Worst Case at Fukushima: An International Cover-Up

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

For the search terms “worst case, Fukushima,” Google returns the same very short story from “experts” all over the world.

And here’s the official story from the Chief Scientific Officer of the entire United Kingdom, Professor John Beddington!

Let me now talk about what would be a reasonable worst case scenario.  If the Japanese fail to keep the reactors cool and fail to keep the pressure in the containment vessels at an appropriate level, you can get this, you know, the dramatic word “meltdown”.  But what does that actually mean?  What a meltdown involves is the basic reactor core melts, and as it melts, nuclear material will fall through to the floor of the container. There it will react with concrete and other materials … that is likely… remember this is the reasonable worst case, we don’t think anything worse is going to happen.  In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion.  You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 metres up into the air.  Now, that’s really serious, but it’s serious again for the local area.  It’s not serious for elsewhere even if you get a combination of that explosion it would only have nuclear material going in to the air up to about 500 metres.

So if only we can persuade all those melting reactors to behave reasonably, like an official scientist, then even the worst case isn’t “serious for elsewhere!”

Hurrah!

And likewise at Scientific American, where “Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima!”

And just what is that worst-case scenario? “They’re venting in order to keep the containment vessel from failing. But if a core melts, it will slump to the bottom of the reactor vessel, probably melt through the reactor vessel onto the containment floor. It’s likely to spread as a molten pool-like lava-to the edge of the steel shell and melt through. That would result in a containment failure in a matter of less than a day.”

Containment failure! And that’s the end of the SciAm story! They don’t even get as far as the Official Chief Scientific Officer, who mentioned a relatively small explosion, which wouldn’t be much of a problem outside the the immediate environs of Fukushima Prefecture.

But we might also ask ourselves how accurate all those “nuclear experts” have been so far.

Are they getting it right, or getting it wrong, and how far wrong?

For example, when they sent a couple of engineers wading into radioactive water at Fukushima #2 just a couple of days ago, how far wrong were the “nuclear experts” about how much radioactivity thoise unfortunate waders would encounter?

They were wrong by a factor of 10,000!

The real situation was ten thousand times worse than their reasonable prediction!

So maybe we should ask a few common-sense questions about the reassuring official story, such as…

What happens to all that spent fuel in leaking storage pools if one of the reactors melts right through the containment vessel and explodes? After all, there’s a heck of a lot of highly radioactive junk nearby!

Reactor No. 1: 50 tons of nuclear fuel

•    Reactor No. 2: 81 tons

•    Reactor No. 3: 88 tons

•    Reactor No. 4: 135 tons

•    Reactor No. 5: 142 tons

•    Reactor No. 6: 151 tons

•    Also, a separate ground-level fuel pool contains 1,097 tons of fuel; and some 70 tons of nuclear materials are kept on the grounds in dry storage.

That’s more than 1700 tons of nuclear fuel! And even though most of it isn’t hot enough to power a nuclear reactor, it’s still hot enough to burst into flames unless you keep it under water!

1700 tons!

Load that up in your pick-up truck, Billy Bob! You and 1699 of your friends, in a caravan that would stretch bumper-to-bumper for eight miles down the road!

And now when we return to the official story, where a melting core (or three!) melts through the containment vessel, hits some concrete, and explodes.

But what if that isn’t really the end of the story?

What if all those nuclear geniuses are just as wrong about a catastrophic melt-through as they were wrong over and over and over about almost everything so far?

What if the melting core doesn’t simply explode and disperse when it hits some “concrete and other materials” directly under the containment vessel, but burns right though a few more meters of “concrete and other materials” and hits the water table under Fukushima NPP? And at beautiful beach-side Fukushima NPP, the water table isn’t nearly as far down as the water table under Chernobyl!

So what’s the worst case now, if we consider the not exactly unimaginable possibility that a melting core doesn’t immediately explode and disperse when it hits some concrete, but burns a few feet more down into the water table under Fukushima NPP?

So instead of dropping a molten ball of uranium and plutonium into a relatively small pot of water, you drop it into something more like a bath-tub instead.

Could you produce a big enough explosion to destabilize all those already leaky pools that barely cover 1700 tons of radioactive junk?

That’s a very big hunka hunka burning death!

And I don’t even claim that this godawful picture is anything like the worst case!

But it’s a bad enough case to make the so-called “worst cases” described by official scientists look like just another bad joke from the same clowns who keep getting everything wrong about Fukushima NPP.