[A-List] Fwd: [New post] Spent Fuel Rods Drive Growing Fear Over Plant in Japan

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

This reads, as would be a natural result of the indescribable fear of
Nuclear energy the Japanese nation felt after being bombed AS THEY WERE
SUING FOR PEACE AFTER WW11, over 60 years ago.  It has affected everything
nuclear forced on them after WW11 by fascist US General Mc Arthur and
global criminal US President Harry Truman, to this day.

Fukushima, a nuclear plant built at US orders over 40 years ago with 'for
export' cheaper US Westinghouse reactors (defective) when Atom bomb
survivors were still alive, has been managed by the cowed and terrified
executives at the Japanese Utility Company Tepco, badly, naturally.  Of
course.

 To get an adequate picture of how the Japanese were viewed by the US
Pentagon and the US State Department all one needs to do is learn of the US
over 60 year occupation of the Japanese Island of Okinawa. Simply put, the
troops on that Island over all the years of occupation raped Japanese girls
on their way to and from school. Never once were they punished for it,
there were no legal checks set up to ever stop them or civil law
protections set up for the Japanese families.  In total, this is
extraordinarily,criminally, brutal treatment.

Wedded to these facts is the fact that the peace between Japan and the US
was never signed.  Rape is an accepted instrument of war no matter
International laws of any kind.  War being insanity.  Maybe twenty years
after the Fukushima reactors were built a mini reactor was built inside
Reactor #4 for much more fissionable fuel.  It has already exploded, it's
many 'superior' poisons in both in the clouds high in the air and leaked
into the sea, meters away from Fukushima, blanket the California coast,
poisoning the produce grown in that state for generations.   Bill Totten's
blog has the minute details.  I recommend them.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Totten's Weblog <donotreply at wordpress.com>
Date: Mon, May 28, 2012 at 1:17 AM
Subject: [New post] Spent Fuel Rods Drive Growing Fear Over Plant in Japan
To: suzannedk at gmail.com


**
          New post on *Bill Totten's Weblog*
<http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>  Spent Fuel Rods Drive
Growing Fear Over Plant in
Japan<http://billtotten.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/spent-fuel-rods-drive-growing-fear-over-plant-in-japan/>
by
Bill Totten <http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>

*by Hiroko Tabuchi and Matthew L Wald*

*The New York Times (May 26 2012)*

*Tokyo -* What passes for normal at the Fukushima Daiichi plant today would
have caused shudders among even the most sanguine of experts before an
earthquake and tsunami set off the world's second most serious nuclear
crisis after Chernobyl.

Fourteen months after the accident, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and
filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top
floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic.

The public's fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some
scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new
catastrophe, now that the three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns
are in a more stable state, and as frequent quakes continue to rattle the
region.

The worries picked up new traction in recent days after the operator of the
plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found a slight
bulge in one of the walls of the reactor building, stoking fears over the
building's safety.

To try to quell such worries, the government sent the environment and
nuclear minister to the plant on Saturday, where he climbed a makeshift
staircase in protective garb to look at the structure supporting the pool,
which he said appeared sound. The minister, Goshi Hosono, added that
although the government accepted Tepco's assurances that reinforcement work
had shored up the building, it ordered the company to conduct further
studies because of the bulge.

Some outside experts have also worked to allay fears, saying that the fuel
in the pool is now so old that it cannot generate enough heat to start the
kind of accident that would allow radioactive material to escape.

But many Japanese scoff at those assurances and point out that even if the
building is strong enough, which they question, the jury-rigged cooling
system for the pool has already malfunctioned several times, including a
24-hour failure in April. Had the outages continued, they would have left
the rods at risk of dangerous overheating. Government critics are
especially concerned, since Tepco has said the soonest it could begin
emptying the pool is late 2013, dashing hopes for earlier action.

"The Number Four reactor is visibly damaged and in a fragile state, down to
the floor that holds the spent fuel pool", said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant
professor at Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute and one of the
experts raising concerns. "Any radioactive release could be huge and go
directly into the environment".

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, expressed similar concerns during a
trip to Japan last month.

The fears over the pool at Reactor Number Four are helping to undermine
assurances by Tepco and the Japanese government that the Fukushima plant
has been stabilized, and are highlighting how complicated the cleanup of
the site, expected to take decades, will be. The concerns are also raising
questions about whether Japan's all-out effort to convince its citizens
that nuclear power is safe kept the authorities from exploring other - and
some say safer - options for storing used fuel rods.

