Matthew
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Situation at Fukushima Has Potential to, “Destroy the World Environment and Our Civilization”
April 8th, 2012
Via: Akio Matsumura:
Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata, was invited to speak at the Public Hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012, on the Fukushima nuclear power plants accident. Before the Committee, Ambassador Murata strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4—with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground—collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. He stressed that the responsibility of Japan to the rest of the world is immeasurable. Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries. Ambassador Murata informed us that the total numbers of the spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site excluding the rods in the pressure vessel is 11,421 (396+615+566+1,535+994+940+6375).
I asked top spent-fuel pools expert Mr. Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy, for an explanation of the potential impact of the 11,421 rods.
I received an astounding response from Mr. Alvarez [updated 4/5/12]:
In recent times, more information about the spent fuel situation at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site has become known. It is my understanding that of the 1,532 spent fuel assemblies in reactor No. 304 assemblies are fresh and unirradiated. This then leaves 1,231 irradiated spent fuel rods in pool No. 4, which contain roughly 37 million curies (~1.4E+18 Becquerel) of long-lived radioactivity. The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.
The infrastructure to safely remove this material was destroyed as it was at the other three reactors. Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks.. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming re-construction effort and will be charting in unknown waters. Despite the enormous destruction cased at the Da–Ichi site, dry casks holding a smaller amount of spent fuel appear to be unscathed.
Based on U.S. Energy Department data, assuming a total of 11,138 spent fuel assemblies are being stored at the Dai-Ichi site, nearly all, which is in pools. They contain roughly 336 million curies (~1.2 E+19 Bq) of long-lived radioactivity. About 134 million curies is Cesium-137 — roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP). The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel).
It is important for the public to understand that reactors that have been operating for decades, such as those at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.
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| Posted Apr 9, 2012, 3:11 am |
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Maizar
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Ian Goddard's Journal has an interesting piece on the possibility that Reactor 3 blew its core away entirely during the hydrogen explosion that occurred shortly after the earthquake and tsunami, with link to source here:
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The signature event of the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns was the large mushroom-cloud explosion of Unit 3 on March 14th. In contrast, the explosion of Unit 1 lacked any notable vertical projection. Yet Tokyo Electric Power Company assumes each was a hydrogen explosion in the upper-deck above the reactor. However, because dramatically different effects suggest different causes, let us consider an evidence-based model wherein the Unit-3 explosion was a steam explosion that vaporized tons of injected seawater into a mushroom cloud and that triggered secondary hydrogen explosions.
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he multimodal empirical evidence reviewed above demonstrates that (a) plumes of steam, (b) thermal hotspots, (c) explosive forces and (d) a steam-like mushroom cloud all correspond with vectors whose origins converge around the lid of a large container of boiling water known as the containment vessel. Additionally, instrumental measurements show that pressure within the containment vessel dropped suddenly with the explosion (consistent with an explosion from the containment) and that the day before the explosion, water levels failed to rise in the reactor for a long time despite in-flowing water (consistent with water flowing out of the reactor and pooling in the containment vessel). Finally, given the presence of fire in two of the explosive plumes (Figures 4 and 6), the explosion in the containment probably initiated secondary explosions of hydrogen gas accumulated in both containment-vessel space and the upper-deck space above the containment vessel. |
Nuclear power stations are like explosive suicide vests. If Ian Goddard's theory is right, that Reactor 3's nuclear core was ejected into the atmosphere, then the destruction of civilization (at least in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly countries bordering the Pacific Ocean) is not a risk but a certainty.
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| Posted Apr 11, 2012, 1:19 pm |
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