Fukushima May Soon Dwarf Chernobyl When Meltdown Hits Groundwater
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Source: Common Dreams
Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Hawaii News Daily
'Worse Than Chernobyl': When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater
by Tom Burnett
Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl. The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won�t admit it.
The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.
If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won�t simply cool down. It will explode � not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.
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Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense � it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different � a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That�s probably a bad solution.
A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.
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Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did � although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster. Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact that a similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.
Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn�t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.
Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for �mixed oxide fuel� which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.
The problem is that you don�t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or a Chernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can�t stop it.
The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That�s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.
� 2011 Hawaii News Daily
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