Frightening: Nuke expert says there was no containment of damaged Fukushima reactors

On March 11, 2011, a 9.03 magnitude earthquake struck off the northeastern coast of Japan. It was the most powerful known earthquake ever to have hit Japan, and one of the five most powerful earthquakes in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900.

The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 133 ft in Miyako in Tōhoku’s Iwate Prefecture, and which, in the Sendai area, traveled up to 6 mi inland. The earthquake moved Honshu (the main island of Japan) 8 ft east and shifted the Earth on its axis by estimates of between 4 to 10 inches.

Damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

The earthquake and tsunami, in turn, led to a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. 

It is the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and only the second disaster (along with Chernobyl) to measure Level 7 on the  International Nuclear Event Scale (INES). This scale runs from 0, indicating an abnormal situation with no safety consequences, to 7, indicating an accident causing widespread contamination with serious health and environmental effects. Prior to Fukushima, the Chernobyl disaster was the only level 7 accident on record, while the Three Mile Island accident was a level 5 accident.

On October 12, 2012, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that maintains the Fukushima plant, admitted for the first time that it had failed to take stronger measures to prevent nuclear disasters for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants.

Now, a nuclear expert at the University of Missouri tells us the Fukushima disaster is even much worse than we’ve been told: There really is no containment because the melted core had cracked the containment vessel.

Nuclear meltdown is an informal term for the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor. A core melt accident occurs when the heat generated by a nuclear reactor exceeds the heat removed by the cooling systems to the point where at least one nuclear fuel element exceeds its melting point. A meltdown is considered very serious because of the potential, however remote, that radioactive materials could breach all containment and escape (or be released) into the environment, resulting in radioactive contamination and fallout, and potentially leading to radiation poisoning of people and animals nearby.

George Washington writes for ZeroHedge, Feb. 27, 2013, that Dr. Steven Starr, who is the director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri and a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility, says:

“The Japanese basically lied about what happened with the reactors for months. They said they were trying to prevent a meltdown, when in fact they knew within the first couple of days Reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi had melted down, and they actually melted through the steel containment vessels. So there was a worst case scenario that they were trying to hide, they even knew that at that time enormous amounts of radiation were released over Japan and some of it even went over Tokyo [...] The melted core cracked the containment vessel, there really is no containment. So as soon as they pump the water in it leaks out again.”

Asahi Shimbum notes that the location of Fukushima melted fuel is unknown. It could be “scattered” in piping, vessels … “we’ve yet to identify all hotspots” around the plant.

While the Japanese government tried to cover up the lack of containment with “mission accomplished” type announcements of “cold shutdown“, the loss of containment has been known for years.

For example, AP wrote in December 2011:

The nuclear fuel moved as it melted, so its condition and locations are little known.

AP noted a couple of days later:

The complex still faces numerous concerns, triggering criticism that the announcement of “cold shutdown conditions” is based on a political decision rather than science. Nobody knows exactly where and how the melted fuel ended up in each reactor ….

Washington’s blog noted:

If the reactors are “cold”, it may be because most of the hot radioactive fuel has leaked out.

Indeed, if the center of the reactors are in fact relatively “cold”, it may be because most of the hot radioactive fuel has leaked out of the containment vessels and escaped into areas where it can do damage to the environment.

The New York Times pointed out in November 2011:

A former nuclear engineer with three decades of experience at a major engineering firm … who has worked at all three nuclear power complexes operated by Tokyo Electric [said] “If the fuel is still inside the reactor core, that’s one thing” …. But if the fuel has been dispersed more widely, then we are far from any stable shutdown.”

After drilling a hole in the containment vessel of Fukushima reactor 2, TEPCO could not find the reactor’s melted fuel.

The Fukushima fuel pools continue to be one of the main threats to Japan, the United States … and all of humanity.

And the Fukushima accident is presently causing higher and higher levels of contamination hundreds of miles away … and is still contaminating wildlife thousands of miles away.

~Eowyn

As Americans Worry About Nuclear Fallout From Japan, Where’s Obama’s Energy Czar?

The Obama administration grows stranger by the day. It has become a “Where’s Waldo?” administration.

The disaster in Japan goes from bad to worse to worser every day. Entire villages and towns have been demolished by the 9.1 earthquake and the 32-ft tsunami. Thousands are reported dead, with more thousands missing. Radiation is leaking from explosions of several units in the Fukushima nuclear plant. There is human suffering on a scale unprecedented since World War II.

What is Obama’s reaction? A strangely affect-less statement, read from a prepared script (that someone else wrote for him), displaying not a whiff of emotion, even less of anguished empathy:

Empathy — the ability to put ourselves in someone’s shoes and feel the emotions they’re feeling — is what makes us human. Psychologists have found that sociopaths/psychopaths (now called by the PC name of “anti-social personality disorder”) lack empathy. I worry about a person who does not have empathy, especially if this individual is president, commander-in-chief, and the most powerful man in the world.

But Obama had no problem showing plenty of affect as he yucks it up at the Gridiron dinner. Well, at least he’s being consistent. As oil spewed from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico last year, Obama also yucked it up at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. 

That’s what we get for electing a joker to the White House.

Now, with radiation leaking from Japan’s exploded nuclear reactors and rising concerns of an imminent core meltdown, Americans are more and more worried that the radiation will be carried by the jet stream to the U.S. west coast. The MSM are scrambling around, consulting this nuclear expert and that nuclear scientist….

Amidst this confusing mess of fears and uncertainty, the man who should know is strangely Missing In Action.

Where's Waldo?

That man is Secretary of Energy, physicist Dr. Steven Chu, the winner of a 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and a vocal supporter of nuclear energy. Chu is an advocate for more research into alternative energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming. As Iain Murray wrote in “Japan’s Nuclear Crisis. Where Is Steven Chu?,” March 14, 2011: (h/t my friend Sol)

He has the authority and the credibility to be all over our airwaves and the Internet telling Americans that their nuclear installations are safe and this terrible but extraordinary incident is no reason to slow down our move to speed up new nuclear construction. Yet he is absent without trace.

Americans expect leadership from their leaders. Chu has the track record to provide it in this case, yet he is failing to do so. If he is being hamstrung by special-interest pressure within the administration, one would expect that to be a resigning matter. I fear it is more likely that he has succumbed to pressure from his erstwhile allies, the greens, and is simply displaying a lack of backbone.

Yet he should consider what this means for his own plans. The administration’s energy plan, based on the EPA’s draconian regulations against greenhouse gas emitters, depends on a hundred new nuclear power plants being built. The administration knows that that powering America by wind and solar energy is as likely as extracting sunlight from cucumbers, which is why nuclear figures so heavily in the plan. If that option is now off the table — and the Left has been so successful in its opportunistic framing of this issue that it might well be — then there is a massive gap in the plan that can only be filled by coal or natural gas. Secretary Chu will be forced to argue that, if there is a nuclear ban, then the EPA’s beloved greenhouse-gas regulations will also have to be taken off the table. This is a circle that simply cannot be squared.

Again, it is up to Steven Chu to provide leadership here. It is his job to be realistic about America’s energy needs. If he fails to perform his duty, the American people must demand someone who is up to the job.

~Eowyn