Nearly all fuel in Fukushima reactor has melted, says TEPCO

[mick silver]

Nearly all fuel in Fukushima reactor has melted, says TEPCOhttp://l.yimg.com/os/publish-images/news/2013-08-26/d19448d6-6aaa-4359-a768-eadacf5fbca9_afp-gif_new.gif (http://www.afp.com/) 7 hours ago





http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/65iLaooZMCPppZ..8SULOw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTM3NztpbD1wbGFuZTtweG 9mZj01MDtweW9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz02NzA-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/afp.com/4be95d55de77d7f0bd43c89cdc5e1e21ee8275b3.jpg (http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-fuel-fukushima-reactor-melted-says-tepco-152528950.html#)
 View photos



http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/YCrwaB3j_gyvwz3TBRXEaA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTgzLjI1O3B5b2ZmPTA7cT 03NTt3PTE0OA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/afp.com/275e5fa827502de86aad871730b5fd7b0ab2b7b2.jpg (http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-fuel-fukushima-reactor-melted-says-tepco-152528950.html#)











New tests show almost all of the fuel inside one of the Fukushima plant's reactors has melted, its operator said Thursday, the latest step in the clean up after Japan's worst ever nuclear crisis.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the technology, which uses elementary particles called "muon" to create x-ray style images, gave the most concrete evidence yet the fuel had dropped to the bottom of the first reactor.
The data, though largely expected, should help TEPCO as it continues its effort to decommission the plant four years after an earthquake and tsunami caused one of the worst nuclear meltdowns in living memory.
Engineers have not been able to develop a machine to directly see the exact location of the molten fuel, hampered by extremely high levels of radiation in and around the reactors.
"While our previous analysis have already strongly suggested that fuel rods had melted down, the latest study provided further data that we like to regard as a progress in our effort to determine the exact locations of the debris," said a TEPCO spokesman.
TEPCO plans to eventually use robots to locate the fuel debris as part of the decommissioning process, which is expected to take three to four decades to complete.
Last month the International Atomic Energy Agency said Japan had made "significant progress" in its cleanup efforts but warned the situation "remains very complex" due to the growing amounts of contaminated water generated by the process.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was directly hit by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and killer tsunami of March 2011.
It lost emergency power to cool the reactors, which went into meltdown, contaminating a vast region in northern Japan.


Nature & Environment
Disasters & Accidents
TEPCO
Japan
Fukushima plant


Click to view comments 
View Comments (370)

[mick silver]

comment ... Is this supposed to be good news? Now the molten fuel will begin to seep through the concrete and through the earth, further contaminating the groundwater and surrounding soil. I don't think Americans realize the amount of radiation we have received, especially on the West Coast as radioactive seaweed, marine life and debris have washed up on the shore. I would never eat any fish from the Pacific. Furthermore, maps from NOAA in 2012 showed airborne bands of radiation fell on Wisconsin, Florida and Maine (! ) as well as the West Coast. Japanese government has not reported the skyrocketing rate of birth defects, miscarriages and thyroid cancers, especially among children. We can expect this in the western US most likely in five to ten years. Get your iodine, folks.................................... comment...The coverup and lies continue. This just keeps on getting worse as the truth "slowly leaks out". I was stationed at Yokota Air Base when the earthquake occurred. We were assured there was no danger where we were, but I wonder. At first, they said only Iodine 131 was released and that cloud traveled east over the ocean, but I know at Camp Zama the drinking was spiked for a couple of days with radioactivity (Camp Zama is south of Tokyo). Then the U.S. State Department got involved and did their own calculations which indicated any short term exposure was fine, though the levels they indicated were much higher than what is acceptable in the States. The U.S. Armed Forces assured U.S. civilian and military folks they were monitoring the air, but I know at Yokota, that did not happen for a first three days or so. They did set up a monitoring station by the armory on Yokota, but it was not powered for the first few days (I know, I looked at the station, and the power cord simply went into the drainage ditch; it was only after the first few days they provided a portable generator to power it). And then it was "discovered" cesium and strontium had escaped; hence, the more or less permanent evacuation of Japanese cities and towns abutting Fukushima.

