Just Before Dawn

It's still going here in Louth, though lighter now, and blowing around in the breeze.

Just got home to Louth from Boston - very challenging, with blowing snow and poor visibility - not long before the A16 at Keal Hill and Dalby Hill is impassable. Had about 3cm here and it's still going strong.

I'm down in Boston this afternoon, so won't be driving back until 7 or 8pm, which might be lively up the A16. Yes, I'll be taking my camera!

I was in the States during the 1991 Easterly, but I do remember the January 87 easterly very well. We lived in the south eastern edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, and after the fourth day of it, we had over a foot of snow and drifts over 4 feet high - I had just started my A-levels and was working nights in a video shop. I slept there one evening, because the two mile bike home would have been lethal - it's still the only time I've ever seen genuine blizzard conditions in lowland eastern England, with visibility down to less than 100 metres on the Wednesday night - that was the night we were finally cut off, and it took until the following Tuesday for the roads to open again. It calmed down on the Thursday or Friday that but did lead to some absolutely perishing night-time minimas. The thing that struck me most though, aside from the dreadful conditions that Wednesday Night, was just how quickly the snow built up, it was really just 48 hours or so of heavy showers, but it really did lay down the white stuff. '79 was pretty bad too, though I don't recall if the worst of that winter was easterly focussed.

I think that it's a little naive to come onto a website given over to the weather and be surprised when people are excited by severe weather. That said, for those of us working in emergency planning or the emergency services, we do see people having the worst days of their lives in some cases as a result of the weather - and no-one can entirely prepare for, for example, the situation that saw the widespread flooding in 2007. It's not the fault of the householder under a foot of dirty water because his street drains weren't designed to cope with that degree of rainfall. All that said, I certainly wouldn't take offence at anyone who loved a good blow or a foot of snow - I'm the same. The vast majority seem perfectly able to seperate out the event and the human cost - Some of us look at a deep storm system and think about the excitement, and some are trying to work out if it's likely to result in a storm surge or 12 hours of continual gritting on dangerous roads and how long a shift they're likely to be working - I try not to be snippy about it but if it occasionally peeks through, you now know why!

That's what it feels like here - RAF Donna Nook recording gusts of between 55-60mph since around 9pm but it noticeably cranked up here again after a bit of a lull.

The GFS 12z chart for 9am Friday morning is interesting in that it has the low funnelling up the Channel, with another Low sat in the Norwegian Sea troughing toward Shetland, with a pretty brisk NE wind across the North Sea. It's fortunate that tide heights are fairly benign at the moment because there's the potential for conditions to create some impressive tide heights along parts of the North Sea Coast on Friday morning.

pretty breezy here at the moment - pressure drop has been pretty impressive though 1001hPa at 4pm down to 985 at 11pm.

Quite right MK - a valid point to make, I think. The 2004 Tsunami might have been on a larger geographical scale, but has there ever been a situation where a country has had to deal with a hugely damaging earthquake, a hugely damaging tsunami and a nuclear powerplant crisis at the same time? I doubt any country on the planet could have coped any better.

Every country with a civil or military nuclear infrastructure has a history of cover-ups and deception. The Fukushima disaster (for that's surely what it will end up being) is just the first major incident in the internet/24 hour live media age. Had the partial meltdown at the General Atomics experimental sodium reactor at Santa Susana California happened in 2011 instead of 1959, or the destruction of an air-alert B-52 at Goldboro N. Carolina, which resulted in the jettisoning of 2 24 megatonne nuclear bombs, one of which tripped five of its six failsafe triggers happened in 2011 instead of 1961, then we'd be all over them, instead of them being essentially forgotten, no matter how potentially catastrophic they may have been. That's not to say that the Japanese authorities shouldn't be utterly open and honest about the situation and make whatever arrangements are necessary within their current circumstance, but it wouldn't be fair to single the Japanese nuclear industry out for being particularly secretive or deceptive. You can find evidence of both in the history of most nuclear powers (civillian or otherwise).

It's not a daft question at all, it's a question that raises more questions - pouring water on the external part of the biological shield is only a valuable procedure if they're worried about radioactive particulates (damping them down to prevent then from becoming wind-blown), or if they're worried about fire, or they are trying to keep the biological shielding cool. If it's the latter, then that suggests that there's still a problem in the cores of the reactors causing overheating - pouring water on the outer shell of the reactor won't cool the fuel rods but it might stop the steel outer reactor shielding from melting. Just speculation on my part, we don't really know, but if I was putting money on it, I think it is about damping the area down to restrict windblow of existing irradiated dust and particles.

Good post - thanks VP. In a pressurised water reactor, the water itself, as well as boron (as either boronic acid or as part of the control rods)serves as a neutron inhibitor. As VP says, 'meltdown' is a generic term often used to describe any set of circumstances which results in a breach of the biological shielding aimed at preventing the escape of radioactive materials beyond the reactor core itself.

