EMERGENCY ALERT - JAPAN IN MELTDOWN
Tokyo Electric Is Disassembling The Truth
and us.
FULL TILT PARANOIA ALARM BELLS.
They have tens of thousands of fuel rods in those storage ponds inside the reactors
EVERYTHING HAS GONE COMPLETELY WRONG IN JAPAN
BELOW - this is what they WERENT TELLING US.
just when you have witnessed what seemed mind boggling...
NOW a complete mind f$ck.
holy shit I am speechless.
PEOPLE ARE BEING POISENED FAR AND WIDE, DON'T LET THE MEDIA POOHPOOHS STEER YOU WRONG. THINK OF THEM AS FEMA DISINFO AGENTS.
from all sources, here is what my mind infers:
HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: THERE IS SUCH A FURY - IT IS MT DOOM ITSELF - OF RADI0ACTIVE CRAP EMITTING SO MUCH INTENSE GAMMA AND NEUTRON RADIATIONS THAT THE ENTIRE MESS IN BEYOND THE ABILITY OF ANYONE TO DO ANYTHING WITH IT. SITUATION IS NOW HOPELESS UNLESS MASSIVELY NEW APPROACH UNDERTAKEN. MEANWHILE, MELTDOWNS ARE NOW IN PROCESS. All types of radioactive atoms will end up in the atmosphere, including plutonium. This crap is going to disrupt a lot of things permanantly and it is going to spread far and wide in a variety of ways. Don't let armchair experts mollify you. Prepare for the worst case scenario. A great many people won't be directly affected but this is like Russian Roulette. Wanna play?
Lets get off the armchair and be practical. Better for everyone to run paranoid and prepare.
thanks for the heads up Naia
probably most of the last 50 workers on site are already dieing....... the whole rotten mess is a completely done FUBAR and nobody knows what to do.
probably the only thing they can do now is attempt to pile as much dirt on it as fast as possible.
they will need a whole fleet of hueys dumping sand, gravel and then concrete on it. LIke Chernoble, that area is doomed for a very long time.
Serious question, though, whether you can get anybody close enough to do anything.
NE ASIA MAY BE TRIPLE WHAMMED.
Can the Japanese ever recover from this....???????
Pray that somebody in Russia or the U.S. has the comprehension to mobilize a massive intervention. The Japanese are way in over their heads. They will need a lot of air logistics to do what they have to do. They will need a lot of cats to berm up a wall of earth around the entire sordid affair just so they can creep closer and closer to shove in fill without killing the workers with massive gamma burns.
At 08:36 PM 3/17/2011 -0700, you wrote:
>from a friend... thought you might find this of interest, michael. :(
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>Subject: 'Chernobyl on Steroids' - 20 years of Spent Fuel Rods Stored at Daiichi
>
>Wow, just when I thought I had a handle on how bad this crisis may get, I learn that I didn't even have a clue.
>
>This is just incredible. It turns out, this type of GE reactor is designed to hold tens of thousands of intensely radioactive spent fuel rods, not only on site, not only inside the reactor building, but in pools that are literally right on top of the reactor. There are 3450 fuel rod assemblies (each holding 63 fuel rods) in those pools which is approximately 20 years worth of fuel rods, and they have no containment structure around them. Just water to keep them cool and suppress the gamma radiation. In other words, each of the four reactors at the Daiichi plant holds the potential for 21 Chernobyls. If those fuel rods don't have water covering them, they will catch fire and begin a nuclear meltdown. According to Congressional testimony today by Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there is now little or no water in the pool storing spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation into the atmosphere. That is apparently the source of the fire in that reactor - the fuel rods themselves are burning.
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>“We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures." Jaczko told Congress today.
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>According to the US-based Institute for Science and International Security, there has been an explosion at reactor 4 in the past 24 hours that apparently has gone unreported. Here is the satellite pic - you can see the newly-damaged building of reactor 4 on the left:
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>[]
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>Figure 1. DigitalGlobe commercial satellite image of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site taken at 9:35AM local time on March 16, 2011.
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>Next to it you can see massive plumes of intensely radioactive steam coming from reactor 3 - that's the one that has the plutonium MOX fuel; you know - the one that had the big explosion reported yesterday. Oh, and today Japanese officials admitted the containment vessel in reactor 3 has indeed been breached. It apparently is in full scale meltdown. Next to reactor 3, you can see steam venting from reactor 2 through a hole made by workers. Japanese officials admitted that containment vessel is also cracked.
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>Apparently there are no workers at the plant now because the radiation is so intense that the workers would die before being able to accomplish anything much. It's so intense they even abandoned a desperate plan to drop water on the spent fuel rods by helicopter. As near as I can determine, there is nothing anyone will be able to do to prevent each of the four reactors (and perhaps all of their spent fuel rods) from undergoing meltdown, with further explosions and release of ungodly amounts of radiation.
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>Then there is an additional, larger spent fuel pool in a separate building on the site which holds another 6291 spent fuel rod assemblies. The tsunami blew out the windows of that building, presumably causing considerable damage.
