Published: March 30th, 2011 at 5:34 pm ET
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Japan Weighs Entombing Nuclear Plant in Bid to Halt Radiation, Bloomberg, March 30, 2011 at 3:25 pm EDT:
Japan will consider pouring concrete into its crippled Fukushima atomic plant to reduce radiation and contain the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years. …
The risk to workers might be greater than previously thought because melted fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a press conference in Vienna.
Radioactive chlorine found March 25 in the Unit 1 turbine building suggests chain reactions continued after the reactor shut down, physicist Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, wrote in a March 28 paper. Radioactive chlorine has a half-life of 37 minutes, according to the report. …
Read the report here.
Published: March 30th, 2011 at 5:34 pm ET
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His resigning says a lot to...
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If radioactive iodine 131 is being found wouldn’t the other forms of radiation also be around?
Is anyone testing for any of the other forms of radiation?
Duane
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It is not just iodine-131 and cesium-137 that are in the ocean, in Japan’s foods, in the water supply, in the air, etc…There are *dozens* of radioisotopes floating about. This is a partial list of isotopes that are most certainly in and around Tokyo: Krypton 85, Krypton 85m, Rubidium 86, Krypton 87, Rubidium 87, Krypton 88, Strontium 89, Strontium 90, Strontium 91, Yttrium 91, Yttrium 92, Yttrium 93, Zirconium 93, Zirconium 95, Niobium 95, Zirconium 97, Niobium 97, Ruthenium 103, and Ruthenium 105. [To visualize the decay-chain of the mass 83 through 105 isotopes ... see trilinear chart of nuclides]
http://www.idealist.ws/trilinear2.pdf
To complete the list of radioactive pollutants in Japan’s biosphere, we must add radiotelluriums, radioiodines, radioceriums, radiocesiums, radiobariums, and other radioactive gases such as Argon 39, Argon 37, Carbon 14, radioactive carbon dioxide (14CO2), and tritium, and finally sea-salt-transmuted chlorine-36.
In a nuclear explosion the radioactive solids and radioactive gases both escape into the environment. In an operating nuclear reactor, steel vessels, corrosive-prone cladding and pipes and the containment building itself keep some, but not all, gaseous radioactive chemicals from escaping into the air and the soil and water.
But every single radioactive gas produced at the containment-less Fukushima reactors and outdoor swimming ponds for fuel rods has escaped. These gases escaped via leaky or manually opened pipes and vents and from cracked or melted fuel rods that blew out gases created via low or re-criticality fissioning or neutron activity from plutonium or uranium.
The leaked gases are no different in nature than what is released into the environment if you conducted an open air hydrogen nuclear (thermonuclear) explosion in the rain – the solid radioactive chemicals mostly would be suppressed, but the gases would leak out and float around an entire country or hemisphere. The gases would later precipitate into radioactive solids – or stay as radioactive gas in air.
Since all of the above radioisotopes are or once were gases, they had (and as long as they are being still released at Fukushima, they still have) the potential to travel large distances from the reactors, even further than Tokyo. Radioactive solids attach to dust particles and can travel across the globe with ease. That even includes plutonium.
http://www.idealist.ws/index.php#statecrisis
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