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« The devil's in the details with radioactive hot particle fallout from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe | Main | "First 24 hours shaped Japan nuke crisis" »
Saturday
Jul022011

Where is the rest of the irradiated nuclear fuel in Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 storage pool?!

At its homepage, Fairewinds Associates has posted a new video featuring its nuclear safety engineer Arnie Gundersen. Thanks to a tip from Ian Goddard, Arnie has been able to identify a single high-level radioactive waste fuel bundle amidst the wreckage of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 storage pool, in a video released by Tokyo Electric Power Company many weeks ago now. The discovery raises more questions that it answers. Why is there only one fuel bundle visible, when there should be many? Where have they gone? And why is the fuel bundle so close to the surface of the water, and thus the air above, when it should be located under much deeper water?

Fragments of irradiated nuclear fuel have been found up to a mile away from the shattered Fukushima Daiichi reactor blocks, likely indicating that one or more of the massive hydrogen gas explosions hurled irradiated nuclear fuel from elevated storage pools that far. And the Unit 3 explosion was the most dramatic of all, with a very tall mushroom shaped cloud hurtling skyward, with very large chunks of dark debris visibly raining down in its wake. Were the missing irradiated nuclear fuel assemblies in that rain of debris? Where did they land? Where are they now? Unshielded irradiated nuclear fuel can deliver a lethal dose of gamma radiation to anyone nearby in just a few minutes.

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