Charles Perrow
Huffington Post
Sept. 21, 2013
Recent disclosures of tons of radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima reactors spilling
into the ocean are just the latest evidence of the continuing incompetence of
the Japanese utility, TEPCO. The announcement that the Japanese government will
step in is also not reassuring since it was the Japanese government that failed
to regulate the utility for decades. But, bad as it is, the current
contamination of the ocean should be the least of our worries. The radioactive
poisons are expected to form a plume that will be carried by currents to coast
of North America. But the effects will be small, adding an unfortunate bit to
our background radiation. Fish swimming through the plume will be affected, but
we can avoid eating them.
Much more serious is the danger that the spent fuel rod pool at the top of
the nuclear plant number four will collapse in a storm or an earthquake, or in a
failed attempt to carefully remove each of the 1,535 rods and safely transport
them to the common storage pool 50 meters away. Conditions in the unit 4 pool,
100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it
could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation
emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate,
would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of
the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be
continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened,
for thousands of years.
Read more
Saturday, September 21, 2013
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