENews.com
August 16th, 2014
Kyodo News, Aug 14, 2014: Less than 12 hours after the quake-triggered tsunami [TEPCO] sought government approval for the unprecedented step of releasing radioactive steam […] Prime Minister Naoto Kan, however, would soon become increasingly distrustful of TEPCO because of delays in starting the so-called venting operations, which were aimed at preventing damage to the reactor containment vessels […] Kan arrived at the plant shortly after 7 a.m. [on March 12.] But he had no idea at the time that fuel was already melting in the No. 1 reactor. [Plant chief Masao Yoshida] explained that the power to remotely operate valves for venting the No. 1 reactor had been lost and that workers would quickly need to manually operate the valves […] [Shift supervisor Hideyoshi Endo] hung a radiation meter from his neck capable of measuring up to 1,000 millisieverts per hour […] Endo’s team was tasked […] to open the valve […] As he lit up the inside of the building with a flashlight, he saw it was filled with what looked like steam or dust. [They went] to a room housing a doughnut-shaped suppression chamber at the bottom of the reactor’s containment vessel. They heard a series of large bangs in the dark — a type of noise Endo had never heard before. […] When Endo was some 30 meters away from the valve, however, he saw the radiation meter reading surpass 1,000 millisieverts […] Endo no longer had a way of knowing how high the radiation level was. Endo only needed a few seconds to decide to return. […] When the two returned to the main control room, all eyes turned to them. “It failed. The radiation meter scaled out,” reported Endo.
IRSN (France), International Workshop (pdf): Major events and their consequences — The core melt of Unit 1 started at 17h00 on March 11 […] Most of the meteorological stations of the AMeDAS system and the SPEEDI, dose rate, measurement stations were out of use […] The only station which was able to detect the radioactive plume from Unit 1, was the one located in Minami Soma approximately 25 kilometres north […]
The M9.0 quake struck at 14h46. The 14-meter tsunami inundated Fukushima Daiichi at 15h46. -Source
NKS Fukushima Seminar 2013 by Wiktor Frid, research leader in reactor technology at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (pdf):
The first release may come relatively early (the times stated below apply to Station Blackout scenario for Swedish reactors and are approximate)
Core uncovery – 10 minutes
Core melt begins – 40 minutes
Reactor vessel melt-through – 4 to 5 hours […]
Early, unfiltered large release cannot be excluded, for example in connection with vessel melt-through […]
Severe accident early containment threats — Containment failure in the early phase of an accident, e.g. in connection with reactor vessel melt-through, could result in large radioactive releases to the environment.
