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TEPCO doesn't know where melted fuel is at in reactors or actual level of radioactive p... - 0 views

  • Fukushima Reactors Status of Reactors Reactor No. 1 Reactor No. 2 Reactor No. 3 Spent Fuel Pools Spent Fuel Pool No. 1 Spent Fuel Pool No. 2 Spent Fuel Pool No. 3 Spent Fuel Pool No. 4 Common Spent Fuel Pool Radiation Releases Plutonium Uranium Chernobyl Comparisons Criticality Japan Tokyo Area Outside Tokyo U.S. & Canada West Coast California Los Angeles San Francisco Bay Area Hawaii Seattle Canada Midwest East Coast Florida US Nuclear Facilities Pacific Radiation Facts Internal Emitters Health Children Testing Food Water Air Rain Soil Milk Longterm Strange Coverups? Video Home Terms About Contact     Cooling system for reactors and spent fuel pools stopped working three times over 16-day period at Alabama nuke plant » NHK: TEPCO doesn’t know where melted fuel is at in reactors or actual level of radioactive particles still being released — About to start checking July 29th, 2011 at 06:43 AM POSITION: relative; BORDER-BOTTOM-STYLE: none; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; BORDER-RIGHT-STYLE: none; MARGIN: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; WIDTH: 336px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; DISPLAY: inline-table; BORDER-TOP-STYLE: none; HEIGHT: 280px; VISIBILITY: visible; BORDER
  • The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it will extract air from troubled reactors at the plant to measure the amount of radioactive substances. [...] The operation is intended to obtain accurate data on what kind of radioactive substances are being released and in what quantity. The air extraction is expected to begin later on Friday for the No.1 reactor and in early August for the No.2 unit. No plans have been decided for the No.3 reactor due to high radiation levels in part of its building.
  • that TEPCO doesn’t know where the melted fuel is or the actual level of radioactive particles still being released: TEPCO hopes the findings may also help the company grasp the extent of leakage of nuclear fuels into the containment vessels. Up to around one billion becquerels of radioactive substances arebelieved to be released every hour from reactors No.1, 2 and 3. It isnot known how accurate this figure is because it was worked out bytaking readings of the air on the plant’s premises.
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95% disagree with "Beyond Nuclear". Let's make it 99% [23Oct11] - 0 views

