Fukushima is out of the news mostly but the problem has NOT gone away. The spent fuel in Unit 4 continues to be housed in a perilous state. The building seems to be sinking, due to seismic damage, about 80 cm – 2.5 feet – so far. The situation is not stable and should be condiered to be deteriorating. The damage of another magnitude 6 quake may crack the fuel pool and drain it.
Kohei Murata, former Ambassador to Switzerland from Japan, discusses Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent fuel pool problems and risks.
Fairewinds reported on this back in August, and noted that there already has been one outage of the fuel pool water pumps. This video shows some impressive footage which Arnie Gunderson explains is the fuel pool heating at 10 C – 19 F – per day. That is 300.000 gallons of water. – just to give an idea of the amount of heat still being generated by the fuel assemblies in the pool.
The fuel pool contains 1525 spent fuel assemblies. Once water is no longer covering the rods the tubing itself can start to burn in air. Once that starts it cannot be put out with water. So no more pumping of water will cool it down. The amount of radioactive material that potentially will be released into the atmosphere will be significantly more than Chernobyl.
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