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Thursday
May172012

Cesium Red Alert--Petition UN to intervene at Fukushima Unit 4

The United Nations is being called upon to intervene in an extremely critical situation still emerging at the damaged Unit 4 amidst the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe. Another earthquake is feared could topple the already damaged Unit 4 reactor building where more than one hundred tons of high-level nuclear waste sits precariously in a  open storage pool elevated ten stories (100 feet) above grade.  Should the reactor building topple and spill the contents of cooling water and nuclear waste onto the ground, a new and more potent radioactive catastrophe would commence beginning with a radioactive fire releasing 10 times the amount of Cesium-137 released into the atmosphere from Chernobyl. This enlarged catastrophe would then engulf the other five reactor units and a common nuclear waste pool potentially releasing 85 times the amount of radioactive cesium.

You are encouraged to sign the "Cesium Red Alert" petition to United Nation's Secretary Ban Ki-Moon and pass it along.

Of course, the U.S. faces potentially catastrophic risks at its 31 GE BWR Mark I and II high-level radioactive waste storage pools, as well.

In fact, U.S. pools hold significantly more waste than their Japanese counterparts. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 held 219 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel, according to the Japanese Parliament's committee investigating the catastrophe. But as but a couple examples, the Pilgrim, MA and Fermi 2, MI Mark I pools hold more than 600 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel, each! In fact, Pilgrim and Fermi 2's pools hold every single irradiated nuclear fuel assembly ever generated by those reactors!