A fire at a spent fuel storage facility is a step up in severity from what we appear to have seen so far - Is it clear whether the storage area is enclosed or open? It might well be open, in which case the nature of the contaminants are likely to be hugely more damaging than the 'steam' discharges that have apparently been the case so far. It was the reactor fire that caused much of the worst of the contamination as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. If the IAEA monitoring starts to pick up materials like Caesium 137 or Strontium 90 at high levels, then the situation is deteriorating very rapidly. Those in the plant still fighting the situation define the word bravery. *Edit* BBC reporting that radiation levels at Fukushima now reading 400 millisieverts per hour - 1 milliseivert = 0.1 rem, so the current radiation levels are 40 rems per hour. The permitted annual 'safe dose' is considered to be 5 rem per year (I think - it's not easy to work out and my memory is a bit hazy on this - confirmation welcomed) so 40 rems per hour is well beyond this. I'd have to go back and look at some of the work done by people like Cresson Kearney on radiation exposure, but I think this level of exposure is just below the estimated range of prompt injury and immediate health impacts (I think thats between 50-100 rems per hour, but that's from a very hazy memory, and if anyone knows different feel free to correct me), but workers will need to be rotated in and out on an almost hourly pattern on that basis, and will be taking radiation doses well beyond recognised health limits. As I said, that pretty much defines courage to me.

Good question - in a pressurised water reactor, the water itself isn't just a coolant in the traditional way, it's the reactor's primary neutron inhibitor - it regulates the speed at which the fuel reacts - the control mechanisms are either control rods (usually of boron) or a fluid of boron injected into the coolant - boron is also a thermal neutron inhibitor. With no water there's nothing regulating the nuclear reaction as well as nothing for boron control rods to sit in. As you say, things go out-of-control very quickly in these circumstances - a matter of minutes. I'd be astonished if at least one of the reactors at Fukushima didn't suffer a partial fuel melt. As for the intactness of the reactor itself - no doubt we'll find out soon enough. As AFF above points out, the detection of Caesium 137 and Iodine 131 is not a good sign - it's a by-product on the nuclear reaction and should be entombed entirely within the reactor itself. Also - why hand out stable Iodine unless it's to combat the absorbing of the radioactive iodine - since Iodine 131 has no place outside of a an intact reactor core, the fact that it's being handed out isn't very reassuring.

AFP reporting that the Japanese have formally requested assistance from the IAEA (The International Atomic Energy Agency - the UN Nuclear Agency) to help manage their current situation. I'm surprised it's taken this long. Local News broadcaster NHK also reporting a potential issue with reactor 2 at Fukushima - with unconfirmed reports that the coolant supply was compromised by the shutdown of an air regulation system and exposure of the fuel rods. The BBC have also picked it up, but report it as unconfirmed.

Good post - I'd have a little more sympathy with the nuclear power industry if they weren't so guarded about the accidents, though (of which there are far more than many people realise) and so unwilling to being open about the concequences - witness the difficulty exposing the extent of the damaged caused by the fire at Sellafield (Then Windscale) in 1957. Nevertheless, you're right about hindsight - it's also important to include context - far more people (by a factor of hundreds) have been killed mining coal or drilling for oil than have died as the direct result of civillian nuclear accidents (accepting that the number indirect deaths resulting from civillian nuclear accidents may never be known). Some of the pictures on the news today have been heart-breaking - the scenes in Sendai in particular looked apocalyptic.

Even if you flattened the reactor, and it suffered a complete meltdown, the design of the Fukushima reactor is such that the implications would be less severe than that of Chernobyl, and people forget that the Soviets and later Ukraine continued to operate the other reactors at Chernobyl until 2000. It doesn't use a carbon-based containment system, for a start (that was a major contributor to the scale and severity of the contamination at Chernobyl) - so whatever happens there wouldn't be 'The End of Japan', even if the core suffers a catastrophic uncontrolled reaction. That's not to say that it wouldn't be an absolutely appalling catastrophe, of course it would. Hopefully, it won't come to that.

Like we bombed the Torrey Canyon to burn off the oil spill? It's not a dumb question at all - the Soviets considered doing precisely that at Chernobyl, with the aim of collapsing the building on top of the reactor and creating, by explosion, what they subsequently did by civil engineering - encasing the reactor in concrete. They discounted it in the end because they couldn't guarantee completely entombing the reactor - I guess this would be the same situation. If the core isn't cooled, there's not much anyone can do except flood the core with vast amounts of water and venting the highly irradiated core with a constant flow of sea water - Like running the cold tap over a burn - the outcome would be vast amounts of highly contaminated seawater, but that's better than an uncontrolled reaction in the reactor core. Reuters now reporting that the emergency cooling procedures at the Fukishima No 3 reactor have failed. This is starting to look very serious. Most countries with civillian nuclear power stations have had emergency situations, but none, as far as I know, have ever had to manage so many at one time. I'd be astonished if the Japanese have enough specialist equipment and specially trained staff to deal with these events at the same time.

The continuing and increasing efforts to evacuate people from around the Fukishima plant (140,000 and rising, with the evacuation zone increased to 10 km) is indeed alarming.

Depends what type of design the reactor is - most nuclear reactors have upper and lower biological shields designed to seal the reactor in the event of an explosion in the core, which may have happened in this instance - though we won't know that yet. If the plant is venting radioactive Iodine 131 (and if the Japanese are handing out Iodine, then that would be my guess) then, rather than Chernobyl, the better comparison would be Three Mile Island. It's early days yet though.

Japanese government have now ordered evacuation of the 3,000 or so people living within 2km of the plant - on that scale, it's probably precautionary - if there was a serious issue, they'd be evacuating a lot further away than that.

20cm here in Louth. Best snow total for here since the winter of '81. Extraordinary.

Thundersnow - Lincolnshire Wolds, North-west of Louth around 1:00pm today - Graupel turning to snow - several loud rolls of thunder and one lightning flash. Now heavy snow falling.

Pink-footed geese on migration perhaps? We've had them arriving for a couple of weeks.

Still a few swifts knocking about here - saw one yesterday over the house - that's actually quite late - they're normally gone with us by the end of August.