I’m not comforted by this Stratfor analysis of the explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan. It looks like we could have had a perfect storm situation, and now there has been a meltdown of the nuclear fuel combined with destruction of the containment facility. Radiation is probably leaking from the plant and there is a possibility that nothing can be done about it.
At this point, events in Japan bear many similarities to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Reports indicate that up to 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) of the reactor fuel was exposed. The reactor fuel appears to have at least partially melted, and the subsequent explosion has shattered the walls and roof of the containment vessel — and likely the remaining useful parts of the control and coolant systems.
And so now the question is simple: Did the floor of the containment vessel crack? If not, the situation can still be salvaged by somehow re-containing the nuclear core. But if the floor has cracked, it is highly likely that the melting fuel will burn through the floor of the containment system and enter the ground. This has never happened before but has always been the nightmare scenario for a nuclear power event — in this scenario, containment goes from being merely dangerous, time consuming and expensive to nearly impossible.
You may remember a post I did about how Germany is paying €130,000 a year for radioactive boar. That’s because radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is absorbed out of the ground and into the mushrooms that wild boar eat. The result is that many of the boars in Europe are unsafe to eat and the government compensates hunters for their contaminated meat so that they are not tempted to sell it to unsuspecting customers.
Germany is a good distance from Chernobyl. It’s over 850 miles from Chernobyl to Munich.
Radiation exposure for the average individual is 620 millirems per year, split about evenly between manmade and natural sources. The firefighters who served at the Chernobyl plant were exposed to between 80,000 and 1.6 million millirems. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that exposure to 375,000 to 500,000 millirems would be sufficient to cause death within three months for half of those exposed. A 30-kilometer-radius (19 miles) no-go zone remains at Chernobyl to this day. Japan’s troubled reactor site is about 300 kilometers from Tokyo.
Because of its design, I don’t think the Japanese reactor is likely to release as much radiation as we saw at Chernobyl, but it is still looking rather grim. It’s terrible that Japan, of all places, has to deal with the threat of radiation poisoning and environmental damage…again.