nuclear-news

At 22:45 in — Robert Alvarez, senior Energy Department official on nuclear issues from 1993-99: On the outer edges of the site they’re trying to block the flow of groundwater coming into the site to prevent this constant flow of contamination. What this means is that this contamination is sort of going on a continuous basis into the Pacific Ocean and it adds more and more to a plume that is predicted to reach the west coast of the United States in the near future. There are no credible disposition paths for this enormous and growing volume of stored contaminated water. This is an unprecedented situation. What are we going to do with all of this water? No technologies currently exist to remove the severely radioactive melted cores. We can’t rule out the possibility of permanent entombment of the reactors there. In other words you cannot rule out the possibility that this is going to become a nuclear national sacrifice zone where only triage can be done to reduce the contamination.
At 48:30 in — Question: My father comes from the western part of Fukushima […] To this day we don’t know where the corium went, because no one can get close to it — and I think that’s the issue.
At 55:30 in — Alvarez: The technologies simply do not exist to handle and otherwise remove the highly radioactive cores of these reactors right now. We really don’t – this is all uncharted territory. […] I think that the likelihood of there being entombment of these reactors with their cores, it’s growing over time — and again it’s a national sacrifice zone scenario.