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>And there are two additional reactors - 5 and 6 - at the Daiichi plant. Those don't appear to be leaking anything at the moment, but they apparently contain the same amount of spent fuel rods as the other four reactors on the site.
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>[]
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>Figure 2. DigitalGlobe commercial satellite image taken of the same site, showing reactor buildings for Units 5 and 6.
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><http://isis-online.org/isis-
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>And don't forget there is the sister plant Fukushima Dai-ni, where there are another 4 reactors, three of which have had the cooling water systems knocked out by the quake/tsunami. So those are in extreme danger of meltdown also.
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>A report on the spent fuel at Daiichi from Tokyo Electric last year showed that at the time of the quake there would have been close to 11,000 spent fuel assemblies stored on site, a total of some 660,000 fuel rods:
><http://www.nirs.org/
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>Compare that to the 1700 fuel rods that burned at Chernobyl, releasing 400 times more radiation than the Hiroshima bomb and causing 1 million deaths world-wide.
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><http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~
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>http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>Nuke engineer: Fuel rod fire at Fukushima reactor "would be like Chernobyl on steroids"
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>By: <http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>The Fukushima reactor building that <http://firedoglake.com/2011/
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>Two days later, the nearby building containing the plutonium-uranium (MOX) fueled Fuksuhima Daichii <http://my.firedoglake.com/
>Although Tokyo Electric said it also continued to deal with cooling system failures and high pressures at half a dozen of its 10 reactors in the two Fukushima complexes, fears mounted about the threat posed by the pools of water where years of spent fuel rods are stored.
>At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.
>“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,†said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.
>People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.
>Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.
>[]
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>We’d be lucky if we only had to worry about the spent fuel rods from a single holding pool. We’re not that lucky. The Fukushima Daiichi plant has <http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>The fuel rods must be kept submerged in water. Why? Outside of the water bath, the radioactivity in the used rods can cause them to become so hot they begin to catch fire. These fires can burn so hot the radioactive rod contents are carried into the atmosphere as vaporized material or as very small particles. Reactor no 3 burns MOX fuel that contains a mix of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium generates more heat than uranium, which means these rods have the greatest risk of burning. That’s bad news, because plutonium scattered into the atmosphere is even more dangerous that the combustion products of rods without plutonium.
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>Chernobyl on steroids. When the nuclear engineer from an identical plant states there’s any possibility of such a catastrophe, Washington, we have a problem. Chernobyl’s contamination settled upon people and nations thousands of miles from that reactor’s location. How far would “Chernobyl on steroids†travel? And where are the up to 20 years of reactor no 1 spent fuel rods that could cause such a problem, and the spent fuel rods held – until the building exploded – in in the spent fuel rod pool atop reactor no 3?
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>Along with the rest of the planet, Washington’s looking at the risk of a potential catastrophe. At least when it comes to finding the fuel rods from reactor 1, Washington possesses some unique assets. One asset – the secretive <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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>What is MASINT? FDL’s recent guest Tim Shorrock answered that question a few years ago for CorpWatch:
><http://www.corpwatch.org/
>With assets like the NRO and the DIA’s MASINT capacity, even an Obama administration that couldn’t find out millions of of barrels of Corexit and crude oil would poison the Gulf should be able to help Japan’s Fukushima plant locate their missing fuel rods. And do so before the missing rods – or any of the other pools of fuel rods in Japan’s stricken reactors – ignite Chernobyl on steroids.
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>Once Obama and his generals have found the fuel rods, let’s hope they’ll time out from Gridion dinners and collateral damage and let the Americans who pay for all the fancy spy technology know what’s happening. Because now that Americans are hearing CNN’s Dr. Gupta talking about potassium iodide (KI) to prevent radiation toxicity, they’re going to be wondering if they need to take KI. As long as we don’t see massive uncontrolled radiation releases from the stricken reactors, they probably won’t. Should we see Chernobyl on steroids, Americans may need a whole lot more than KI. And until the spent fuel rods are located, there won’t be enough information to let Americans plan how to protect their loved ones. Unless we all learn the fuel rods have caught fire.
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>[Note: revised at 3:15 PM Pacific on 3/14/11]
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><http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>Why Fukushima's "spent" fuel rods will continue to catch fire
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>By: <http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>Yesterday the spent fuel rod pool at Fukushima Daiichi reactor 4 caught fire. About that time instruments at the plant showed an exponential increase in radiation levels. After the fire was quenched, radiation levels fell. In the hour before I sat down to write this, there was an explosion at the same spent fuel rod pool. As I write, another fire is burning there. NHK reports the radiation level – 300 to 400 milliSieverts – is so high that firefighters cannot approach the area.
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>NHK reports that by Monday March 14 the temperature in the spent fuel rod pool was 84 degrees C: nearly double the usual temperature. NHK reports that there aren’t temperature readings for today: technical failure. We do know the pool temperature increased by roughly twenty degrees C per day after loss of power on Friday. And we know that water boils at 100 degrees C.
