Reports from the TEPCO Fukashima Daiichi nuclear complex over the past few weeks have slowly revealed that damage to the cores in three of the reactors has been exceptionally severe. Tokyo Power Company officials indicated that in two of the reactors, their cores had not only melted down, but melted through the steel containment vessels.
In addition, TEPCO admitted it had misreported the amounts of radioactive material released during the first week of the crisis, after the earthquake and tsunami. Apparently, the release in the first seven days was 230% greater than all the radioactivity released in the 75 days that followed.
Cooling the amazingly hot blobs of radioactive material is apparently being done by simply pumping millions of gallons of (mostly sea)water into areas where the blobs came to rest, and hoping for the best. Even so, TEPCO's public statements have been upbeat, even hopeful -- though, gosh: They did call the continuing crisis "regrettable".
However, nuclear industry experts outside Japan and the United States have said they believe the crisis is more severe than anyone, certainly the Japanese government and TEPCO, are admitting -- and one, in an interview with Al-Jazeera, called it "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind".
"[TEPCO] recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," [said Arnold Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US]...Assuming Gunderson's analysis is correct, why isn't the media doing more to present the facts, particularly if there will be a continuing health hazard?
"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist..."
"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."
Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well...
"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."
"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."But, TEPCO's
But that's probably asking too much of our media, or our government.
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