Would love to know his source, but this is not good.
That breached containment pool is going to trigger trouble and there ain’t nothing anyone is going to be able to do to stop it.
I agree - the spent fuel pool is now appears to be the big issue. NB that they got the reactors at the other location under control cold-stopped and no one seems to want to notice it much.
NB2: There is a real possibility that there are crass political motivations at work in Germany behind their recent actions. The CDU just got *spanked* at the polls in Hamburg, and an election is coming up in Baden-Wuerttemberg. In B-H, the CDU (Merkel’s party) has had control for a long time - decades.
But the polls are signaling that the CDU is in trouble in B-H.
Well, guess what there happens to be two of in B-H? Reactor power plants.
Guess who is possibly going to shift the election away from the CDU in B-H? The Greens. And what do the Greens hate (with a passion)? Well, yes, coal. But they hated nukes before they hated coal. On the nuke issue, polling has indicated that the Germans want their nukes closed down “as soon as possible” by 53% of respondents. That’s a pretty big block of pretty hard-core anti-nuke people.
Enter the EU Energy Commissioner, Herr Günther Oettinger. Guess which German political party he’s from?
The CDU. Merkel’s party.
The all-out push to make a big, splashy reactions to events in Japan by the German government could be a crass bit of opportunism to hang onto some control by the CDU. Losing Baden-Wuerttemberg would be a BIG deal - there’s a large chunk of Germany’s’ population in that state, as well as a big chunk of their economy. And the CDU has held it for decades and decades. To lose it to the Greens is probably unthinkable to Merkel et al. I won’t go so far as to say that losing B-H means the CDU is going to be wiped out in the next lower house elections, but it would require Merkel change course on a lot of issues (like bailing out the rest of Europe on the Germans’ wallets) that she’s doubled-down upon.