Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.... the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.
Fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor... that blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.
... 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl... data shows hot spots further away than from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl.
... an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.
In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant. The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
Far more radiation has been released than has been reported. They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this. The new calculations show within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days, and the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes... referred to as "hot particles."
Hot particles are being discovered by scientists everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo... over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters. Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and radioactive air filters are being discovered in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.
The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer... these get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant... these [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April.
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US? Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
Assessment of solving this crisis is grim... units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor.
The creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely. Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations... to do otherwise is simply an immoral act.
It will take experts at least ten years to design and implement a plan... so ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water... we are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come.
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back the assessment... with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started... but they never end.
Fukushima: It's much worse than you think - Features - Al Jazeera English
