Scientists
Warn of Extreme Risk: Greatest Short-term Threat to Humanity is From Fukushima
Fuel Pools
Global Research, November 08, 2013
The
Japanese nuclear agency recently green-lighted the removal of the spent
fuel rods from Fukushima reactor 4′s spent fuel pool. The operation is
scheduled to begin this month.
The
success of the cleanup also has global
significance. So we all have a direct interest in seeing that
the next steps are taken well, efficiently and safely.
If
one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe adverse impacts
not only on Japan ... but the rest of the world, including the United States.
Indeed, a Senator called it a national security concern for
the U.S.:
The
radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another
earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the
safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.
Award-winning
scientist David Suzuki says that Fukushima is terrifying, Tepco and the
Japanese government are lying through their teeth, and Fukushima is “the most
terrifying situation I can imagine”.
Suzuki
notes that reactor 4 is so badly damaged that – if there’s another earthquake
of 7 or above – the building could come down. And the probability of another
earthquake of 7 or above in the next 3 years is over 95%.
Suzuki
says that he’s seen a paper that says that if – in fact – the 4th reactor comes
down, “it’s bye bye Japan, and everyone on the West Coast of North America
should evacuate. Now if that’s not terrifying, I don’t know what is.”
The
operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant ... will begin a dry
run of the procedure at the No. 4 reactor, which experts have warned carries grave
risks.
***
“Did you ever play pick up sticks?”
asked a foreign nuclear expert who has been monitoring Tepco’s efforts to
regain control of the plant. “You had 50 sticks, you heaved them into the air
and than had to take one off the pile at a time.
“If
the pile collapsed when you were picking up a stick, you lost,” he said. “There
are 1,534 pick-up sticks in a jumble in top of an unsteady reactor 4. What do
you think can happen?
“I do not know anyone who is confident
that this can be done since it has never been tried.”
One
slip-up in the latest step to decommission Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear
plant could trigger a “monumental” chain reaction, experts warn.
***
Experts
around the world have warned
... that the fuel pool
is in a precarious state – vulnerable to collapsing in another
big earthquake.
Yale
University professor Charles Perrow wrote about the number 4 fuel pool this
year in the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists.
“This
has me very scared,” he told the ABC.
“Tokyo would have to be evacuated because
[the] caesium and other poisons that are there will spread very rapidly.
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.
Former
Japanese ambassador Akio Matsumura warns that – if the operation isn’t done
right – this could one day be considered the start of “the ultimate catastrophe
of the world and planet”:
(He
also argues that removing the fuel rods will take
“decades rather than months.)
Nuclear
expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that
people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere if one of the Fukushima fuel
pools collapses. Gundersen said:
Move
south of the equator if that ever happened, I think that’s probably the lesson
there.
Harvey
Wasserman wrote two months ago:
We
are now within two months of what may be humankind’s
most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
***
Should
the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing
horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come
crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could
fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten
the health and safety of all us.
***
Former
Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our
civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect
to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”
Even Japan’s Top
Nuclear Regulator Says that The Operation Carries a “Very Large Risk Potential”
Even
the head of Japan’s nuclear agency is worried. USA Today notes:
Nuclear
regulatory chairman
Shunichi Tanaka, however, warned that removing
the fuel rods from Unit 4 would be difficult because of the risk posed by
debris that fell into the pool during the explosions.
“It’s a totally different operation
than removing normal fuel rods from a spent fuel pool,” Tanaka
said at a regular news conference. “They need to be handled extremely carefully
and closely monitored. You should never rush or force them out, or they may
break.”
He
said it would be a
disaster if fuel rods are pulled forcibly and are damaged or break open when dropped from the pool,
located about 30 meters (100 feet) above ground, releasing highly radioactive
material. “I’m much more worried about this than contaminated water,” Tanaka
said
The
same top Japanese nuclear official said:
The
process involves a very
large risk potential.
A
task of extraordinary delicacy and danger is about to begin at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power
station.
***
One
senior official told me: “It’s
going to be very difficult but it has to happen.”
Why It’s Such a
Difficult Operation
CNN
notes that debris in the fuel pool might interfere with operations:
South
China Morning Post notes:
Nothing
remotely similar has been attempted before and ... it is feared that any error
of judgment could lead to a massive release of radiation into the atmosphere.
***
A
spokesman for Tepco ... admitted,
however, that it was not clear whether any of the rods were damaged or if
debris in the pool would complicate the recovery effort.
Professor
Richard Broinowski – former Australian Ambassador to Vietnam, Republic of
Korea, Mexico, the Central American Republics and Cuba – and author of numerous
books on nuclear policy and Fukushima, says some of the fuel rods are probably fused.
Murray
E. Jennex, Ph.D., P.E. (Professional Engineer), Professor of MIS, San Diego
State University, notes:
The
rods in the spent fuel pool may
have melted .... I consider it more likely that these
rods were breached during the explosions associated with the event and their
contents may be in contact with the ground water, probably due to all the
seawater that was sprayed on the plant.
