This is from today's report from AP about the accident:

Quoted for educational purposes only:

"The accident occurred Thursday after workers mistakenly put too much uranium into a bucket-like container, setting off an uncontrolled atomic reaction that continued for hours, spurting radioactive particles into the air.

"Instead of relying on the high-tech equipment expected at a nuclear facility, the workers had been manually pouring the potentially deadly material, company officials said. Japanese media reports also said the workers had never received proper training."

My questions are 1) Why were these folks pouring material manually, and 2) Is this typical of the type of nuclear accident we might see next year in the U.S. due to software and imbedded chip failures?"

-- CD (CDOKeefe@aol.com), October 03, 1999

Answers

Like I said - all it takes is one bozo with the wrong size spoon.

-- Y2KGardener (gardens@bigisland.net), October 03, 1999.

They were not pouring plutonium as the header claims.

1. "Why were these folks pouring material manually..."

This is a "san-K job" (3-K job -- "Kitanai, Kitsui, Kikken" - dirty, difficult, dangerous). These jobs are usually reserved for foreigners in Japan. Japanese consider themselves too clean, clever and cute for such jobs. The poor economy has forced companies to fire foreigners to make jobs available for Japanese. Since these workers were Japanese and they had never done this procedure before, I suspect the job was previously held by foreigners.

Companies don't care if foreigners become sick or injured doing such jobs (just hire more...), so "san-K" workers don't receive training. This job will be probably be given back to foreigners after this incident.

2. "Is this typical of the type of nuclear accident we might see next year in the U.S. due to software and imbedded chip failures?"

Computers don't kill people - people kill people.

-- PNG (png@gol.com), October 03, 1999.

A 1,000 pardons. Uranium, not plutonium. I suspect that it would be difficult to come by enough plutonuium to "pour" it? Sorry, not a nuclear engineer, and only got a "B" in college chem. Hated chemistry. I just typed in the first radioactive material that came to mind. ;-/

-- CD (CDOKeefe@aol.com), October 03, 1999.

A thousand apologies are not necessary... AP called it a "bucket-like container?" It was a bucket!

-- PNG (png@gol.com), October 03, 1999.

Still the question remains, why were these workers (whether foreign or Japanese) manually pouring uranium into a bucket "instead of relying on the high-tech equipment expected at a nuclear facility..."? Is it true that, in this case, a computer did not kill people, but rather the lack of a computer (and using manual work-arounds) did? Were the workers on a manual system because the computerized processing was not working, or was there never a computerized system for this process, or were the workers simply untrained in how to use the computerized process?

-- RUOK (RUOK@yesiam.com), October 03, 1999.

Just some background; Plutonium is MUCH more hazardous than Uranium -- primarily a toxicity factor -- and much smaller quantities of Plutonium will go critical. What has me very curious about this story is that only very pure enriched Uranium (U-235) would create a "prompt critical" accident (and signature blue flash) in the quantities described in news reports. Commercial reactors use very dilute amounts of U-235 in their fuel rods. With the instability in Asia, has Japan started a covert n-weapons program???

Good luck Doc

-- T.H. "Doc" Toups (ttoups@aol.com), October 03, 1999.

They were processing fuel rods for Japan's fast breeder.

As I've said many times - Japan has no nuclear weapons... only parts and components in close proximity to each other. And they have had these for decades.

The workers bypassed the automated system and attempted to bypass two steps because it seemed "more efficient."

-- PNG (png@gol.com), October 03, 1999.

maybe they were manually pouring it as a way of practicing their y2k contingency plan. remember...we need manual back-ups.

.

-- corrine l (corrine@iwaynet.net), October 03, 1999.

Was this a Breeder Reactor plant where, as I understand it, plutonium is made. If not, why were they making plutonium there? Is the process employed (crude) consistent with making "Bomb Grade" Plutonium.

-- Larry (Rampon@cyberramp.net), October 03, 1999.

I guess that goes to show you that the Japanese put thousands of their citizens at risk just because they didn't want to get their hands dirty, the job was below them. For a country that loathes nuclear bombs, they aren't as smart as they think they are. This won't be the last nuclear accident we'll be hearing about. Last month we almost had a potential melt down at a nuclear power plant in New York.

-- glow worm (glow worm@glow wormmm.xcom), October 03, 1999.

Folks, it was Plutonium...don't believe that Uranium nonesense.

Japan buys spent fuel rods for reprocessing, as well as using their own. They chemically strip out the "daughter products" and add some plutonium to "enrich" it. The alternative is to physically enrich it by concentrating U235, which is Extremely difficult. Note that they were using chemical means (a chemical reactor) which is not applicable to Uranium Concentration.

The boys were using Plutonium solutions and it bit them. They are probably going to die, and I feel very upset that they did not receive proper training.

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), October 04, 1999.

K. Stevens... this was not re-processing.

-- PNG (png@gol.com), October 04, 1999.

This has more to do with the notion of the role of government during catastrophes than radioactivity. Last night, a friend living in Japan arrived and he was relating a personal story about a conversation he had with the Ministry of Defense director of a northern prefecture. He had been providing advanced english lessons to the said director at the time of the Kobe earthquake and he had asked what this man's response was to the criticism of the government's poor response to the disaster. The Director's no non-sense response was that a person has a responsibility to take care of their own self.

-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), October 04, 1999.

I don't usually get into the way-off topic posts, but I have a question that I've been dying to ask, so I'll ask it here.

[Rant On]:

If the reaction occured because the people involved put up to 6 times as much material in the container as they were supposed to, exactly why were they given containers that large in the first place? If you weren't supposed to put more than X kilograms of material in the damn bucket, why provide buckets with a capacity of 6X? That's just asking for trouble!

[Rant off]:

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), October 04, 1999.