Yikes - Fukushima cleanup gets more complicated

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This story keeps getting bigger and bigger - from Yahoo/Agence France-Presse:

Nearly all fuel in Fukushima reactor has melted, says TEPCO
New tests show almost all of the fuel inside one of the Fukushima plant's reactors has melted, its operator said Thursday, the latest step in the clean up after Japan's worst ever nuclear crisis.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the technology, which uses elementary particles called "muon" to create x-ray style images, gave the most concrete evidence yet the fuel had dropped to the bottom of the first reactor.

The data, though largely expected, should help TEPCO as it continues its effort to decommission the plant four years after an earthquake and tsunami caused one of the worst nuclear meltdowns in living memory.

One of the comments is especially poignant to us:

The coverup and lies continue. This just keeps on getting worse as the truth "slowly leaks out". I was stationed at Yokota Air Base when the earthquake occurred. We were assured there was no danger where we were, but I wonder. At first, they said only Iodine 131 was released and that cloud traveled east over the ocean, but I know at Camp Zama the drinking was spiked for a couple of days with radioactivity (Camp Zama is south of Tokyo). Then the U.S. State Department got involved and did their own calculations which indicated any short term exposure was fine, though the levels they indicated were much higher than what is acceptable in the States. The U.S. Armed Forces assured U.S. civilian and military folks they were monitoring the air, but I know at Yokota, that did not happen for a first three days or so. They did set up a monitoring station by the armory on Yokota, but it was not powered for the first few days (I know, I looked at the station, and the power cord simply went into the drainage ditch; it was only after the first few days they provided a portable generator to power it). And then it was "discovered" cesium and strontium had escaped; hence, the more or less permanent evacuation of Japanese cities and towns abutting Fukushima.

A friend of Lulu's niece served on the USS Essex and has about seven years of life left. The ship desalinated the water without measuring for ocean-borne radioactivity.

I wrote about it two months ago: Truth - the Fukushima tsunami and its aftermath

Since then, he had to have emergency surgery removing parts of his esophagus.

The tragedy is that if this had been a thorium reactor, it would have shut itself down gracefully. LFTRs can not melt down - they are already molten.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 19, 2015 2:13 PM.

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