Did you miss this?
How much worse can it get?
There’s a chance that these pieces came from the spent fuel in pools above the reactors. Those spent fuel rods are supposed to be sitting in water and there was a period of time when they were believed to be uncovered (that was when they started dropping water from helicopters) but now they are flushing water into the pools. When the outer domes blew up and exposed these pools - could have blown some spent fuel out of the pools.
As I understand it, they kept the spent rods outside the reactor vessel in the coolant that surrounds it. So the core is probably still contained. It’s the next layer out seems to be breached, but I think this has been known for a while. This is a new complication to that problem. Not only is it breached, but now pieces of the spent rods have escaped are now in the environment. Previously it had been the water surrounding them that was getting out, but now it’s the rods themselves.
The ‘spent’ fuel rod pools are located on the upper level of the reactor buildings. Think of them as a swimming pool, where the fuel rods are kept in a vertical configuration in a grid, covered with water.
It is possible that one of the hydrogen explosions ejected fuel rods out from the pool.
The fuel rod pool at unit 4 is probably the source of most of the heavier element radiation. Those rods were the ‘newest’ that are outside a reactor pressure vessel.
As the article says, most likely they are from the spent fuel pool. Containment on reactor 2 is damaged (most likely in the torus), but not catastrophically so, which would be required to fling fuel rods around the outside.
We probably do not ever want to know that.
Did you miss this?