http://www.bellona.no/bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/japan_whistleblowerFukushima reactor designer turned whistleblower says he knew reactor No 4 has been unsound for 40 years
A former Fukushima Daiichi reactor designer turned whistle blower today said the crippled plant’s reactor No 4 had been relying on flawed steel to hold radiation in its core, and that he himself helped hide the defect when the reactor – which he called a "time bomb” – was built four decades ago.
Charles Digges, 24/03-2011
Three technicians meanwhile were rushed to hospital after receiving severe radiation burns, triggering a second evacuation of workers in as many days, as anxiety over the safety of Tokyo’s tap water persisted. Official readings indicated that radiation levels in the metropolis’s water had returned to “normal,” but that readings were coming back high for tap water in two neighboring prefectures, Chiba and Saitama.
The former reactor engineer, Mitsuhiko Tanaka, who says he turned his back on the nuclear industry after Chernobyl, told Japan Today that he had assisted in covering up the critical design flaw while working for a unit of Hitachi in 1974.
Reactor No 4 was shut down for maintenance when the catastrophic 9.0 scale earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, and disabled all of the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s reactor cooling systems.
Reactor No 4 has since suffered critic lacks of coolant in its open spent nuclear fuel storage pond which has been ablaze off again and on again since last week, releasing massive doses of radioactivity into the environment. Rescue workers resorted to bombing it with seawater dropped from helicopters with questionable success.
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