Hold Your Breath—for about a Year

Great news, Dear Readers! I’m giving you total permission to start chain smoking! Oh, and you can drink all you want, starting with a pitcher of martinis before breakfast. Red meat, all you can eat! Put a lot of salt on, and then have an extra piece of cheesecake. Oh, you can also skip going to the gym, bothering to drop in at the office, and contributing to that 401K plan….

Why the good life, all of a sudden?

Well, consider the state of affairs at Fukushima reactor four. The reactor, you remember, was down for maintenance when the earthquake / tsunami struck, which meant that the radioactive rods were not in the core of the reactor, but in a cooling pool.

Einstein said it best: nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water. So here’s my physics-for-poets of how this process works.

Small pellets of radioactive fuel are placed in rods, which are encased in zirconium alloy. Important—that zirconium alloy is highly explosive, and can ignite on contact with air. Anyway, during the reaction process, enormous heat is generated, which goes to heat the water, which produces steam, which drives turbines, which in turn produce electricity. The problem?

Well, the fuel in the rods is only 95% consumed, so those rods—logically called “spent rods”—need to be cooled. For how long? Five years, minimum. So the spent rods are put in cooling pools, which circulate cool water constantly.

Now, where did the rocket scientists decide to put the cooling pools for the Fukushima plants? Five or six storeys up, on the roofs! Oh, and there’s no containment up there, as there is in the reactor. So if something blows the roof off, the cooling pool is exposed.

You know what happened—initially, the plants were cooling down after the earthquake. The tsunami hit, and guess where the generators were? Yup, right there in the basement.

Guys?

But before you start raising you eyes in disgust at the Japanese, I should point out that we have 23 of the buggers in the US. Oh, and they were designed by General Electric.

Nor is that all—the generators flooded, the power was off, but it wasn’t “just” spent rods up there, because the operators of the plant had emptied the core, and had put 202 unspent, reactor-ready rods up in the cooling pond on the top floor. And they are side by side with the 1331 spent rods. (Note—in fact, the sharp-eyed Miss Taí pointed out that it’s really 202 unspent and 1331 spent rod assemblies. Why? Because up to 80 rods are packaged together in one unit. So the actual number of rods is something over 120,000….)

Now then, here’s what the building looks like:

Two things—minimally—happened: the earthquake damaged the structure, and the there was an explosion / fire at the plant. Think it can’t get worse? Think again, because the operators of the plant made the decisions to pour seawater into the cooling tanks. And that seawater is corrosive.

Fasten your seat belts—we’ve barely begun….

Because the water from the cooling pool, you see, is leaking, and that leaking is making the ground very soggy. So what do we have? A sinking building with 1500-plus spent and unspent rod assembies of radioactive fuel in a leaky pool 100 feet in the air in a building that might collapse.

Oh, did I mention that the pool may have had debris from the explosion, and that that debris may have damaged the integrity of the pool?

And I probably forgot as well to tell you that there are 80 damaged fuel rods up there? Here’s what one source had to say:

In an 11-page information sheet released in August, TEPCO said one of the assemblies was even damaged as long ago as 1982, when it was bent out of shape during a transfer. … The damaged racks were first reported by a Fukushima area newspaper on Wednesday, as TEPCO is preparing to decommission the plant and remove the spent fuel assemblies from Reactor No. 4. 

I should note, by the way, that the “August” referred to is August of 2013, two years after the disaster took place.

Or rather, started. Because let me tell you—it’s by no means over yet. Yes, they have installed a crane, and work started in November of last year to remove the fuel rods from the pool. As of 30 March of this year, 983 rods were still in the cooling pool—the process is expected to last all year.

Now then—time for today’s vocabulary enrichment—“criticality.” And here, I bring you one source on the issue.

Arnie Gunderson, a veteran US nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, told Reuters that “they are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” especially given their close proximity to each other, which risks breakage and the release of radiation.

Gundersen told Reuters of an incredibly dangerous “criticality” that would result if a chain reaction takes place at any point, if the rods break or even so much as collide with each other in the wrong way. The resulting radiation is too great for the cooling pool to absorb – it simply has not been designed to do so.

“The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no control rods to control it,”Gundsersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”

Simply put, for the next year, we are all going to have to hope that nothing, absolutely NOTHING happens out of the ordinary—not one fuel rod dropped, not one rod corroded significantly, not one rod stuck in the pool, not one rod bumping into each other.

Oh, and keep your fingers crossed, Readers, that there isn’t another earthquake of 7 or above on the Richter scale since that…?

I know you’re asking—so what happens if one rod breaks, releasing radiation? Well, take a look at this headline:

Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario. Radiation Fuel Rods Matches Fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima Bombs

Potentially, there could be a huge cloud of radiation drifting over the Pacific Ocean, and reaching the West Coast in a week.

Now you see why I was up at four in the morning?