The amount of information we are given on a daily basis (most of it trivial nonsense) is overwhelming and often submerges issues that are both important and critical. One of those issues that are considered “over there” and not our problem is the nuclear disaster at the Japanese Fukushima reactors. From the Prison Planet.
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We noted days after the Japanese earthquake that the biggest threat was from the spent fuel rods in the fuel pool at Fukushima unit number 4, and not from the reactors themselves.
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….Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years. (Bold mine)
beyond the Koswiggle
The urgency presented by this scenario according to nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen.
...an earthquake of 7.0 or larger could cause the entire fuel pool structure collapse, it is urgent that everything humanly possible is done to stabilize the structure housing the fuel pools at reactor number 4.
That urgency is complicated by the current state of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors.
...there is no protection surrounding the radioactive fuel in the pools. ...if fuel pools at reactor 4 collapse due to an earthquake – people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside for a while. (bold mine)
The investigation by the Independent Investigation Commission on the accident reported,
...the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be “the weakest link” in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.
As the eminent German physicist Dr. Hans-Peter Durr said ten months ago
... if the spent fuel pool spills, we will be in a situation where science never imagined we could be.
Top spent-fuel pools expert Mr. Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy stated,
...assuming a total of 11,138 spent fuel assemblies are being stored at the Dai-Ichi site, nearly all, which is in pools. They contain roughly 336 million curies (~1.2 E+19 Bq) of long-lived radioactivity. About 134 million curies is Cesium-137 — roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP).
I get the distinct impression that the Japanese and US government is being a bit short on the information that has been given to the citizens of those nations, as well as the rest of the world, on just how much danger the situation presents.