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Page added on June 10, 2014
Officials fear melted reactor fuel is now exposed at Fukushima
Tepco: We don’t know at this point if fuel is uncovered — Large drop in water level — Experts ‘struggling’ to find condition of nuclear cores, nothing is known for all 3 reactors
TEPCO: Water in reactor half expected level — Officials with the operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant say the water level inside the No.2 reactor’s containment vessel is about half what they had estimated. […] They found the water was around 30 centimeters [11.8 inches] deep. TEPCO officials […] say they don’t know whether the fuel is entirely submerged. […] They believe then flowing out of the reactor building through holes in the chamber.
NHK WORLD, June 10, 2014: TEPCO officials are struggling to find […] the condition of the melted fuel […] Officials believe that at reactor number 2, water is leaking […] at the bottom of the containment vessel, but do not know exactly from where. [At] reactors 1 and 3, the utility has found the sources of some leaks, but suspects there are other breaches […] Nothing is known about the condition of the melted fuel in all 3 reactors. TEPCO is considering various forms of surveys, including a plan to send a camera-mounted robot […]
Kyodo News, June 9, 2014: TEPCO confirms water level of Fukushima No. 2 reactor container […] A TEPCO official [said] the detailed condition of the melted fuel remains unknown.
NHK Transcript, June 9, 2014:
- Officials at Tepco are facing another setback.
- They don’t know whether [the water] even covers all of the nuclear fuel.
- Officials don’t know about the condition of the melted fuel.
- Officials believe the water level at another reactor is 10 times deeper.
- Teruaki Kobayashi, Tepco official: “We cannot tell at this point if the fuel is entirely submerged or if part of it’s above the water.”
- They believe it’s flowing through the chamber then out of the reactor building.
21 Comments on "Officials fear melted reactor fuel is now exposed at Fukushima"
chilyb on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 4:14 pm
just gotta figure out how to plug those leaks.
Any ideas…?
Mauricio on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 5:00 pm
“just gotta figure out how to plug those leaks.
Any ideas…?”
why doesn’t anyone has ten fingers free ?
J-Gav on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 5:31 pm
Oh fuck! That doesn’t sound like good news.
Dave Thompson on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 6:08 pm
440 some odd across the globe. Do not eat anything out of the oceans, oh yea you can skip the breathing part to now.
SilentRunning on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 6:32 pm
Still waiting for the predicted “nuclear volcanoes” to erupt.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/decommision/index-e.html
Oh, BTW: Fuel from unit #2 is now over 2/3rd removed – every fuel rod removed decreases the radiation levels on site, and eliminates the danger of collapse of pool #4.
With continuing progress, it’s no wonder that the Fukushima hysteria stories are getting less and less coherent.
Makati1 on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 8:02 pm
Thanks for the chuckle, Dave. But, you are correct. Slowly, we are all being poisoned by not only Fukushima, but by Dow Chemical and his cousins, and GMOs and nuclear waste from Iraq, and on and on. The last breath of really fresh, clean air has not been breathed in our lifetime. And, it will only get worse. Man has passed peak life expectancy and we are sliding down the far side of that bell curve also.
Silent, what about the 400 odd pools still containing some 250,000+ TONS of spent fuel rods scattered all over the world? What is going to happen to those when the SHTF? What happens if the grid goes down and there is no way to keep them cool? Remember, there are about 100 of them in the US alone.
Interesting to think about isn’t it?
chilyb on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 8:40 pm
silent – this appears to be a report, more or less, directly from Tepco – not hysteria. Personally I don’t remember reading anything about the potential for a “nuclear volcano.” Is this something else we need to be concerned about?
toolpush on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 9:43 pm
Silent,
“Oh, BTW: Fuel from unit #2 ”
I think that is a typo, it should have read unit #4.
Unit #2 spent fuel pool is still full of fuel rods as nobody has been able to get inside unit#2 apart from a few suicidal robots. Their bodies are piling up.
After 3 years Tepco still can’t find 3 missed placed reactor cores, very untidy of them. What ever happened to drilling under the buildings to find them? Did they chicken out? Because they thought they may find out what they didn’t want to know?
DMyers on Tue, 10th Jun 2014 10:03 pm
Hey, ya’ll, it’s invisible, so it isn’t really there. And when they’re talking about reactor fuel, I’m keying into the fuel part. Fuel is a good thing and always has been. I’m fueling me up at least once a week.
Is your skin falling off? Do you have external tumors? Do you glow under a black light? Of course, the answer to all these questions is no. Radiation from Fukushima is not causing any observable problems.
Norm on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 1:35 am
the fuel rods melted all the way to China. go look for them in China.
