"These buildings are supposed to be seismically and structurally secure and, you know, if the ground sinks under them, that suddenly changes a lot of people's perception," Gunderson said, underscoring the assurances of the nuclear industry that reactors are constructed to survive earthquakes intact. The Japanese "seismic calculations were wrong all along," he added.
Unit 4 was first damaged by the earthquake/tsunami event, and then suffered several explosions during the aftermath. Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) acknowledged that the building was damaged and went in during the spring of 2011 to structurally reinforce the elevated fuel pool, to keep the bottom of the pool from breaking and dumping fuel rods uncontrollably.
Today the Unit 4 building is buckled, and is two inches wider at the bottom than at the top. There is at least one crack in its foundation.
Of the four Fukushima reactors and fuel pools, Unit 4 has the most nuclear fuel in the fuel pool, and no fuel in its reactor within the containment. All the fuel in Unit 4 is outside the relative safety of the containment. And part of that fuel is the entire hot nuclear core that used to be in the reactor. That's why the fuel pool steams on colder days.
"There is dozens of times more Cesium in the nuclear fuel pool at Unit 4 than was ever released in all the above ground [nuclear bomb] testing that ever occurred, so if that pool were to face structural damage from another earthquake, it would likely devastate Japan," Gunderson said, "It's a sleeping dragon."
He added that until Tepco gets the fuel out of the pool, the world needs to keeps its fingers crossed that there's not another earthquake, because Tepco is moving too slowly and methodically to make the site safe any time soon.
Perception of Safety Wins Out Over Reality
As has been widely reported, Tepco has known since 2002 that the Fukushima site was unsafe. "I actually think they knew in the eighties," Gunderson commented. One reason TEPCO didn't do anything was money, and another was public relations.
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