Mar 21 2011
Japan Reactor Situation Under Control?
In Japan, workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated Monday evening after smoke began emanating from a building. Over the weekend cooling operations at the numbers 3 and 4 reactors continued as progress was made toward restoring electricity to the facility. Meanwhile spinach and rapeseed shipments from Fukushima, Ibaragi, Tochigi and Gunma have been suspended after higher-than-normal levels of radiation were detected in the food. Milk from Fukushima is also on a list of temporarily banned foods. Officials say the radiation levels are not high enough to pose a health risk if consumed, but they are acting out of caution.
GUEST: Aileen Mioko Smith is Executive Director of Green Action, a Japanese environmental group; she happens to be on vacation in San Francisco.
2 Responses to “Japan Reactor Situation Under Control?”
Please find out where the waste water from the reactor
drenching is being stored. I strongly suspect that proper
holding vessels are not being employed and that contaminated
waste water is returning to the ocean.
Given the tremendous volume of radioactive run off created
during the past several days, this is a problem that needs to
be addressed most urgently.
If the electric company needs to hire ocean going tankers with
specialized pumping equipment, this service should be
available. The delay is allowing this to become an even larger
disaster. Not only for Japan but perhaps for us all.
Someone must take command that understands the consequences of failing to properly contain the waste water being generated at Fukushima.
The solution is actually rather simple and the solution is not
dilution. By dumping a few loads of sand into the manhole
closest to the ocean, the storm sewer system becomes a
holding cell. The manholes closer to the plant could then be
used as points from which the radioactive waste water could
be pumped back onto the reactor buildings or to a tanker.
PLEASE HURRY
No one likes an alarmist without cause, however, in this case,
there appears to be cause for alarm.
Study the close up views of the #3 reactor explosion and you
will see that the blast was not the type of blast one would
expect from a hydrogen explosion. The fireball seen in the
corner of the plant was too small. Not only that, inspection
reveals that this was a directional blast. Much as if a cannon
had been fired straight up from inside the reactor building.
This is what one would expect if the reactor dome exploded
with enough force to take out the removable concrete pads
covering the reactor dome.
Injecting sea water into the molten core causes an immediate
explosion of steam. If the temperature of the reactor vessel
had reached critical temperature, it would not have had the
integrity required to withstand this dramatic increase in
pressure.
If my assessment is correct, the dark colored cloud we witnessed, that was shot approximately 1,000 feet into
the air, contained the MOX core of the reactor and made
this accident, worse than the one at Chernobyl.
I also suspect that the #1 and #2 reactor vessels have
lost their integrity due to the same process.
P.S. – I wish to contact me, try the e-mail address
submitted with this post.
My Yahoo account seems to have been deleted.