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We’re In The Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cuban Missile Crisis
Scientists Warn of Extreme Risk
We’ve long said that the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima.
The Japanese nuclear agency recently green-lighted the removal of the spent fuel rods from Fukushima reactor 4′s spent fuel pool. The operation is scheduled to begin this month.
The head of the U.S. Department of Energy correctly notes:
The success of the cleanup also has global significance. So we all have a direct interest in seeing that the next steps are taken well, efficiently and safely.
If one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan … but the rest of the world, including the United States. Indeed, a Senator called it a national security concern for the U.S.:
The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.
Hiroaki Koide – a nuclear scientist working at the University of Kyoto – says:
I’m worried about whether Tepco can treat all the 1,331 [spent-fuel] assemblies without any problem and how long it will take.
Award-winning scientist David Suzuki says that Fukushima is terrifying, Tepco and the Japanese government are lying through their teeth, and Fukushima is “the most terrifying situation I can imagine”.
Suzuki notes that reactor 4 is so badly damaged that – if there’s another earthquake of 7 or above – the building could come down. And the probability of another earthquake of 7 or above in the next 3 years is over 95%.
Suzuki says that he’s seen a paper that says that if – in fact – the 4th reactor comes down, “it’s bye bye Japan, and everyone on the West Coast of North America should evacuate. Now if that’s not terrifying, I don’t know what is.”
The Telegraph reports:
The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant … will begin a dry run of the procedure at the No. 4 reactor, which experts have warned carries grave risks.
***
“Did you ever play pick up sticks?” asked a foreign nuclear expert who has been monitoring Tepco’s efforts to regain control of the plant. “You had 50 sticks, you heaved them into the air and than had to take one off the pile at a time.
“If the pile collapsed when you were picking up a stick, you lost,” he said. “There are 1,534 pick-up sticks in a jumble in top of an unsteady reactor 4. What do you think can happen?
“I do not know anyone who is confident that this can be done since it has never been tried.”
ABC notes:
One slip-up in the latest step to decommission Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant could trigger a “monumental” chain reaction, experts warn.
***
Experts around the world have warned … that the fuel pool is in a precarious state – vulnerable to collapsing in another big earthquake.
Yale University professor Charles Perrow wrote about the number 4 fuel pool this year in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
“This has me very scared,” he told the ABC.
“Tokyo would have to be evacuated because [the] caesium and other poisons that are there will spread very rapidly.
Perrow also argues:
Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.
Former Japanese ambassador Akio Matsumura warns that – if the operation isn’t done right – this could one day be considered the start of “the ultimate catastrophe of the world and planet”:
(He also argues that removing the fuel rods will take “decades rather than months.)
Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere if one of the Fukushima fuel pools collapses. Gundersen said:
Move south of the equator if that ever happened, I think that’s probably the lesson there.
Harvey Wasserman wrote two months ago:
We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
***
Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.
***
A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.
Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”
Even Japan’s Top Nuclear Regulator Says that The Operation Carries a “Very Large Risk Potential”
Even the head of Japan’s nuclear agency is worried. USA Today notes:
Nuclear regulatory chairman Shunichi Tanaka, however, warned that removing the fuel rods from Unit 4 would be difficult because of the risk posed by debris that fell into the pool during the explosions.
“It’s a totally different operation than removing normal fuel rods from a spent fuel pool,” Tanaka said at a regular news conference. “They need to be handled extremely carefully and closely monitored. You should never rush or force them out, or they may break.”
He said it would be a disaster if fuel rods are pulled forcibly and are damaged or break open when dropped from the pool, located about 30 meters (100 feet) above ground, releasing highly radioactive material. “I’m much more worried about this than contaminated water,” Tanaka said
The same top Japanese nuclear official said:
The process involves a very large risk potential.
BBC reports:
A task of extraordinary delicacy and danger is about to begin at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power station.
***
One senior official told me: “It’s going to be very difficult but it has to happen.”
Why It’s Such a Difficult Operation
CNN notes that debris in the fuel pool might interfere with operations:
South China Morning Post notes:
Nothing remotely similar has been attempted before and … it is feared that any error of judgment could lead to a massive release of radiation into the atmosphere.
***
A spokesman for Tepco … admitted, however, that it was not clear whether any of the rods were damaged or if debris in the pool would complicate the recovery effort.
The Wall Street journal notes:
Among the risks [Hiromitsu Ino, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at the University of Tokyo] and other experts cite is the possibility that a container being used to move the units falls and breaks apart, exposing the fuel to the air.
