Fukushima Update

Fukushima Update

The news coverage has mostly moved on to Libya and other stories, but the Fukushima troubles are hardly over. Good information continues to be posted on the PhysicsForum site, a thread with over 1,300 posts now, whose members are exerting an admirable discipline on each other by relentlessly pointing out the difference between speculation and credible sources. Commenters on that site recently posted these two excellent links. First, YouTube is carrying video footage of several helicopter flyovers. This footage, previously almost unwatchable, has been run through a terrific piece of software that stabilizes the bumping and jerking of the camera.

Second, a slideshow from AREVA, a French public power company with a strong presence in nuclear energy projects of all kinds, depicts the unfolding accident in fairly clear schematic form, with due attention given to which conclusions are the most speculative. It is unfortunately clear that fissile products have escaped into the environment. The damage, nevertheless, still is not of Chernobyl-like proportions. The nearby crops, for instance, may have been ruined for this year, but it does not appear that the land is permanently contaminated. (We take our blessings where we can find them.) Workers have been injured, but reports of deadly doses so far appear to be alarmist and inaccurate. (I very much hope.)

This picture keeps bothering me, though. For several days, the participants at PhysicsForum have been discussing whether these could be fuel rods that were blown out of the spent-fuel pool at Unit #3 when that unit exploded on March 14. They don't really look like ordinary structural rods, and yet the radiation readings in and around the unit don't suggest that a lot of fuel rods could be lying around in the open air, either. Considering how much contamination already has escaped in the form of steam and coolant-water runoff, the last thing the suffering residents of the area need is another explosion and/or fire that might blow pieces of fuel rods into the air.

If this disaster does nothing else, it has demonstrated that on-site storage of fuel rods, coupled with vulnerable cooling systems, is a less-than-perfect solution to the public distaste for permanent nuclear waste facilities of the Yucca Mountain variety. The core containments have held up pretty well at Fukushima, but the spent-fuel pools were nowhere near as well contained as the reactor vessel.