By National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) US Department of Energy
The China syndrome refers to a scenario in
which a molten nuclear reactor core could fission its way through its
containment vessel, melt through the basement of the power plant and down into
the earth. While a molten reactor core wouldn’t burn “all the way through to
China” it could enter the soil and water table and cause huge contamination in
the crops and drinking water around the power plant. It’s a nightmare scenario,
the stuff of movies. And it is happening at Fukushima and there is no technology
known to man to stop it continuing.
TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company however
is trying to play down the full impact of this nuclear accident.
According to scientist Micho Kaku there is
a mathematical formula which can determine at what level the accident really
is.
Apparently the stricken nuclear plant has
already released 50,000 trillion Becquerel’s of radiation which would put
Fukushima in as a category 7 nuclear accident which is still less than
Chernobyl however The Fukushima plant is still continuing to leak radiation
from its reactors and TEPCO have claimed the problem could take another 40
years to fix, and to top that statistic the whole situation is less than
stable.
Fukushima is basically a ticking time bomb.
The slightest disturbance i.e. a small
earthquake and there are many as the stricken plant sits on a fault line
causing a pipe to burst and an evacuation of the crew could set off a full
scale melt down at all 3 nuclear power stations taking the catastrophe far and
beyond what happened at Chernobyl.
To make matters worse TEPCO in a moment of panic
pumped in sea water from the Pacific in a desperate attempt to keep water above
the melting core but as we well know sea
water contains salt which corroded any remaining working pumps at the site.
They resorted to sending in suicide squads
into the crippled plant to hose water onto the melting reactor.
And the situation has now worsened.
This accident has released enormous amount
of iodine into the atmosphere, Iodine is soluble, and when it rains it soaks
into the soils and of course into the food system.
Farmers there are now dumping milk and
crops and the local economy has collapsed.
It's
been over half a decade since Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station
suffered a catastrophic meltdown which topped the International Nuclear Event
Scale due to its severity. Radiation loves to hang around, and researchers
conducting operations with robots inside the damaged reactors were met with
radiation levels at their highest point since the actual meltdown back in 2011.
In fact, the radiation level is so elevated
that the robot operators had to quickly recall one of their robotic probes
because it began to literally go blind.
Like sending a rover to another planet, the
mission for robot operators from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is to
monitor the status of the failed reactors and the nuclear materials housed
within.
Unfortunately, the radiation level of the
reactor units was high enough to actually begin to damage one of the robots'
camera systems, and could have completely blinded the view for the operator and
left the bot stranded in the radioactive hellscape. (In layman's terms what they
are saying here is no technology has yet been invented to fix the problem,
humans or robots cannot get anywhere near the rector long enough to fix the
problem so TEPO's claim it will take another 40 years to fix the problem is
probably a very conservative guess)
However, TEPCO was able to study some of
the readings taken by the robots before things went awry.
The scientists have estimated the level of
radiation to be anywhere from 530 Sieverts per hour to 650 Sieverts per hour.
Those numbers are representative of the
amount of radiation an object would expect to be bombarded with over a specific
period of time.
To add a bit of scope to that, it's
estimated that just one Sievert will cause fatal cancer in approximately 5% of
people, while a dose of five Sieverts will kill 50% of people exposed to it
within a month.
As little as 90 millisieverts (0.09 Sieverts)
accumulated over time can increase cancer risk in both adults and children.
(With 300 tons of this stuff washing into the Pacific every day how long will
it take before it kills the Pacific Ocean, it is a big ocean but not that big)
Later this month TEPCO plans to send yet
another probe into the reactor to take additional readings and hopefully paint
a clearer picture of just what exactly is going on inside.
