Five days after this story was posted, the "radiation cloud" had not developed despite the story's assertion that: "Experts say this could be the beginning of a "spent fuel pool criticality (meltdown)' involving up to 89 TONS of nuclear fuel burning up into the atmosphere and heading to North America." The story named no "experts" and provided links only to TEPCO announcements in Japanese. The bulk of the story reads like an infomercial for "protective" gear of various sorts that TRN makes a point of saying it does NOT sell. Despite such obvious warning signs, others -- such as The Ecologist and Gizmodo -- reported the threat of "another meltdown" at Fukushima Unit #3 as imminent.
Clarification and reassurance quickly started chasing the "new meltdown" rumor around the Internet. ENENEWS (Energy News) promptly posted the TEPCO reports in English, demonstrating that there was nothing "sudden" about the steam releases, they've been happening more or less daily since 2011, but condensation caused by cold weather makes them visible. At FAIREWINDS (Energy Education), Arnie Gunderson posted on January 1:
-- the Internet has been flooded with conjecture claiming that Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 is ready to explode". Our research, and discussions with other scientists, confirms that what we are seeing is a phenomenon that has been occurring at the Daiichi site since the March 2011 accident". While the plants are shutdown in nuke speak, there is no method of achieving cold shut down in any nuclear reactor. While the reactor can stop generating the actual nuclear chain reaction, the atoms left over from the original nuclear chain reaction continue to give off heat that is called the decay of the radioactive rubble (fission products)". constantly releasing moisture (steam) and radioactive products into the environment." [emphasis added]
In other words, Fukushima Unit #3 continues to leak radioactivity into both air and water, as Units #1 and #2 presumably do as well. But as Gunderson explains, the level of radioactivity has declined sharply without becoming benign:
"When Unit 3 was operating, it was producing more than 2,000 megawatts of heat from the nuclear fission process (chain reaction in the reactor). Immediately after the earthquake and tsunami, it shut down and the chain reaction stopped, but Unit 3 was still producing about 160 megawatts of decay heat. Now, 30 months later, it is still producing slightly less than 1 megawatt (one million watts) of decay heat". 1 megawatt of decay heat is a lot of heat even today, and it is creating radioactive steam, but it is not a new phenomenon."
Reassurances about Fukushima are as misleading as scare stories
The reassuring aspects of the condition of Unit #3 -- radioactive releases are not new, they're less intense than they once were, the nuclear waste is cooling -- while true enough, provide only a false sense of comfort. Also true: radiation is released almost continuously, the releases are uncontrolled, no one seems to be measuring the releases, no one seems to be tracking the releases, no one is assessing accumulation of the releases. And while it's true that the waste is cooling and decaying, it's also true that a loss of coolant could lead to another uncontrolled chain reaction. ("Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 is not going to explode," says Gunderson in a headline, but he can't know that with certainty.)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
8
6
6