>
>The spent fuel rod pool at reactor 4 is one of <http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>Six of the spent fuel rod pools are (or were) located at the top of six reactor buildings. One “common pool†is at ground level in a separate building. Each “reactor top†pool holds up to 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds up to 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds <http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>Now that we have partial meltdown in the reactor vessels – the part of the reactor where nuclear reactions are supposed to happen – in at least three of the Daiichi palnt’s six reactors, why bother with swimming pools for fuel rods? Simple. Even after they are no longer usable to drive nuclear fission in the reactor vessels, the “spent†fuel rods are still highly radioactive. Part of that radioactive energy is emitted as heat. That’s no surprise: heat from radioactivity is the how the reactor core vessels generate the heat that drives the nuclear plant’s turbines to generate electricity. The fuel rods don’t know whether they are in the core or in the pools: they keep emitting heat and radioactivity until the radioactive material decays into non-radioactive elements. That process can take years, which is why spent fuel rods are still dangerous years after they leave the reactor core.
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>How can we prevent the spent fuel rods from bursting into flame once they’re out of the reactor core? The Fukushima plant –“ like many other reactors – keeps the rods in water, which absorbs the heat energy. But the pools – like the water in a teakettle – will boil il away unless new water is added. After the Fukushima plant lost power in Friday’s 9.0 earthquake and got hit by the tsunami, the plant was no longer able to keep the pools topped up.
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>How long does it take the water in spent fuel rod pools to boil down to dangerously low levels? Yesterday FDL reader MtnWoman – who worked at TMI for twelve years – <http://my.firedoglake.com/
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>Why did the spent fuel rod pool at reactor 4 catch fire again today? Yesterday the <http://www.ieer.org/>
>“The ability to remove decay heat from the spent fuel also would be reduced as the water level drops, especially when it drops below the tops of the fuel assemblies. This would cause temperatures in the fuel assemblies to rise, accelerating the oxidation of the zirconium alloy (zircaloy) cladding that encases the uranium oxide pellets. This oxidation reaction can occur in the presence of both air and steam and is strongly exothermic—that is, the reaction releases large quantities of heat, which can further raise cladding temperatures. The steam reaction also generates large quantities of hydrogen….
>These oxidation reactions [with a loss of coolant] can become locally self-sustaining … at high temperatures (i.e., about a factor of 10 higher than the boiling point of water) if a supply of oxygen and/or steam is available to sustain the reactions…. The result could be a runaway oxidation reaction — referred to in this report as a zirconium cladding fire — that proceeds as a burn front (e.g., as seen in a forest fire or a fireworks sparkler) along the axis of the fuel rod toward the source of oxidant (i.e., air or steam)….
>As fuel rod temperatures increase, the gas pressure inside the fuel rod increases and eventually can cause the cladding to balloon out and rupture. At higher temperatures (around 1800°C [approximately 3300°F]), zirconium cladding reacts with the uranium oxide fuel to form a complex molten phase containing zirconium-uranium oxide.
>Beginning with the cladding rupture, these events would result in the release of radioactive fission gases and some of the fuel’s radioactive material in the form of aerosols into the building that houses the spent fuel pool and possibly into the environment. If the heat from one burning assembly is not dissipated, the fire could spread to other spent fuel assemblies in the pool, producing a propagating zirconium cladding fire.
>The high-temperature reaction of zirconium and steam has been described quantitatively since at least the early 1960s….â€
>Translation for laypeople: Without enough water to cover the, the fuel rods will keep on igniting, just like trick birthday candles keep re-igniting after we blow them out. Just like trick birthday candles, the only way to put out the fuel rods is to put them under water. That’s why even after Monday’s reactor 4 spent fuel rod fire was quenched, the spent fuel rod pool caught fire again this afternoon.
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>Unlike trick birthday candles, the spent fuel rods burn hot (3300 degrees F) enough so that the radioactive material in the rods is aerosolized: carried into the atmosphere in clouds of hot smoke. And unlike our trick birthday candles, the spent fuel rods in reactor building 4 are four stories off the ground – just like the other five reactor spent fuel pools at Fukushima. And unlike our trick birthday candles, right now the radioactivity around the spent fuel rods is so high that no one can approach them to put out the fire.
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>I’m a slow typist: by the time I completed this the fire burning at reactor 4’s spent fuel rod pool had gone out – €“ apparently spontaneously. Fortunately, we’re not yet at the 140 hour mark by which the NRC calculated spent fuel rods in ideal conditions would be at risk of combustion. That’s a good thing, because there’s one other big difference between trick birthday candles and spent fuel rods. Trick birthday candles merely drip more wax on the cake. Uncontrolled spent fuel rod fires could pour enough radioactive waste into the atmosphere to cause what a nuclear engineer (at a Vermont plant identical to Fukushima reactors) calls “Chernobyl on steroids†.
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>Let’s hope the spent fuel rods at Fukushima are put back under water before we have the opportunity to test her hypothesis.
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><http://www.huffingtonpost.
