Discussion Forum
Japan Atomic Energy Body Sees Technical Hurdles Ahead, Wall Street Journal by Mitsuru Obe, September 14, 2011:
[...] Removing the fuel from the spent-fuel pools and the reactors is vital [...]
Experts fear that their structures might have been weakened by the heat and radiation from the damaged fuel and the large amount of seawater [...]
Related Posts
- TEPCO acknowledges ‘vapor’ is still being seen at Reactors No. 2, 3 and 4 spent fuel pools May 22, 2011
- NY Times: Spent fuel pools in reactors “have lost their cooling systems” — Nuclear engineers now warning pools “could pose an even greater danger than the melted reactor cores” April 6, 2011
- Fox News: “ALL of the stricken reactors and spent fuel pools contain plutonium” March 18, 2011
- Nuclear Engineer: Far more radioactivity inside spent fuel ponds than in reactors — Could very well produce damage greater than Chernobyl March 15, 2011
- Nuclear engineer: NRC now says reactors and containments have breached and released plutonium off-site — “Much worse” than if from spent fuel pools (VIDEO) August 22, 2011
52 
22
I’m sure the radiation and seawater weakened the structures somewhat, but, pardon my sarcasm, wouldn’t the explosions in each of the reactor buildings play a bit of a role also?
Who writes this crap? Did they forget to include that little tidbit, or was it intentional – or, more likely, they are just feeding the garbage that’s fed to them to the masses…
Report Comment
Dear James: You’re asking a totally reasonable question given the way most substances and matter behaves without being in extreme high radiation environments (multi-centi Sieverts!). The “weakening” of matter from “radiation” (not heat or explosions) is a different kind of weakening problem and it’s one most of us are very unfamiliar with. I do not claim any understanding of the molecular physics myself. However, I have read a number of primary research articles and some books on this topic, as well as some things online though I recommend going to the library and finding things for yourself with the help of a GOOD research librarian if you’re not good at researching literature. High radiation, uncontained, unshielded actually breaks down substances around it through crazing, warping and distortion of the crystalline structures or just structures of most substances at a molecular and larger levels, including in reinforced or tempered steel, metal alloys of virtually all kinds and concrete–even steal reinforced and basalt reinforced concrete found in nuclear reactors. Part of the problem with the sarcophagus at Chernobyl is not just the weakened foundation due to the initial explosion, but is also due to the high ambient radiation levels at the site. To see more of what this article may be hinting at and what I’m talking about look up primary research articles and books on what happens to metals and concrete holding plutonium, in particular, when it has an accidental…
Report Comment
[...]when it has an accidental criticality, which means when it starts to fission. It is not primarily the heat energy released that weakens surrounding structures, unless, of course, there is also some sort of explosion.
Report Comment
And furthermore, the article says that “removing the fuel is vital to ensure no radiation leaks”
Earth to Wall Street Journal – radiation already has been leaking for six freaken months!!!
Report Comment
The NRC has already stated that the reactors have melted out. Remember, the Wall Street Journal is owned by an organization that, well, see below.
Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie.
By Mike Gaddy. Published Feb. 28, 2003
On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast.
On August 18, 2000, a six-person jury was unanimous in its conclusion that Akre was indeed fired for threatening to report the station’s pressure to broadcast what jurors decided was “a false, distorted, or slanted” story about the widespread use of growth hormone in dairy cows.
The court did not dispute the heart of Akre’s claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in court, as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers. Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion…
Report Comment
and the rest…..
and written rule against deliberate distortion of the news.
The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves.
In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is only a “policy,” not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation. Fox aired a report after the ruling saying it was “totally vindicated” by the verdict.
Report Comment
@StPaulScout
Good evening SPS, Regarding your post which said ” the NRC has already stated the reactors have melted out” What do you mean by melted out? Specifically, out of where? The reactor vessels, the containment, out of the building, out to sea? I think it is important to know where out is. Also, do you believe the NRC when they make a statement about Fukushima? If so, Why? or Why not? Since you stated that the majority of FOX viewers are “too stupid” to discuss a topic such as Fukushima with. Let me ask you this : Hypothetically, If you heard that FOX was reporting that people from the area where you live be evacuated immediately due to ,for example, radiation contamination, would you believe them? Or are you too smart for that? Peace, IK
Report Comment
Listen to FOX at your own peril. They are know liars. Have lied in the past, lie today, will lie in the future….