"It was taboo to raise questions about the spent fuel that was piling up",
said Hideo Kimura, who worked as a nuclear fuel engineer at the Fukushima
Daiichi plant in the 1990s. "But it was clear that there was nowhere for
the spent fuel to go".

The worst-case situations for Reactor Number Four would be for the pool to
run dry if there is another problem with the cooling system and the rods
catch fire, releasing enormous amounts of radioactive material, or for
fission to restart if the metal panels that separate the rods are knocked
over in a quake. That would be especially bad because the pool, unlike
reactors, lacks containment vessels to hold in radioactive materials. (Even
the roof that used to exist would be no match if the rods caught fire, for
instance.)

There is considerable disagreement among scientists over whether such
catastrophes are possible. But some argue that whether the chances are
small or large, changes should be made quickly because of the magnitude of
the potential calamity.

Senator Wyden, whose state could lie in the path of any new radioactive
plumes and who has studied nuclear waste issues, is among those pushing for
faster action. After his recent visit to the ravaged plant, he said the
pool at Number Four poses "an extraordinary and continuing risk" and the
retrieval of spent fuel "should be a priority, given the possibility of
further earthquakes".

Attention has focused on Number Four's spent fuel pool because of the large
number of assemblies filled with rods that are stored at that reactor
building. Three other reactor buildings at the site are also badly damaged,
but their pools hold fewer used assemblies.

According to Tepco, the pool at the Number Four reactor, which was not
operating at the time of the accident, holds 1,331 spent fuel assemblies,
which each contain dozens of rods. Several thousand rods were removed from
the core just three months before so the vessel could be inspected. Those
rods, which were not fully used up, could more easily support chain
reactions than the fully spent fuel.

While Mr Koide and others warn that Tepco must move more quickly to
transfer the fuel rods to a safer location, such transfers have been
greatly complicated by the nuclear accident. Ordinarily the rods are lifted
by giant cranes, but at Fukushima those cranes collapsed during the series
of disasters that started with the earthquake and included explosions that
destroyed portions of several reactor buildings.

Tepco has said it will need to build a separate structure next to Reactor
Number Four to support a new crane.

The presence of so many spent fuel rods at Fukushima Daiichi highlights a
quandary facing the global nuclear industry: how to safely store - and
eventually recycle or dispose of - spent nuclear fuel, which stays
radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

In the 1960s and 1970s, recycling for reuse in plants seemed the most
promising option to countries with civilian nuclear power programs. And as
Japan expanded its collection of nuclear reactors, local communities were
told not to worry about the spent fuel, which would be recycled.

The idea of recycling fell out of favor in some countries, including the
United States, which dropped the idea because it is a potential path to
nuclear weapons. Japan stuck to its nuclear fuel cycle goal, however,
despite leaks and delays at a vast reprocessing plant in the north, leading
utilities to store a growing stockpile of spent fuel.

As early as the 1980s, researchers, including those at the United States
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, started warning of the risks of storing
growing amounts of nuclear fuel in pools. The United States has since
concluded that densely packed pools are safe enough, but Tepco says that it
never even specifically studied the risks posed by the pools.

"Japan did not want to admit that the nuclear fuel cycle might be a failed
policy, and did not think seriously about a safer, more permanent way to
store spent fuel", said Tadahiro Katsuta, an associate professor of nuclear
science at Tokyo's Meiji University.

The capacity problem was particularly pronounced at Fukushima Daiichi,
which is among Japan's oldest plants and where the oldest fuel assemblies
have been stored in pools since 1973.

Eventually, the plant built an extra fuel rod pool, despite suspicions
among residents that increasing capacity at the plant would mean the rods
would be stored at the site far longer than promised. (They were right.)

Tepco also wanted to transfer some of the rods to sealed casks, but the
community was convinced that it was a stalling tactic, and the company
loaded only a limited number of casks there.

The casks, as it turns out, were the better choice. They survived the
disaster unscathed.

_____

Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Tokyo, and Matthew L Wald from Washington.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/world/asia/concerns-grow-about-spent-fuel-rods-at-damaged-nuclear-plant-in-japan.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2
  *Bill Totten <http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>* |
2012/05/28 at 08:17 | Categories:
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