The failure of Western Reactor Containment. Direct injection of nuclear pollution from core material contaminants into the aquifer en route to the sea.
The Tepco idea of freezing the aquifer to prevent flow to the sea appears to be a construct to be seen to be doing something when only the removal of the source of the contaminants will do the job.
The trouble with this position is that 1. No nuclear expert – individual, government or corporate knows the precise location and disposition of all the fuel material 2. It remains too radioactive for even robots to approach. Human die and electronics burn out in the intense radiation field.
The hydrology of Japan will have been known for decades, known long before the nuclear power plants were built.
It appears at the 2.5 year mark, it is time for nuclear industry and government to disclose the time frame required to stop the contamination of the land, sea and air from the broken nuclear plants in Japan.
This is the least to be disclosed by authorities who have known these things since the time of March 2011.
For 2.5 years the people of Japan and the world have been told it is safe to cesium, strontium and plutonium. We have been constantly told that the disaster is “over”.
We have been bombarded with assurance that the pollution is Like a Banana, in a re-use of the old Banana Dose Equivalent.
Molten fuel rods in broken reactors feeding the Japan aquifer as it flows to the Pacific is not like a banana.
It is a predictable disaster which has been covered up for 2.5 years.
The fuel in and around and beneath the reactors will take many years to remove from all the reactors. It cannot be done at the present time. No technology on earth exists to do it with.
At the same time as Tepco finally admitted the constant flow of polluted ground water to the sea, if proclaimed it was to conduct a trial run of fuel rod removal from the No 4 spent fuel pool. One rod. The main rod removal procedure from the spent fuel pools will not commence until next year. In the meantime the fuel polluting the groundwater and Pacific Ocean remains
in its unknown positions within and outside the leaking and broken reactors.
2.5 years ago Australian nuclear experts proclaimed these reactors were among the “best in the world”. For decades western nuclear authorities proclaimed the superiority of western containment over Soviet containment. But Fukushima is not contained, its containment is broken and there is containment at all between the broken reactors and the aquifer.
The ocean will continue to receive radio nuclide contamination for many years – until the reactor fuel and outside the broken reactors is removed.
It is quite useless blame the natural flow of ground water in Japan for this. It is appropriate to ascribe the cause as being due to nuclear industry being sited over underground rivers of water within the aquifer.
Tepco does not have sufficient funds to fix this. Neither does nuclear industry. Even if money was no object, no technology exists which enables the removal of the fuel from within and outside the broken reactors. Noone has accurately mapped the location of the fuel. No expert knows precisely where it is.