On 3/20/2015 8:57 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
*From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] *On
Behalf Of *John Clark
*Sent:* Friday, March 20, 2015 1:22 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: TEPCO admits Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 core completely melted down
In Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
> Just in case anybody wanted to pretend that the Fukushima disaster is
behind us;
here is this piece of bad news, based on recent telemetry using muon
detectors for
imaging the reactor vessels. The core of reactor units 1 appears to have
melted
through both the reactor itself and the outer containment structure. This
is also
the likely situation for units 2 and 3 as well. A total meltdown is not a
good
scenario – and that is a huge understatement.
I disagree. Assuming the above is true, and it probably is, that would be WONDERFUL
news. In a water cooled reactor, the sort that is used everywhere ( except for Chernobyl
and other reactors in the former USSR which used graphite) a core meltdown is as bad a
disaster as it gets, and having the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded right under
the plant caused billions of dollars of damage, but Fukushima killed NOBODY. So
apparently the worst that can happen to a water cooled nuclear power reactor is bad but
not all that bad. The death toll from the huge earthquake was 20,000, but the death toll
from Fukushima was zero.
The incurred cancer deaths will happen quietly, years, decades, centuries and millennia
later and they will happen off camera, but that does not mean that they will not happen.
I doubt we will ever know the final death toll – many tens of thousands of years from
now when the released corium decays through various decay series into relatively
innocuous elemental products – along the way slowly leeching into the biosphere over the
centuries, millennia and tens of millennia. However one thing I think is clear is that
your figure of zero deaths has a zero percent probability of being correct…. Over the
long run.
No doubt you're right that the number won't be zero. But it will probably be small, so
long as nobody messes with the corium. They just leave it there. The radioactive
elements will decay. Small amounts may eventually leach into the water and biosphere -
but there is probably a threshold below which radioactive elements don't have adverse
effects.
Brent
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