Friday, March 25, 2011

All Four Reactor Cores or Spent Fuel Pools Leak Highly Radioactive Water

So says Kyodo News here:


[H]ighly radioactive water was later found leaking near all four troubled reactor units at the plant.

A day after three workers were exposed to water containing radioactive materials 10,000 times the normal level at the turbine building connected to the No. 3 reactor building, a water pool with similarly highly concentrated radioactive materials was found in the No. 1 reactor's turbine building, causing some restoration work to be suspended, it said.

Pools of water that may have seeped from either the reactor cores or spent fuel pools were also found in the turbine buildings of the No. 2 and No. 4 reactors, measuring up to 1 meter and 80 centimeters deep, respectively, while those near the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors were up to 40 cm and 1.5 meters deep.

Recent reports describe two phenomena: surface temperatures on reactor vessels far exceeding the prescribed limits, and the need to keep re-filling the spent fuel pools because of rapid evaporation and/or leakage loss.

Add to these observations the new information that radioactive water is now observed pooling in various places in all four reactor facilities, and the plain statement "Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Friday it has begun injecting freshwater into the No. 1 and No. 3 reactor cores at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant," and it is difficult not to conclude that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima I are themselves damaged and that their spent fuel ponds were cracked in the earthquake and cannot retain water without constant attention to refilling.

This is a disaster for the people of Japan, and a terrible rebuke of the hubris of the nuclear power industry.