Fukushima in Peril
Its official! A building can be leaning and have bulging walls supporting a massive tank of liquid on the top floor, and still be secure from any earthquake! This means the world is safe!
The Wall Street Journal just reported that TEPCO doesn’t have a plan to deal with the collapse of Spent Fuel Pool 4 at the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan. Yet a host of scientists, nuclear experts and researchers, say we facing a situation right now that is so serious that it literally threatened our very existence, for the entire Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable if the building collapses.
According to U.S. Army General Albert Stubblebine of the Natural Solutions Foundation, the situation is extremely serious and poses a significant danger to our entire civilization. Since TEPCO and the Japanese government have refused the entombment option (as the Russians did with Chernobyl) the world is at the mercy of nature. A mistake here would cause the deaths of tens of millions of people across the globe. Read report here.
When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.
The Japanese ambassador Murata writes to UN Secretary General: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Japan and the whole world depends on No. 4 reactor’. 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.”
And this is what Mr. Robert Alvarez, US reactor pools expert, had to say: “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.
You may also read Dr. Michio Kaku who stated “People don’t realize that the Fukushima reactor is on a knife’s edge; it’s near the tipping point. A small earthquake, another pipe break, another explosion could tip it over and we could have a disaster much worse, many times worse than Chernobyl. It’s like a sleeping dragon.” Full text here.
He also said on the 28th that, “Radiation levels are 1,000 milliseverts/hour. This means that workers will come down with radiation sickness with only 15 minutes of exposure. Some workers will die after 6 hours of exposure. The meaning of all this is: if radiation levels continue to rise, and workers are forced to evacuate, the accident will be in free fall.” Dr. Kaku called for an immediate entombment of the plant after the disaster began. Now it might be too late for that and will take too long to do it.
Also an independent report from Fairewinds.
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