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>Doomsday Scenario at Fukushima
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>Marvin Resnikoff
>Senior Associate, Radioactive Waste Management Associates
>Posted: March 15, 2011 11:03 AM
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>The slow motion events occurring at Japan's (or GE's) Fukushima reactor cannot be sugar-coated. It is a doomsday scenario unfolding.
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>Nuclear reactors are not the same as coal/oil/gas electricity plants. Unlike conventional plants, they cannot be turned off. So while brave workers were tending to Units 1, 2 and 3 reactors, attempting against all odds to keep the reactor from overheating, the fuel pool at Unit 4 was left untended; without makeup water to cool them, the fuel rods overheated. Above 1800 oF, an exothermic reaction, a fire, took place with the zirconium cladding around the uranium pellets. Zirconium burned, forming zirconium oxide and hydrogen gas, which then exploded and released radioactive cesium, a semi-volatile metal, to the atmosphere.
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>Near the plant, the radiation levels dangerously escalated to 400 milliseiverts/hour (or 40 rems/hour in U.S. parlance). Considering background is on the order of 1 milliseivert per YEAR, this means a yearly background dose every 9 seconds. Put plainly, workers at the Fukushima reactors are putting their lives in immediate jeopardy.
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>What is a fuel pool?
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>Each year a commercial reactor operates, approximately 30 tons of fuel are irradiated. Every year or year and a half, this fuel is moved to a fuel pool for safe storage. Under 20 feet of circulating and replenished water, the fuel is stored. Water shields the radioactivity and cools the fuel, which still gives off heat. If water is not resupplied, which apparently was the case at unit 4, the water levels decline, the fuel is uncovered and it overheats, leading to a hydrogen explosion.
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>How much cesium-137 is contained in a fuel pool?
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>The amount of cesium contained in the fuel pool is typically measured in curies or becquerels, but these assessments are meaningless unless you are a physicist. An easier way to look at it is in relation to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, where 100,000 Japanese where killed. Cesium is a semi-volatile material that has been detected in the air downwind of the Fukushima reactors. How many Hiroshima bombs worth of cesium-137 are contained in the fuel pool?
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>In work for the State of Nevada, we estimated that 10 tons of irradiated (what the industry calls "spent") nuclear fuel was equivalent to 240 times the amount of cesium-137 released by the Hiroshima bomb. Ten tons is the amount of irradiated fuel that would be contained in a shipping container or cask used to transport the fuel. Why so much more cesium than the Hiroshima bomb? Because an atomic explosion occurs in milliseconds, but a nuclear reactor operates continuously for years. Many more fissions means much more fission products, including cesium You do the math. If Unit 4 operated for 35 years and produced 30 tons of irradiated fuel per year and each ton is equivalent to 24 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, then each fuel pool could contain on the order of 24,000 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, if all the produced irradiated fuel remains in the fuel pool..
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>This is not to say all this material will be released to the atmosphere or ocean. This is the maximum cesium-137 possible inventory at each Fukushima reactor. Each fuel pool at each Fukushima reactor also contains approximately the same amount of strontium-90 and other cancer causing materials. In addition to the fuel pools at each Fukushima reactor, a larger common fuel pool sits at ground level between two reactors in a building with windows. The damage the tsunami caused to this independent fuel pool has not been discussed by the media.
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>Iodine, cesium and other radionuclides can be carried downwind and inhaled. Radionuclides that land in the sea may be taken up by fish and eaten. When these cancer-causing materials are taken into the body by inhalation or ingestion, they concentrate in different organs. Cesium concentrates in muscle, strontium (like calcium) in bones, iodine in the thyroid. Once in the body, these radioactive materials continue to decay, releasing harmful gamma and beta radiation. Plutonium, also present, gives off alpha radiation. Rearranging the DNA in the human body leads to cancer. To put this in another way, a BWR reactor boils water to produce electricity by generating cancer-causing materials.
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>Take this out of the nuclear realm. Imagine another harmful poison, botulism. Imagine a botulism reactor, reproducing botuli fast enough to produce heat and steam to turn turbines. Then imagine having to contain these billions of botuli so the public is not harmed. This is essentially the friendly atom that has now come full circle in Japan and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will relicense for an additional 20 years at Vermont Yankee and at 30 other Fukushima-type reactors in the United States. Fortunately, the State of Vermont has taken matters into its own hands and has decided not to allow Vermont Yankee to run past 2012..
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><http://www.nytimes.com/2011/
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>[]
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>March 16, 2011
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>U.S. Calls Radiation ‘Extremely High,’ Sees Japan Nuclear Crisis Worsening
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>By <http://topics.nytimes.com/
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>This article is by David E. Sanger, Matthew L. Wald and Hiroko Tabuchi.
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>WASHINGTON — The chairman of the United States <http://topics.nytimes.com/
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>The announcement opened a new and ominous chapter in the five-day-long effort by Japanese engineers to bring the six side-by-side reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by an earthquake and a tsunami last Friday. It also suggested a serious split between Washington and its closest Asian ally at an especially delicate moment.
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>The Congressional testimony by Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the commission, was the first time the Obama administration had given its own assessment of the condition of the plant, apparently mixing information it had received from Japan with data it had collected independently.
