Letting
Tepco "Clean Up" Fukushima Is Like Letting a Murderer Do
Brain Surgery On a VIP
14
August, 2013
If
an incompetent doctor killed numerous patients doing routine surgery
– and then lied and tried to cover it up – would you let him
perform brain surgery on a VIP such as the president?
Of
course not?
So
why are we letting Tepco to remove the fuel rods from Fukushima?
Tepco
has an abysmal track record:
Engineers
warned Tepco and the Japanese government many years before the
accident
that the reactors were seismically unsafe … and that an earthquake
could wipe them out
The
Fukushima reactors were fatally
damaged before the tsunami hit … the earthquake took them out even
before the tidal wave hit
An
official Japanese government investigation concluded that the
Fukushima accident was a “man-made”
disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and
Tepco and bad reactor design
Tepco
knew right after the 2011 accident that 3
nuclear reactors had lost containment,
that the nuclear fuel had “gone
missing”,
and that there was in fact no
real containment
at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for
2 and a half years … instead pretending
that
the reactors were in “cold shutdown”
Tepco
just admitted that it’s known
for 2 years
that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the
groundwater and Pacific Ocean
Tepco
– with no
financial incentive
to actually fix things – has only been pretending
to clean it up. And see
this
Tepco’s
recent attempts to solidify the ground under the reactors using
chemicals has backfired
horribly.
And NBC News notes:
“[Tepco] is considering freezing the ground around the plant.
Essentially building a mile-long ice wall underground, something
that’s never been tried before to keep the water out. One scientist
I spoke to dismissed this idea as grasping at straws, just more
evidence that the power company failed to anticipate this problem …
and now cannot solve it.”
And
yet Tepco is going to attempt the equivalent of brain surgery on the
president.
Specifically
– as we noted in 2012 – the greatest
short-term threat to humanity
is from the fuel pools at Fukushima.
If
one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe
adverse impacts on the United States. Indeed, a Senator
called it a national
security concern for the U.S.:
The
radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event
of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That
absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent
fuel a security issue for the United States.
Nuclear
expert Arnie
Gundersen
and physician Helen
Caldicott
have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere if
one of the Fukushima fuel pools collapses. Gundersen said:
Move
south of the equator if that ever happened, I think that’s probably
the lesson there.
Former
U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials
from the Fukushima fuel pools “an
issue of human survival”.
So
the stakes in decommissioning the fuel pools are high, indeed.
But
– in 3 months – Tepco is going to start doing this very difficult
operation on its own.
The
operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing
to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged
reactor building, a dangerous
operation that has never been attempted before on this scale.
Containing
radiation equivalent to 14,000
times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima
68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly
together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to
collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area.
Tokyo
Electric Power Co (Tepco) is already in a losing battle to stop
radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and
experts question whether it
will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies
successfully.
“They
are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the
rods,” said Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and
director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel
assemblies.
The
operation, beginning this November at the plant’s Reactor No. 4, is
fraught with danger, including
the possibility of a large release of radiation if a fuel assembly
breaks, gets stuck or gets too close to an adjacent bundle,
said Gundersen and other nuclear experts.
That
could lead to a worse disaster
than the March 2011 nuclear crisis
at the Fukushima plant, the world’s most serious since Chernobyl in
1986.
No
one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle
Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear
Industry Status Report 2013: “Full release from the Unit-4 spent
fuel pool, without any containment or control, could
cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date.”
***
The
utility says it recognizes the operation will be difficult but
believes it can carry it out safely.
Nonetheless,
Tepco inspires little
confidence.
Sharply criticized for failing to protect the Fukushima plant against
natural disasters, its handling of the crisis since then has also
been lambasted.
***
The
process will begin in November and Tepco expects to take about a year
removing the assemblies, spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai told Reuters by
e-mail. It’s just one installment in the decommissioning process
for the plant forecast to take
about 40 years
and cost $11 billion.
Each
fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5
meters (15 feet) long. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies
and a further 202 unused assemblies are also stored in the pool,
Nagai said.
***
Spent
fuel rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in
the universe, that gets formed during the later stages of a reactor
core’s operation.
***
“There
is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted
and get too close to each other,” Gundersen said.
He
was referring to an atomic chain reaction that left unchecked could
result in a large release of radiation and heat that the fuel pool
cooling system isn’t designed to absorb.
“The
problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it.
There are no control rods to control it,” Gundersen said. “The
spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat,
not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”
The
rods are also vulnerable
to fire should they be exposed to air,
Gundersen said. [The pools have already boiled
due to exposure to air.]
***
Tepco
has shored up the building, which may
have tilted and was bulging after the explosion,
a source of global concern that has been raised in the U.S. Congress.
***
The
fuel assemblies have to be first pulled from the racks they are
stored in, then inserted into a heavy steel chamber. This operation
takes place under water before the chamber, which shields the
radiation pulsating from the rods, can be removed from the pool and
lowered to ground level.
The
chamber is then transported to the plant’s common storage pool in
an undamaged building where the assemblies will be stored.
[Here
is a visual
tour of Fukushima's fuel pools,
along with graphics of how the rods will be removed.]
Tepco
confirmed the Reactor No. 4 fuel pool
contains debris
during an investigation into the chamber earlier this month.
Removing
the rods from the pool is a delicate task normally assisted by
computers, according to Toshio Kimura, a former Tepco technician, who
worked at Fukushima Daiichi for 11 years.
“Previously
it was a computer-controlled process that memorized the exact
locations of the rods down to the millimeter and now they don’t
have that. It has to be done
manually so there is a high risk that they will drop and break one of
the fuel rods,”
Kimura said.
***
Corrosion
from the salt water will have also weakened the building and
equipment, he said.
And
if an another strong earthquake strikes before the fuel is fully
removed that topples the building or punctures the pool and allow the
water to drain, a spent fuel fire releasing more radiation than
during the initial disaster is possible, threatening about Tokyo 200
kilometers (125 miles) away.
What’s
the bottom line?
Top
scientists and government officials say that Tepco
should be removed from all efforts
to stabilize Fukushima. And an
international team of the smartest scientists
should handle this difficult “surgery”.
Note
1: Americans should not assume that we can’t have any effect on
internal Japanese politics. It is the American
government which is calling the shots in terms of Japanese nuclear
policy … and has been for many decades.
Note
2: This situation is identical
to the financial crisis, mass surveillance by the NSA and other
scandals.
Specifically, no amount of debate can fix the problem. If we don’t
fire the people who caused the problems in the first place – and
have no motivation to actually fix things – they will never get
fixed.
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