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 |  Subject: Gundersen: Fukushima  Thu Sep 12, 2013 9:46 am | |
| This story is never going away.....it's only getting bigger....Time BombGundersen: Fukushima Unit 4 fuel racks distorted from quake and roof falling into pool — Nuclear rods likely to snap, they won’t be able to remove be able to be removed (AUDIO) | Published: September 12th, 2013 at 6:56 am ET
By ENENews
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Title: #117: Olympic Insanity + If Gundersen were in Charge at Fukushima
Source: Nuclear Hotseat
Host: Libbe HaLevy
Date: Sept. 10, 2013 - Quote :
- INTERVIEW: Former nuclear industry insider Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education paints a clear picture of the current state of problems at Fukushima Daiichi… and then explains what he would do if he were in charge of the disaster site.
At 31:00 in
- Quote :
- Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds Energy Education: Think of a fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes and you try to pull a cigarette out, you pull the cigarette out, it will come out just fine. But if the pack is distorted and you pull the cigarette out, it breaks. Well that’s the problem they’re going to encounter on Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4. The racks are distorted from the earthquake — oh, by the way, the roof has fallen in, which further distorted the racks.
The net effect is they’ve got the bundles of fuel, the cigarettes in these racks, and as they pull them out, they’re likely to snap a few. When you snap a nuclear fuel rod, that releases radioactivity again, so my guess is, it’s things like krypton-85, which is a gas, cesium will also be released, strontium will be released. They’ll probably have to evacuate the building for a couple of days. They’ll take that radioactive gas and they’ll send it up the stack, up into the air, because xenon can’t be scrubbed, it can’t be cleaned, so they’ll send that radioactive xenon up into the air and purge the building of all the radioactive gases and then go back in and try again.
It’s likely that that problem will exist on more than one bundle. So over the next year or two, it wouldn’t surprise me that either they don’t remove all the fuel because they don’t want to pull too hard, or if they do pull to hard, they’re likely to damage the fuel and cause a radiation leak inside the building. So that’s problem #2 in this process, getting the fuel out of Unit 4 is a top priority I have, but it’s not going to be easy. Tokyo Electric is portraying this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers. Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore, the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it. |
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