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>Mr. Jaczko’s most startling assertion was that there was now little or no water in the pool storing spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation into the atmosphere.
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>As a result, he said, “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.â€
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>His statement was quickly but not definitively rebutted by officials of Tokyo Electric Power, the Daiichi’s plant’s operator, and Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.
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>“We can’t get inside to check, but we’ve been carefully watching the building’s environs, and there has not been any particular problem,†said Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric. Speaking on Thursday morning in Japan, Takumi Koyamada, a spokesman for the regulatory agency, said that when it was checked 12 hours earlier, water remained in the spent fuel pool at reactor No. 4.
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>“We cannot confirm that there has been a loss in water,†he said.
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>On Wednesday night, Mr. Jaczko reiterated his earlier statement and added that commission representatives in Tokyo had confirmed that the pool was empty. He said Tokyo Electric and other officials in Japan had confirmed that, and also stressed that high radiation fields were going to make it very difficult to continue having people work at the plant.
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>If the American analysis is accurate and emergency crews at the plant have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled — it needs to remain covered with water at all times — radiation levels could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at reactor No. 4, but to keep servicing any of the other problem reactors at the plant. In the worst case, experts say, workers could be forced to vacate the plant altogether, and the fuel rods in reactors and spent fuel pools would be left to meltdown, leading to much larger releases of radioactive materials.
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>While radiation levels at the plant have varied tremendously, Mr. Jaczko said that the peak levels reported there “would be lethal within a fairly short period of time.†He added that another spent fuel pool, at Reactor No. 3, might also be losing water and could soon be in the same condition. Efforts to pour in water by dumping it from helicopters were suspended, for fear that the helicopter crews would receive too large a dose of radiation.
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>Mr. Jaczko’s testimony came as the American Embassy in Tokyo, on advice from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Americans to evacuate a radius of “approximately 50 miles†from the Fukushima plant.
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>The advice to Americans in Japan represents a graver assessment of the risk in the immediate vicinity of Daiichi than the warnings made by the Japanese themselves, who have told everyone within 20 kilometers, about 12 miles, to evacuate, and those 20 to 30 kilometers to take shelter. While maps of the plume of radiation being given off by the plant show that an elongated cloud will stretch across the Pacific, American officials said it would be so dissipated by the time it reached the West Coast of the United States that it would not pose a health threat.
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>“We would recommend an evacuation to a much larger radius than has currently been provided by Japan,†Mr. Jaczko said. That assessment seems bound to embarrass, if not anger, Japanese officials, suggesting they have miscalculated the danger or deliberately played down the risks.
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>It was not immediately clear how many people live within the zone around the plant that American officials believed should be evacuated. But the zone gets far closer to the city of Sendai, with its population of one million, which took the brunt of the earthquake last week.
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>At a hearing on Wednesday, Senator <http://topics.nytimes.com/
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>American officials were careful to offer no public comparisons to past nuclear accidents when discussing the Fukushima disaster. But clearly the crisis in Japan already far outstrips what happened at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, where very little radiation escaped a crippled reactor. The effort now is to keep the Japanese crisis, involving at least three reactors that had been in active use before the quake, and three others that were inactive but had storage pools for spent fuel, from escalating to the levels of the worst nuclear disaster in history: Chernobyl.
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>Though the plant’s reactors shut down automatically when the quake struck on Friday, the subsequent tsunami wiped out the backup electronic pumping and cooling system necessary to keep the fuel rods in the reactors and the storage pools for spent nuclear fuel covered with cool water.
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>The spent fuel pools can be even more dangerous than the active fuel rods, as they are not contained in thick steel containers like the reactor core. As they are exposed to air, the zirconium metal cladding on the rods can catch fire, and a deadly mix of radioactive elements can spew into the atmosphere. The most concern surrounds Cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years and can get into food supplies or be inhaled.
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>Mr. Jaczko (pronounced YAZZ-koe) said radiation levels might make it impossible to continue what he called the “backup backup†cooling functions that have so far helped check the fuel melting inside the reactors. Those efforts consist of using fire hoses to dump water on overheated fuel and then letting the radioactive steam vent into the atmosphere.
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>Those emergency measures, carried out by a small squad of workers and firefighters, represent Japan’s central effort to forestall a full-blown fuel meltdown that would lead to much higher releases of radioactive material into the air.
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>Mr. Jaczko’s testimony, the most extended comments by a senior American official on Japan’s nuclear disaster, described what amounts to an agonizing choice for Japanese authorities: keep sending workers into an increasingly contaminated area in a last-ditch effort to cover nuclear fuel with water, or do more to protect the workers but risk letting the pools of water boil away — and thus risk a broader meltdown.
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>The Japanese authorities have never been as specific as Mr. Jaczko was in his testimony about the situation at reactor No. 4, where they have been battling fires for more than 24 hours.
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>According to Tokyo Electric’s data, the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor contains 548 fuel assemblies that were in use at the reactor until last November, when they were move to the storage pool on the site. That means that the fuel rods were only recently taken out of active use and that their potential to burn and release radioactivity is higher than spent fuel in storage for a longer period.
