Nuclear Engineer: Estimated 276 quadrillion Bq of Cs-137 entered Fukushima basements — Triple Chernobyl total release — A portion “has already made its way to aquifer, whence it can easily flow into sea”
August 26, 2013 Title: The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013
Authors: Mycle Schneider, Antony Froggatt
Date Published: July 2013
Mr. [Toru] Ebisawa, who had served NAIIC as an expert reactor engineer, estimated the amount of radioactivity that had seeped into the water that fills the basement of the reactor buildings (Unit-1, -2 and -3, as of 20 November 2012) as follows [footnote 292]:
- Cesium-137: 276 PBq (i.e. 40 percent of the reactor core inventory) [...]
[...] about 2.5 to 3.3 times, depending on the estimate, the total amount released into the environment from the Chernobyl accident.
[...] In June 2013, it was revealed that the groundwater sampled from a monitoring well adjacent to the Unit-2 turbine building is contaminated with strontium and tritium, so the highly radioactive water that filled the unit basement has already made its way to the aquifer, whence it can easily flow into the sea. [...]
[Footnote 292] Toru Ebisawa, 2013, Bulletin of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, 465: 12. J. Kanda gives an earlier estimate of 160 PBq, as of May 2011, Ocean Policy Research Foundation, Kaiyo Hakusho 2012 [annual report in Japanese], p. 45. Seizando-Shoten Publishing, 2012.
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