You are quite welcome, redshawk.
TEPCO has said that it will not use the Soviet/Chernobyl technique of burying the reactor in concrete.
Re the Soviet approach to meltdown: (I found a 40 minute (4 part) YOU TUBE video series by Nova titled “Inside Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus” interesting - it walked through the design of the lead ‘Sarcophagus’ and filmed some pretty astonishing scientists studying what happened to the fuel after the melt down, and problems they continue to face. Here’s a link if you’re interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KeSXMTzt6M&feature=related)
Some posts I’ve read say that the Japanese can’t dump concrete on Fukushima reactors while they are hot anyway. The company proposes to wait while the fuel cools down and then invent the means of removing the fuel. It proposes to complete the work in 10 to 12 years. It’s hard to conceive of what the Japanese face clearing the tsunami rubble - all those homes, factories, schools, lives etc. So the complexity of the nuclear cleanup adds even more to their recovery. I keep them in my prayers.
YIKES! Read his reply to a UPI article yesterday:
This website, as most on the web on this topic at the sub-academic and non-A-list academic levels, is U.S. military/CIA/Nuclear industry disinformation—blatent minimization and lies.
It is describing the Fukushima and Japanese nuclear cataclysm as a “was”, as in, “in the past”. It has not even really begun yet. There have been full nuclear meltdowns, as a matter of scientific fact, at reactors one, two and three. There have been partial meltdowns of far more radioactive (1,000,000x more) “spent fuel” in all the pools in bldgs. 1-4 and perhaps in reactor 5.
Who knows how much fuel melted in the common spent fuel pool while it was unrefrigerated. It itself stores about 6000 TONS of so-called spent fuel. Remember that only 50 tons of Uranium dioxide, reactor fuel, enriched for power generation criticality, not acidental criticality, that quickly went “accidentally critical” and exploded (either a steam explosion or some other sort of sub-nuclear explosion that distributed a lot of burnt graphite—despite revisionist history on the particulate matter that spread strontium-90 and cesium actinides essentially all over nearly all of Europe.
At Fukushima Dai ichi, there are a total of 7000 TONS (more than 160x Chernobyl) involved in the far less well contained (it hasn’t exploded yet, or has it here and there?—MOX fuel in reactor 3?) circumstances, in equally poorly designed General Electric (MSNBC/NBC, etc.) nuclear plant bldgs, just in different ways. Remember that it takes 7 years to cool “spent fuel” under the best of circumstances. This is NO was; this is no past tense event.
Wake up people. GE is enmeshed with the media and the nuclear power industry and the military, simultaneously. How much information do you really think we’re going to get in the U.S., which in addition has the largest number of nuclear power reactors on the planet, at 104, with France at 59 and, idiotically, Japan has 55 is number 3. Japan’s nuclear reactors sit on four, not just two, but FOUR separate, very active, tectonic plates and most are on or near very active mega-thrust faults. Absolutely brilliant!
Please study, if you don’t believe me that this site and nearly 99% of any site you find on this topic that’s not A-list or A-level academic peer-reviewed material, the incident of 2007 to the present at Kashiwazaki Kariwa on the other side of Honshu, same latitude.
Cheers!!! If you’re in the U.S., I wouldn’t be drinking any tapwater where rain can hit it, or drinking any milk or any California, Oregan, Washington, British Columbia, or any northern 50% of the U.S. agricultural product of any kind that’s been rained on since about March 15.