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>Experts say workers at the plant probably could not approach a fuel pool that was dry, because radiation levels would be too high. In a normally operating pool, the water not only provides cooling but also shields workers from gamma radiation. A plan to dump water into the pool, and others like it, from helicopters was suspended because the crews would be flying right into a radioactive plume.
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>Earlier in the day, Japanese authorities announced a different escalation of the crisis at Daiichi when they said that a second reactor unit at the plant might have suffered damage to its primary containment structure and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam.
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>The break, at the No. 3 reactor unit, worsened the already perilous conditions at the plant, a day after officials said the containment vessel in the No. 2 reactor had also cracked.
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>But in one of a series of rapid and at times confusing pronouncements on the crisis, the authorities insisted that damage to the containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor — the main focus of concern earlier on Wednesday — was unlikely to be severe.
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>At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday held by two subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Energy Secretary <http://topics.nytimes.com/
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>“We are trying to monitor it very closely,†he said. “We hear conflicting reports about exactly what is happening in the several reactors now at risk. I would not want to speculate about what is happening.â€
>David E. Sanger and Matthew L. Wald reported from Washington, and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
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><http://www.washingtonpost.
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>Japan races to contain meltdowns after two blasts; third reactor loses cooling capacity
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>By Chico Harlan and Steven Mufson, Monday, March 14, 9:30 AM
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>TOKYO — A second explosion rocked Japan’s seaside Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex Monday, this time destroying an outer building at unit 3. A Japanese government official separately said that a third reactor at the six-reactor facility had lost its cooling capacity, adding to the complications facing the engineers who try <http://www.washingtonpost.
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>The explosion at unit 3 did not damage the core containment structure, and Japanese authorities asserted that there would be little increase in radiation levels around the plant. But the explosion -- <http://www.washingtonpost.
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>The blast injured 11 people, one seriously.
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>The <http://www.washingtonpost.
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>On Saturday, a similar explosion <http://www.washingtonpost.
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>The U.S. Seventh Fleet said on Monday that some of its personnel, who are stationed 100 miles offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, had come into contact with radioactive contamination. The airborne radioactivity prompted the fleet to reposition its ships and aircraft.
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>Using sensitive instruments, precautionary measurements were conducted on three helicopter aircrews returning to USS Ronald Reagan after conducting disaster relief missions near Sendai. Those measurements identified low levels of radioactivity on 17 air crew members.
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>The low level radioactivity was easily removed from affected personnel by washing with soap and water, and later tests detected no further contamination.
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>Like the Saturday explosion at unit 1, the blast at unit 3 took place after a buildup of hydrogen was vented by the reactor. The hydrogen was produced by the exposure of the reactor’s fuel rods and their zirconium alloy casing to hot steam.
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>In normal conditions, the fuel rods would be covered and cooled by water.
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>The explosion occurred as Tokyo Electric entered day four of its battle against a cascade of failures at its two Fukushima nuclear complexes, using fire pumps to inject tens of thousands of gallons of seawater into two reactors to contain partial meltdowns of ultra-hot fuel rods.
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>The tactic produced high pressures and vapors that the company vented into its containment structures and then into the air, raising concerns about radioactivity levels in the surrounding area where people have already been evacuated. The utility said that at one of the huge, complicated reactors, a safety relief valve was opened manually to lower the pressure levels in a containment vessel.
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>But the limited vapor emissions were seen as far less dire than the consequences of failure in the fight against a more far-reaching partial or complete meltdown that would occur if the rods blazed their way through the reactor’s layers of steel and concrete walls.
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>The potential size of the area affected by radioactive emissions could be large. A state of emergency was declared briefly at another nuclear facility, the Onagawa plant, after elevated radioÂactivity levels were detected there. Later, Japanese authorities blamed the measurement on radioactive material that had drifted from the Fukushima plant, more than 75 miles away, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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>The IAEA noted that forecasts said winds would be blowing to the northeast, away from the Japanese coast, over the next three days.
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>Tokyo Electric said radioactivity levels inside the plant and at its nearby monitoring post were higher than normal. Although levels had fallen Sunday, the Kyodo News Agency said that radiation at the plant’s premises rose Monday over the benchmark limit of 500 microsievert per hour at two locations, measuring 751 microsievert at the first location at 2:20 a.m. and 650 at the second at 2:40 a.m., according to information Tokyo Electric gave the government. The hourly amounts are more than half the 1,000 microsievert to which people are usually exposed in one year.
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>In addition to one worker hospitalized for radiation exposure, two others felt ill during stints in the control rooms of Fukushima Daiichi units 1 and 2.
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>Although Tokyo Electric said it also continued to deal with cooling system failures and high pressures at half a dozen of its 10 reactors in the two Fukushima complexes, fears mounted about the threat posed by the pools of water where years of spent fuel rods are stored.
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>At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.
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>“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,†said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.
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>People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.
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>Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.
>
>At Fukushima Daiichi unit 3, the explosion was an indicator of serious problems inside the reactor core.
