“When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater”; A Comment

A Comment: This is a re-post from April 6, 2011, especially relevant now since it appears radiation levels are spiking throughout the western and southwestern parts of the US. I'm sorry for repeating what you no doubt have already learned from the beloved and most trustworthy mainstream media, whose diligence, honesty and relentless pursuit of truth have kept you continually and fully informed. They have kept you fully informed, right? What? Oh... apologies! Silly me, I forgot, this is America... - CP

“When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater”
By Dr. Tom Burnett

"Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl. The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it. The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it. If reactor 3 is in meltdown,  the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.

Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.

A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.

Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster. Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact that a similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.

Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn’t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.

Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for ‘mixed oxide fuel‘ which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used. The problem is that you don’t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bringing fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or a Chernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can’t stop it. The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That’s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years."

- http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/

Tom Burnett is a farmer on the Big Island of Hawaii. He blogs at drtom.posterous.com. 

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 What Happens In A Nuclear Meltdown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter6.html

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A comment: OK, so what do we have here? The melting temperature of uranium dioxide is 5,189 degrees Fahrenheit," said Martin Bertadono, a nuclear engineer at Purdue University. As the graphic above clearly shows, the reactor plant lies directly on the Pacific Ocean coastline. If the core actually melts down and burns through the bottom of the containment vessel it will eventually reach ground water. The melted core will "burn" for many, many years at 5,189 degrees F while boiling off literally unlimited amounts of highly radioactive Pacific Ocean steam into the atmosphere. THIS is why they're lying like hell about the true situation, because if it really happens, hell will have been brought to Earth. - CP

Update, 10/12/2012: Well, now it certainly looks like it HAS happened. See the post immediately below regarding increased radiation. Good luck, folks!

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