Fukushima 50

[Sundowner]

Fukushima 50

To lay down your life for another.... there is no greater act.

 

Regards,
Sun

Fukushima 50 Stay Behind to Prevent Nuclear Meltdown

"They are known as the Fukushima 50, the workers who stayed behind at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in order to prevent a meltdown in Japan.

Between 50 and 70 plant engineers -- who have not been identified and are being hailed as heroes -- continue to work around the clock in dangerous conditions, as hundreds of thousands have evacuated the area, fearing a meltdown.

Two of the workers are missing after an explosion and fire at the Unit 4 reactor, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Workers have since resumed operations, Reuters reports.

"The longer they stay, the more dangerous it becomes for them," Margaret Harding of the American Nuclear Society told CBS News.

The engineers are trying to cool nuclear reactors with seawater, while trying to avoid fires and explosions.

"You are the only ones who can resolve a crisis. Retreat is unthinkable," Japanese Prime Minister Naota Kan told them, the Financial Times reported.

The workers have exposed themselves to high doses of radiation, which could cause cancer.

"These workers, in a few hours, are getting fairly high doses I would say by contemporary standards for worker protection, and that's likely to pose some risks down the line," David Richardson, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, told the BBC. He added that the radiation the Fukushima 50 would receive in an hour is the same amount a U.S. nuclear worker would be exposed to over an entire career..........."

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/16/fukushima-50-stay-prevent-nuclear-meltdown/

[skorpion]

god bless them knowing they are helping to prevent a disater or at least keeping it from happening for a while, this is unpredictable so it could go either way. lets just hope they can get this fixed.

[F22RaptorDude]

Makes me think of the Oceanic 6 from lost all of a sudden even tho they have nothing to do with this. Name relates, but its so heroic what they are doing there. True hero's   

[oakranger]

Lets hope that they do not have the same ending as those at Chernobyl disaster.   

Shortly after the accident, firefighters arrived to try to extinguish the fires. First on the scene was a Chernobyl Power Station firefighter brigade under the command of Lieutenant Volodymyr Pravik, who died on 9 May 1986 of acute radiation sickness. They were not told how dangerously radioactive the smoke and the debris were, and may not even have known that the accident was anything more than a regular electrical fire: "We didn't know it was the reactor. No one had told us."[29]

Grigorii Khmel, the driver of one of the fire-engines, later described what happened:

    We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning ... We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: "What is graphite?" I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up. "It's hot," he said. The pieces of graphite were of different sizes, some big, some small enough to pick up ...
    We didn't know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had no idea. There was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled the cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof—Vashchik Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik ... They went up the ladder ... and I never saw them again.[30]:54

However, Anatoli Zakharov, a fireman stationed in Chernobyl since 1980, offers a different description:

    I remember joking to the others, "There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We'll be lucky if we're all still alive in the morning."

Twenty years after the disaster, he claimed the firefighters from the Fire Station No. 2 were aware of the risks.

    Of course we knew! If we'd followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation—our duty. We were like kamikaze.[31]

The immediate priority was to extinguish fires on the roof of the station and the area around the building containing Reactor No. 4 to protect No. 3 and keep its core cooling systems intact. The fires were extinguished by 05:00, but many firefighters received high doses of radiation. The fire inside Reactor No. 4 continued to burn until 10 May 1986; it is possible that well over half of the graphite burned out.[7]:73 The fire was extinguished by a combined effort of helicopters dropping over 5,000 metric tons of sand, lead, clay, and boron onto the burning reactor and injection of liquid nitrogen. Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko captured film footage of a Mi-8 helicopter as it collided with a nearby construction crane, causing the helicopter to fall near the damaged reactor building and kill its four-man crew.[32]

From eyewitness accounts of the firefighters involved before they died (as reported on the CBC television series Witness), one described his experience of the radiation as "tasting like metal," and feeling a sensation similar to that of pins and needles all over his face. (This is similar to the description given by Louis Slotin, a Manhattan Project physicist who died days after a fatal radiation overdose from a criticality accident.)[33]

The explosion and fire threw hot particles of the nuclear fuel and also far more dangerous fission products, radioactive isotopes such as caesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90 and other radionuclides, into the air: the residents of the surrounding area observed the radioactive cloud on the night of the explosion.

[Babalonian]

God blees them.  My only fear is the people/management responcible for putting them in this situation are long gone and safe from the scene.

[Tupac]

God blees them.  My only fear is the people/management responcible for putting them in this situation are long gone and safe from the scene.

I think it was their choice to stay.

[MarineUS]

 

[skorpion]

well we all know how horrible the chernobyl accident was, there talking about this one being just as bad or worse if it all goes wrong...

[Muzzy]

 

[4deck]

 

[CAP1]

and if these engineers survive this.....and one were able to talk with any of them.......i'd be willing to bet that they all say that they were only doing their job. people like them give hope to the human race. 

[Wolfala]

Does anyone but me feel we are screwed when the Soviets threw tens of thousands of guys to handle Chernobyl and our tulips are essentially relying on 50 guys with a government (Japans) that can't find it's head from it's ass?

[EskimoJoe]

Does anyone but me feel we are screwed when the Soviets threw tens of thousands of guys to handle Chernobyl and our tulips are essentially relying on 50 guys with a government (Japans) that can't find it's head from it's ass?

Considering the average intelligence between the Japanese and the Soviets...

Nope.

[CAP1]

Does anyone but me feel we are screwed when the Soviets threw tens of thousands of guys to handle Chernobyl and our tulips are essentially relying on 50 guys with a government (Japans) that can't find it's head from it's ass?

nope. i think the japanese tech. is lightyears ahead of the russians.

[oakranger]

nope. i think the japanese tech. is lightyears ahead of the russians.

They where way ahead.  The design of the Chernobyl was weak along with poor training for the employees.  Another problem was the graphite.