Fuel
rod expert Arnie Gundersen – a nuclear engineer and former senior manager of a
nuclear power company which manufactured
nuclear fuel rods – recently explained the biggest problem with the fuel
rods (at 15:45):
I
think they’re belittling the complexity of the task. If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as
a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out —
but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette
straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and
other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November,
December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated,
they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing.
***
I
suspect we’ll have more airborne releases as they try to pull the fuel out. If
they pull too hard, they’ll snap the fuel. I think the racks have been distorted, the fuel has
overheated — the pool boiled – and the net effect is that it’s
likely some of the fuel will be stuck in there for a long, long time.
The
racks are distorted from the earthquake — oh, by the way, the roof has fallen
in, which further distorted the racks.
The
net effect is they’ve got the bundles of fuel, the cigarettes in these racks,
and as they pull them out, they’re
likely to snap a few. When you snap a nuclear fuel rod, that
releases radioactivity again, so my guess is, it’s things like krypton-85,
which is a gas, cesium will also be released, strontium will be released.
They’ll probably have to evacuate the building for a couple of days. They’ll take that radioactive gas and
they’ll send it up the stack, up into the air, because xenon
can’t be scrubbed, it can’t be cleaned, so they’ll send that radioactive xenon
up into the air and purge the building of all the radioactive gases and then go
back in and try again.
It’s
likely that that problem will exist on more than one bundle. So over the next
year or two, it wouldn’t surprise me that either they don’t remove all the fuel
because they don’t want to pull too hard, or if they do pull to hard, they’re
likely to damage the fuel and cause a radiation leak inside the building. So
that’s problem #2 in this process, getting the fuel out of Unit 4 is a top
priority I have, but it’s not going to be easy. Tokyo Electric is portraying
this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers.
Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore,
the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The
net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they
snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it.
The
consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has
ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being
removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in
the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive
releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including
Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.
[Mycle
Schneider, nuclear consultant:] The situation could still get a lot worse. A massive spent fuel fire would likely
dwarf the current dimensions of the catastrophe and could exceed the
radioactivity releases of Chernobyl dozens of times.
Experts
question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies
successfully.***
No
one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and
Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report
2013: “Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or
control, could cause by
far the most serious radiological disaster to date.”
***
Nonetheless,
Tepco inspires little
confidence. Sharply criticized for failing to protect the
Fukushima plant against natural disasters, its handling of the crisis since
then has also been lambasted.
***
“There
is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted and get
too close to each other,” Gundersen said.
***
Tepco
confirmed the Reactor No. 4 fuel pool
contains debris during an investigation into the chamber
earlier this month.
Removing
the rods from the pool is a delicate task normally assisted by computers,
according to Toshio Kimura, a former Tepco technician, who worked at Fukushima
Daiichi for 11 years.
“Previously
it was a computer-controlled process that memorized the exact locations of the
rods down to the millimeter and now they don’t have that. It has to be done manually so there is
a high risk that they will drop and break one of the fuel rods,”
Kimura said.
***
Corrosion
from the salt water will have also weakened the building and equipment, he
said.
ABC
Radio Australia quotes an expert on the situation (at 1:30):
Richard Tanter, expert on nuclear
power issues and professor of international relations at the University of
Melbourne:
***
Reactor
Unit 4, the one
which has a very large amount of stored fuel in its fuel storage pool, that is sinking. According to former prime Minister Kan
Naoto, that has sunk some 31 inches in places and it’s not uneven.
And
Chris Harris – a, former licensed Senior Reactor Operator and engineer – notes that it doesn’t help that a lot of the rods are in very
fragile condition:
Although
there are a lot of spent fuel assemblies in there which could achieve
criticality — there are also
200 new fuel assemblies which have equivalent to a full tank of gas, let’s call
it that. Those are the ones most likely to go critical first.
***
Some
pictures that were released recently show that a lot of fuel is damaged, so when they go ahead and put
the grapple on it, and they pull it up, it’s going to fall apart.
The boreflex has been eaten away; it doesn’t take saltwater very good.
Nuclear
engineers say that the fuel pool is “distorted”, material
was blown up into air and came down inside, damaging the fuel, the roof fell
in, distorting things inside.
Indeed,
Fukushima documents discuss
“fuel that is severely damaged” inside cooling pool, and show illustrations of
“deformed or leaking fuels”.
The Urgent Need:
Replace Tepco
Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe is being told by his own party that Japan’s response is
failing. Plant operator
[Tepco] alone isn’t up to the task of managing the cleanup and decommissioning
of the atomic station in Fukushima. That’s the view of Tadamori
Oshima, head of a task force in charge of Fukushima’s recovery and former vice
president of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party.
***
[There's]
a growing recognition that the government needs to take charge at the Fukushima
station.... “If we allow the situation to continue, it’ll never be resolved”
[said Sumio Mabuchi, a government point man on crisis in 2011].
Copyright © 2013 Global Research
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