Smoke hampering efforts at Fukushima

Sean Bernie an independant nuclear expert has been giving good information about what is going on at Fukushima over the last week and continues to do so - I'm so glad that someone else is talking about how this is all being covered up in the media! 


Call me cyncial but I think that it is no coincidence that the UK US & French governments are all attacking Libya right now, all of a sudden the on-going nuclear catastrophe that is affecting 4 nuclear reactors and at least 5 fuel ponds with approx 20 years worth of legacy waste is barely making the news at all...




Fukushima radioactivity polluting the sea around the station
TEPCO are reporting that there are signifiant radioactive materials in the seawater near the discharge canal where the cooling water normally leaves the plant. It is likely that this maybe the result of the cooling efforts whereby the reactors have been being flooded with seawater.


Does this mean that radioactivity is being washed straight through the site into the local water table and the ocean? I believe that this is highly probable. This plant is not operating under anything like normal conditions, and so all  discharges are fair game in a situation where they are trying to avert the distribution of 4 reactor cores into the environment a battle they definitely haven't won yet.


Just what has happened to the fuel ponds that were sat above the reactor cores in the reactors that have expereinced big explosions?


Robert Alavarez a former member of the U.S. DO.E published a study in 2003 about spent uel ponds here is an excerpt from an article Robert published on March 13th on the institute for policy studies:


"[which] indicated that if a spent fuel pool were drained in the United States, a major release of cesium-137 from a pool fire could render an area uninhabitable greater than created by the Chernobyl accident. We recommended that spent fuel older than five years, about 75 percent of what's in U.S. spent fuel pools, be placed in dry hardened casks — something Germany did 25 years ago. The NRC challenged our recommendation, which prompted Congress to request a review of this controversy by the National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, the Academy reported that a "partially or completely drained a spent fuel pool could lead to a propagating zirconium cladding fire and release large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment."

(full article can be read here) Institute for Policy Studies