More cesium than from Chernobyl

Comparison of estimates of releases

• Chernobyl 8.5E16 (85 quadrillion Bq of cesium-137)
• Estimate from USDOE aerial survey 2.9E17 (285 quadrillion Bq of cesium-137)

Tepco: We should have told public this sooner… we failed to cool molten fuel after meltdowns began

Experts: Fukushima cesium release could be more than triple Chernobyl

ENENews,

14 December, 2013

Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 14, 2013: Fire engines were used in a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt to pump water to cool overheating reactors during the early phase of the 2011 Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. According to a Dec. 13 report by the operator of the crippled facility, water was pumped in sufficient quantity to avert core meltdowns in the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors, but much of it strayed into irrelevant pipes and ended up elsewhere. [...] water failed to cool it and the other reactors efficiently, and could not stop the core meltdowns in the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors. [...] TEPCO officials said they knew as early as late March 2011 [...] “We should have shared the finding with the public in the belief it would help promote universal safety, but failed to do so,” said [a] TEPCO Managing Executive Officer [...]

Estimate of Consequences from the Fukushima Disaster, Nordic PSA Conference (nuclear utilities in Finland and Sweden), September 2011: Estimate of releases from aerial survey [...] The National Nuclear Security Administration NNSA (USDOE) has published an aerial map of projected one year doses from contamination. [...] The assessment takes into account symmetrical deposition on the ocean, weather patterns [...] a correction for the remainder of activity in the cloud beyond 100 km, and a further correction for continuous low level releases for the rest of the time that it will take TEPCO to stop them [...] which gives the final assumption for Cs137 release of 2.85 E+17 Bq [...] it could be assumed that the results obtained with this method can be interpreted as an upper bound of all estimates. [...]

Table 6 Comparison of estimates of releases

• Chernobyl 8.5E16 (85 quadrillion Bq of cesium-137)
• Estimate from USDOE aerial survey 2.9E17 (285 quadrillion Bq of cesium-137)

Full presentation paper here

See also: Study: Fukushima released 100 quadrillion becquerels of cesium into atmosphere... In just ONE day -- About equal to Chernobyl's total release