#Japan reactor meltdown getting worse how to#
“At the prefecture, they were very worried but had no plan for how to deal with it.”Remarkably, that is the norm-both in Japan and in the United States. “At the plant they seemed to dismiss our concerns about spent fuel pools,” said Mioko Smith. pools are operated safely.Īileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action Kyoto, met Fukushima plant and government officials in August 2010. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reaffirmed its position that the U.S. nuclear plant would have about 10 times as much fuel in its pools, he said.Īnd yet the nuclear industry and American government are poo-poohing the danger. The Japanese plant’s pools are far from capacity, but still contain an enormous amount of radioactivity, Lyman said. nuclear plants use the same sort of pools to cool spent nuclear-fuel rods as the ones now in danger of spewing radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, only the U.S. to the leaking Fukushima reactors.Īs McClatchy notes, American reactors hold much more spent fuel than the Japanese reactors (the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima – in turn – dwarfsChernobyl): “While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about - that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan - it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure,” said Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert.Īs MSNBC notes, there are 23 virtually-identical reactors in the U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed after the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl began to unfold on March 11, UCS officials said on Wednesday. Those concerns seem to contrast with the confidence U.S. Internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission e-mails and memos obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists questioned the adequacy of the back-up plans to keep reactor cooling systems running if off-site power were lost for an extended period. regulators privately have expressed doubts that some of the nation’s nuclear power plants are prepared for a Fukushima-scale disaster, undercutting their public confidence since Japan’s nuclear crisis began, documents released by an independent safety watchdog group show.
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