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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the close-to-double dept.

Dissident Voice reports

After a week of limited coverage of "unimaginable levels" of radiation inside the remains of collapsed Unit 2 at Fukushima[...], Nuclear-News.net reported February 11 that radiation levels are actually significantly higher than "unimaginable".

Continuous, intense radiation at 530 sieverts an hour (4 sieverts is a lethal level), was widely reported in early February 2017--as if this were a new phenomenon. It's not. Three reactors at Fukushima melted down during the earthquake-tsunami disaster on March 3, 2011, and the meltdowns never stopped. Radiation levels have been out of control ever since. As Fairewinds Energy Education noted in an email February 10:

Although this robotic measurement just occurred, this high radiation reading was anticipated and has existed inside the damaged Unit 2 atomic reactor since the disaster began nearly 6 years ago.... As Fairewinds has said for 6 years, there are no easy solutions because groundwater is in direct contact with the nuclear corium (melted fuel) at Fukushima Daiichi.

What's new (and not very new, at that) is the official acknowledgment of the highest radiation levels yet measured there, by a factor of seven (the previously measured high was 73 sieverts an hour in 2012). The highest radiation level measured at Chernobyl was 300 sieverts an hour.

[...] This coverage relates only to Unit 2's melted reactor core. There is no reliable news of the condition of the melted reactor cores in two other units.

[...] Whatever is actually going on at Fukushima is not good, and has horrifying possibilities. It is little comfort to have the perpetrator of the catastrophe, TEPCO, in charge of fixing it, especially when the Japanese government is more an enabler of cover-up and denial than any kind of seeker of truth or protector of its people.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:13AM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:13AM (#470106)

    Your two links may be reputable and unslanted, but they are equally poor.

    The first seems to confuse pressure vessel and containment vessel (despite having them correct in a diagram at the top), scaremongering about the weakened pressure vessel failing in a new quake (um, it already has) and scattering fuel and debris everywhere (um, that's why there is a containment vessel). There is in fact no (new) evidence of a containment vessel breach (previously there have been breaches in sealing around pipes going into the side of the containment, but that would release steam, not fuel, and I don't think that was in #2 anyway).

    The second makes the same mistake (in the headline no less) as many other articles and implies the radiation levels have increased, which they haven't. Radiation levels have simply been measured at a point they never got to before, we don't know what the levels were in 2011, almost certainly they are lower now.

    https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/243904-fukushimas-reactor-2-far-radioactive-previously-realized-no-sign-containment-breach [extremetech.com]
    http://www.snopes.com/fukushima-reactor-falling-into-ocean/ [snopes.com]

    The contrast with chernobyl is that there the meltdown _did_ go through the containment vessel, the resulting fuel/cladding/concrete etc. mix (chernobylite) is _less_ radioactive than the pure melted fuel rods at fukushima, _but_ it is uncontained exposed to the air in the basement of the reactor building. Fukushima meltdown is more radioactive and more difficult to get to and get samples from precisely because it is contained, chernobyl was uncontained (hence need for the sarcophagus). I have read that they got samples of the "elephants foot" at chernobyl by using AK47s to shoot fragments off it from a safe distance, that tells you how uncontained it is.

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