





I.  CNN Claims Tokyo Residents May be in Danger


















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RE: This sucks.
By kilkennycat on 3/19/2011 4:21:11 AM , Rating: 2
Zero danger to the US from this accident. Not at all so to Japan. Remember Japan is only the size of California with a population of 127 million. Not far to run from air-borne radiation-particles, especially Cs-137. You might have noticed that the winds at Fukushima since the earthquake have been light and always blowing out to sea.

The 4 damaged reactors have rapidly-drying holding-ponds with a total of ~ 500,000 fuel rods, partly or fully exposed to the air apart from any debris covering them. The massive hydrogen explosions pretty well verify that the zirconium tubing on the fuel-rods has been oxidizing in the water-vapor and significant disintegration of the rods has been taking place ( @ > 1500degrees C). The emergency crews have only been able to douse one reactor (#3) so far and the success here is doubtful; with each dousing, massive amounts of steam appear and then die down after the dousing.

Anyway, we are left with at least 3 reactor buildings open to the air, full of debris and rapidly drying out. Strong on-shore winds are likely to blow large amounts of radioactive dust from the interior of the roofless buildings into the air, putting the emergency crews into instant jeopardy and potentially scattering particles far inland. The air-borne danger to the Japanese population is not over until ALL of those open radiating structures are either truly flooded with water on a continuing basis (each spent-fuel pond normally contained ~2700 tonnes of water), isolated from the atmosphere by some impervious cover, or completely buried in sand/boron/lead. And typhoon season is only a few months away...