Similarly, Edwin Lyman – a nuclear expert and the chief scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists notes:
The biggest risk with Unit 4 pool unloading is that a spent fuel cask might drop and damage the pool, causing a leak that could expose some fuel and cause overheating.
Professor Richard Broinowski – former Australian Ambassador to Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Mexico, the Central American Republics and Cuba – and author of numerous books on nuclear policy and Fukushima, says some of the fuel rods are probably fused.
Murray E. Jennex, Ph.D., P.E. (Professional Engineer), Professor of MIS, San Diego State University, notes:
The rods in the spent fuel pool may have melted …. I consider it more likely that these rods were breached during the explosions associated with the event and their contents may be in contact with the ground water, probably due to all the seawater that was sprayed on the plant.
Fuel rod expert Arnie Gundersen – a nuclear engineer and former senior manager of a nuclear power company which manufactured nuclear fuel rods – recently explained the biggest problem with the fuel rods (at 15:45):
I think they’re belittling the complexity of the task. If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out — but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing.
***
I suspect we’ll have more airborne releases as they try to pull the fuel out. If they pull too hard, they’ll snap the fuel. I think the racks have been distorted, the fuel has overheated — the pool boiled – and the net effect is that it’s likely some of the fuel will be stuck in there for a long, long time.
In another interview, Gundersen provides additional details (at 31:00):
The racks are distorted from the earthquake — oh, by the way, the roof has fallen in, which further distorted the racks.
The net effect is they’ve got the bundles of fuel, the cigarettes in these racks, and as they pull them out, they’re likely to snap a few. When you snap a nuclear fuel rod, that releases radioactivity again, so my guess is, it’s things like krypton-85, which is a gas, cesium will also be released, strontium will be released. They’ll probably have to evacuate the building for a couple of days. They’ll take that radioactive gas and they’ll send it up the stack, up into the air, because xenon can’t be scrubbed, it can’t be cleaned, so they’ll send that radioactive xenon up into the air and purge the building of all the radioactive gases and then go back in and try again.
It’s likely that that problem will exist on more than one bundle. So over the next year or two, it wouldn’t surprise me that either they don’t remove all the fuel because they don’t want to pull too hard, or if they do pull to hard, they’re likely to damage the fuel and cause a radiation leak inside the building. So that’s problem #2 in this process, getting the fuel out of Unit 4 is a top priority I have, but it’s not going to be easy. Tokyo Electric is portraying this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers. Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore, the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it.
The Japan Times writes:
The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.
Reuters notes:
Experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully.
***
No one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013: “Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date.”
***
Nonetheless, Tepco inspires little confidence. Sharply criticized for failing to protect the Fukushima plant against natural disasters, its handling of the crisis since then has also been lambasted.
***
“There is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted and get too close to each other,” Gundersen said.
***
The rods are also vulnerable to fire should they be exposed to air, Gundersen said. [The pools have already boiled due to exposure to air.]
***
[Here is a visual tour of Fukushima's fuel pools, along with graphics of how the rods will be removed.]
Tepco confirmed the Reactor No. 4 fuel pool contains debris during an investigation into the chamber earlier this month.
Removing the rods from the pool is a delicate task normally assisted by computers, according to Toshio Kimura, a former Tepco technician, who worked at Fukushima Daiichi for 11 years.
“Previously it was a computer-controlled process that memorized the exact locations of the rods down to the millimeter and now they don’t have that. It has to be done manually so there is a high risk that they will drop and break one of the fuel rods,” Kimura said.
***
Corrosion from the salt water will have also weakened the building and equipment, he said.
ABC Radio Australia quotes an expert on the situation (at 1:30):
Richard Tanter, expert on nuclear power issues and professor of international relations at the University of Melbourne:
***
Reactor Unit 4, the one which has a very large amount of stored fuel in its fuel storage pool, that is sinking. According to former prime Minister Kan Naoto, that has sunk some 31 inches in places and it’s not uneven.
And Chris Harris – a, former licensed Senior Reactor Operator and engineer – notes that it doesn’t help that a lot of the rods are in very fragile condition:
Although there are a lot of spent fuel assemblies in there which could achieve criticality — there are also 200 new fuel assemblies which have equivalent to a full tank of gas, let’s call it that. Those are the ones most likely to go critical first.
***
Some pictures that were released recently show that a lot of fuel is damaged, so when they go ahead and put the grapple on it, and they pull it up, it’s going to fall apart. The boreflex has been eaten away; it doesn’t take saltwater very good.
Nuclear engineers say that the fuel pool is “distorted”, material was blown up into air and came down inside, damaging the fuel, the roof fell in, distorting things inside.