  • 95% disagree with “Beyond Nuclear”. Let’s make it 99% by Rod Adams on October 14, 2011 in Antinuclear activist , Politics of Nuclear Energy , Unreliables , Wind energy Share0 One of the more powerful concepts that I studied in college was called “groupthink.” The curriculum developers in the history department at the US Naval Academy thought it was important for people in training to become leaders in the US Navy learn to seek counsel and advice from as broad a range of sources as possible. We were taught how to avoid the kind of bad decision making that can result by surrounding oneself with yes-men or fellow travelers. The case study I remember most was the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion where virtually the entire Kennedy Administration cabinet thought that it would be a cakewalk . If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be. Aside: Don’t we live in an amazing world? I just typed “Bay of Pigs groupthink” into my browser search box and instantly hit on exactly the link I needed to support the statement above. It even cites the book we used when I was a plebe in 1977, more than 33 years ago. End Aside. Not everyone, however, has the benefit of early leadership lessons about the danger of believing that a small group of likeminded people can provide actionable advice. Some of the people who are most likely to be victims of groupthink are those who adamantly oppose the continued safe operation of emission-free nuclear power plants. The writers who exclusively quote members of that tiny community have also fallen into the groupthink trap.   On October 8, 2011, the Berkeley Patch, a New Jersey based journal that regularly posts negative stories about Oyster Creek, featured an article titled Petitioners to NRC: Shut Down All Fukushima-Like Nuclear Plants . Here is a snapshot of the masthead, the headline and the lede. The article is a diatribe that quotes people on the short list of frequently quoted antinuclear activists including Paul Gunter, Michael Mariotte, Kevin Kamps, Deb Katz and Dale Bridenbaugh. The author faithfully reproduces some of their best attempts to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt using untruths about the actual events at Fukushima. For example, the article uses the following example of how antinuclear activists are still trying to spread the myth that the used fuel pools at Fukushima caught fire. Oyster Creek – the oldest nuclear plant in the United States – has generated over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuc
  • 95% disagree with “Beyond Nuclear”. Let’s make it 99% by Rod Adams on October 14, 2011 in Antinuclear activist, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Unreliables, Wind energy Share0 One of the more powerful concepts that I studied in college was called “groupthink.” The curriculum developers in the history department at the US Naval Academy thought it was important for people in training to become leaders in the US Navy learn to seek counsel and advice from as broad a range of sources as possible. We were taught how to avoid the kind of bad decision making that can result by surrounding oneself with yes-men or fellow travelers. The case study I remember most was the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion where virtually the entire Kennedy Administration cabinet thought that it would be a cakewalk. If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.Aside: Don’t we live in an amazing world? I just typed “Bay of Pigs groupthink” into my browser search box and instantly hit on exactly the link I needed to support the statement above. It even cites the book we used when I was a plebe in 1977, more than 33 years ago. End Aside. Not everyone, however, has the benefit of early leadership lessons about the danger of believing that a small group of likeminded people can provide actionable advice. Some of the people who are most likely to be victims of groupthink are those who adamantly oppose the continued safe operation of emission-free nuclear power plants. The writers who exclusively quote members of that tiny community have also fallen into the groupthink trap.  On October 8, 2011, the Berkeley Patch, a New Jersey based journal that regularly posts negative stories about Oyster Creek, featured an article titled Petitioners to NRC: Shut Down All Fukushima-Like Nuclear Plants . Here is a snapshot of the masthead, the headline and the lede. The article is a diatribe that quotes people on the short list of frequently quoted antinuclear activists including Paul Gunter, Michael Mariotte, Kevin Kamps, Deb Katz and Dale Bridenbaugh. The author faithfully reproduces some of their best attempts to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt using untruths about the actual events at Fukushima. For example, the article uses the following example of how antinuclear activists are still trying to spread the myth that the used fuel pools at Fukushima caught fire. Oyster Creek – the oldest nuclear plant in the United States – has generated over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear said. “Granted that some of that has been moved into dry cast storage, but the pool remains full to its capacity,” Kamps said. “And this was a re-rack capacity. Much later in terms of quantity of high level radioactive waste than it was originally designed for.” This represents 125 million curies of radioactive cesium-137 and the NRC has reported that up to 100 percent of the hazardous material could be released from a pool fire, Kamps said. “I would like to point out that Fukushima Daiichi units one, two, three and four combined in terms of the inventory of high level radioactive waste in their storage pools does not match some of these reactors I mentioned in terms of how much waste is in these pools,” Kamps said. “So the risks are greater here for boil downs and the consequences of a radioactive fire in these pools.” Fortunately, the people who are not a part of the antinuclear community are finally beginning to recognize their own strength and to realize that they do not have to remain silent while the lies are being spread. Here is how a knowledgable commenter responded to the above segment of the article: If Patricia Miller had bothered to do the fact-checking required by journalistic integrity she would have come across this video showing 30 feet of water above the fuel at Fukushima with all of the fuel bundles exactly where they’re supposed to be.
  • On October 8, 2011, the Berkeley Patch, a New Jersey based journal that regularly posts negative stories about Oyster Creek, featured an article titled Petitioners to NRC: Shut Down All Fukushima-Like Nuclear Plants. Here is a snapshot of the masthead, the headline and the lede. The article is a diatribe that quotes people on the short list of frequently quoted antinuclear activists including Paul Gunter, Michael Mariotte, Kevin Kamps, Deb Katz and Dale Bridenbaugh. The author faithfully reproduces some of their best attempts to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt using untruths about the actual events at Fukushima. For example, the article uses the following example of how antinuclear activists are still trying to spread the myth that the used fuel pools at Fukushima caught fire. Oyster Creek – the oldest nuclear plant in the United States – has generated over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear said. “Granted that some of that has been moved into dry cast storage, but the pool remains full to its capacity,” Kamps said. “And this was a re-rack capacity. Much later in terms of quantity of high level radioactive waste than it was originally designed for.” This represents 125 million curies of radioactive cesium-137 and the NRC has reported that up to 100 percent of the hazardous material could be released from a pool fire, Kamps said. “I would like to point out that Fukushima Daiichi units one, two, three and four combined in terms of the inventory of high level radioactive waste in their storage pools does not match some of these reactors I mentioned in terms of how much waste is in these pools,” Kamps said. “So the risks are greater here for boil downs and the consequences of a radioactive fire in these pools.”
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  • NOTHING happend to the fuel in the pools at Fukushima. I would like to see some evidence other than the word of an activist who frightens kids for a living to support Gunter’s rant about peices of fuel being ejected miles away. From the looks of that video, the fuel didn’t move an inch. There is also a poll associated with the article. The poll discloses that it is completely unscientific, since it allows anyone to vote and is not based on randomly selected participants. However, I think that the results as of 0315 this morning are pretty amusing since the antinuclear opinion piece has been posted for nearly a week.
  • Perhaps this October 12, 2011 post titled Oyster Creek Response that was published on Clean Energy Insight has something to do with the way the results are shaping up with 1029 out of 1080 respondents (95.3%) saying that Oyster Creek should not stop operating. Here is one more example of how inbred the group of antinuclear activists has become. I am talking here about the people who are so adamantly opposed to using nuclear energy that they do not even want existing nuclear plants to keep on producing clean, emission free, low cost electricity. Michael Mariotte of NIRS makes the following extraordinary claim: Ninety-five percent of the people in the world know about Fukushima, Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service said.
  • “It took a really extraordinary event for 95 percent of the people in the world to know about it,” he said. “If they know about Fukushima, they know about Mark 1 reactors exploding in the air and releasing toxic radiation across the world and they know that’s not a good thing. Something has to be done to make sure that never happens again.” I could not let that one pass without a comment; I am quite sure that Mariotte has once again fallen victim to the fact that he surrounds himself with people who echo his own prejudices. Here is my response.
  • Marriotte makes an interesting statement by he claiming that “95% of the people in the world” know about Fukushima. That statement might be true about the people in the United States, where advertiser-supported television news programs covered the events with breathless hype for several months. I am pretty sure that you would have a difficult time finding anyone in China, central Africa, the Asian subcontinent, South America or the Middle East who can even pronounce Fukushima, much less know anything about GE Mark 1 containments. Most of them would not even know that they should be worried about radiation because they have never been taught to be afraid of something that they cannot smell, feel, taste, or hear especially when it occurs at levels that have no chance of making them sick within their expected lifetime. Mariotte, Gunter, Kamps, Katz and Bridenbaugh are all members of a vocal, but tiny group of people who have been carrying the water of the fossil fuel industry for decades by opposing nuclear energy, the only real competitor it has. They are victims of groupthink who believe that their neighbors in Takoma Park are representative of the whole world.
  • Just before making this comment, I voted in the unscientific poll associated with the article. 95% say that Oyster Creek should keep on powering New Jersey homes and businesses. They are not impressed by the Beyond Nuclear FUD; they like clean electricity.
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Clear spike in radiation measured across Japan on September 21 (CHARTS) [27Sep11] - 0 views

