Published: August 24th, 2012 at 1:20 pm ET
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Yastel Yamada, cofounder and director of Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima
TUC Radio (Maria Gilardin)
Recorded July 30, 2012
At 14:40 in
Yastel Yamada, co-founder and director of Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima:
The fuel has melted down and eroded the concrete and now Tepco says that there is some room and they say this depth is 65cm — 25 inches — but this is a simulation, no one has seen inside, therefore the shape of the debris is not known. This is just an assumption.
Furthermore sand and concrete is not like steel. It’s a mixture of stone, sand, and cement.
Therefore, the vessel bottom might be eroded or broken.
Listen to the report here
Published: August 24th, 2012 at 1:20 pm ET
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"Sieve" describes it better.
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I have already breathed some of the radioactive pulverized concrete dust…last year.
I live 5600 miles away.
Beware the blobs! They are much worse than Godzilla.
Tokyo… Prepare to meet your undoing.
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Im going to be as straight forward as I can
Yo, that sh!t meltedout bro.
TWiB
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#MeltOut
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Despite water has been poured on the melted cores – the temperature was so high they melted themselves out of the pressure vessels in only one or two days.
Then the emissions has been going on. What actually happens there under is not possible to tell, as no one has been able to see or measure this.
And there is nothing under control – emissions go on. Mostly as steam and water solutions. And some also direct vaporizing into the air.
The fission isotope products are like hundred different substances and many many more combined products.
Three cores of hundreds of tonnes uranium.
I made a telephone call to the safety authorities, spoke to one expert and asked him: "What if one kilo of this material was to vaporize, how bad would it be"? He answered: ONE KILO, he said, that is really much, that would be far too much".
This I write just to make people understand the size of this.
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Exactly Urban, that is the point. Once at San Onofre the plant shut down because of a small problem. We went inside containment and found "fuel fleas", minute or microscopic small little particles emitting several REM. It was too dangerous to work in the area unless it was cleaned up first. These were caused by one or two fuel rods with a pinhole leak. The total that leaked out was probably a gram or two.
Multiply that by a couple gazillion and that is the situation.
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A repost from earlier article, and also from around a year ago after Arnie Gundersen speculated that the coriums had probably flattened out like 'pancakes' in the dry well under the ex-containment vessel. In GE Mk1 boiling water reactors the control (hahahaha) rods come up from underneath, as they melted down with the fuel rods there would have been molten corium flowing down through the holes that the control rods pass though into the control rod drive cavity, quite probably enlarging the holes as it flowed.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reaktor.svg
At 2400-2800c corium burns through concrete at the rate of 5cm per hour, and the base of the concrete dry well beneath the pressure vessel is about 8m as far as I can discover (anyone with better knowledge?). The time it would have taken the corium to burn through that thickness is about 160 hours. There are 24 hours in a day so 160 hours is 6.6666 days. There's one for the numerologists amongst us! Debbil's work for sure..
So let's say that after the fuel to start melting following the main cooling system failure during the earthquake (not tsunami, earthquake that fractured the cooling pipes), within about a week the corium would have been into the ground. Providing of course the thermal power of the corium was not exhausted by the concrete as is passed through.
Lots of data here> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_%28nuclear_reactor%29
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good stuff omniversling…
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Slight correction on the GR reactors. The control rods are completely within the pressure vessel, the "control rod drives" are the mechanisms that have penetrations through the bottom of the pressure vessel. These penetrations are rather small, as are the instrumentation that also goes into the RPV from the drywell basement.
Good point about the thermal loss Omni. Under the fuel is a large support plate and other large structures. It is not a direct shot through the bottom of the vessel. My slightly educated guess is that there is fuel in lumps still in the fuel area, around the support structure, at the bottom of the vessel and some certainly that fell all the way through into the drywell basement. My estimation is based on the structure and also based on history of meltdowns. Is there enough concentrated fuel on top of the concrete to melt through it-a big maybe, but we may never know.
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http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread663958/pg2
http://www.world-nuclear.org/images/info/chernowreck2.gif
Comparing with Chernobyl (up here), Fukushima's design (even with several times more melted fuel) may actually be containing the corium within the concrete.
Still, the point here is that there's no way to take such mess out (or even getting closer round the plant without dying).
However, here's not about some remote (and respectable) state-capital as was Kiev around (even being quite poorer), but Tokyo and the whole Japan is on stakes.
Like any occidental man, I've grown watching stuff like Speed Racer, reading admiring about 'The Japanese Miracle', and watching the Soccer Intercontinental Cup every year with some Argentine team playing there. This catastrophe and devastation is something that Occident shouldn't let be.
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All three cores were more than likely in the ground under the reactors within a week of the Tsunami. Anybody who was watching the live video of the site could see the fissure that opened up outside of Reactor three close to the venting tower. Steam was pouring out of that hole, and as far as I can tell light steam is still coming up from underground. The obvious conclusion was that a substantial portion of the core of Reactor Three was underground and off center from the reactor. Of course, the Japanese could tell us that they had a ruptured pipe underground at that spot, and the world would believe it.
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