Kenz300 on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 7:14 am
Nuclear energy — Too Dangerous and too costly…..
Time to shut them down and replace them with cleaner, safer and cheaper alternative energy sources.
Wind, solar, wave energy, geothermal and second generation biofuels made from algae, cellulose and waste are the future.
Fukushima, Japan Rebuilding Communities with Solar, Commits to 100 Percent Renewable Energy by 2040
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/05/fukushima-japan-rebuilding-communities-with-solar-commits-to-a-100-percent-renewable-energy-by-2040
Kenz300 on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 8:01 am
The nuclear industry is doing all they can to slow the transition to alternative energy sources.
TEPCO and the government of Japan have not been open and honest about this nuclear disaster from the very first day. The cost and environmental damage caused by nuclear energy is a price too high to pay.
How much will it cost to dismantle all the old nuclear reactors around the world and store the nuclear waste FOREVER?
Nuclear Giant Exelon Launches Front Group to Cover Its Assets, Undermine Renewable Energy?
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/06/nuclear-giant-exelon-launches-front-group-to-cover-its-assets-undermine-renewable-energy?page=all
bobinget on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 10:52 am
One thing seems certain. With every new outcome of Fuku’s disaster, uranium’s stock goes further down the Porcelain Parkway. I seriously doubt any group could get financing for new U fueled reactors.
We, Japan, may be desperate for energy but if half of Japan’s population is negatively effected, it’s no longer a viable method.
I wonder how Iranians are dealing with this news?
Northwest Resident on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 10:59 am
bobinget — I’m pretty sure that your average Iranian is saying something like: “News? What news? Fukushima? What’s that? Nuclear energy? What for — we have oil? The government is doing what?!”
Skeptical on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 1:16 pm
You’d think after 3+ years, they’d be able to KNOW how much water is covering the fuel!
SilentRunning on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 8:30 pm
chilyb wrote:
>– this appears to be a report, more or less, directly from Tepco
Yes, with very large amounts of editing to extract the most alarming snippets.
>not hysteria. Personally I don’t remember reading anything about the potential for a “nuclear volcano.”
1) Go to google:
2) Search fukushima and “nuclear volcano”. You’ll get lots of hits with alarming predictions that the cores were going to melt down to magma, and then erupt nuclear volcanoes. This alarmist hysteria was VERY common in 2011. Of course, it utterly failed to happen.
The other huge hysteria was that the fuel storage pool #4 was going to collapse, then burst into a nuclear meltdown even bigger than the current mess. This too failed to happen.
Then the removal of the same fuel rods from the same pool started. The hysterics now shifted to fuel rods touching during removal, touching off the very same meltdown catastrophe. Well, as of today, over 2/3rds of the fuel has been removed – no disaster.
> Is this something else we need to be concerned about?
There’s no shortage of real problems in this disaster – or in the world in general. Global warming, species loss, overpopulation, etc. If you were living near Fukushima, you certainly would have justifiable concerns about radiation in your environment.
SilentRunning on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 8:42 pm
norm wrote:
>the fuel rods melted all the way to China. go look for them in China.
I’ve read that the antipode of Fukushima is actually in the Atlantic ocean just off the coast between Uruguay & Argentina.
So, for the Japanese, this would be “the Uruguayan Syndrome!”
Of course, there’s no way that molten nuclear fuel would even make it to earth’s core – and absolutely no way it would keep burrowing through the other side of the planet – fighting gravity all the way!
Makati1 on Wed, 11th Jun 2014 9:22 pm
Silent, there is a lack of practical education in the US. They may even think the earth is still flat, if they think about it at all.
Norm on Thu, 12th Jun 2014 4:17 am
The Fukushima fuel rods are gonna be in China. Since China is fairly close… not starting in the US, starting in Japan. So the rods don’t have to go thru the middle of the Earth. They can take a shortcut then pop back up in China. I’m sure of it. Nobody else knows what happened to the rods, so you can believe me.
chilyb on Thu, 12th Jun 2014 11:40 am
Silent: I am curious to hear if you have any practical ideas on how the leaks in reactors 1-3 can be plugged in the near future. This is a real issue at hand, IMO, preventing radioactive material from continuing to leak from the cooling water into the groundwater -> ocean.
Yes, I agree that the idea of a “nuclear volcano” as you describe is totally absurd. I thought it might have something to do with the fuel going critical again underground. It’s probably too dispersed as this point.
Roman on Thu, 12th Jun 2014 1:00 pm
I say let the spent fuel get hotter, melt into the crust, it will get incorporated and diluted and become solid rock.