Reporter: Many experts now believe Fukushima’s melted fuel burned through the concrete floors and has gone down into the groundwater — “No one yet knows how deeply those 3 cores melted into the ground… No one knows where the cores are” (AUDIO)
ENE News
At 42:00 in — Linda Moulton Howe, Regional Emmy Award-winning reporter: “Five years later now in March 2015, no one yet knows how deeply those three cores melted into the Fukushima ground.”
At 44:30 — Howe: “In the first days of the March 2011 catastrophe, [nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen] told media that Fukushima was ‘Chernobyl on Steroids’. Arnie meant that the Fukushima disaster would turn out to be much worse than the April 1986 core explosion at the Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Many experts believe now that the three missing Fukushima cores have melted right through the concrete floors, and are contaminating any water that reaches them — going down, perhaps touching, the groundwater.”
At 45:30 in — Arnie Gundersen, nuclear engineer: “Scientists and engineers knew exactly where the nuclear core was at Chernobyl a year later, but at Fuksuhima we’ve got three nuclear cores that are in direct contact with groundwater. Now that mean the containment broke and water is coming in and is contaminating the groundwater — so clearly the liquid releases from Fukushima are way, way more severe than Chernobyl.”
At 57:30 in — Howe: “The concept is… when water from mountain run-off reaches the ice wall, it will freeze or flow around the frozen ground out to the Pacific Ocean without passing by the highly radioactive melted cores. But everybody says, ‘How do you know that’s going to work because no one knows where the cores are, or how deep they are in the ground right now?’”
At 1:16:45 in — Howe: “[Fukushima] is a cleanup challenge that is now expected to take decades more, into the end of the 21st century — re-enforcing what Arnie Gundersen said five years ago in that very first week, that ‘Fukushima is Chernobyl on steroids’. And so far over these five years, it appears that he has been right.”
Published: May 12th, 2016 at 1:44 pm ETBy ENENews |