>
>Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that to produce hydrogen, temperatures in the reactor core had to be well over 2,000 degrees and as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. He said a substantial amount of fuel had to be exposed at least at some point.
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>“That’s the significance of the hydrogen — it means there was serious fuel damage and probably melting,†said Gilinsky, who was at the NRC when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor had a partial meltdown in 1979. “How much? We won’t know for a long time. At TMI we didn’t know for five years, until the vessels were opened. It was a shock.â€
>
>The Fukushima Daiichi unit 3 was built by Toshiba. Last year, the unit began using some reprocessed fuel known as “mox,†a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, produced from recycled material from nuclear weapons as part of a program known as “from megatons to megawatts.†Anti-nuclear activists have called mox more unsafe than enriched uranium. If it escapes the reactor, plutonium even in small quantities can have much graver consequences on human health and the local environment for countless years, much longer than other radioactive materials.
>
>The Kyodo News Agency cited Tokyo Electric as saying that more than three yards of a mox nuclear-fuel rod had been left above the water level, raising concerns that bits of plutonium or its byproducts may already be mixed into vapors or molten material.
>
>The Fukushima Daiichi unit 3, once capable of generating 784 megawatts of power, is substantially bigger than unit 1, which generated about 460 megawatts. As a result, lowering temperatures in its reactor core could prove a much tougher task, experts said.
>
>Japanese officials were also trying to figure out whether Friday’s earthquake, or the subsequent high pressures and temperatures in the reactors, had caused other cracks or leaks in reactors in the region. So far officials have not said that they have found any, though they have noted still unexplained losses of water in some reactor vessels.
>
>Although Fukushima Daiichi units 1 and 3 posed the gravest dangers for now, Tokyo Electric said it was still working on its other units.
>
>Tokyo Electric also said it had released vapors with some radioactive materials at all four of the reactors at its second Fukushima complex — Fukushima Daini — on Saturday. After injecting water into the reactors, the company said that water levels were stable, off-site power restored, and shutdowns complete or in progress. Nonetheless, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Monday that Fukushima Daini units 1, 2 and 4 remained in a nuclear state of emergency.
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>© 2011 The Washington Post Company
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><http://www.reuters.com/
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>REUTERS
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>
>
>Analysis: Japan nuclear crisis reaches new levels
>
>Wed Mar 16, 2011
>7:24pm EDT
><http://blogs.reuters.com/
>By <http://blogs.reuters.com/
>
>NEW YORK (Reuters) - Japan's nuclear crisis may have taken its most dangerous turn yet after a U.S. official said one of the pools containing highly radioactive spent fuel rods at the stricken plant had run dry.
>
>One nuclear expert said that there was now even a possibility that the disaster may approach the extent of the Chernobyl accident, the worst ever in the industry's history. When the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986 it spewed a radiation cloud over a large area of Europe.
>
>And a nuclear engineer said that it may be time to consider ways to bury or cover the entire complex in some kind of material that would stop radiation from leaking into the atmosphere.
>
>Triggering the new levels of alarm were comments by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko in Congress on Wednesday. "There is no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures," he said.
>
>Japanese officials have been working desperately for two days to try to get more water into the pool to cover the rods, which remain hot for months after they are removed from the reactors and can quickly release radioactive components if exposed to the air.
>
>"If they don't get water to these spent fuel pools in view of the containment breaches in the other plants the actual radiation releases could approach that category of Chernobyl," said Victor Gilinsky, who was an NRC commissioner at the time of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, which was the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
>
>Earlier Japanese authorities told the International Atomic Energy Agency that radioactivity was being released directly into the air at the pool for the No.4 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Experts say the pools could present a bigger threat to public health than the reactors, which appear to be still encased in steel containment systems.
>
>"Up until now they have not been able to get close to the spent rods, as even with protective clothing it only stops workers from breathing in radioactive particles, not from radiation itself," Dr Peter Hosemann PHD of the University of California Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Department said Tuesday.
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>While the building holding the rods has been rocked by fire and a blast, officials in Japan had not said how much water remained in the 40-foot deep tanks.
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>James Acton, Associate in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an interview before Jaczko's comments that it appeared there was a leak in the pool.
>
>"There is either a leak in the spent fuel pool or the rods are hot enough to cause evaporation," Acton said.
>
>DEADLY MIX
>
>When a fuel rod is exposed to the air the zirconium metal cladding on the rods can easily catch on fire, releasing a deadly mix of radiation into the atmosphere. The earlier fires and explosion in the area of the spent fuel storage tank left the pool partly open to the air allowing the radiation to escape into the atmosphere.
>
>Experts say the water should remain at least eight feet over the spent fuel to maintain acceptable radiation levels but the level usually is kept much higher.
>
>"As the water drains there's going to be less stability - and higher levels of radiation released," said Tara Neider, President and CEO of Areva Federal Services, a U.S. arm of the world's biggest nuclear power plant builder, French giant Areva SA.
>
>Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the operator of the six-reactor complex, was considering spraying water into the spent fuel pools through the holes in the roof by helicopter but later canceled that mission.
