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Nuclear Expert: “The Melted Core Cracked The Containment Vessel, There Really Is No Containment” At Fukushima Reactors
Steven Starr - Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri/Senior Scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility - said:
The Japanese basically lied about what happened with the reactors for months. They said they were trying to prevent a meltdown, when in fact they knew within the first couple of days Reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi had melted down, and they actually melted through the steel containment vessels.
So there was a worst case scenario that they were trying to hide, they even knew that at that time enormous amounts of radiation were released over Japan and some of it even went over Tokyo [...]
The melted core cracked the containment vessel, there really is no containment. So as soon as they pump the water in it leaks out again.
Asahi Shimbum notes that the location of Fukushima melted fuel is unknown. It could be ‘scattered’ in piping, vessels ... “we’ve yet to identify all hotspots” around plant.
While the Japanese government tried to cover up the lack of containment with "mission accomplished" type announcements of "cold shutdown", the loss of containment has been known for years.
For example, AP wrote in December 2011:
The nuclear fuel moved as it melted, so its condition and locations are little known.
AP noted a couple of days later:
The complex still faces numerous concerns, triggering criticism that the announcement of “cold shutdown conditions” is based on a political decision rather than science. Nobody knows exactly where and how the melted fuel ended up in each reactor ….
We noted last year:
If the reactors are “cold”, it may be because most of the hot radioactive fuel has leaked out.
***
The New York Times pointed out last month:
A former nuclear engineer with three decades of experience at a major engineering firm … who has worked at all three nuclear power complexes operated by Tokyo Electric [said] “If the fuel is still inside the reactor core, that’s one thing” …. But if the fuel has been dispersed more widely, then we are far from any stable shutdown.”
Indeed, if the center of the reactors are in fact relatively “cold”, it may be because most of the hot radioactive fuel has leaked out of the containment vessels and escaped into areas where it can do damage to the environment.
After drilling a hole in the containment vessel of Fukushima reactor 2, Tepco cannot find the fuel.
As AP notes:
The steam-blurred photos taken by remote control Thursday found none of the reactor’s melted fuel ….
The photos also showed inner wall of the container heavily deteriorated after 10 months of exposure to high temperature and humidity, Matsumoto said.
TEPCO workers inserted the endoscope — an industrial version of the kind of endoscope doctors use — through a hole in the beaker-shaped container at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant’s No. 2 reactor ….
New video of the inside of the torus room in Fukushima reactor 1 shows piles of sediment:
As nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen pointed out last year:
Tokyo Electric ran a probe into the basement of Unit 1. This is not inside the containment, this is outside the containment. On the top of the water surface they found lethal radiation, 1000 rem an hour.
But then they put the probe down into the water and what’s even worse is the bottom, the sediment on the bottom, was thousand of times hotter than that. And what that indicates is that fuel, nuclear fuel, has left the containment, as particles, and settled out on the bottom outside the containment. So, I think that’s a pretty clear indication that the containment was breached. It just makes decommissioning these plants… it was going too be hard already, but this information makes it worse.
Loss of containment of nuclear fuel also exists within the spent fuel pools at Fukushima.
For example, Chris Harris, former licensed Senior Reactor Operator and engineer says of new video released by Tepco showing extensive damage and debris in Fukushima spent fuel pool 3:
Plenty of heavy steel beams and refueling equipment that must be cleared out of the way in order to see how badly damaged each fuel assembly is.
There is little doubt that failed fuel exists, which is highly radioactive.
Asahi Shimbum notes:
The water [inside Fuel Pool 4] was muddy and brown.
The Fukushima fuel pools continue to be one of the main threats to Japan, the United States ... and all of humanity.
And the Fukushima accident is presently causing higher and higher levels of contamination hundreds of miles away ... and is still contaminating wildlife thousands of miles away.
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Oh, I'm sorry - I hurt your feelings. What, you have a lisp or something?
It really wasn't primarily about the guy's (correctable) speech issues. That was an aside. The main thing was about getting people to the relevant programming at 33:40. People who broadcast can and should correct annoying and distracting speech anomalies like persistent whistles, etc. I didn't intend to knock the chip off your shoulder.
