Japanese officials, who continue to stonewall even the IAEA, have finally admitted something that we all knew the instant we saw Reactor #3 blow a column of debris a thousand feet straight into the air: the core is damaged. It was unthinkable that the maze of pipes and wires required to be fully intact in order to both have pumps running and coolant not leaking could have survived that insult.
First the news and then the analysis.
Reactor Core May Be Breached at Damaged Fukushima Plant
Japan’s nuclear regulator said one reactor core at the quake-damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant may be cracked and leaking radiation.
“It’s very possible that there has been some kind of leak at the No. 3 reactor,” Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman at the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said in Tokyo today. While radioactive water at the unit most likely escaped from the reactor core, it also could have originated from spent fuel pools stored atop the reactor, he said.
Two plant workers were hospitalized yesterday with radiation burns after stepping in the water, which was found to have radiation levels 10,000 times higher than water used in reactor cooling, Nishiyama said earlier today.
A simplistic analysis says that if there’s 10,000 times the radioactivity in a pool of water in the turbine building, then there had to be a meltdown of the fuel rods. This is confirmed by the presence of detected zirconium-95 in nearby seawater, the detection of cesium and tellurium in the US, and hinted at by the neutron beam.
Not only have the rods melted down, the released products have traveled in a highly concentrated form all the way to the turbine building, which is some distance from the reactor itself.
Somehow very, very radioactive water got from the reactor core area all the way into the turbine building. Perhaps water pumped into the reactor leaked out of a damaged pipe, or perhaps all the water poured on the damaged reactor has trickled towards the ocean and has accumulated in the turbine building. Either way, it doesn’t really matter; there are core products in significant quantities outside of the core.
Further confirmation is in the radioactive isotopes found in the seawater both near and quite far from the plants:
Another survey conducted by the Tokyo Electric Power Company on Wednesday detected radioactive iodine-131 at 146.9 times the limit, 330 meters away from a water outlet of the nuclear plant.
by cmartenson