>
>Arnie Gundersen, a 29-year veteran of the nuclear industry who has worked on reactors similar to the Daiichi plant and is now chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates Inc, warned that dropping water on the spent fuel pool could make matters worse.
>
>"It's a bad idea to drop water onto the fuel racks. You could get an inadvertent criticality. That means you could have a nuclear reaction, similar to that in a reactor core, in the fuel pool," Gundersen said.
>
>MORE RADIATION
>
>"There is more radiation in the spent fuel pool - which is about ten stories in the air -- than in the reactor core," Gundersen said, noting used rods contain more dangerous radioactive materials than new rods, including elements cesium, strontium and plutonium.
>
>Plutonium, in particular, is a very nasty isotope and could cause cancer in very small quantities if ingested, he said.
>
>The uranium fuel is burned in the reactor for three to six years before being placed into the pool. About one third of the fuel is removed from the reactor core to the pool every 18 to 24 months during refueling outages.
>
>Used fuel rods must sit in the spent fuel pool for at least five years. Though, much to the consternation of environmental and anti-nuclear groups, the rods usually sit in the pool much longer while waiting for either reprocessing or storage in dry casks.
>
>Gundersen also said he recommended evacuating children and pregnant women to more than 50 miles away from the plant to avoid the radiation risk.
>
>In a sign that other spent fuel rod pools could be in a deteriorating condition, the NRC Chairman Jaczko said he also believed the pool at the No. 3 reactor may also have a leak.
>
>"Every day it seems like things may be stabilizing but you wake up the next morning and it seems like things have not stabilized or maybe gotten worse," said Brian Woods, nuclear engineering associate professor at Oregon State University and a former engineer for the U.S. Department of Energy.
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>Woods said that it may be time to think of encasing the complex in some kind of protective material.
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>"More than likely you're probably looking at some kind of external containment," he said.
>
>(Reporting by Scott DiSavino, David Sheppard, <http://blogs.reuters.com/
>
>
><http://abcnews.go.com/
>
>ABC NEWS
>Fukushima: Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Design Caused GE Scientist To Quit In Protest
>
>Damaged Japanese Nuclear Plant Has Five Mark 1 Reactors
>
>By MATTHEW MOSK
>March 15, 2011
>
>Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.
>
>Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.
>
>"The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release."
>
>The situation on the ground at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is so fluid, and the details of what is unfolding are so murky, that it may be days or even weeks before anyone knows how the Mark 1 containment system performed in the face of a devastating combination of natural disasters.
>
>But the ability of the containment to withstand the events that have cascaded from what nuclear experts call a "station blackout" -- where the loss of power has crippled the reactor's cooling system -- will be a crucial question as policy makers re-examine the safety issues that surround nuclear power, and specifically the continued use of what is now one of the oldest types of nuclear reactors still operating.
>
>GE told ABC News the reactors have "a proven track record of performing reliably and safely for more than 40 years" and "performed as designed," even after the shock of a 9.0 earthquake.
>
>Still, concerns about the Mark 1 design have resurfaced occasionally in the years since Bridenbaugh came forward. In 1986, for instance, Harold Denton, then the director of NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, spoke critically about the design during an industry conference.
>
>"I don't have the same warm feeling about GE containment that I do about the larger dry containments,'' he said, according to a report at the time that was referenced Tuesday in The Washington Post.
>
>"There is a wide spectrum of ability to cope with severe accidents at GE plants,'' Denton said. "And I urge you to think seriously about the ability to cope with such an event if it occurred at your plant.''
>
>Bridenbaugh Believes Design Flaws Were Addressed At Fukushima Plant
>
>Bridenbaugh told ABC News that he believes the design flaws that prompted his resignation from GE were eventually addressed at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Bridenbaugh said GE agreed to a series of retrofits at Mark 1 reactors around the globe. He compared the retooling to the bolstering of highway bridges in California to better withstand earthquakes.
>
>"Like with seismic refitting, they went back and re-analyzed the loads the structures might receive and beefed up the ability of the containment to handle greater loads," he said.
>
>When asked if that was sufficient, he paused. "What I would say is, the Mark 1 is still a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment."
>
>ABC News asked GE for more detail about how the company responded to critiques of its Mark 1 design. GE spokesman Michael Tetuan said in an email that, over the past 40 years, the company has made several modifications to its Mark 1 reactors in the U.S., including installing "quenchers" and fortifying the steel structures "to accommodate the loads that were generated." He said that GE's responses to modifications ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were also shared with the Japanese nuclear industry.
>
>Bridenbaugh told ABC News that he is watching the events in Japan with a mix of anxiety and deep reflection. Many years have passed since he and fellow GE colleagues Gregory C Minor and Richard B. Hubbard publicly resigned, joined the anti-nuclear movement, and became known as the "GE Three."
>
>Undoubtedly, he said, the containment structures at that Fukushima Daiichi plant are facing significant amounts of pressure -- and testing the very questions he was studying on paper more than three decades earlier. While he knew then that the Mark 1 had design limits, he said, no one knows now whether those limits will be surpassed.
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