Thursday, May 12, 2011

FUKUASHIMA problems are not going away any time soon



There MAY Be A Two Year Window
IF No More Big Quakes Hit

By Tom Burnett
5-6-11




Those of you who have been following me at Hawaii News Daily or on my blog may not have been thrilled with my initial assessments back in March - and ongoing - that Fukushima isn't going away.
 
The reactors can NEVER be placed in 'cold shutdown' because the cores are partially melted together. We are talking about hundreds of tons of fissile material inside reinforced concrete containment vessels. The containment vessels are cracked. They are releasing radiation. Fission excursions are still occurring and no one can go inside those containments for hundreds of years - even if they could crack one open.
 
They can continue to pour water on them and drain it off into the ocean because there is nothing else they can do. If they stop pumping water, the genie comes out. If they keep pumping water, it has to go somewhere and that somewhere is the ocean. It is still stop gap. Those reactor cores cannot be put into 'cold shutdown' or dismantled or entombed. Never.
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1 comment:

  1. If the fuel has melted into a lump at the bottom of the core then it is less likely to go critical again. This is becuase the fuel will have been diluted by mixing with other materials in the core. Also it makes it harder for the water to moderate the neutrons. In general systems which contain water, graphite or berylium are more easy to get to go critical than a mixture which does not contain high levels of these substances.

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