If you have EQ on your audio from computer, use a midrange band set to 5-8khz and pull that band down. It will limit the offending s-whistle you are talking about. There is a signal processor called a de-esser that could be used by Camerons mix engineer. Could be it's really bad and they are already using the de-esser, and this is pretty much as good as it gets. -- Ha!
Meh, just don't think about it, it'll go away. That's what the Japanese government thinks anyway.
purely transitory?
on a serious note, couldnt they just nuke it and make it go away?
may sound snarky, but how else are they actually going to deal with it
nuke it
burn it up
cross fingers
JQ that is not a serious note. I have a physics degree and Nuking Fukashema only disperses the existing and newly created radioactivity over a vaster area. The goal is containment from the environment and your evening meal, not dispersal into it.
All the boron on the planet should have already been dumped on it.....after all the captains steering this planet.
Boron only slows down the speed of nutrons thus reducing chain reactions. There is nothing that eleminates an elements radioactive imbalance between its nutrons and protrons. That is the nature of radioactivity and isotopes of an element.
Because it would probably send those tons of radioactive material into the air...
A nuke won't vaporize all that stuff.
Maybe if they set off a big ass nuke just above it, it might vaporize ALL the stuff... but it needs to be real big like a 50 megaton TSAR bomba thingee. But no way the politicians have enough balls to do that and certainly not in Japan of all places.
Scientists would have to be 100% sure otherwise if you do it and it doesn't work, you're even more screwed than before.
Repeat, I am a physicist, and atomic bombing of a radioactive target does not erase its radioactivity. It only vaporizes, disperses, and adds to its total quantity of radioactive material. Atomic bombing of Chernobyl or fukashema are nonrational ideas.
It was brought up to use a nuke to blow the top off the Macondo well at the Deep Hoizon rig in the Gulf, but it turns out massive amounts of methane were unleashed and have traveled horizontally through the New Madrid Fault, which runs up the Mississippi River Valley more than halfway up the US.
There would have been a good chance they'd blow up a big chunk of the lower US. And there were still lots of people that thought that risk was OK.
They should send John Corzine to vaporize it!
So, they "vaporize" it all, and now you have a big ass cloud of radioactive vapor. This is an impovement how exactly?
hey, I think TruNews is right on in their coverage of issues and has great guests, but they are post-Tribulational rapture in their Escatology and that is a very unstudied viewpoint.
The day humans, as a species, realise this (earth) is all we have got, maybe, just maybe, they start to realize that this (earth) is a little a boat in a vastness of unexplored space.
Want to have a peek?
Focus.
This is a ringing endorsement to keep on keeping on. Build them to the left, build them to the right, thars dollars in them nuklar things.....
Capitalism has to externalize costs when it needs to achieve its design goal, which is to maxiumize shareholder value. As Gordon Gekko likes to say, "If you're not inside, you're outside."
What capitalism? Where can you find capitalism in this world?
all forms of capitalism, including socialism and fascism.
You sure you are not referring to US 'american' citizenism?
All-encompassing labels can be such handy things.
WAshington does a great job.
The coverup has been and continues to be criminal in nature.
2 plants down, 102 more to go.
Visit Nuke Pro (not pro nuke I tell ya!)
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/manifesto-why-shut-them-down.html
Almost 2 years later and they still have not even found the cores.
No one has ever said they're looking.
That's because most of it is currently in the form of particulates floating around the globe in the atmosphere and oceans.
Thanks assholes.
Actually there is no doubt.
Just witness the general vertical (up and down) movement of the floating particles in the video. These convection currents are caused by the heat still being released by the spent fuel bundles.
Don't laugh, HAARP is real! I saw it on Ancient Aliens.
The world needs more radpid growing two-headed fish and rapidly growing so this has been a win for feeding what will soon be 9b people...
Mutant Ninja Turtles
They are hoping for another earhquake so they can claim the cleanup is impossible and move on.
Waiting for the lawsuit against Japan for poisoning the Pacific Ocean.
They've had thousands of earthquakes, and will continue to have thousands more.
Good work, GW. When something this big is off the MSMs radar, you know it's BAD.
It's ignored by the MSM because centralized nuclear power is supposed to be the "plan b" to keep the ponzi growing.
The fact that a "plan c" still hasn't been mentioned tells me all I need to know...
What? The article has quotes and links to articles from the Associated Press and New York Times. Do you consider those to be non-mainstream?