Indeed, Fukushima documents discuss “fuel that is severely damaged” inside cooling pool, and show illustrations of “deformed or leaking fuels”.
The Urgent Need: Replace Tepco
Tepco is severely downplaying the risks involved in removing fuel rods. For example, Tepco’s head of the Fukushima plant, Akira Ono, says:
We have removed spent fuels many times. Therefore, we don’t think we are going to be doing anything that is very dangerous.
That is idiotic given that (as shown above) this is anything but a normal fuel removal operation.
Tepco is incompetent and corrupt, and has been in cover-up mode since day one. As such, it is the last company which should be in charge of the clean-up.
Top scientists and government officials say that Tepco should be removed from all efforts to stabilize Fukushima. They say that an international team of the smartest engineers and scientists should instead handle this difficult mission.
Bloomberg notes:
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is being told by his own party that Japan’s response is failing. Plant operator [Tepco] alone isn’t up to the task of managing the cleanup and decommissioning of the atomic station in Fukushima. That’s the view of Tadamori Oshima, head of a task force in charge of Fukushima’s recovery and former vice president of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party.
***
[There's] a growing recognition that the government needs to take charge at the Fukushima station…. “If we allow the situation to continue, it’ll never be resolved” [said Sumio Mabuchi, a government point man on crisis in 2011].
Because the U.S. controls Japanese nuclear policy, Americans should demand of our political representatives that they pressure Japan to kick Tepco off the job ... and let an international team of scientists and engineers take over.
Postscript: As challenging as removing the fuel rods from the pool at unit 4 will be, it will be even harder at units 1 through 3. Specifically, it's too radioactive for Tepco to even get a look at what's going on in those 3 reactor pools, and they have no idea how to do it. Indeed, the technology does not even exist to approach those reactors, as the high radiation levels quickly destroy even robots.
Nuclear fuel rod expert Gundersen says the pool at unit 3 is in much worse shape than at 4:
Unit 3 is worse [than No. 4]. Mechanically its rubble, the pool is rubble. It’s got less fuel in it [than unit 4, but] structurally the pool has been dramatically weakened. And, god nobody has even gotten near it yet.
Tepco's not up to it ... we need a focused, well-funded international effort to fix this mess.
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Yes. please. Fuck you Harry Reid.
watched a great video the other day about what and how finland is storing its nuclear waste in a mamoth man built cave system
hoping to store it safely for 100,000 years
their biggest worry is how to warn people away from it in the future, with thoughts that it may be primitive people that eventually find the stuff
eerie and fascinating
about onkalo
movie is 'into eternity'
here is link to part one
http://dotsub.com/view/8e40ebda-5966-4212-9b96-6abbce3c6577
i had found it elsewhere in its entirety in one piece
their biggest worry is how to warn people away from it in the future, with thoughts that it may be primitive people that eventually find the stuff
Back when Yucca Mountain was in its infancy, a team of scientists proposed establishing a monastery-type installation nearby inhabited by scientists who would protect the repository and pass on their knowledge and mission to succeeding generations. Could be the power of prayer is all we'll have left if Fukushima goes TU.
Its a pretty sad movie, they storing it 500 meters under ground, all the heat pumps installed today in Finland are drilled to 200 metes (all new installations are vertical drill) , how about 500year from now someone drills to 500 meters, warm enough?
Torrent---
Into Eternity is a feature documentary film directed by Danish director Michael Madsen,[1] released in 2010.[2] It follows the construction of the Onkalo waste repository at theOlkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland. Director Michael Madsen questions Onkalo's intended eternal existence, addressing an audience in the remote future.
Into Eternity raises the question of the authorities' responsibility of ensuring compliance with relatively new safety criteria legislation and the principles at the core of nuclear waste management.[3]
I notice you said 'hoping to store it safely for 100,000 years'
Does hope work better than lead shielding?
Plutonium's half-life is 80 million years, so anywhere contaminated should be safe in about 800 million years.
!00,000 is insignificant by comparison
We'll need a shitload of those pure tungsten rods you pointed me to, lead ain't dense enough. Alternatively, we could round up you, and everybody that looks like you;)
The 80 million years is true only for the most stable isotope, which is the least radioactive, and also the rarest isotope.
Other isotopes have relatively shorter half-lives.
Difference between radiation danger, which varies and decays, and heavy metal poisoning danger, which is constant as long as it exists as a heavy metal. Non-radioactive heavy metals may also cause cancer.
Thats as long as humankind can be expected to be an ongoing concern.
We've got five years.
Isn't it insane to use fuels that you have to safeguard for 100,000 years to Boil Water to make electricity?
