At the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima, leakage of contaminated water was reported recently. One hundred and thirty tons of highly contaminated water was leaked from a reservoir. Those resorvoirs have only 3 layers of sheets as the wall, they say. Only 3 layers of sheets! There are 13000 tons of such water reserved in tanks as well as reservoirs at present. Four hundred tons of contaminated water are brought about from the plant every day. The amount of reserved water with radiation is continuously increasing. There could be much more leakage of polluted water from those reserved in the fragile reservoirs than reported this time, I suspect.
The melt down fuels are unknown in detail at all. They could penetrate the casing of reactors below the destroyed reactor. We should expect pollution into the water underground and eventually into the ocean. The melt down fuels are still totally inaccessible now. All they are doing now is to cool them blindly with water.
The numerous used fuels are still being pooled. Especially, in the pool of 4th reactor, there are more than 1300 of used fuels being cooled. The 4th reactor building is half detroyed by the explosion of the other reactor buildings. It could fall down by any quake etc that results in scattered used fuels on the ground. At that situation, since those used fuels out of water are highly radioactive, the plant could become inaccessible.
Most importantly, there are still 150000 evacuees from the area adjacent to the plant. Most of them would lose their homeland forever, I am afraid. Hundreds of people have already died among those evacuees. Over half of them are reported to have died of the causes related with the stress or any illness due to long lasting evacuation. There should be more numbers of workers at the plant being irradiated from ow on. They might have problems of chronic radiation in the future.
The accident in Fukushima has never ended yet. We have not found even the exit to solution.
Shin San,
ReplyDeleteI am very sad when I read what you are telling us has happened. Your predictions are going to happen and it is just a matter of time. Back in the early 1980's I took over 40 hours in classes to better understand radiation contamination, while I was working for the City of Mesa, Arizona. It took me a good month after the classes for my mind and body to accept what I learned and put it into perspective so that I was able to live with that knowledge. Once I left my job with the city and my responsiblities were no longer involved with nuclear radiation, I slowly returned to a normal way of life. I saw some horrible films of what nuclear radiation contamination will do and how it changed every thing because the levels of contamination clearly made leaving the land area surrounding this contamination an absolute necessity. I thought a lot about how this would disrupt the lives of so many innocent people and animals and how impossible it would be to clean up such a mess. Now you are describing what I learned, as it has happened, and it brings back memories I wish I could forget. The only answer is for all men to abandon all nuclear uses and to bury any nuclear enriched material deeply in a place where it would never be available for future access. My concerns now are what will happen in the ocean when all the fish begin to be contaminated, and how big an area will need to be considered contaminated. Again I am sorry for what has happened, and I fear that we will see more of this type of accident happening in the future!
Bob,
DeleteThanks for the same idea against the nuclear use as we have had. I know no nuclear power plant has built since the Three Mile's accident except for one under possible construction somewhere in th US. I hope they will give it up. Since we are in the earth quake active era now, it is out of the question if we should resume operation of the nuclear power plants, most of them being pretty old, in Japan. But some people would do that by any means. A terrible idea!
So far, the contamination is not so bad that it won't cause internal radiation to the people through food intake. But it is a serious problem that we cound not know when and how it should be expected to be settled it down.
Shin San,
DeleteJust a comment, my estranged son-in-law was trained in the US Navy to safely operate a nuclear power system on board an Aircraft carrier. A few years after he left the Navy, he became a Nuclear Power Plant Operator at a plant just North of Omaha,Nebraska. He retired from there early last summer, and applied at a new Nuclear Power Plant that was one of two new plants built in the state of Georgia. I do not know if these two plants replaced older plants in that area, or are totally new, but they are a brand new technology according to what I heard from our daughter, who occasionally sends us an email. So it would appear that in our country, they are building new nuclear power plants!!! Before he retired from the plant in Nebraska he was involved in safety training for the past few years, and I understand that he is doing the same thing at this new plant and has been there since it began operation sometime last year. I, like you thought that they were not building new nuclear plants in the USA. We have one of the larger plants with three separate generators that is west of Phoenix, AZ about 65 miles west of our QTH. Depending on the prevailing winds, they seasonally blow from west to east or Southwest to Northeast, but in either case my home is in the path of that plant! Knowing what I learned, I have often thought it would be better to move someplace further away, but then there would be other issues with a new QTH too!