this as a problem they can get control of it they just stretch out the time. Is it a cultural thing? It's like no one wants to step up and say "this thing will, or is, burning down. We have to do something different". I know there are smart, brave, capable people there. But trying to bring firetrucks in through that rubble? There is no possible way they could pump enough water into 2-3 fuel pools, especially if they are leaking. Were they afraid to let water run over it and down to the ground? That would have resulted in far less exposure than what we have now, and they wound up doing it anyway after several explosions and perhaps a scattering of fuel. Now the most experienced people are likely being irradiated, potentially at lethal levels to control a problem. But low-balling the official level, trying to bring in firetrucks when you should be moving equipment in with miltary trucks and bulldozers...
They just decided this was a level 5, comparable to our own accident. Say what?
Here's a pic of the "other" level 5, Three Mile Island.
I don't see the bent and twisted metal, smoke and steam rising from the wreckage of hydrogen and perhaps steam explosions. I don't see the hundreds and hundreds of tons of "spent" fuel sitting dry in broken tanks, perhaps blown around the site, radiation levels at high (what does that mean - don't they have meters in Japan, or do they think treating people like children is the best way to handle this?). TMI didn't have the head of their nuclear commissions telling them they are underestimating the danger and moving their own citizens further away than the people who live there. That accident did melt the core. But it didn't have hundreds and hundreds of tons of spent fuel laying around in empty pools getting hot and spewing radioactive steam for days through blown out roofs. Level 5 my...
Electric to pumps is great, but those were to circulate water that sat in an enclosed pool. What they need are sump pumps capable of sucking up large amounts of debris-filled seawater and dumping it on the fuel, letting it run out on the ground until the temperature is lowered, like fireboat pumps that can pump 100,000 gal/min and overcome the leaks. Maybe they were so afraid of the smaller exposure of pouring water from the sea on it that it got away from them? Because they clearly ought to be, publicly, looking at calling this a level 6 or 7 disaster. That public acknowledgment would bring a lot of pressure and resources to bear. If not now, when?
I don't want to understate the difficulty. There is waist high debris, debris in the water, no electricity, and now, several days later, likely melted core fuel and a multiple seriously compromised plants. But perhaps by a response that did not acknowledge these problems during the 8 hours they had left on battery backup before there was NO power might have been the time to call for international efforts to get help.
And now they tell people, likely most with no food or water (their houses are so small they don't store things like we do) in an an area they almost condescendingly call "high radiation" to stay put and shut the windows?
Are they just hoping it will be easier to collect the bodies? They need to be evacuated now, but the country has been slow to mobilize for this. I asked early on who had the stockpiles, because there were reports that exceeded a million people needing food and water, half of them homeless, and some seemed to think Japan was rich enough to handle it. Well, maybe rich enough, but not nearly fast enough. Maybe they are more worried about rescuing people that haven't been found yet to realize that it does no good to rescue if you can't care for them.
Ok, sorry about the rant...it's just been bugging me. And I know I am too far away to be sure, but the evidence seems to be mounting.
This seeming slow response to evacuate is eerily reminiscent of Chernobyl. If you are interested, here are pics of people living around there in 2009 - near the bottom of
this page. Maybe there will be a web site like this one for Fukushima.
But remember, even if people are exposed unecessarily by a too slow response, if information is covered up that might have helped people make a smart decision, even if they start dropping water and later sand and Boron from helicopters, and asking people to work in lethal conditions that may have been avoided with a reponse that wasn't based on saving face...this isn't Chernobyl.
And before we do any testing of the reactors here, we need to get the too large store of spent fuel rods out of their pools because there are more here than in the reactors of Japan. Because testing is how Chernobyl started.
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