but then there was some kind of failure in unit 2.

There, a malfunctioning valve prevented workers from manually venting the containment vessel to release pressure and allow fresh seawater to be injected into it. That meant that the extraordinary remedy emergency workers have been using to keep the nuclear fuel from overheating no longer worked.

Oh, that's Ginger said.

Shit.

There was a failure before that, because unit 2 had been stabilized with the portable generating units they brought in. It was when the normal cooling system failed this morning that they moved to add seawater, which they'd already done to 1 and 3.

I don't understand why all resources in Japan weren't there to pump seawater into the reactors. At one point they had a generator run out of gas which caused one of the explosions.

I understand that things are chaotic there, but a helicopter can bring in more gas at any point.

I' ve been hearing about fire in a fourth now too.

Ginger, what does it mean? I mean, I hear beyond 3 Mile Island, but I don't know what it means, in practical terms.

I know it's bad. God, those poor people in Japan.

Some perspective, Erin.

I'm glad Ginger's here.

Come the apocalypse, I'm going out in search of Buffistae.

As of about a half an hour ago, they were still managing to add water to units 1-3, but now there's a fire in unit 4. Of course, they can dump water into unit 2 now, because the pressure has been relieved, although not the way one would have chosen. As the article says, the exposure rates are getting too high for workers to stay there.

Even in the worst case, the exposure to any one individual downwind is going to be small. No one who's not near the plant is going to keel over and die. The biggest danger with these particles is increased long-term chance of cancer. The main cancers from Chernobyl were thyroid cancer in children, because one of the longer lived isotopes is radioactive iodine. They're already distributed potassium iodide, and if you give the thyroid enough good iodine, it doesn't try to take up more. It didn't help that the diet in the Chernobyl area was already low in iodine.

Thanks, guys. That's good info.

I used to go to CNN for news, but I don't really trust them anymore.

ITA, Cash.

I don't understand

There was a 9.0 quake, tsunamis and nearly 350 significant aftershocks. The death toll might climb over 10,000. All resources are desperately needed just about everywhere. Chaotic seems an understatement.

Cash...

"If you look at Chernobyl, they did not have a containment [system]. So once they had an accident, they had massive releases of radioactive materials," Klein says. "In the case of Japan, as long as the containment and reactor vessel remain intact, it's not likely they will have massive radiation releases."

The containment vessel is what is at issue now. It's not secure.