The Voice of Fukushima by Yogan Baum

Author:Yogan Baum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: chernobyl, fukushima, fukushima nuclear disaster, earthquake fukushima, tsunami japan, earthquake japan, fukushima daiichi, fukushima meltdown, fukushima nuclear catastrophe, chernobyl nuclear disaster
Publisher: Yogan Baum

11 Diverse Nuclear Considerations

Well, Giorgio, relax. Be a good boy and go back to 2011, the summer without much hope. Months in limbo. Sitting on packed suitcases, not knowing how the situation in Dai-ichi was. How deep had the burning nuclear fuel penetrated? It had burned through the containment vessels, no doubt about that, but had it really been stopped by the concrete below? Had it burned itself out? This was no ordinary fire. A nuclear chain reaction continues to produce heat as long as there is enough fuel, in our case highly enriched uranium packed closely enough, to sustain the process.

In Chernobyl heroic miners called in from all over the Soviet Union had tunneled underneath the devastated reactor to fill in boron, a neutralizer of nuclear reactions. What they found was that the ugly mess of leaked fuel, the corium, as it is called, had already cooled and hardened. By some not even now understood piece of good luck, that smoldering slow motion nuclear bomb had been defused. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) Would we be so lucky? We sat on our suitcases, and towards winter I bought snow chains, just in case we would have to make a run for it.

We had agreed on a plan: we would drive inland as fast as possible, if necessary in two separate cars, to try and reach Niigata, on the Japanese Sea. Should we indeed have to go in separate cars (in case I was out somewhere, teaching) we would meet up at a certain service station on the highway just before reaching Niigata, the big city on the west coast. From there, we would either go south, towards Osaka, or even try to take a boat to Korea or Russia. The important thing was not to waste time, to be early in the mad rush, we knew. The highway would be choked with refugees like ourselves, we knew, and we were determined not to get stuck in slow traffic.

We didn’t have the faintest idea, indeed nobody had, what the status of melted down Reactors 1, 2 and 3 were. My secret fear was the seeping through of a hot corium, either one would do, into the limestone underneath Dai-ichi. Remember, twenty-five meters had been taken off the seaside cliff to get the reactors closer to the water. It was cheaper that way. Seawater had to be continuously pumped up for the secondary cooling. The genius planners had sharpened their pencils back in the 1960s and calculated that it would make sense to remove those twenty-five meters. “Tsunami? What tsunami?” I can hear them mock the doubters. “Dai-ichi is safe!” Well.

Back to my worst fears that summer of 2011. Suppose any one of the coria, hundreds of tons of red hot nuclear fuel, somehow meets ground water deep down below Dai-ichi? Old fashioned steam explosions pack quite a punch, more than enough to blow up the ruins of the former power plant. Plenty enough to let that house of cards collapse

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.