I doubt they add the cost of safeguarding the fuel rods for 100,000 years when they tell us how cheap nuke power is -
And I'll bet future generations will think what a butch of freaking idiots and morons
I vote for sending Obama's daughters to clean p fukishima all the while guarded by the yakuza.
I don't understand why, if these rods are so hot that touching two together can boil water, WHY ARE THEY CONSIDERED SPENT?
We needn't mine any more uranium. Just keep using these 'spent' rods until they can't be made to boil water anymore. Then, when they can't go critical in storage anymore, mission accomplished!
What don't I understand?
Plain old Uranium is not strong enough to work a reactor at only 1% U238. You have to enrich it to 2% or 3% for it to work in a conventional reactor. Then you can use 1% or 2% of it up, before the fuel rod must be replaced.
Then that depleted rod, which still has about 99% of the radioactivity it started with, must be put away in a safe place for 100,000 years until all the radioactivity diperses.
Or, you could build a Thorium reactor and use up 98% of the radioactivity. Then the spent fuel rods would only need to be stored for 300 years.
Which is still insane (300 years) but it is orders of magnitude less insane than 100,000 years.
Four suggestions :
One, it is an exageration,
Two, it may refer to new fuel rods, not spent fuel rods,
Three, there is a point of diminishing energy production in used and mostly depleted fuel rods that reduces the efficiency of heat production, and at some point in the fuel burn cycle it is more economical to replace used and depleted fuel rods with new and undepleted fuel rods, even if the used fuel rods still produce some heat.
Four, fuel rods normally do not touch the adjacent parallel fuel rods, and the distance between fuel rods is normally at a fixed distance, and fuel rods cannot be moved closer together in order to produce more heat when depleted, or moved farther apart to create less heat. Control rods are moved in and out and placed between fuel rods to control the reaction rate, control rods to either block or unblock the fission emitted neutrons that sustain or limit the chain reaction. A slow chain reaction produces heat. A fast chain reaction produces more heat. A very fast chain reaction produces an explosion. Fuel rods could melt, which would be a big problem, but a nuclear explosion from fuel rods is probably impossible.
Insane, yes.
And, it's directly analogous to inter-generational debt ... that is, we spend now; someone else gets the bill.
Most of us agree that it's wrong to saddle future generations with the financial debt that we accrue. At least those future generations could declare bankruptcy.
They absolutely cannot evade the responsibility for containing OUR nuclear waste, though. We are shackling our children for an eternity.
beaglebog, your IRRITANT avatar is brilliant. It is the best I have seen here in a long while.
So this is how it will end....
I was thinking along the same lines. Here is what should be happening but isn't. An international team of experts from every field known to man that could be applied to the problem set is assembled and set loose on the problem with a basically unlimited budget and man power, from every society able to help.
To answer why that isn't that happening, we may have to look at why as a society we are boiling water essentially with poisons that never stop. It's is prima facia insane, but so are nuclear weapons, and global war machines. It's amazing, I try and believe six impossible things before breakfast everyday, and try and forget how stupid mankind is as a race.
.. how much KY would it take to ram a spent fuel rod up a certain Nevada senator's posterior?
Hmm? OK... , scratch the lube.. there are budgetary concerns..
But as a patriot, I volunteer to take my 18V grinder and fashion the serrations on the rod that assure permanent and unidirectional insertion.
"I doubt they add the cost of safeguarding the fuel rods for 100,000 years when they tell us how cheap nuke power is -"
I was but a yute when the un-groovy oldsters were being pitched on "electricity too cheap to even meter"..
..and they told them that the toll roads would be opened up for free when the bonds were paid off in the 1990's ..
.. and that social security was a viable economic proposition and could be used to fund everything from surviving children to heartburn.
most all of those liars and idiots are dead or comfortably retired..
I've often wondered, why can't they just load the spent stuff onto unmanned spacecraft and aim them at the sun and be done with it?
Because roughly 3 to 5% of all rocket launches still end in catastrophic failure and/or explosion.
Just one nuclear waste-carrying rocket exploding high in the earth's atmosphere, and dispersing its radioactive cargo there, would soon kill essentially all life on earth.
All this also ignores the fact that the useful payload of even the most powerful rockets that could totally break free of near-earth space is on the order of a few tens of tonnes, while there are literally hundreds of THOUSANDS of tonnes of spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste already on hand, with more being generated all the time.
For a vindictive deity, he sure is a stupid motherfucker.
Too dangerous to launch with risk of rocket failure,
and failure to escape Earth or escape Earth orbit.