  • Fukushima & Japan Tokyo Area Outside Tokyo Fukushima Reactors Status of Reactors Reactor No. 1 Reactor No. 2 Reactor No. 3 Spent Fuel Pools Spent Fuel Pool No. 1 Spent Fuel Pool No. 2 Spent Fuel Pool No. 3 Spent Fuel Pool No. 4 Common Spent Fuel Pool Radiation Releases Plutonium Uranium Longterm Chernobyl Comparisons Criticality US & Canada West Coast California Los Angeles San Francisco Bay Area Hawaii Seattle Canada Midwest East Coast Florida US Nuclear Facilities North Anna (VA) Calvert Cliffs (MD) World Europe France UK Germany Chernobyl Rest of Europe South America Russia Asia China South Korea Taiwan Rest of Asia Pacific Rad. Maps & Forecasts Radiation Maps Radiation Forecasts Rad. Facts Internal Emitters Health Testing Food Water Air Rain Soil Milk Strange Coverups? Children Video Home Log In Discussion Forum page_item
  • See all charts here.
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Nuclear Expert Discusses 'Melt-Through' at NRC Meeting: I believe melted nuclear core l... - 0 views

  • Fukushima & Japan Tokyo Area Outside Tokyo Fukushima Reactors Status of Reactors Reactor No. 1 Reactor No. 2 Reactor No. 3 Spent Fuel Pools Spent Fuel Pool No. 1 Spent Fuel Pool No. 2 Spent Fuel Pool No. 3 Spent Fuel Pool No. 4 Common Spent Fuel Pool Radiation Releases Plutonium Uranium Longterm Chernobyl Comparisons Criticality US & Canada West Coast California Los Angeles San Francisco Bay Area Hawaii Seattle Canada Midwest East Coast Florida US Nuclear Facilities North Anna (VA) Calvert Cliffs (MD) World Europe France UK Germany Chernobyl Rest of Europe South America Russia Asia China South Korea Taiwan Rest of Asia Pacific Maps & Forecasts Radiation Maps Radiation Forecasts Rad. Facts Internal Emitters Health Testing Food Water Air Rain Soil Milk Strange Coverups? Children Video Home page_
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Japan Forced School Children To Clean Radioactive Dirt From Swimming Pools [09Jul11] - 0 views

  • In another propaganda show meant to convince the public there is no threat from radiation in Japan, local schools forced children to clean radioactive dirt from the bottom of the schools swimming pools. One PTA member who didn’t trust the assertions from the school and the government kept a sample of the dirt collected from the pool and decided to have it tested for radiation
  • According to a the Mainichi Daily News (Japanese), that sample was found to contain 17,020 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium. Here is an English translation of the Mainichi Shinbun article as posted on Yahoo News, 7/5/2011, provided, by EX-SKF
  • East earthquake: Community School of cesium from the mud pool Joso, Ibaraki / 2 times the allowable standard landfill It was disclosed that 17,020 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium was detected from the dirt that were scooped out from the swimming pool when the teachers and pupils of one public elementary schools in Joso City did the cleaning of the pool in May. The amount is more than twice the safety limit set by the Ministry of the Environment for the radioactive debris that could be buried. The school moved the dirt in a separate area. Upon this news, the city’s Board of Education surveyed the situation of the pool dirt in city’s elementary schools and junior high schools on July 4, and found out there were 4 other elementary schools who had kept the dirt on the school premises.
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  • A member of the school’s PTA collected a bucketful of this dirt on June 11, and sent 3 kilograms of it to a laboratory specializing in radiation measurement. The result, which was delivered on June 29, showed the sample contained 7,700 becquerels/kg of cesium-134 and 9,320 becquerels/kg of cesium-137. The safety limit for disposal of radioactive debris, as announced by the Ministry of the Environment last month, is 8,000 becquerels/kg. If it is below that limit, you can bury the debris. If it exceeds, then the measures will be necessary to shield the radiation. The Ministry of Education and Science says the dirt from the pool would be treated in the same manner.
  • The vice principal of the elementary school said, “As an activity to promote love for the school, 5th and 6th graders participated in the cleaning.” The school didn’t think of the radiation contamination then. The city’s Board of Education instructed the principals of the city’s schools on May 25 to pay attention to the health of pupils when cleaning the swimming pools, but by that time 4 schools including this elementary school had already had pupils clean the pools
  • The city’s Board of Education has decided to have a company that specializes in disposal of industrial waste to dispose the pool dirt from the school. As to the dirt at 4 other schools, the radiation will be measured on July 5. If the numbers are higher than those for the schoolyards, the dirt will be disposed as industrial waste. Koichi Sakamaki, manager for education [at the Board of Education] said, “Cleaning the swimming pools is part of the school instruction. But we should have been a bit more careful.”
  • The member of the school’s PTA says, “That the children did the cleanup of radioactive dirt should be recorded as such , for the future health monitoring. The city’s Board of Education should provide appropriate countermeasures, and disclose information fully.” The Board of Education of Ibaraki Prefecture, on the other hand, says “While it’s true there is no standard for evaluating the pool dirt, but there is no need to be nervous as long as you wash your hands after cleaning the pool.”
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Spent Fuel Pools in Japan Survived Disaster, Industry Notes [28Jul11] - 0 views

