Dear Readers,
The explosion at the Fukushima MOX plant (unit 3) looks far worse than the explosion yesterday at Fukushima Unit 1, which destroyed the top part of the reactor building.
They are assuming it was a hydrogen gas explosion, but what happened to the spent fuel pool there? These buildings are huge, these are huge explosions. This is awful.
White clouds were coming up from Unit 1 again today, which shouldn't be happening if it's under control. So it's not under control. Unit 2 apparently isn't under control, either. Having huge explosions on either side can't make things easier. Other reactors in Japan are also in trouble.
And the New York Times is saying that radioactive releases could continue for MONTHS.
May I respectfully take this moment to ask San Onofre and Diablo Canyon to shut down forever? What kind of warning do those guys want, anyway? Acts of God aren't good enough? Man's folly exposed says nothing?
The nuclear industry has been telling us for nearly 25 years that nothing as bad as Chernobyl (ONE MILLION DEAD) could EVER happen again. By the time it's over, THIS could be MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
In 2010, according to TEPCO, the operator of the site, there were already more than 10,000 spent fuel assemblies located at the Fukushima-Daiichi complex, mostly in spent fuel pools.
After Chernobyl the nuclear industry ignored cancer clusters, deformities, heart problems, and thus, undercounted the death toll a thousand different ways. But a compendium of thousands of studies, published by the New York Academy of Sciences, put the number at close to a million.
After Hiroshima / Nagasaki and all the atomic bomb testing, health effects were carefully and deliberately downplayed, too. Determining which new cancers have been caused by Fukushima won't be easy EVEN IF a million people die in and around Japan, and another million die around the rest of the planet. The winds and waters move these poisons around very quickly.
There is no way to know how much radiation is being released, or how much will reach the United States. It should be noted, however, that the Japanese military used free-floating balloons to try to bomb America during World War Two. Nearly ten thousand were launched and over a thousand bomb-balloons reportedly got through.
That's the way the winds go.
There's spent fuel in numerous locations around these reactors, including huge pools with four-foot thick concrete walls -- located ABOVE the reactors in these models. These pools need nearly constant water supplies.
Fuel in dry casks, also located at the site, have a few feet of concrete and a few inches of steel protecting them. That's not nearly good enough. In an accident, the dry casks can't simply be doused in water even if you could get near enough to throw the water on them.
The United States wants to build Yucca Mountain because dry casks aren't really a very safe or practical solution. But Yucca Mountain, planned for a seismically active area, isn't a good solution, either. So they just endlessly debate the matter and keep the plants running (and try to build new ones).
Right now, the entire core of any of these stricken reactors in Japan could be turned to rubble in an instant -- pulverized or "rubbleized". This is not a "nuclear explosion," which is not possible, but it would be very, very bad. The resulting reactor vessel steam explosion could, for example, blow the 20,000 pound top of the reactor pressure vessel half a mile high. All four [correction: six, but it is believed only three had fuel in them, so corrected to three] reactors at Fukushima could explode in sequence: Bing bing bing bing, one after another. But that wouldn't even be the worst of it. All that spent fuel is in danger, too.
We're not out of the wood, by any means. We're not even out of the demolition derby.
Yours,
Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA
---------------------------------------------------- Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html ----------------------------------------------------- Fukushima III explosion on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_N-wNFSGyQ Wow. ----------------------------------------------------- 1945 Japanese Balloon Bombs to North America: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO6-96Pyi0o -----------------------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers: An Expose
Carlsbad, CA
www.acehoffman.org
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
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