Going Nuclear

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but about Japan's Fukushima power facility?

Japan has told the UN nuclear watchdog a spent fuel storage pond was on fire at an earthquake-stricken reactor and radioactivity was being released "directly" into the atmosphere, the Vienna-based agency said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), citing information it had received from Japanese authorities, said dose rates of up to 400 millisievert per hour have been reported at the Fukushima power plant site.

"The Japanese authorities are saying that there is a possibility that the fire was caused by a hydrogen explosion," it said in a statement.

“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.

People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.

Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.

ALSO:

Fissionability of cooling ponds:

The threat of a fission explosion at the Fukushima power facility emerged today when the roof of the number three reactor exploded and fears that a spent fuel pool, located over the reactor, has been compromised. The pool, designed to allow reactor fuel to cool off for several years, was constructed on top of the Fukushima reactors instead of underground. As of 2010, there were 3450 fuel assemblies in the pool at the number three reactor. The destruction of the number three reactor building has experts concerned about whether the spent fuel storage pool, which sits just below the roof, could have survived intact the hydrogen explosion. The explosion was much more severe than Saturday’s blast at the number one reactor.
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According to Albert Donnay, a former nuclear engineer, “This means the common pool is now full of radioactive and corrosive seawater that will cause the fuel assemblies to fail and burst open, as they are doing inside the reactor cores that have been deliberately flooded with seawater. If the pool drains or boils away, the fuel will melt, burn and even possibly explode if the fuel collapses into a sufficiently critical mass.”

This may explain why the Japanese government began adding boric acid to the reactor spent fuel pools at the facility shortly after the earthquake and tidal wave.

“If those solutions – the sea water and the boric acid – don’t work, there are no more arrows in the quiver. They have shot everything they have, they have run out of options and there is nothing left.”

AND:

The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material.
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Don't panic or anything, it's North America that should panic, and Japan i guess. But with the Japanese market imploding, and the US not far behind, the implications of this are going to be PROFOUND. Food stortages, towards the end of this year for US IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Peace and love