[expat4ever]

Worldwide we as a species has detonated like 6000 nuclear warheads for testing purposes. We may be one of the dumbest species on the planet.

[Glass]

ok so there is an exclusion zone around fukushima now? That is new news.

The other news though is not good news. The damage is being maximised and I do believe it was an attack on Japan and the US as secondary target. The whole of the west coast is being completely poisoned and being made uninhabitable. This will starve the US of food. And it's all under the cover of Act of God.

[woodman]

ok so there is an exclusion zone around fukushima now? That is new news.

The other news though is not good news. The damage is being maximised and I do believe it was an attack on Japan and the US as secondary target. The whole of the west coast is being completely poisoned and being made uninhabitable. This will starve the US of food. And it's all under the cover of Act of God.

I have heard claim that the tsunami which hit Fukushima was a man made event and was retaliatory for Japan's failure to back Israel politically. I do not believe this, but I don't believe much of anything. I know that I know very little. I don't believe anyone has the technical ability to generate a tsunami with technical precision to hit a given target. I do believe that the criminal stupidity that caused the reactors to be placed there and allowed for them to be compromised, should be punished with extreme measures. People who allowed this should be publicly hanged or worse. The whole system that enabled this should be completely dismantled and run by competent individuals with no dual motives. Profit should never be part of the equation when the future of the earth is endangered. The profit motive is greed when corporate machinations are involved and greed is always short sighted. To locate tons of spent nuclear fuel atop a nuclear furnace is insanity. Insanity!

To date, no one has been held responsible for this crime against our Mother Earth which feeds us and is our home. It is a crime against all humanity and all future humanity.

[Spectrism]

This report is just wrong in so many ways!



Nearly all fuel in Fukushima reactor has melted, says TEPCO

New tests show almost all of the fuel inside one of the Fukushima plant's reactors has melted, its operator said Thursday, the latest step in the clean up after Japan's worst ever nuclear crisis.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the technology, which uses elementary particles called "muon" to create x-ray style images, gave the most concrete evidence yet the fuel had dropped to the bottom of the first reactor.
The data, though largely expected, should help TEPCO as it continues its effort to decommission the plant four years after an earthquake and tsunami caused one of the worst nuclear meltdowns in living memory.
Engineers have not been able to develop a machine to directly see the exact location of the molten fuel, hampered by extremely high levels of radiation in and around the reactors.
"While our previous analysis have already strongly suggested that fuel rods had melted down, the latest study provided further data that we like to regard as a progress in our effort to determine the exact locations of the debris," said a TEPCO spokesman.
TEPCO plans to eventually use robots to locate the fuel debris as part of the decommissioning process, which is expected to take three to four decades to complete.
Last month the International Atomic Energy Agency said Japan had made "significant progress" in its cleanup efforts but warned the situation "remains very complex" due to the growing amounts of contaminated water generated by the process.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was directly hit by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and killer tsunami of March 2011.
It lost emergency power to cool the reactors, which went into meltdown, contaminating a vast region in northern Japan.


The people doing this "clean up" and "decommissioning" and writing this moronic report need to be shackled and secured to the number one reactor for 3 days to better assess the decommissioning process.

The fuel all melted down the first month of this fiasco. It takes them 4 years to think it did? I could have told them that from the start. Now they pretend to need to locate it. I will give them a hint: its UNDER the reactor plant.

As for clean up- I guess their idea of clean up is flushing all the contamination into the Pacific Ocean.

I am not very impressed by the Japs these days. They seem to be cowardly idiots doddering around blindly muttering stupid things.

How do you "decommision" a nuclear disaster site with a pile of non-functional rubbish above it? There is NO decommissioning to these disaster zones. That is like pretending to do cosmetic surgery on a cadaver.

3 to 4 decades to complete? They mean 3 to 4 decades for the bulk of it to wash into the oceans and kill off the entore Pacific sea life and one third of the human population.

These bastards still have not even removed the spare rods from the cooling towers. Now those are potentially 1000 times worse than the world-killing crap they already loosed.