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Japan Official: Bottom of reactor vessel suspected to have “broken off” at Fukushima Unit 2 after the explosion, called “catastrophic development… very grave” — Top US Expert: It’s inconceivable how melted fuel could be extracted (VIDEO)

ENE News

Asahi Shimbun, June 12, 2014: [Cabinet Secretariat councilor Kenichi Shimomura's notebook] entry for 6:14 a.m. [on March 15, 2011] shows that the situation at the plant had changed dramatically for the worse. Shimomura wrote: “There was a loud noise and (pressure) fell to zero.” [...] That was when officials at TEPCO headquarters received a report that an explosion had occurred in the vicinity of the No. 2 reactor and the pressure in the suppression chamber had abruptly fallen to zero. In his notes, Shimomura states that TEPCO officials suspected the bottom of the pressure vessel may have broken off, a catastrophic development. Shimomura writes that Kan called Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano and told him, “Something very grave has occurred.” [...] Asked why he decided to divulge his own notes on the nuclear accident, Shimomura said: “I kept quiet because I thought that no one would want to listen to someone who was in government at the time. However, I felt the time had come to speak up because the Yoshida testimony was revealed.” Shimomura said he was never questioned by the government investigative panel or asked to submit his notebooks.

NHK WORLD, June 11, 2014: Nuclear Watch: Learning from Three Mile Island… to remove fuel debris from the damaged reactors — the only other people who have done that kind of work are engineers at TMI nuclear power plant… NHK obtained special permission from the US government to access 1,000 video tapes that recorded engineers removing fuel debris from the plant…. William Austin was in charge of the work. He thinks the situation at Fukushima is a lot more challenging than TMI. The fuel at Fukushima Daiichi has melted through the reactor cores and has dropped to the bottom of containment: “You’re orders of magnitude worse — it’s… I mean, I can’t conceive of how much difficulty you’ve got.”… The vessels have many leaks. On top of that engineers at Fukushima have to deal with 3 reactors not just one like at TMI.

Watch the NHK segment here

Published: June 13th, 2014 at 2:40 am ET
By ENENews

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