  • The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently produced a list of safety improvements that might be undertaken at American nuclear plants in light of the Fukushima disaster in Japan. On Tuesday, the nuclear industry focused on two elements that were conspicuous by their absence.
  • In a presentation to Wall Street analysts, Marvin Fertel, the president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, emphasized that spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had “survived the accident quite well.”Early in the crisis, which began with an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, American regulators feared that water in one of the pools had almost completely boiled off, and the American Embassy in Tokyo advised Americans to stay 50 miles away. But “the pools may turn out to be a much better story at Fukushima than people envisioned,’’ Mr. Fertel said.
  • Noting that fuel pools at American reactors have far more radioactive material in them than the ones at Fukushima, the accident focused new attention on the idea of moving spent fuel out of the pools and into dry casks, Something already done at most American reactors when they run out of space.That idea first came to prominence after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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  • But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s report does not call for moving more of the fuel.When the commission received an oral report from a six-member “task force” it appointed to study the safety implications of Fukushima, one commissioner, William C. Ostendorff, said he had received letters from members of Congress asking for wider use of the casks, however.But Charles L. Miller, who led the task force, replied that removing the fuel would not do much to reduce the basic problem, which is that fuel rods remain in the pool, and if cooling is knocked out, the water that provides protection against melting and the release of radioactive materials will boil away.
  • “Before you can take it out of the pool, it has to be at least five years old, and by that time, we call it, for lack of a better word, cold fuel,’’ Mr. Miller said.At the briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Fertel mentioned other recommendations from the task force, including better instruments for altering operators to how much water is in the pools and new ways of adding water in an emergency. Pulling more fuel out, he said, would provide certain advantages but is also certain to expose workers to radiation in the course of the transfer.
  • Fukushima used dry casks as well, and those appear to have survived without damage, Mr. Fertel said, although they have not been thoroughly inspected. “They’re fine, but so are the pools,’’ he said.
  • They were not unscathed, however; debris flew into the pools after the buildings surrounding them blew up in hydrogen explosions.
  • The task force also refrained from recommending changes in emergency planning zones, despite the embassy’s recommendation during the crisis for Americans to stay 50 miles away from Fukushima. In the United States, emergency evacuation planning is required within 10 miles of any reactor.
  • Mr. Fertel said the recommendation to evacuate to 50 miles “was based not on information, but on the lack thereof.’’
  • Opponents of nuclear power have argued that the commission should cease all extensions of reactors’ operating licenses until it has digested the lessons of the accident in Japan. But Mr. Fertel noted that since March 11, the commission has issued 20-year license extensions for the Vermont Yankee, Palo Verde, Prairie Island, Salem and Hope Creek reactors, and allowed higher power outputs for Limerick and Point Beach.
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Scientists Radically Raise Estimates of Fukushima Fallout [25Oct11] - 0 views

  • The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed. So concludes a study1 that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant. The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action. The analysis has been posted online for open peer review by the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
  • Andreas Stohl, an atmospheric scientist with the Norwegian Institute for Air Research in Kjeller, who led the research, believes that the analysis is the most comprehensive effort yet to understand how much radiation was released from Fukushima Daiichi. "It's a very valuable contribution," says Lars-Erik De Geer, an atmospheric modeller with the Swedish Defense Research Agency in Stockholm, who was not involved with the study. The reconstruction relies on data from dozens of radiation monitoring stations in Japan and around the world. Many are part of a global network to watch for tests of nuclear weapons that is run by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna. The scientists added data from independent stations in Canada, Japan and Europe, and then combined those with large European and American caches of global meteorological data.
  • Stohl cautions that the resulting model is far from perfect. Measurements were scarce in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima accident, and some monitoring posts were too contaminated by radioactivity to provide reliable data. More importantly, exactly what happened inside the reactors — a crucial part of understanding what they emitted — remains a mystery that may never be solved. "If you look at the estimates for Chernobyl, you still have a large uncertainty 25 years later," says Stohl. Nevertheless, the study provides a sweeping view of the accident. "They really took a global view and used all the data available," says De Geer.
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  • Challenging numbers Japanese investigators had already developed a detailed timeline of events following the 11 March earthquake that precipitated the disaster. Hours after the quake rocked the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, the tsunami arrived, knocking out crucial diesel back-up generators designed to cool the reactors in an emergency. Within days, the three reactors operating at the time of the accident overheated and released hydrogen gas, leading to massive explosions. Radioactive fuel recently removed from a fourth reactor was being held in a storage pool at the time of the quake, and on 14 March the pool overheated, possibly sparking fires in the building over the next few days.
  • But accounting for the radiation that came from the plants has proved much harder than reconstructing this chain of events. The latest report from the Japanese government, published in June, says that the plant released 1.5 × 1016 bequerels of caesium-137, an isotope with a 30-year half-life that is responsible for most of the long-term contamination from the plant2. A far larger amount of xenon-133, 1.1 × 1019 Bq, was released, according to official government estimates.
  • The new study challenges those numbers. On the basis of its reconstructions, the team claims that the accident released around 1.7 × 1019 Bq of xenon-133, greater than the estimated total radioactive release of 1.4 × 1019 Bq from Chernobyl. The fact that three reactors exploded in the Fukushima accident accounts for the huge xenon tally, says De Geer. Xenon-133 does not pose serious health risks because it is not absorbed by the body or the environment. Caesium-137 fallout, however, is a much greater concern because it will linger in the environment for decades. The new model shows that Fukushima released 3.5 × 1016 Bq caesium-137, roughly twice the official government figure, and half the release from Chernobyl. The higher number is obviously worrying, says De Geer, although ongoing ground surveys are the only way to truly establish the public-health risk.
  • Stohl believes that the discrepancy between the team's results and those of the Japanese government can be partly explained by the larger data set used. Japanese estimates rely primarily on data from monitoring posts inside Japan3, which never recorded the large quantities of radioactivity that blew out over the Pacific Ocean, and eventually reached North America and Europe. "Taking account of the radiation that has drifted out to the Pacific is essential for getting a real picture of the size and character of the accident," says Tomoya Yamauchi, a radiation physicist at Kobe University who has been measuring radioisotope contamination in soil around Fukushima. Click for full imageStohl adds that he is sympathetic to the Japanese teams responsible for the official estimate. "They wanted to get something out quickly," he says. The differences between the two studies may seem large, notes Yukio Hayakawa, a volcanologist at Gunma University who has also modelled the accident, but uncertainties in the models mean that the estimates are actually quite similar.
  • The new analysis also claims that the spent fuel being stored in the unit 4 pool emitted copious quantities of caesium-137. Japanese officials have maintained that virtually no radioactivity leaked from the pool. Yet Stohl's model clearly shows that dousing the pool with water caused the plant's caesium-137 emissions to drop markedly (see 'Radiation crisis'). The finding implies that much of the fallout could have been prevented by flooding the pool earlier. The Japanese authorities continue to maintain that the spent fuel was not a significant source of contamination, because the pool itself did not seem to suffer major damage. "I think the release from unit 4 is not important," says Masamichi Chino, a scientist with the Japanese Atomic Energy Authority in Ibaraki, who helped to develop the Japanese official estimate. But De Geer says the new analysis implicating the fuel pool "looks convincing".
  • The latest analysis also presents evidence that xenon-133 began to vent from Fukushima Daiichi immediately after the quake, and before the tsunami swamped the area. This implies that even without the devastating flood, the earthquake alone was sufficient to cause damage at the plant.

