The risk to workers might be greater than previously thought because melted fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a press conference in Vienna.

Nuclear experts call these reactions “localized criticality,” which will increase radiation and hamper the ability to shut down the plant. The reactions consist of a burst of heat, radiation and sometimes an “ethereal blue flash,” according to the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory web site.

Uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions!

Just like an atomic bomb, only smaller!

And what could happen if the meltdown continues, and all the plutonium in Reactor #3 melts into a blob that’s bigger than critical mass?

From Bloomberg…

Japan’s crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant “continues to further stabilize,” said Bill Borchardt, the executive director for operations at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

HARHARHARHAR!!!

Meanwhile, back in reality…

“The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell,” said Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima. “I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards.”

Core through the floor!

That’s a guy from GE talking, and isn’t it weird when corporate whores like “Beltway Bill” Borchardt who run “regulatory” commissions are even more corrupt than corporate whores who are openly employed by corporations?  

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…

Bloomberg’s daily status report from Fukushima…

No. 2: Contaminated water in the turbine structure contains 10 million times more radiation than normal cooling water, NHK said.

So how bad is that?

The water in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 2 reactor’s turbine building was measured at more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said today.

The normal radiation level that we receive over a year is about four millisieverts,” said Stephen Lincoln, a nuclear power and uranium specialist at the University of Adelaide.

In other words, the dose you get at Fukushima in one hour is the same as what you would normally absorb in 250 years!

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/1…

Japanese officials have expressed alarm over a possible fracture of a reactor core at one unit of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Okay! That’s the (extremely) bad news! Now for the good news!

“Our data suggest the reactor retains certain containment functions,” says  Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the nuclear safety agency.

“Certain containment functions!” You could say the same thing about a sieve!

But the worst news was buried way way down in the article from PressTV, and never even mentioned by the NY Times.

“Reports indicate that a number of Japanese people who lived between 200 and 350 kilometers away from the plant have been hospitalized for exposure to radioactive materials.”

HOSPITALIZED for radiation! 200 MILES AWAY FROM FUKUSHIMA!

And Tokyo, that enormous city, is only 130 miles away from Fukushima.

Black smoke at Fukushima

Fukushima Daiichi’s Reactor No. 3 began belching black smoke for an hour late in the afternoon, leading its operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to evacuate workers. No. 3 is considered one of the most dangerous of the reactors because of its fuel – mixed oxides, or mox, which contain a mixture of uranium and plutonium and can produce a more dangerous radioactive plume if scattered by fire or explosions.

This is very bad news, kiddies! Black smoke ain’t steam! It means something dirty is burning!

And what could be burning, in a nuclear reactor full of melting uranium and plutonium?

Why is the most common unemployment stat now 8.9% instead of 11.5%?

Because so many unemployed workers have given up looking for work and “disappeared.”

Millions of jobless Americans are no longer on the radar screen because they’ve stopped looking for work. The percent of the total workforce either in jobs or actively looking is at its lowest point in 25 years.

If the share of Americans who are either employed or seeking work was the same today as it was before the Great Recession, the current unemployment rate would be 11.5 percent instead of 8.9 percent.

There’s worse news, too.

The biggest losses during the Great Recession were jobs paying $19.05 to $31.40 an hour. By contrast, the biggest gains over the past year have been jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

In other words, the big news isn’t the slow return of jobs. It’s the drop in pay.

All the guns and all the money are on one side, and the other side is a disorganized mob of down-scale consumers.

Who wins?

Der Spiegel recently published some “graphic” photos of American soldiers in action in Afghanistan.

The details don’t matter.

An American drone attack in Datta Khel, Pakistan killed 44 people, including 13 children, on March 17, 2011.

One of the elders, Malik Faridullah Wazir Khan told the BBC that “the area was completely covered in blood. There were no bodies, only body parts – hands, legs and eyes scattered around. People carried away the body parts in shopping bags and clothing or with bits of wood, whatever they could find.”

“We are a people who wait 100 years to exact revenge. We never forgive our enemy.”

“We announce a jihad against the US and her allies sitting in our country,” said Malik Jalal Sarhadi Qat Khel, another tribal leader. “We will avenge our tribesmen at any cost, even if it takes a hundred years.”