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Tepco doesn’t know how to stop the leaks and no idea where the cores of the nuclear reactors are with radiation hitting both Koreas, China and the Pacific hard but Tepco is about to cause a much bigger problem.
Specifically, the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima. Should one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere.
Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival”. But in 2 months, Tepco is going to start doing this very difficult operation on their own, removing 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale.
In November, Tepco plans to remove spent fuel from Reactor No. 4 with radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction. Removing its spent fuel, which contains deadly plutonium, 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 Japan and neighboring countries at serious risk.
The big danger identified by Japan’s atomic energy commission is if you lose water in one of the spent fuel pools and you get a spent fuel fire.
Mycle Schneider, a nuclear consultant said the situation could still get a lot worse. A massive spent fuel fire would likely dwarf the current dimensions of the catastrophe and could exceed the radioactivity releases of Chernobyl dozens of times. First, the pool walls could leak beyond the capacity to deliver cooling water or a reactor building could collapse following one of the hundred of aftershocks. Then, the fuel cladding could ignite spontaneously releasing its entire radioactive inventory.
More than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully.
“They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” said Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies.
Specifically, the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima. Should one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere.
Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival”. But in 2 months, Tepco is going to start doing this very difficult operation on their own, removing 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale.
In November, Tepco plans to remove spent fuel from Reactor No. 4 with radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction. Removing its spent fuel, which contains deadly plutonium, 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 Japan and neighboring countries at serious risk.
The big danger identified by Japan’s atomic energy commission is if you lose water in one of the spent fuel pools and you get a spent fuel fire.
Mycle Schneider, a nuclear consultant said the situation could still get a lot worse. A massive spent fuel fire would likely dwarf the current dimensions of the catastrophe and could exceed the radioactivity releases of Chernobyl dozens of times. First, the pool walls could leak beyond the capacity to deliver cooling water or a reactor building could collapse following one of the hundred of aftershocks. Then, the fuel cladding could ignite spontaneously releasing its entire radioactive inventory.
More than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully.
“They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” said Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies.
Tepco doesn’t know how to stop the leaks