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    The Japanese government's report has already acknowledged that the shaking at Fukushima Daiichi exceeded the plant's design specifications. Anti-nuclear activists have long been concerned that the government has failed to adequately address geological hazards when licensing nuclear plants (see Nature 448, 392–393; 2007), and the whiff of xenon could prompt a major rethink of reactor safety assessments, says Yamauchi.

  • The model also shows that the accident could easily have had a much more devastating impact on the people of Tokyo. In the first days after the accident the wind was blowing out to sea, but on the afternoon of 14 March it turned back towards shore, bringing clouds of radioactive caesium-137 over a huge swathe of the country (see 'Radioisotope reconstruction'). Where precipitation fell, along the country's central mountain ranges and to the northwest of the plant, higher levels of radioactivity were later recorded in the soil; thankfully, the capital and other densely populated areas had dry weather. "There was a period when quite a high concentration went over Tokyo, but it didn't rain," says Stohl. "It could have been much worse." 
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Fukushima Forever [21Sep13] - 0 views

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    [...] Much more serious is the danger that the spent fuel rod pool at the top of the nuclear plant number four will collapse in a storm or an earthquake, or in a failed attempt to carefully remove each of the 1,535 rods and safely transport them to the common storage pool 50 meters away. Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years. [...]
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Tepco: Recent quake caused water level drop in tank next to Spent Fuel Pool No. 4 [02Ja... - 0 views

  • UPDATE* EX-SKF has a translation of Tepco’s press release: Fukushima Reactor 4 Skimmer Surge Tank Latest: Earthquake Caused the Water to Go from SFP to Reactor Well Instead, Says TEPCO “Tepco officially admitted the decreasing water level of the tank at reactor 4 was caused by the earthquake on 1/1/2012. (Source) Tepco states the water did not flow into the tank from water cooling system but flew into the container vessel in stead. However they still have not announced they managed to fixed the broken part of the reactor.” -Fukushima Diary Mainichi Shimbun, January 2, 2012:
  • Google Translate Headline: <1 Fukushima nuclear power plant> No. 4 tank drawdown effects of earthquakes and announced …
  • TEPCO two days, the water level decreased by more than one day of the tank adjacent to the spent fuel pool of the first nuclear power plant Unit 4, Fukushima, said the cause, effects of earthquakes announced four largest intensity observed in northeastern Kanto was. TEPCO, flows into the opposite side of the reactor containment tank of radioactive contamination in pool water, and found that it caused by loss of water supply to the tank from a temporary pool. The cooling effect of the pool, he said. According to TEPCO, the tank water level is usually about 1.6 inches per hour, such as reduced natural evaporation, after the earthquake, were down by 8-9 cm per hour. Polluted water in the tank is removed from heat and dust through the filter and an external heat exchanger and returned to the pool again.
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Newly Released TEPCO Data Proves Fairewinds Assertions of Significant Fuel Pool Failure... - 0 views

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 28 Aug 11 - No Cached
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    Video - New TEPCO data measured on August 19 & 20 shows severe damage to the spent fuel in Fukushima Daiichi Units 1, 2, and 3. The adjacent TEPCO table posted on the front page shows incredibly high levels of Cesium 137 and Cesium 134 in all three spent fuel pools of Units 1, 2, & 3. This TEPCO data clearly contradicts and refutes the July assertion by the NRC the Fukushima Daiichi spent fuel pools were not damaged in this tragic accident. Crytome (cry to me) has a new high resolution photo, also uploaded, that shows the extensive damage of the Unit 3 spent fuel pool and the reactor building.
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P/C Jaczko, Johnson & Tsutsui, The Ongoing Fukushima Daiichi Crisis [24Sep13] - 0 views

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    At 45:00 in Gregory Jaczko, Former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: There's very risk significant activities happening in the next several months with the attempt to remove fuel from the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. That's a very significant activity, and it's also unprecedented. There's significant structural damage to the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. New structures had to be created. They're going to have to lift significant debris from the pools. These are all very, very unprecedented activities.
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Nuclear waste requires a cradle-to-grave strategy, study finds [27Aug11] - 0 views

