May 20, 2012

Major crack in the south wall of Fukushima reactor 4: is this the end of the world as we know it?

 

May 20, 2012TOKYOIf there isn’t a large crack there is still the issue of the severely damaged Unit Number Four building ‘tilting.’ The 1500 spent fuel rods pond almost suspended in air on the fifth floor and the extreme potential for a slight earthquake or explosion to unleash a catastrophic radioactive chain of events ‘much worse than Chernobyl.’ “The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements because a hydrogen explosion blew off the roof during the early days of the accident and sent the building into a list.” (See photo) A mysterious black substance five times more radioactive than the Chernobyl-Belarus mandatory evacuation zone was discovered 4 kilometers from the center of Tokyo, the Hirai Station. The mystery radioactive black substance discovered close to Tokyo on the heels of the discovery of Cesium in Fukushima Prefecture 122 times higher than in Belarus evacuation zone. -DBTPK
Dr. Michio Kaku, Flashpoints Daily News Magazine interview: Humans cannot come close to certain parts of the reactor site and even robots get fried. They’re delicate machinery; their micro-circuitry cannot withstand the intense bombardment of radiation. We’re talking about thousands of rads of radiation per hour being registered there and that is affecting the cleanup operation. “It will take years to invent a new generation of robots” able to withstand the radiation. The workers are like Samurai warriors, they’re like suicide workers. They know they are getting huge amounts of radiation going to the site. They can only go in, seconds to minutes, at a time doing work and then the next batch has to come in. Chernobyl had a half a million workers who worked minutes at a time. Here we have a situation much worse than Chernobyl simply because we have basically five reactors that could go up. One reactor setting off the next reactor, that’s a huge amount of radiation, over ten times the radiation inventory found in Chernobyl. “People don’t realize that the Fukushima reactor (Number 4) is on a knife’s edge; it’s near the tipping point. A small earthquake, another pipe break, another explosion could tip it over and we could have a disaster much worse, many times worse than Chernobyl. It’s like a sleeping dragon. Just in the last few weeks it’s been in the paper to some degree, Units 2, 3, and 4 have been shown to be in a very dire situation. Unit 2, we now know completely liquefied. We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power, a 100% liquefaction of a uranium core. Unit 3, on the other hand, Unit 4, on the other hand, has an even worse problem, and that it’s a spent fuel pond that is totally uncovered because of a hydrogen explosion that took place last year. The 1,500 rods that could be exposed to the air and then set off another spent pond with 6,000 rods. Altogether there are 11,000 rods in the Fukushima site that could be tipped over. A slight earthquake, a light explosion could set the whole reactor back into motion. And also, in regards to Unit 3, we found where we thought there was 33 ft. of water above the core. We put a TV camera in Units 2 and 3. We have TV pictures of the core; Unit 2 is completely liquefied, Unit 3 does not have 33 ft. of water on top of it, it has two feet of water. Two feet of water, not thirty-three, meaning that the core is completely, or partially covered, meaning it could liquefy. So between Units 2, which is completely liquefied, Units 3, which is totally exposed, and Unit 4, which has 1,500 spent fuel rods that, in principle, are exposed to the outside environment, we have a catastrophe in the making.” –Death by 1000 papercuts