Report Comment
Regarding FOX News–the fact that Fox tends to lean a particular way makes it all the more pressing that those of us who oppose nuclear DO occasionally visit their webpage. If we see a pro-nuclear editorial or even an article that doesn’t present the full picture there, we need to post comments to try to get the other perspective out. Most of their viewers/readers are NOT visiting enenews, and, ideologically, many of them are probably inclined to be okay with nuclear (and suspicious of “environmentalist’ types), but most simply hold these views without ever having really thought deeply about it or read up on the “con” side of the nuclear issue. So we’ve got to bring the word TO THEM when a story published there presents us with an opening.
When we do that, we WILL get attacked by nuke-lovers, but we have to remember that there ARE persuadable people out there, even if they are not making themselves visible by posting comments. So we need to be polite and rational no matter how much they try to bait us.
Report Comment
Who is going to pay for the extra cable line to my bathroom as I will be throwing up all the time if I have to watch that bigoted, racist, fascist, idiocy..
I didn’t run out of descriptions.. they just aren’t worth my time and energy to type it.
Report Comment
The majority of FOX viewers are too stupid to discuss something like this with. They do not want to think. They want to be told. They are afraid and need to believe in a scary bad guy. “Liberals” are used to fill that need. “Liberals” being ANYONE that disagrees with whatever the rant-of-the-day is on FOX. We all know plenty of people that watch FOX. They are brain-dead for the most part…..
Report Comment
@Iam335. Hello I35, I have to agree, we should be polite & rational to each other. Regarding your post ” If we see a pro- nuke editorial or article that doesn’t represent the full picture”. What is the whole picture that everyone who doesn’t visit enenews is missing? Do you get your information only from this forum. Do you believe the whole picture is presented on this forum? Also are you inclined to be suspicious of “environmentalist” types? Do you not think that they( environmentalist’s) have also thought deeply about the views they hold? What is an environmentalist type anyway? Are you suspicious of me for asking these questions? Please Clarify. Regards IK
Report Comment
The fact that Fox is full of liars is pretty obvious, however the fact that the WSJ would deliberately misinform is another…
Report Comment
News Corp owns FOX. News Corp owns the WSJ. News Corp can lie with impunity via any and all of it’s ‘news’ outlets. News Corp owns lots of Television and Radio in the U.S.
Report Comment
http://www.dowjones.com/?from=
isnt this the parent organisation??
Report Comment
Nuclear Reactors Don Dow Jones Sustainability Criteria
September 16, 2010
“LONDON (IDN) – One of the leading international benchmarks for corporate contribution to sustainable development, the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI World), has included a number of U.S. and European nuclear power utilities in its latest review.
Forty-eight companies have been added to the DJSI in its most recent review, while 46 have been removed. In the utilities sector, eight nuclear power plant operators are listed. These include Germany’s EOn and RWE; Spain’s Endesa and Iberdrola; Entergy and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) of the USA; Italy’s Enel; and Fortum of Finland.
RWE appears in the index every year since it was launched. Alwin Fitting, a member of RWE’s executive board in charge of corporate responsibility, commented: “We take our responsibility very seriously, so we are delighted that our efforts are being recognized by inclusion in the Dow Jones Index.”
According to World Nuclear News (WNN), he added, “The fact that we have been included in the index now for twelve years in a row is a great honour and an incentive for RWE to continue showing the same energy to lead.”
Endesa has been included in the index for the tenth consecutive year. Andrea Brentan, the company’s CEO, said that Endesa’s continued inclusion in the index underscores its real commitment to meeting the power needs of citizens in a way that is safe, cost-efficient and guided by principles…
Report Comment
principles of sustainability.
