[Tilting]

CBS mixes robots with the Fukushima disaster reporting.

After you lose containment whereas your melted cores travel outside the once hermetically sealed concrete vaults to origins unknown, the radioactive melts are into the open environment with no cure presently known to deal with it.

Surrounding the melts with water helps shield the radioactivity to a certain extent but what to do with the water that is now radioactively contaminated?

Reports says that 1,000 tons of radioactive melt per blown reactor or (3) x 1,000 tons = 3,000 tons of radioactive melt that has to be removed, whenever they discover where it is. This is a low ball figure since the radioactive melts continue to irradiate the surrounding environment and produce even more radioactive materials for removal.

Radiation poisoning is best explain like being stab with a knife and dying 40 or 50 years later. Being exposed to radiation when older doesn't matter much in that case but it is the kids esp. young girls that are most vulnerable since they are still developing and adding mass susceptible to cell damage by radiation.

[Ancesthntr]

“Number one this is right next to the sea. We’re 100 yards from the ocean. We have typhoons here in Japan. This is also a high earthquake zone. And there’s gonna be future earthquakes. So these are unknowns that the Japanese and no one wants to deal with.”

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The more accurate response would have been: “Number one this is right next to the sea. We’re 100 yards from the ocean. We have typhoons here in Japan. This is also a high earthquake zone. And there’s gonna be future earthquakes. So these are unknowns that the Japanese and no one wants to deal with. You utter moron. Even school children know that.”

[mrsmith]

” no one knows exactly where *inside the reactor buildings* the fuel is.”

Anyway, I thoght we all already died from Fukushima?

[Revel]

90% of Freepers are too ignorant to do anything except holler “Give me some of that clean nuclear power”. If you want to see how the human race can be brainwashed then look no further.

[SaveFerris]

[Lesley Stahl]

One of the greatest nuclear physicists of all time.

[Billthedrill]

It's an interesting engineering challenge, no doubt about that. For the Reactor One meltdown, no excuse. Unlike the other two, it had a purely passive emergency cooling system that not only could have taken them through it, but was doing so until it was shut off because it was working too well, and when the power went it couldn't be turned back on. Reactor Four was already cold iron, so the only threat was leakage from the storage tanks where the fuel rods had been deposited. When that building blew from hydrogen leakage from Reactor Three there were a lot of truly shocked people.

James Mahaffey, Professor Emeritus of Nuclear Engineering, calls the entire sequence of events "inexcusable" in his Atomic Accidents, which is highly recommended. TEP (Tokyo Electric Power) had been told about the inadequacy of the seawall and the vulnerability of the emergency generators on numerous inspections. And but for the unfortunate placement of one power distribution panel they'd have gotten away with the thing. And but for the unfortunate timing of the first hydrogen explosion they'd still have gotten away with it. When that made a timely approach to the power panel impossible, the meltdowns were inevitable.

So where from here? A Chernobyl-style sarcophagus won't stop the groundwater contamination, that's a whole new realm of recovery. The ice barriers were a really innovative idea but they appear to have failed. There may be no other choice but to pump the contaminated cooling water into the ocean and hope for the best, securing the solid corium and other contaminated solids with physical barriers. They may need to go to bedrock to pull that off, and this in a highly active seismic zone. It's a very formidable engineering challenge indeed.