A feeling of desperation is sweeping over Japan as news from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power site worsens with high levels of radiation now showing up in groundwater. International Atomic Energy Agency monitors are urging a wider evacuation zone beyond the Japanese government’s evacuation perimeter.
So far the Japanese government has refused to increase the evacuation zone, a decision that American health experts are openly questioning. One expert told DCBureau.org, “They need to begin to think about importing clean food and water to Japan on a mass scale if this cannot be controlled.”
The United States has offered to aid Japan with robots and experimental methods developed in secret at the Savannah River National Laboratory for the National Nuclear Security Administration to try to trap escaping radioactive material.
Because everything that touches radioactive material becomes radioactive, the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water pouring over the reactors and pools to cool them are now highly radioactive as the water seeps through the tunnels and pipe runs beneath the reactor complex into the ground and the sea. The radioisotopes being detected indicate that partially melted fuel is contaminating the environment. One source said volunteer plant workers are not wearing dosimeters to document their radiation dosage.
Just how long term a problem Japan faces can be found in the United States, where thousands of gallons of high level nuclear waste stored at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina became 50 million gallons as attempts to clean-up the nuclear bomb making plant has continued over the decades. The metal storage tanks began leaching into the groundwater and there is a constant threat of a hydrogen explosion in the closely monitored tanks. An explosion would release tremendous amounts of radiation into the environment, according to Terry Spears who is in charge of the tank remediation facility.
Experts are now closely looking at the length of time reactor number three burned its AREVA MOX fuel and asking why TEPCO officials agreed to load a plutonium-based fuel in such an old power reactor. AREVA officials have insisted their fuel contributed nothing more to the nuclear disaster than what would have taken place in any loss of coolant accident.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan openly questioned if Japan would proceed with a plan to construct 14 more reactors over the next twenty years. He also stated that the government might play a much larger role in reactor operations. A TEPCO spokesman says the accident costs will exceed the value of his company. The loss of the Fukushima Daiichi complex would amount to the loss of about one percent of the world’s nuclear power supply.
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent overview of today’s events.