Head of PG&E Peter Darbee noted, “We are increasingly adapting our strategies, our operations and our culture to drive positive results across the ‘triple bottom line’ of people, planet and profit.”
http://globalgeopolitics.net/wordpress/2010/09/16/nuclear-reactors-don-dow-jones-sustainability-criteria/
Report Comment
I only wish this were the truth. There is only profit if the gov’t hands out huge subsidies and assume all the liability, which translate into no one liable.
Report Comment
Look closely at the web page. In the top left corner it says “DOWJONES A NEWS COPORATION COMPANY”.
Report Comment
Dear James: The entire English language mainstream media or what we here on ENE call the “MSM” is now owned by only five multinational behemoth corporations as opposed to more than 50 corporations, still way over-concentrated ownership for our fourth column protecting any remaining democracy and always weak democracy in the U.S., 25 years ago. The concentration in ownership or oligopoly–virtual monopoly, status of this industry, which is corporatist/corporativist, is dictatorially managed from the top down. It is likely that no content that appears in the MSM is accidental. It is even less likely that information in the MSM appearing repeatedly is not part of social construction to control the masses’ concepts about various issues. Do you, does anyone, know of any corporations, particularly large corporations that are not de facto dictatorial in political structure? That is are there any such entities, exceptions only proving the rule, where all decisions are not ultimately decided by maybe a total of one to a few more than a dozen individuals, all of whom earning multiples of entry-level workers in the 350x+ category?
Report Comment
There is no logical reason to assume that information we receive from any mainstream source, such as the WSJ, is to be taken wholesale at face value without deep application of evolving critical thinking skills (I’m not saying you were saying that). Such information is manufactured by corporations that profit from and own all aspects of the nuclear power AND nuke weapons industries. We can safely, therefore, only assume that our English language media is almost completely about social construction of the collective worldview by the class that owns and benefits most from this disinformation machinery, as well as from the disinformation itself to prevent needed or ecologically sustainable and timely changes at all costs, including the costs of the public health. Bottom line, don’t be shocked by the short-sightedness, in terms of the lack of realistic humanist values, of the always insane despotic overlords of our world socioeconomic dominant paradigm makers. Being a billionaire or nearly so is about conquest, hyper exploitation and hoarding and is always enforced by diverse overtly and covertly violent and coercive methods to gain the complicit or coerced consent of the masses from whom these parasites blood suck the value they hoard.
Report Comment
MSM they all stretch the truth and FOX is anti Democratic. They are the poster child for the Republicans. A tad redundant but recently I get more news from RT than I do any of the US MSM networks. Who woulda thunk it. JMHO
Report Comment
Don’t think for a minute that RT doesn’t have their agenda also.
Report Comment
Dear James2: I agree with you wholeheartedly in reference to your comment “don’t think for a minute that RT doesn’t have their agenda also”. This is also a capitalist corporate entity representing a nation with wholly corporativist aims benefiting their own billionaire, multinational corporate, military and covert organization ruling class, completely enmeshed with the rest of the world’s billionaires, multinational, strong military and covert organization ruling class or what China keeps harping on about lately as the New World Order. The NWO is just billionaires, the greediest stupidist humans, producing and enforcing policy giving them even more latitude to steal from and poison to death the rest of us in the process. I feel exactly the same about Al Jazeera, which though, on the books is owned by the State of Qatar, is I feel probably, as I’ve heard from reliable sources, most likely owned by the British indirectly. Whatever the actual ownership of these and other dominant corporate media outlets around the world, they are all corporations with fully dictatorial, titular minority (billionaire) control over information presented by them. With RT, the reason they employ people like Tom Hartman, who I viscerally somewhat like (I don’t say that often about any MSM news personality), is that there are deep animosities left over from the Cold War between apparatchiks of the U.S. and then U.S.S.R. disinformation machinery (CIA MSM, KGB–Pravda, TAAS). The case in both…
Report Comment
Dear James2 and ENE: The bottom line about any cororate MSM is that all the FRAMING (study works by George Lakoff and his co-researcher’s, including, Johnson) supports globalization, which benefit, primarily billionaires, multinational corporations, and the world’s largest and most toxic, criminal military and covert leaderships.
