Fukushima: "Biggest Industrial Catastrophe'
Jun 18, 2011 14:09 Filed in: Nuclear Reactors Subjects Politics
The news emerging from Japan about the meltdown of three, possibly four, nuclear reactors at Fukushima has not been good. Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president told journalist Dahr Jamail:
A nuclear waste specialist stated that approximately 966 square kilometers near the power station are now uninhabitable. 966 square kilometers is 238,704 acres. Considering the fact that the reactor is sitting on the ocean, we can calculate the radius of a half circle with an area of 966 square kilometers thusly: 966 = .5 x π x r2. Solving for r, we get r = sqrt(966)/(.5xπ) = 24.8 km.
That means that everything within 24.8 km (15.4 miles) of the plant is uninhabitable. And since the damaged reactors are still emitting radioactive particles into the atmosphere, that radius will grow, although its direction of growth depends on the direction of the wind.
The U.S. mainstream media has been unusually quiet about the developing disaster to the west, even though the western United States has received substantial fallout. Researchers have already connected the fallout with a spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred in the ten weeks immediately following the disaster. In the case of NBC and MSNBC, the silence can possibly be attributed to the fact that GE, the manufacturer of the reactors in question, owns the two networks, but there is no excuse for the others not to take more interest. An accident described by an authority in the field as “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind” ought to be on the tongue of every anchorperson.
Read Dahr Jamail’s article in AlterNet.
We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.
A nuclear waste specialist stated that approximately 966 square kilometers near the power station are now uninhabitable. 966 square kilometers is 238,704 acres. Considering the fact that the reactor is sitting on the ocean, we can calculate the radius of a half circle with an area of 966 square kilometers thusly: 966 = .5 x π x r2. Solving for r, we get r = sqrt(966)/(.5xπ) = 24.8 km.
That means that everything within 24.8 km (15.4 miles) of the plant is uninhabitable. And since the damaged reactors are still emitting radioactive particles into the atmosphere, that radius will grow, although its direction of growth depends on the direction of the wind.
The U.S. mainstream media has been unusually quiet about the developing disaster to the west, even though the western United States has received substantial fallout. Researchers have already connected the fallout with a spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred in the ten weeks immediately following the disaster. In the case of NBC and MSNBC, the silence can possibly be attributed to the fact that GE, the manufacturer of the reactors in question, owns the two networks, but there is no excuse for the others not to take more interest. An accident described by an authority in the field as “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind” ought to be on the tongue of every anchorperson.
Read Dahr Jamail’s article in AlterNet.
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