Fukushima: Worse Than a Disaster

[FBaggins]

6. The "trip to the twilight zone" is entirely in the fantasy concocted by the author

Some of the outright lies in the piece:

Jaczko is anti-nuclear, but he isn't nutty enough to claim that "it's not likely that the fuel will ever be recovered" - nor did he in the quote that was given

"The absolutely uncontrollable fission of the melted nuclear fuel assemblies continue somewhere under the remains of the station"

...is a flat-out lie (as is the formatting that leaves the reader with the impression that Masuda said it). This is the danger of extreme scientific illiteracy that infects so much of the anti-nuke fringe. It is absolutely 100% impossible that there is "uncontrollable fission" occurring "somewhere under the remains of the station".

Fission of reactor fuel always results in large amounts of radioactive iodine being created. It's impossible to miss or hide it... yet none has been detected for many years. Obviously the author lacks any semblance of a clue on the subject - as do his sources.

In 1986, Russian teams of workers found the melted corium of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor core in the facility’s lowest level. Whilst “frying 30 workers” along the way, they contained it just enough to prevent burrowing into the ground, maybe. During containment work at Chernobyl, a makeshift robotic camera managed to actually photograph the monster, the melted core, nicknamed “the Elephant’s Foot.” Thirty years after the fact, the “Elephant’s Foot” is still lethal.

Also untrue. The Russians didn't "contain it just enough"... it stopped entirely on its own. This despite being much hotter than Fukushima's corium (because the meltdown occurred above full power rather than at a tiny percentage of same). While giving over very dangerous radiation levels, the Elephant's Foot did not "fry 30 workers along the way" (That's the death toll for workers a the plant who died of radiation poisoning in the weeks following the meltdown... none of them went to the "foot&quot . The worker in the most famous photo of the "foot" (Artur Korneyev) has been inside the reactor dozens of times and is still alive (or at least he was earlier this year).

extraordinarily high radiation zaps and destroys robots at first sight when sent into Fukushima’s containment vessels.

Another lie. Dozens of hours of video have been sent out from within the containment vessels. One robot got itself stuck (but continued to operate otherwise). In all cases, the robots "died" when their cables were cut.

After all, the law allows any Japanese politician to put an offender behind bars for 10 years for breaking state secrets, which are (very embarrassingly) whatever the accuser claims to be “secretive.”


Made up out of whole cloth. Sure - just like the US/Europe/etc, you can be jailed for divulging state secrets... but those aren't "whatever the accuser wants them to be"... they have to be identified in advance and the offender has to know that it was classified (I'm still waiting for the anti-nuke fringe to provide evidence that anything having to do with Fukushima was ever classified under this act - which had nothing at all to do with the tsunami/meltdowns)... and the law does not "allow any politician" to jail someone. They have a criminal justice system just like other advanced countries.