| Sunday, March 13, 2011
 Dear
All -
I am monitoring the situation in Japan here from Berlin,
and here´s a few remarks:
- Very often (if not almost always), the nuclear
waste from the power plants is stored next to the
reactors on order to reduce the transport distance
and thereby the risk (but also the difficulty in finding
a place where people accept such stuff): In Japan
the (separate) cooling system for the interim nuclear
waste facility is likely also to have been affected,
as all installations seems to have been flooded by
the Tsunami or damaged due to the quake. I asked the
Finnish Experts when making Into Eternity what would
happen if the cooling water around the waste would
somehow evaporate (if not cooled) or leak out (if
physically damaged): In about one week the temperature
will rise to 600-700 degree celsius starting a so-called
radioactive fire.
The Fukushima power plant has been in operation since
the 1970s, with 6 reactors. I do not know if all reactors
have been operating all the time, but an average reactor
holds about 25 tonnes of high level nuclear material,
and typically in a cycle of 4 years all this material
is replaced. Let´s just assume that the 6 reactors
have operated over 30 years, that’s a total
of 180 years when viewed as one reactor - this time-period
viewed in terms of fuel-cycles is 45 x 25 tonnes =
1125 tonnes of high level nuclear waste probably sitting
next to the plant / 0.3% if the total amount waste
in the world). The latest batches will still need
cooling for 40 years.
- From the beginning I have been told by the
Finnish experts, that a final facility for high-level
nuclear waste can never be achieved in Japan exactly
because of the earth-quake geology. If there already
has been a partial melt down - or a full will occur,
we must imagine that about 25 tons of high-level nuclear
material heats up along with the metal-casing creating
a soup of, I think, many thousand tonnes which by
gravity will float down into a kind of "undercup"
designed to prevent what the so-called "China-syndrome".
De facto, as I see it, such a meltdown will create
a radioactive substance of such a magnitude that it
can never be removed, as you cannot "dismantle"
it (as you can with fuel-rods, which weighs perhaps
a few 100 kg each, and which you have designed machinery
to move around), only create a "sarcophagus"
as in the case of Chernobyl - in reality a surface
ONKALO which will need to be able to last for 100,000
years in one of the very worst earthquake areas in
the world.
- One of the "unkowns" concerning
storing high-level nuclear waste for 100,000 years
is what happens inside the waste for this timespan,
as almost all known elements in the universe are created
in the nuclear processes. In Japan they now try to
cool the reactors by using seawater. Apart from actually
- according to experts - being an act of desperation
which will not only destroy the reactor (signifying
to what extreme the situation already by now is),
flooding with seawater will also mean that the chemical
"mixture" inside the reactor will not be
known anymore, as the seawater is not "pure".
I do not know if this has been tried before, or if
this is in fact a kind of full scale experiment?
- European experts have already been out saying
that such a disaster cannot happen in Europe because
we do not have earthquakes or tsunamies. Several points
are important to note: Japan has always known about
the danger, and have thought to have been building
accordingly. They were wrong. In other words: We are
not, I repeat, not dealing with a natural disaster,
but with human error. And in this respect with exactly
the same thing which triggered Chernobyl: a human
error. So even if you think that building for Richter
Scale 11 earthquakes is sufficient, we will never
know if this will be enough, just as we will never
know the limits for human errors. What we do know
for certain, however, is that private companies can
only have as their goal to make a profit and this
is why attempts were made in Japan to hide a near-meltdown
in 1987, as the company knew it would destroy business
- and ultimately the global power structures which
today argue in the name of CO2 for a nuclear renaissance.
- Finally: Even if I sit here in Europe feeling
lucky that Japan is halfway around the globe: If the
situation gets worse + the wind changes (as is the
forecast for Wednesday, 3/16 (in time for all the
heat to build up futher?)) in the direction of Tokyo,
it will never be possible to move 35 million people.
As one Expert on TV said: Japan could be down on the
floor. Japan is the world’s 3rd largest economy
and we know what kind of tsunami we are then talking
about.
All, in the most profound meaning, the best |
