At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.
Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that to produce hydrogen, temperatures in the reactor core had to be well over 2,000 degrees and as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. He said a substantial amount of fuel had to be exposed at least at some point.
“That’s the significance of the hydrogen — it means there was serious fuel damage and probably melting,” said Gilinsky, who was at the NRC when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor had a partial meltdown in 1979. “How much? We won’t know for a long time. At TMI we didn’t know for five years, until the vessels were opened. It was a shock.”
The Fukushima Daiichi unit 3, once capable of generating 784 megawatts of power, is substantially bigger than unit 1, which generated about 460 megawatts. As a result, lowering temperatures in its reactor core could prove a much tougher task, experts said.
Japanese officials were also trying to figure out whether Friday’s earthquake, or the subsequent high pressures and temperatures in the reactors, had caused other cracks or leaks in reactors in the region. So far officials have not said that they have found any, though they have noted still unexplained losses of water in some reactor vessels.
well if they’re losing water, then they’ve got themselves (or, we’ve got ourselves) a cracked pan and that is a big problem - you can’t just walk in and concrete it up
-—————Tell that to the parents of the children who developed cancer.See also:
Ah, yes, the children. The magical touchstone of "it doesn't matter what we have to do and how many people it harms if it will save the life of one child."
How about all the parents whose children were harmed because of unnecessarily evacuating tens of thousands of people from the surrounding region? Besides, there wasn't an increase in childhood cancer deaths from Chernobyl. You'll notice that there was screening 2 to 4 years post-Chernobyl for thyroid cancer that showed an increase but that was due to intensive screening detecting what would always have been there but not diagnosed for one reason or another. Also, the latency period for developing thyroid cancer from such a cause is 10 years, so screening 2 to 4 years after the incident would not have spotted the cancers from this cause. Look at what was actually discovered over the decades since Chernobyl versus what the fear-mongers were hyping at the time. Follow the links I posted to the UNSCEAR report fielded by Z. Jawoworski.
The human tragedy of Chernobyl was caused, not by Chernobyl, but by the activists promoting government action where none was needed:Besides the 28 fatalities among rescue workers and employees of the power station due to very high doses of radiation (2.9 – 16 Gy), and 3 deaths due to other reasons (UNSCEAR 2000b), the only real adverse health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe among approximately five million people living in the contaminated regions were the epidemics of psychosomatic afflictions that appear as diseases of the digestive and circulatory systems and other post-traumatic stress disorders such as sleep disturbance, headache, depression, anxiety, escapism, “learned helplessness”, unwillingness to cooperate, overdependence, alcohol and drug abuse and suicides. These diseases and disturbances could not have been due to the minute irradiation doses from the Chernobyl fallout (average dose rate of about 1 – 2 mSv/year), but they were caused by radiophobia (an deliberately induced fear of radiation) aggravated by wrongheaded administrative decisions and even, paradoxically, by increased medical attention which leads to diagnosis of subclinical changes that persistently hold the attention of the patient. Bad administrative decisions made several million people believe that they were “victims of Chernobyl” although the average annual dose they received from “Chernobyl” radiation was only about one third of the average natural dose. This was the main factor responsible for the economic losses caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe, estimated to have reached $148 billion by 2000 for the Ukraine and to reach $235 billion by 2016 for Belarus.
Observations on the Chernobyl Disaster and LNT
Additional reasons why this is not Chernobyl ...
And even if it had been Chernobyl, Chernobyl was one of the most overhyped disasters until global warming came along.
As I pointed out earlier on another thread:When are we going to find out the truth and how much radiation is in the jet stream?
Please try to find Before It's Too Late: A Scientist's Case FOR Nuclear Energy by Bernard Cohen. You can get a used one from Amazon for a few dollars. This will put the risks of everything into perspective so you won't be tormenting yourself with images that have little basis in fact. You do know, don't you, that a typical coal-fired plant puts out as waste many tons of radioactive materials per year? And that even if one of the Japanese nuclear plants (light water reactors) completely blew up, it would be, compared to Chernobyl (a graphite core that could burn), like a kid taking a leak against the side of the garage of a house by a river compared to a dam breaking upstream, and that Chernobyl (see reference 4), despite the 31 early deaths of people working at the plant over the next four years, didn't result in a huge number or even a moderately large number of deaths in the surrounding countryside and that the major portion of deaths from Chernobyl was caused by moving people away, giving them a stipend, and their dying from alcoholism as a result or by unnecessary abortions?
Did you know that there are places throughout the world where people have lived for thousands of years that have levels of naturally-occurring radiation that are hundreds of times greater than you could ever receive from a popped nuclear electric plant in Japan (much less Chernobyl) without any statistically higher incidence of cancer? (See also CHERNOBYL: THE FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN by Z. Jawoworksi and "Observations on the Chernobyl Disaster and LNT?" Z. Jawoworski, Dose-Response, 2010, and Nuclear Weapons and Radiation: Miscellaneous Facts, John Moore (look for the part titled "Beneficial Radiation and Regulations."