Thousands evacuate as Fukishima nuclear emergency is declared

[Peter Lemkin]

Here is a new photo of the new hole [likely made some many months ago actually] caused by molten nuclear fuel melting its way out of the reactor [steel and then thick cement]. The new problem is in reactor #2, though none of the reactors is safe. Radiation levels taken at the level of the photo are high enough to kill a human in one minute and destroy a radiation-resistant robot in an hour or two. There is NO KNOWN way to deal with the molten nuclear fuel which will not cool down for a very LONG time - measured in hundreds or thousands of years. It will continue to heat up and melt into rock below it, polluting any groundwater it passes through. Similar seems to be happening at several of the other plants on the site. Other scenario variants are possible - all worse. That this news is not news in the MSM is amazing to me...

Nuclear fuel likely melted through Fukushima reactor vessel

Camera finds hole, deadly radiation levels in No. 2 reactor

Images from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's No. 2 reactor revealed a hole made by fuel leaking out of the pressure vessel.


TOKYO -- Melted fuel likely leaked out into a reactor's containment vessel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and is emitting deadly radiation inside, Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings reported on Thursday.
Tepco inspected the inside of the No. 2 reactor's containment vessel in late January by inserting a camera on a telescoping pole. The resulting images showed a 1-sq.-meter hole apparently melted into a steel-grating walkway directly beneath the reactor pressure vessel, confirming that there was a leak.


The utility estimated that one area of the containment vessel was emitting radiation at a level of 530 sieverts per hour -- enough to kill a human in under a minute. Only emissions up to 73 Sv/hour had been detected before at the reactor, which was crippled by a March 2011 tsunami.
Tepco previously believed that most of the reactor's nuclear fuel had been contained in the pressure vessel, based on last year's muon tomography inspection -- a technique similar to X-rays but more powerful.

In effect, Fukushima has become the world's largest dirty bomb, and the remaining fuel rods could explode (achieve criticality) at any moment. Even right now, the radiation is so intense that robots built to explore the wreckage can only survive for a few hours before their circuits are destroyed. Thus, there's almost no scenario in which Japan, Tepco or anybody in the world figures out how to clean up the wreckage, reclaim the melting fuel rods and reestablish control over the nuclear reactions that are still ongoing.You can't even successfully build a containment vessel on top of it all because the melting nuclear fuel has already burned a massive hole in the floor and has melting its way into the ground water and ocean.
"Tepco also said image analysis had revealed a hole in metal grating beneath the same reactor's pressure vessel," reports The Guardian. "The one-metre-wide hole was probably created by nuclear fuel that melted and then penetrated the vessel after the tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi's back-up cooling system."
Gee, ya think? I love how Tepco and the world's excuse-making media has been lying about Fukushima for so long that the truth still manages to escape them. Do they think a one-meter hole magically appears in a nuclear containment vessels due to random chance? No, it's melting fuel rods, you morons. And some of that fuel is MOX fuel, which contains plutonium-239 that boasts a half life of 24,000 years. So sometime in the year 26000 A.D. the Fukushima nightmare will be HALF as toxic as it is right now. What a wonderful, progressive future to look forward to, eh? If we wait long enough, this problem will go away......about 20 half-lives, or about 480,000 years. Then it will be only a major radiation zone. N.B. the radiation levels now are almost double those found at Chernobyl, and because of both the total amount of nuclear fuel and the longer time it was in active use, there is MUCH more dangerous nuclear materials on site at Fukishima - and it is much more unstable.

[Peter Lemkin]

Whatever radioactive daughters are in the environment, will be bioaccumulated in the ecosystem - along with direct irradiation of all living creatures by the radioactive elements - some of which have half-lives measured in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

Wild boars roam Czech forests - and some of them are radioactive

The Czech Republic has an unusual problem this winter with its wild boar meat, a local delicacy. The boars are radioactive.
Actually, it's not the boars themselves per se, but what they're eating. A cold and snowy winter is forcing them to feed on false truffles, an underground mushroom common in the Sumava mountain region shared by Czechs, Austrians, Germans - and wild boars.
The mushrooms can absorb high levels of the radioactive isotope Caesium 137. And three decades ago the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl released a fair amount of Caesium 137 that eventually drifted down on the Sumava mountains.
Now the boars are eating the mushrooms, and ingesting the Caesium 137 along with them. That's making their meat radioactive, Jiri Drapal at the State Veterinary Administration told Reuters.
"It is more or less a time issue," Drapal said.
But it's a long time period. The half life of Caesium 137 is 30 years - that is, it takes 30 years for the radioactivity of the isotope to fall to half its original value. Then another 30 to fall to half again, and so on. The boars could be glowing for quite a while.
"We can expect to find (affected) food for a number of years from now," Drapal said.
And that could cause some problems with the supply of boar meat, which is popular in the Czech Republic. It often shows up on restaurant menus in goulash, a thick stew of meat, sauce and dumplings.