Tuesday 5 November 2013

Mark Willacy interviewed

Mark Willacy's coverage of the Fukushima disaster for the ABC provides a contrast to the silence of Radio New Zealand. 

Mark Willacy has also written a book. He has also been condemned recently by Mike Ruppert in a rather bolshevik fashion ('He who is not with us is against us)


Nobody knows where Fukushima’s melted cores are now, expert says
Tepco admitted fuel “is actually eating through the concrete… hopefully it’s not eating through any further”



4 November, 2013




I’m pretty sure even now, they’re struggling to understand what happened [...] You’ve got a situation where I went to Tepco for this book and said, ‘I need to talk to one of your head honchos.’ They gave me one of their top guys and he’s not only a manager but a nuclear engineer, so he knows what he’s talking about. And I just said, ‘Do you know what the status of the reactors are?’ He said, ‘We think, in Reactor 1 the nuclear fuel’s burnt through the pressure vessel and its burning through the containment vessel. There’s about 7 meters of concrete there, it’s already burned through about 70 centimeters of that. We think we’ve cooled it enough so it’s no longer burning through […] He said at the end, ‘That’s all we can surmise for now.’


To hear the Book Club interview GO HERE


Fukushima by Mark Willacy, book published July 1, 2013 (Excerpt): Even more than a year after admitting that reactors 1, 2 and 3 had suffered meltdowns, TEPCO couldn’t tell the public much more. [...] The reactor cores melted down and nobody knows where the melted fuel is now,’ said nuclear-reactor engineer Hiroaki Koide from Kyoto University. ‘[…] because we do not know where the melted reactor cores are, we don’t know the full scale of the contamination of the environment.’ TEPCO admitted the reactor cores were in a parlous [i.e. dangerous] state […] ‘We can’t measure them or see them,’ said Junichi Matsumoto, now on TEPCO’s Nuclear Reform Special Taskforce. ‘I think in Reactor 1 the fuel pierced through the pressure vessel and about 90 per cent of it remains at the bottom of the container. In Reactor 2 and Reactor 3, 60 to 70 per cent melted and spilt out from the pressure vessel to the lower parts of the containers. But I think the melted fuel has cooled and solidified, judging from the temperature or pressure inside the containers. It has eroded the concrete by several dozens of centimetres.’


Information on his book "Fukushima" HERE


ABC Australia, June 26, 2013 (At 3:15 in): Tepco, when I was talking to them for the book, admitted to me that the fuel in at least one of those reactors has melted through what is called the pressure vessel. It’s actually eating through the concrete underneath that pressure vessel, and that’s called the containment vessel — and it’s eating slowly through that concrete. Although Tepco is saying look we’ve cooled it, hopefully it’s not eating through any further. They really don’t know much more than that.


Hear broadcast HERE

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