Report Comment
The case in both nations has been at least once that the modern sleezy scumball disinformation heads, G.H.W. Bush for the U.S. and Vladimir Putin for Russia have ended up in the official presidency or what is thought of as the main leadership role in the official, retail reality, government face presented to the people. Iran has their former CIA/KGB equivalent running their official political machinery face, as well. Nothing could be more outrageous, except for maybe Nero, in each case, being reanimated and appearing on TV today in the flesh! Unfortunately, the present situation would be many orders of magnitude worse both in polity structure and liberties taken by these scum especially considering the whole-world stakes for the remaining 7B of us and the remaining species on the planet. Almost nothing else could be worse, except for perhaps our collective irradiation from Fukushima, or be any more worrying than nations with so many billionaires and so many nuclear weapons and power plants of questionable safety being run by the main liars representing the main super homicidal parasites in each of their respective economies. We are very stupid monkeys as a species to not immediately be pulling out the guillotines for serious chopping from the top activities.
Report Comment
A GE Mark 1 BWR has a thick steel pressure vessel and a thick concrete containment (with a thin steel liner?). The WSJ article’s reference to “primary containment” does not fit reality. This adds to a long list!!
If the report of an IAEA meeting in Vienna on Monday is accurate, I look forward to the world’s press being invited in for a full open session of public disclosure of the clean-up plan. Planning for the impossible, IMO.
Report Comment
The lies continue. The truth continues to be downplayed for nothing more than greed. Human life is not worth anything.
Each day, it gets harder to come here and read this and know that the truth falls on deaf ears, not only in Japan, but the world over.
If each and every one of us were millionaires, and we stood togehter as a group and fought this, and had the resources that money generates, it would not change one damn thing.
I am so sick of corporate rule, aka fascism. I want “my” country back !!
I’m watching “If God’s Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise” and crying at those 2 horrid events (Katrina and The BP Oil Spill ). I love Louisiana soooo much, but it has been crippled so badly, I couldn’t stand living there any longer.
No Justice there, and there will not be any here either. It takes a stronger person than I to live in a country that has completely sold out and does NOT GIVE a DAMN about any of it’s citizens unless they are RICH and not be completely ashamed.
America the Beautiful sure isn’t very beautiful any longer. We are a laughing stock of corruption and greed and genocide the world over.
Admin Will you please put a counter below the box? PLEASE??
/emotional rant
Report Comment
I want to second the request for a counter to tell how many character we have used. As it is, I have to open Word and use the word count function and then paste it back in the box every time.
Report Comment
I agree with you Iam335, ” polite and rational”.
But I’m afraid that leaves me out. Oh Darn!
Report Comment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation
A list of what News Corp owns. Look at the ‘International” section and you can see they own the Dow Jones company and the WSJ.
Report Comment
Scott!!
I Thank You for providing documentation which a lot of
Americans don’t know about: our “News” media is
controlled. I tell you that right now at this moment
I have Thom Hartmann on the FSTV…
I don’t want to argue against your main anti-Fox, Murdoch
point of view, as most folks aren’t educated, really, too much
about how their information is and has been controlled.
At least the Brits have a “Ministry of Propaganda” to more
or less put it in their Face: Have a Good Attitude, We Got it Tough.
You go too far though, Scott.
Rush Limbaugh’s TV show, during the end of Clinton’s era,
was hilarious, nailing such faces as Sally Jesse Raphael.
But to think that nowadays Rush is filthy Rich,
by spewing a deliberately-confusing, dumbed-down vision
of what political discourse ought to be, is sickening.
I don’t trust any “Left” nor “Right” politicians.
It is coming down to it, St. Paul Scott….
That was YOUR Local POE-LEECE that charged and
stomped on the Girl Journalists at the Convention.
Appreciate the Fact that Amy, Queen Goodman, makes
a lot of money to deliver a carefully-crafted message.
No Way she’s going near 9/11 Reality….Broadway is
real Nice. Giving the Continued Appearance of Truthfulness.
The sophisticated Seeker of Knowledge becomes aware
of the Biases, prejudices of every speaker in the WORLD,
and the seeker of Truth ought to have a Good reference to-spiritual/religious/cultural realities which underly
everybody’s…
Report Comment