Maybe because they are psychopaths who really do want to kill us all off
Wow ... great graphics, HH
George, thanks for the report. Are you on the west coast of the U.S.?
so, how is it that radiation destroys robots?
i don't understand this claim.
Short version: The decay of radioactive materials generates heat, which alone can be sufficient to break molecular bondings, thereby altering the material. Such bondings can also be broken by the radiation itself directly. In any case you end up with materials that changed on a molecular level. These corrosive effects get intensified further if there is also neutron radiation, which can directly change atoms into other elements (by neutron capture and subsequent beta-decay). Then there is the possibility that radiation generates currents in electronic devices which destroy them. Do I have to go on, or is it now clear how radiation destroys robots?
isn't it possible to build robots to withstand ratiation?
lead shielding, more robust heat-resistant materials, etc?
it seems like a technological problem, and one that should be able to be overcome.
Engineering is the application of Science to technological design...with regards to Economy.
There are costs associated with designing robots that are even more robust then the ones that fried.
You ought to watcth the Chernobyl Film that GW posted in the Comments. Of course they also used robots to attempt to clean the roof of the Chernobyl Plant. Those Robots also fried.
(USSR TECHNOLOGICAL EXPERTISE: In May, 1986 the USSR was not that far behind the USA considering their Technology. They had a Large Orbiting Space Station, MIR. Their SPACE SHUTTLE, ORBITER BURAN-ENERGIA, was being prepared for flight. The USA Space Program, BOTH NASA AND THE US Air Force, were grounded as a result of the Challenger Accident as well as Titan IV Launch Vehicle Failures. The USSR was not that backwards and had come close to catching us the race to minaturize Electronics. Look Buran up online. The Buran was beautiful. It appeared like our own Space Shuttles and was as large and more capable. It takes a lot of technology to loft a Flying Machine the size of a DC-9 Passenger Jet into Low Earth Orbit.)
Back to the point... There are COSTS associated with developing that type of technology. It is not something readily available "off of the shelf". TEPCO is a Power Company. It is not an Engineering Company. Furthermore they have LACKED FUNDS until recently. This has overwhelmed them.
The thermal conditions at the Reactor Sites are extremely elevated. (High Temperatures) To melt Graphite and Uranium requires high Temperatures. That is what MELTDOWN means.
This is a very serious accident.
Yes, but not to withstand any arbitrarily large dose of radiation. They are not flesh-and-blood, but the physical mechanisms by which radiation damages the human body are equally present with metal-and-electronics. And any effective shielding against the intensity of radiation under discussion here would almost certainly make any robots so equipped both ineffectively awkward and unwieldly.
hmm.. I stuck my Android in the microwave and put it on "10" for a couple of minutes..
that didn't work out too well.
Should have put in a Blackberry.
Overdone?
he has very harsh competition, but I do believe Harry is the most self serving and insane member of Capitol Hill
the perfect individual with which to trust these materials
Maybe is recommend it Harry Reid is keep spent nuclear fuel in his refrigerator.
Aw c’mon.. how hard could it be to move a couple of thousand tons of hot fuel from a swimming pool suspended a hundred feet in the air in a damaged building in a highly radioactive area an earthquake zone?
Gee, it’s not like the back-up power system was located below sea level next to the ocean or anything.
I mean, like, how stupid would the engineers that designed a place like that have to be?
And what stupid country would idiots like that have to come from, anyway?
It can't be affected for that long, cause yee aint got that long.
How the fuck can a pool be deformed and warped and still hold water?
I think tepco is mostly correct this one time. If the rods are mangled it could only be in a pool that looks like the roads in detroit. And if that were the case, then the rods have already touched each other and been torn open -- yet the world-wide catastrophic environmental damange hasn't happened. I call bullshit unless someone can explain this.
Here is a minor experiment for you.
Open a Coke Can. Take a drink FIRST. (I don't need you to get wet...although...) Now apply pressure to the can...with your thumb until you WARP AND DENT IT. That can is DEFORMED.
Does it still hold Coke?
BUT THE RACKS ARE WARPED. The Pool might be warped...BUT THE RACKS ARE WARPED.
Because the Racks are Warped the Fuel Rods may be difficult to impossible to extract. They ARE BRITTLE.
(And Three of you people Up Vote his comment??? Can't you read? Can't you THINK?)
"Award-winning scientist David Suzuki says that Fukushima is terrifying,"
Sorry, but any article with that phrase in it gives me cause for concern.
When Suzuki, Fukushima and terrifying are all used in the same sentence, I automatically associate Suzuki and terrifying.
He is an ultra-socialist, political activist who uses science as a cover for his agenda.
... but he is make awesome bullet bike.