nuclear-news

UK government held gravest fears about Fukushima crisis

The British government made contingency plans at the height of the Fukushima nuclear crisis which anticipated a “reasonable worst case scenario” of the plant releasing more radiation than Chernobyl, new documents released to the Guardian show.

The grim assessment was used to underpin plans by the British embassy in Tokyo to issue protective iodine pills to expats and visitors. It also prompted detailed plans by Cobra, the government’s emergency committee, to scramble specialist teams to screen passengers returning from Japan at UK airports for radioactive contamination.

The UK government’s response to the unfolding crisis is revealed in documents prepared for Sir John Beddington, the chief scientist and chair of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), and released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. The 30 documents include advice from the National Nuclear Laboratory on damage to the plant, public safety assessments from the Health Protection Agency (HPA), computer models of the radioactive plume from Defra’s Radioactive Incident Monitoring Network (Rimnet), and the worst case scenario that might unfold at the plant.

A substantial number of documents were withheld on grounds that they contained “information which, if disclosed, would adversely affect international relations,” the government’s civil contingencies team said…….

warned that an explosion at one reactor or fuel pond could trigger a domino effect as other reactors and the spent fuel ponds became too dangerous to deal with. The “reasonable worst case scenario” envisaged ruptures at all three reactors in operation before the earthquake, and radiation leaks from six spent fuel ponds at the Fukushima site.

The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate estimated this would release 10% of the radioactive caesium-137 and iodine-131 in the cores and one third of the caesium-137 in the spent fuel ponds. Under that scenario, wind currents carried the plume directly towards Tokyo at a speed of five metres per second. Had the event happened, it could have released the equivalent of 9.92 million terabecquerels of radiation from iodine-131 into the open air, nearly double the 5.2 million terabecquerels released by the fire at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine in 1986…..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jun/20/japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-japan

—

June 22, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - Fukushima 2011