  • ScienceDaily (July 3, 2010) — after Fukushima, it is now imperative to redefine what makes a successful nuclear energy–from the cradle to the grave. If the management of nuclear waste is not considered by the authority, the public in many countries reject nuclear energy as an option, according to a survey appearing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE.
  • According to Allison Macfarlane, Associate Professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University and a member of the Blue Ribbon for nuclear future of America, resulting in storage for nuclear waste, which is still a last-minute decision to a number of countries outside of Japan. It is surprisingly common for reactor sites for overburdened with spent nuclear fuel without any clear plan. In South Korea, for example, saving to four nuclear power stations in the nation is filled, leading to a crisis within the storage potential of the next decade.
  • United Arab Emirates broke the ground for the first of four nuclear reactors on 14 March 2011, but has not set the precedence of storage. Hans Blix, former head of the International Atomic energy Agency and current President of the UAE’S International Advisory Council, noted: “it is still an open question of a draft final disposal and greater attention should be spent on deciding what to do.”
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  • Some very low level nuclear waste can go into landfill-type settings. But low level waste consists of low concentrations of long-lived radionuclides and higher concentrations of these short-lived must remain sequestered for a few hundred years in subsurface engineering facilities. Medium-and high-level wastes require placing hundreds of meters below the ground for hundreds of thousands of years in order to ensure public safety. Intermediate waste containing high concentrations of long-lived radionuclides, as high-level waste, including spent fuel reprocessing and fuel waste. Because they are extremely radioactive high level waste that emits heat. There is no repository for high level nuclear waste disposal wherever in the world.
  • All types of energy production, money is on the front end of the process and of waste management in the back end. Macfarlane argues, however, that a failure to plan for the disposal of waste can cause the most profitable front end of a company to collapse.
  • Nuclear fuel discharged from a light water reactor after about four to six years in the kernel. This should be cool, because the fuel is radioactively and thermally very hot to discharge, in a pool. Actively cooled with borated water circulated, spent fuel pools are approximately 40 feet (12 meters) deep. Water not only removes heat, but also helps to absorb neutrons and stop a chain reaction. In some countries, including the United States, metal shelves in spent fuel pools hold four times the originally planned amount of fuel. The plans to reprocess fuel have failed for both economic and political reasons. This means that today is more fuel pools from reactor cores, and the fuel endangers big radiation in the event of an accident-loss of coolant, as happened in Fukushima.
  • Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant spent fuel has seven pools, one at each reactor and large shared swimming pool, dry storage of spent fuel on site. Initially, Japan had planned a brief period of storage of spent fuel in the reactor before reprocessing, but Japan’s reprocessing facility has suffered long delays (scheduled to open in 2007, the installation is not yet ready). This caused the spent fuel to build the reactor factory sites.
  • Countries should include additional spent fuel storage nuclear projects from the beginning, and not the creation of ad hoc solutions, after spent nuclear fuel has already begun to build. Storage location is a technical issue, but also a social and political.
D'coda Dcoda

Nuclear agency urged to review US spent fuel pools [06Oct11] - 0 views

  • Extract The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should act immediately to improve the safety of pools containing radioactive waste stored at U.S. nuclear plants, an internal report released Wednesday said. The report by NRC staff elevates the importance of spent-fuel pools, saying current regulations do not require instruments measuring water levels to be operable in case of an accident. Water levels at spent-fuel pools were a principal issue after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that crippled a nuclear plant in Japan. End Extract http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/international/news/20111006p2g00m0in019000c.html
D'coda Dcoda

204 new fuel rods turned out to be in the "spent" fuel pool at reactor 4.[29Oct11] - 0 views

  • Tepco has announced that there are 1,331 spent fuel rods in the pool of reactor 4. However, 10/14/2011, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency announced that the pool contained 204 units of new fuel rods as well. They assumed that once aftershock hits the pool and it’s damaged, the fuel rods get to 900 C, melting out of the zirconium cover in 2.3 hours later. As the zirconium alloy cover (Zircaloy) is destroyed, it emits hydrogen, which is likely to cause hydrogen explosion. The melted fuel rods are estimated to have reached 2,800 C and started to melt down some 7.7 hours later.
  • Currently Tepco is reinforcing the fuel pool, which is now exposed to outside because it lost the wall from the explosion. Today Hokkaido University stated that there is a possibility that another M9.0 hits north Japan again (soon? imminent?). They say they caught the same earthquake echo of 89.9MHz as what they caught before 311. According to their report, another M9.0 may hit from December to January, the epicenter may be from South Miyagi prefecture offshore to Ibaraki offshore, which is beside Fukushima plant.
  • Even apart from this report, it is rational to assume another major aftershock hits Fukushima plants anytime. Fukushima is still on the edge.
D'coda Dcoda

Reactor 4 : Spent fuel pool was boiling without water after 1/1/2012 [08Jan12] - 0 views

  • Following up this article about the decreasing of water level at reactor 4… The blogger woman in Minamisoma leaked information from an actual Fukushima worker. According to her post, after the earthquake of 1/1/2012, the pipe of spent fuel pool for reactor 4 was broken, the pool completely lost its water. The worker stated, Sooner or later, the truth will have to to be widely known. Believe it or not, you will only regret. Wear a mask at least. The pool was boiling without water.
D'coda Dcoda

Leakage from spent fuel pool of reactor 4 , spent fuel pool completely exposed [09Nov11] - 0 views

  • Tepco announced that water purifying system leaked liquid at spent fuel pool of reactor 4.
  • It happened on 11/8/2011. No announcement about the radiation level or leaked nuclide etc.. The system is to take off the salt from water. It happened in the high pressure pump part of the water purifying system. A journalist of Shukan Asahi, Mr.Imanishi was invited to go into the site by an actual Fukushima worker. The Tepco worker had sanity enough to think Tepco and the government should reveal the truth because it is the world wide / historical industrial disaster. He wanted the journalist to report what is actually going on in the plant. From his report, the spent fuel pool of reactor 4 is completely “exposed”.
Dan R.D.

Report: Journalist gets inside Fukushima plant, says Reactor No. 4 Spent Fuel Pool is c... - 0 views

  • Nov. 9 — “A journalist of Shukan Asahi, Mr.Imanishi was invited to go into the site by an actual Fukushima worker,” reports Mochizuki. The journalist reported that “the spent fuel pool of reactor 4 is completely ‘exposed’,” Mochizuki writes. For the video below Mochizuki summarizes Imanishi’s comments: The wall and ceiling of Reactor No. 4′s building was completely blown off by “some explosion” “The spent fuel pool is totally left outside, out of control so what you can even see it from out of the reactor” “The wall of the reactors are about 1m thick of huge concrete mass. It is blown off.” “It shows how much the explosion(s) were more massive that they were announced by the government.”
D'coda Dcoda

