Published: March 18th, 2011 at 7:21 am ET
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U.S. nuclear officials suspect Japanese plant has a dire breach, Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2011 at 4:50 am EST:
U.S. government nuclear experts believe a spent fuel pool at Japan’s crippled Fukushima reactor complex has a breach in the wall or floor, a situation that creates a major obstacle to refilling the pool with cooling water and keeping dangerous levels of radiation from escaping.
That assessment by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials is based on the sequence of events since the earthquake and information provided by key American contractors who were in the plant at the time, said government officials familiar with the evaluation. It was compelling evidence, they said, that the wall of the No. 4 reactor pool has a significant hole or crack. …
A breach in the pool would leave engineers with a problem that has no precedent or ready-made solution, said Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“My intuition is that this is a terrible situation and it is only going to get worse,” he said. “There may not be any way to deal with it.” …
Read the report here.
Published: March 18th, 2011 at 7:21 am ET
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“Spent rod pool” storage not the “reactor pool”.
They are different…
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Note:
Spent rods are just as dangerous if they over heat !
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Unable to shed much heat, the concentrated radioactive slurry continued to increase in temperature within the defective 80,000 gallon containers. On 29 September 1957, one tank reached an estimated 660 degrees Fahrenheit. At 4:20pm local time, the explosive salt deposits in the bottom of the vat detonated. The blast ignited the contents of the other dried-out tanks, producing a combined explosive force equivalent to about 85 tons of TNT. The thick concrete lid which covered the cooling trench was hurled eighty feet away, and seventy tons of highly radioactive fission products were ejected into the open atmosphere. The buildings at Chelyabinsk-40 shuddered as they were buffeted by the shock wave.
While investigators probed the blast site in protective suits, a mile-high column of radionuclides dragged across the landscape. The gamma-emitting dust cloud spread hazardous isotopes of cesium and strontium over 9,000 square miles, affecting some 270,000 Soviet citizens and their food supplies. Over twenty megacuries (MCi) of radioactivity were released, almost half of that expelled by the Chernobyl incident.
A report compiled in 1991 found that the incidence of leukemia in the region had increased by 41% since Chelyabinsk-40 opened for business, and that during the 1980s cancers had increased by 21% and circulatory disorders rose by 31%. It is probable, however, that the true numbers are much higher since doctors were required to limit the number diagnoses issued for cancer and other radiation-related illnesses. In the village of Muslyumovo, a local physician’s personal records from 1993 indicated an average male lifespan of 45 years compared to 69 in the rest of the country. Birth defects, sterility, and chronic disease also increased dramatically. In all, over a million Russian citizens were directly affected by the misadventures of the Mayak Chemical Combine from 1948 to 1990, including around 28,000 people classified as “seriously irradiated.”
http://www.damninteresting.com/in-soviet-russia-lake-contaminates-you
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If it were breached, the situation would be even worse than it is now, bad as it already is.
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please take the radiation talks over here http://enenews.com
some of us still come to fosl hoping for some GULF OF MEXICO news.
Thank YOU.
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