Sunday, June 19, 2011

How Bad Are Things With Fukushima?

More than three months after the tsunami, things are not getting much better both in terms of recovering from the disaster and getting true information from Tepco and the government. More and more it's looking like the BP fiasco of 2010. It seems that every week we learn about another problem. This week it's the water. They started to decontaminate it on Friday at 8am and stopped at 1pm supposedly because they needed a part.

The water has been a problem for a while. They are having problems cooling the reactors. Their spraying of water has led to radiation being emitted into the air. And, at some point, they will have to get rid of the radioactive sea water. The question is where.

One supposed expert, Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, has called Fukishima "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind." He goes on, "The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor. TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."

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