Nuclear Waste Piles Up As Repository Plan Falters [28Jul11] - 0 views

  • Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on California's central coast has more than 1,300 tons of nuclear waste sitting on its back porch, waiting for pickup. The problem is, there's no one to pick it up
  • The 103 other reactors in the country are in the same bind — it has now been more than 50 years since the first nuclear plant was switched on in the United States, and the federal government still hasn't found a permanent home for the nation's nuclear waste
  • The two nuclear reactors at the plant generate steam that drives giant turbines, which in turn generate electricity that powers about 3 million households. Once the uranium rods that fuel the reactors are used up, they're removed and cooled down underwater, in temporary storage pools.
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  • The trouble is, those "temporary" pools have become pretty permanent and crowded, as utilities load them up with more fuel rods, squeezing them closer together
  • Since 1982, utility customers on the nuclear grid have paid $34 billion into a federal fund for moving the waste to some kind of permanent disposal site — something the federal government still hasn't done
  • 65,000 tons of nuclear waste have piled up at power plants — waste that produces more radioactivity than the reactors themselves
  • "It is clear that we lack a comprehensive national policy to address the nuclear fuel cycle, including management of nuclear waste
  • Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the leading contender, until Nevada's residents said "not in our backyard."
  • In the meantime, utility companies like PG&E are stuck with the waste. During a visit three years ago, engineers at Diablo Canyon were preparing to move older waste from storage in pools to containers called dry casks. "The spent fuel pools were not built large enough to hold all the fuel from the original 40-year license life, so we had to find alternatives for safe storage," said Pete Resler, head of PG&E's nuclear communications at the time. The company is now using some dry casks — huge concrete and steel canisters to store older, less radioactive waste. Each is anchored to its own concrete pad.
  • "Each one of those pads is 7-foot-thick concrete with steel rebar reinforcement in it," Resler says. Those pads are there as an extra measure because Diablo is situated near two significant seismic faults. There are now 16 of these canisters sitting on the plant grounds, with plans to fill 12 more in the next couple of years
  • Though most agree that dry-casking is safer than leaving the fuel rods in pools of water, nobody's proposing it as a permanent solution. The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, told Sen. Feinstein's committee that it's the best we can do for now.
  • "Right now we believe that for at least 100 years, that fuel can be stored with very little impacts to health and safety, or to the environment," Jaczko said.
  • In the meantime, the Blue Ribbon Commission appointed by President Obama to find that way forward will issue another round of recommendations Friday
  • They're likely to include more stop-gap measures, while the holy grail of a permanent home for spent fuel remains decades away
  •  
    There's a detailed chart on the page showing how much waste is stored at sites, state by state
D'coda Dcoda