The hot mass likely melted downward into everything it touched until enough impurities were churned into it for that non radioactive mass to act like control rod absorption materials.
Well yes, the fire will eventually burn itself out...
Every earthquake causes recriticality, and they have had thousands of earthquakes since 3/11/11, and thousands more to come.
We are beyond anything any scientist ever had nightmares about.
That's uninformed conjecture. Why in the hell would earthquakes cause criticality? And those quakes don't produce much shaking as most are out to sea at distance. And radiation will zip through plastic like a hot knife through warm butter. Plastic is a good barrier to chemical migration. But the best solution is glassifying into rock like materials.
Here is where a comparison can be drawn. If a killer asteroid was discovered, I believe the media would say nothing. They would say nothing because their handlers would either say nothing or tell them to say nothing and the MSM always obeys their handlers.
Fukashima will have the same effect as a killer asteroid with the exception that we have warning. We know that radioactive material from these reators is being swept out in the Pacific Ocean. We know that radioactive material from the reators is being carried on the jet stream.
What we will not know until it is too late is who is fucked and how fucked they are. The radiation's effect is cummulative. We could be hit with a day, a week, a months worth and show no problems. A year? Two years? Ten years? Eventually a trend begins to surface somehow and somewhere on some people. Then the damage is done and the reactive system will make a lot of noise to mitigate a problem that cannot at that time be resolved.
It is totally up to the individual to determine how safe or unsafe they are and take measures in accord with that determination. You can pile your resources and your neighbor's resources (for you socialists) on the problem and your favorite big government politicians will go and buy a bently with your $ and tell you to fuck off.
It's really simple. We are on our own, it just does not feel that way.
Hmmm. This whole festering, Fukushima-potentially-species-reducing-physics-driven-I-don't-care-who-your-god-is-scientific-cankersore-too-big-to-resolve makes me want to buy farmland in Chile and get the hell out of the northern hemisphere. And no, I'm not some shill for Sovereign Man but a real human being on the West Coast of North America looking at how the wind and sea currents flow. Doug Casey's Cafayate might even be safer, though that nuke plant a few hundred miles from his place in Cordoba kinda worries me. This disaster is bigger than we are, and few people realize it. Better to quietly move on to greener pastures, which yes, will also be affected in the long run as it's just one lifeboat/big blue marble we live on, but side effects/cancer/mutations blown my way later rather than sooner is sadly perhaps the best we can do.
The sink hole that is growing in Louisiana is a bit of an ongoing, and troubling, development as well.
http://enenews.com/officials-work-by-sinkhole-suspended-increase-in-unde...
mmm I have a great idea how to use that sinkhole.... Hello, TEPCO?
the onlly solution is to dig trenches to the open ocean and just let all the radiation move out to the ocean....wanna take bets that this is what they end up doing.....?
Suspect it will just lay where it is forever, gradually diluting, and as a general immediate hazard locally.
Myself, I would consider using short cannon to launch sandbags over the entire complex and bury it under 30 feet of sand, then cover with plastic sheeting and concrete
It is an immediate global extinction hazard. It covered the Northern and Southern Hemispheres within 40 days, and continues two years later with no containment whatsoever.
In 40 days. And 40 nights???
Where can we find rad readings that confirm your assertions? If I knew for sure that what you say is true, I would be screaming it to everyone at the top of my lungs. Why no other news of this?
Go read http://fukushima-diary.com/ from its inception. You'll get the picture.
sheets of plastic?
how bout duct tape?
engineer of a train right?
not like a mechanical engineer....
my brain hurts just thinking about your post
johnQpublic - EVERY single scifi movie i have ever seen uses plastic suits when they go into the nuc...! even space suits are plastic. it is a wonder material!
radiation cant get thru a plastic ziplock bag so they could just bag all the waste and problem solved.......
They made a sarcophagus out of Chernobyl didn't they?
Airborne contaminants could be limited by some kind of lid. Plastic has been used in containment pond linings.
Close in work to cover the area doesn't seem very feasible and the tech to dig up the masses may just disturb it releasing more contaminants than would have been otherwise.
Water contamination may be ongoing and very hard to isolate especially if the masses descended to sea level or lower.
Michael_engineer,
Some of the roof parts collapse at Chernobyl.
A French company is working on sarcophagus ( funded by EU?). There is a lot of work to be done before you can say that's stabilized.