Reader Karen sent this article to us describing the dire situation at Fukushima’s reactor #4, thanks for keeping us informed.
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| After writing my essay“Radioactive Hell on Earth”—actually I wanted to change that title to “Fukushima on Steroids”—I see Christina Consolo’s essay“Fukushima is Falling Apart”:
Are you ready—it is becoming clear that we, our children and our entire
civilization is hanging by a thread. It is a very sorry thing to report
that we have literally shot ourselves in the foot with a big nuclear
shotgun full of radioactive particles of the worst conceivable kind. |
| It has taken a year but finally “a U.S. Senator
finally got off his ass and went to Japan to see what is going on over
there. What he saw was horrific.
Reactor No. 4 building is on the verge of collapsing. Seismicity
standards rate the building at a zero, meaning even a small earthquake
could send it into a heap of rubble. And sitting at the top of the
building, in a pool that is cracked, leaking, and precarious even
without an earthquake, are 1,565 fuel rods.” If
an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain, this
could result in a catastrophic radiological fire that could wipe out
most of the northern hemisphere; certainly it would be a massive
civilization-breaking event. |
| After an onsite tour of what remains of the
Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear facilities, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a
senior member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural
Resources, sent a letter to Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki saying,
“The scope of damage to the plants and to the surrounding area was far
beyond what I expected. The precarious status of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi
nuclear units and the risk
presented by the enormous inventory of radioactive materials and spent
fuel in the event of further earthquake threats should be of concern to
all and a focus of greater international support and assistance.” |
Fukushima Daiichi Reactor building 4 and exposed fuel pool
Image source: Asahi Shimbun |
| 1,565 fuel rods translates into 460 tons of nuclear fuel stored in pool in a barely intact building
on its third and fourth floors. If the storage pool breaks and runs
dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode. The worst-case
scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of
the No. 4 reactor pool, but also the disintegration of spent-fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. The wall of the south side is falling apart at reactor No. 4 and Dr. Helen Caldicott said she would evacuate her family from Boston if it did. |
| Consolo says, “If this pool collapses, as Senator
Wyden is now saying too, we would face a mass extinction event from the
release of radiation in those rods. This may be the most important thing
you ever pay attention to for the sake of your family, friends, your
neighbors, every one you know and meet, all of humanity.” |
| “Preliminary reports of soil contamination are
starting to come in from the USGS, who has seemed reluctant to share
this information. Los Angeles, California, Portland, Oregon and Boulder,
Colorado so far have the highest radioactive particle contamination out
of the entire U.S. Iodine, cesium, strontium, plutonium, uranium, and a
host of other fission products have been coming directly from Japan to
the west coast for thirteen months. Reports in the past week indicate
the pollen in southern California is radioactive now too, and it is
flying around, and if you live there and go outside, you are breathing
it in. And so are your children,” continued Consolo. |
| Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into
the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent
severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be
transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into
dry casks. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent
fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will
require a major and time-consuming reconstruction effort and will
involve charting in unknown waters. Reports indicate that things are so
hopeless at the plant that workers are not even working on weekends and
certainly governments around the world have not gotten together in a
desperate Manhattan Project[1] (in reverse) to save humanity. |
| Arnold Gundersen,
a former nuclear power industry executive, is claiming that the
Fukushima nuclear disaster is already 10 times worse than the 1986
Chernobyl meltdown in the former Soviet Union. If that is true it’s
already taps for a whole lot of men, women and children in the northern
hemisphere with the absolute promise that the radiation will continue relentlessly through the coming years.
It is sounding like nuclear hell coming to earth to teach us something
about our arrogance, massive stupidity and pathetic weakness. |
| While our government would love us all to believe
that the nuclear problems in Japan are under control, nothing could be
farther from the truth. Engineers for Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco)
say readings
of airborne radiation inside reactor No. 2 showed almost 73 sieverts
per hour this week. To put that into perspective, exposure to that
amount of radiation would kill a normal person within minutes. These
levels are some of the highest readings since the beginning of the
disaster and there is no one telling us that this nuclear contamination
will lessen. |
| MOX Plutonium Fuel |
| The mixed oxide fuel (MOX) reactor[2],
which burns with plutonium/uranium, is more deadly than those burning
on uranium-enriched fuel, according to nuclear experts. The half-life of
plutonium-239 in MOX is 24,000 years and just a few milligrams of P-239
escaping in a smoke plume will contaminate soil for tens of thousands
of years. A single milligram (mg) of MOX is as deadly as 2,000,000 mg of
normal enriched uranium meaning that one mg of MOX is basically two
million times more powerful than one mg of uranium. If even a small
amount of this potent substance escapes from the plant in a smoke plume,
the particles will travel with the wind and contaminate soil for tens
of thousands of years. |
| Ray Guilmette of the National Council on Radiation
Protection and Measurements said that plutonium “is thousands of times
more radioactive than uranium,” if absorbed into the body. |
| Donald Olander, professor emeritus of nuclear
engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said that because
plutonium decays quickly, it produces radiation that can kill cells in
the body more quickly. But the plutonium itself would pose a severe
threat only if it was involved in a violent reaction that turned it into
dust particles that could be inhaled. No one knows the exact number but
plenty of the fuel rods at risk are MOX, thus containing deadly
plutonium. If that blows up then we might end up wishing we had had a
nuclear war instead. |
| Limited Nuclear Exchange |
| If you want to know what this means from
mainstream sources, tune into what International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and its U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility
(PSR) are saying would happen from just a limited nuclear war—forget
about a full-scale meltdown of thousands of dirty nuclear fuel rods. |
| More than a billion people around the world would
face starvation following a limited regional nuclear weapons exchange
(such as a clash between India and Pakistan) that would cause major
worldwide climate disruption, driving down food production in China, the
U.S. and other nations, according to a major new report released by Dr. Ira Helfand, the author of Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk.
Helfand said, “The needless and preventable deaths of one billion
people over a decade would be a disaster unprecedented in human history.
It would not cause the extinction of the human race, but it would bring
an end to modern civilization as we know it.” |
| The Dalai Lama
summaries the situation saying, “We have degenerated into an insane
society, unconsciously committing mass suicide by ecocide. Unrestrained
corporate capitalism coercively and insidiously exploits vulnerable
people and myopically plunders, depletes and corrupts finite planetary
resources that sustain life. Billions of people suffer needless poverty,
starvation and avoidable disease, while obscenely privileged corporate,
political and religious plutocrats greedily acquire power and excessive
material wealth far beyond their conceivable needs.” |
| Special Note:
These subjects are covered in my Nuclear Toxicity Syndrome book as well
as the second edition of my Iodine book (both published in 2011), which
dive deeply into the issue and threat of radioactive iodine. Having
lots of sulfur on hand as well as sodium bicarbonate, iodine, clay and
magnesium is a good start for a radiation survival home pharmacy. |
Dr. Mark Allan Sircus, Ac., OMD, DM (P)
Director International Medical Veritas Association
Doctor of Oriental and Pastoral Medicine
http://publications.imva.info
http://blog.imva.info
URL: http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/hanging-thread |