It's 2050: Do you know where your nuclear waste is? [09Sep11] - 1 views

  • Though nuclear power produces electricity with little in the way of carbon dioxide emissions, it, like other energy sources, is not without its own set of waste products. And in the case of nuclear power, most of these wastes are radioactive.1 Some very low level nuclear wastes can be stored and then disposed of in landfill-type settings. Other nuclear waste must remain sequestered for a few hundred years in specially engineered subsurface facilities; this is the case with low level waste, which is composed of low concentrations of long-lived radionuclides and higher concentrations of short-lived ones. Intermediate and high-level waste both require disposal hundreds of meters under the Earth’s surface, where they must remain out of harm’s way for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years (IAEA, 2009). Intermediate level wastes are not heat-emitting, but contain high concentrations of long-lived radionuclides. High-level wastes, including spent nuclear fuel and wastes from the reprocessing of spent fuel, are both heat-emitting and highly radioactive.
  • When it comes to the severity of an accident at a nuclear facility, there may be little difference between those that occur at the front end of the nuclear power production and those at the back end: An accident involving spent nuclear fuel can pose a threat as disastrous as that posed by reactor core meltdowns. In particular, if spent fuel pools are damaged or are not actively cooled, a major crisis could be in sight, especially if the pools are packed with recently discharged spent fuel.
  • Elements of success
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  • All countries with well-established nuclear programs have found themselves requiring spent fuel storage in addition to spent fuel pools at reactors. Some, like the US, use dry storage designs, such as individual casks or storage vaults that are located at reactor sites; other countries, Germany for one, use away-from-reactor facilities. Sweden has a large underground pool located at a centralized facility, CLAB, to which different reactors send their spent fuel a year after discharge, so spent fuel does not build up at reactor sites. Dry storage tends to be cheaper and can be more secure than wet storage because active circulation of water is not required. At the same time, because dry storage uses passive air cooling, not the active cooling that is available in a pool to keep the fuel cool, these systems can only accept spent fuel a number of years after discharge.6
  • The United States had been working toward developing a high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada; this fell through in 2010, when the Obama administration decided to reverse this decision, citing political “stalemate” and lack of public consensus about the site. Instead, the Obama administration instituted the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to rethink the management of the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.8 The US can flaunt one success, though. The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), located near Carlsbad in southern New Mexico, is actually the only operating deep geologic repository for intermediate level nuclear waste, receiving waste since 1998. In the case of WIPP, it only accepts transuranic wastes from the nuclear weapons complex. The site is regulated solely by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state of New Mexico has partial oversight of WIPP through its permitting authority established by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The city of Carlsbad is supportive of the site and it appears to be tolerated by the rest of the state.9
  • France has had more success after failing in its first siting attempt in 1990, when a granite site that had been selected drew large protests and the government opted to rethink its approach to nuclear waste disposal entirely. In 2006, the government announced that it needed a geologic repository for high-level waste, identified at least one suitable area, and passed laws requiring a license application to be submitted by 2015 and the site to begin receiving high-level waste by 2025.
  • Canada recently rethought the siting process for nuclear waste disposal and began a consensus-based participatory process. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization was established in 2002, after previous attempts to site a repository failed. The siting process began with three years’ worth of conversations with the public on the best method to manage spent fuel. The organization is now beginning to solicit volunteer communities to consider a repository, though much of the process remains to be decided, including the amount and type of compensation given to the participating communities.
  • the most difficult part of the back end of the fuel cycle is siting the required facilities, especially those associated with spent fuel management and disposal. Siting is not solely a technical problem—it is as much a political and societal issue. And to be successful, it is important to get the technical and the societal and political aspects right.
  • After weathering the Fukushima accident, and given the current constraints on carbon dioxide emissions and potential for growth of nuclear power, redefinition of a successful nuclear power program is now required: It is no longer simply the safe production of electricity but also the safe, secure, and sustainable lifecycle of nuclear power, from the mining of uranium ores to the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. If this cannot be achieved and is not thought out from the beginning, then the public in many countries will reject nuclear as an energy choice.
  • Certain elements—including an institution to site, manage, and operate waste facilities—need to be in place to have a successful waste management program. In some countries, this agency is entirely a government entity, such as the Korea Radioactive Waste Management Organization. In other countries, the agency is a corporation established by the nuclear industry, such as SKB in Sweden or Posiva Oy in Finland. Another option would be a public– private agency, such as Spain’s National Company for Radioactive Waste or Switzerland’s National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste.
  • Funding is one of the most central needs for such an institution to carry out research and development programs; the money would cover siting costs, including compensation packages and resources for local communities to conduct their own analyses of spent fuel and waste transportation, storage, repository construction, operations, security and safeguards, and future liabilities. Funds can be collected in a number of ways, such as putting a levy on electricity charges (as is done in the US) or charging based on the activity or volume of waste (Hearsey et al., 1999). Funds must also be managed—either by a waste management organization or another industry or government agency—in a way that ensures steady and ready access to funds over time. This continued reliable access is necessary for planning into the future for repository operations.
  • the siting process must be established. This should include decisions on whether to allow a community to veto a site and how long that veto remains operational; the number of sites to be examined in depth prior to site selection and the number of sites that might be required; technical criteria to begin selecting potential sites; non-technical considerations, such as proximity to water resources, population centers, environmentally protected areas, and access to public transportation; the form and amount of compensation to be offered; how the public is invited to participate in the site selection process; and how government at the federal level will be involved.
  • The above are all considerations in the siting process, but the larger process—how to begin to select sites, whether to seek only volunteers, and so on—must also be determined ahead of time. A short list of technical criteria must be integrated into a process that establishes public consent to go forward, followed by many detailed studies of the site—first on the surface, then at depth. There are distinct advantages to characterizing more than one site in detail, as both Sweden and Finland have done. Multiple sites allow the “best” one to be selected, increasing public approval and comfort with the process.
  • he site needs to be evaluated against a set of standards established by a government agency in the country. This agency typically is the environmental agency or the nuclear regulatory agency. The type of standards will constrain the method by which a site will be evaluated with regard to its future performance. A number of countries use a combination of methods to evaluate their sites, some acknowledging that the ability to predict processes and events that will occur in a repository decrease rapidly with each year far into the future, so that beyond a few thousand years, little can be said with any accuracy. These countries use what is termed a “safety case,” which includes multiple lines of evidence to assure safe repository performance into the future.
  • Moving forward
  • France, Canada, and Germany also have experienced a number of iterations of repository siting, some with more success than others. In the 1970s, Germany selected the Gorleben site for its repository; however, in the late 1990s, with the election of a Red–Green coalition government (the Greens had long opposed Gorleben), a rethinking of repository siting was decreed, and the government established the AkEnd group to re-evaluate the siting process. Their report outlined a detailed siting process starting from scratch, but to date too much political disagreement exists to proceed further.
  • Notes
  • Nuclear wastes are classified in various ways, depending on the country or organization doing the classification. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) notes six general categories of waste produced by civil nuclear power reactors: exempt waste, very short-lived waste, and very low level waste can be stored and then disposed of in landfill-type settings; low level waste, intermediate level waste, and high-level waste require more complex facilities for disposal.
  • Sweden is currently the country closest to realizing a final solution for spent fuel, after having submitted a license application for construction of a geologic repository in March 2011. It plans to open a high-level waste repository sometime after 2025, as do Finland and France.
  • Some countries, such as Sweden, Finland, Canada, and, until recently, the US, plan to dispose of their spent fuel directly in a geologic repository. A few others, such as France, Japan, Russia, and the UK have an interim step. They reprocess their spent fuel, extract the small amount of plutonium produced during irradiation, and use it in new mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. Then they plan to dispose of the high-level wastes from reprocessing in a repository.
D'coda Dcoda

Former UN Advisor: Many scientists are emphasizing precarious situation of Fukushima Sp... - 0 views

  • The Need for Independent Assessment of the Fourth Reactor, Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., October 25, 2011: “In his recent blog, entitled “The Fourth Reactor and the Destiny of Japan”, Akio Matsumura correctly identifies the spent fuel pool in Unit 4 as the most serious potential threat for further massive radioactive releases from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.” The Fourth Reactor and the Destiny of Japan, Akio Matsumura, September 29, 2011:
  • “I, along with many eminent scientists, are emphasizing the precarious situation of the fourth reactor that contains 1,535 nuclear fuel rods in the pool and is balanced on the second floor, outside of the reactor containment vessel. If the fuel rods spill onto the ground, disaster will ensue and force Tokyo and Yokohama to close, creating a gigantic evacuation zone. All scientists I have talked with say that if the structure collapses we will be in a situation well beyond where science has ever gone. The destiny of Japan will be changed and the disaster will certainly compromise the security of neighboring countries and the rest of the world in terms of health, migration and geopolitics. The Japanese government should immediately create an independent assessment team to determine the structural integrity of the spent fuel pool and its supporting structure. This is of the highest importance: the structure’s security is critical to the country’s future.” h/t Anonymous tip About Akio Matsumura Throughout his long career at the United Nations and other organizations he has brought together the unlikeliest of people: Arafat and Rabin, Chinese government officials and the Dalai Lama, and many more.
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