While the mass media has all but dropped its interest in the Fukushima crisis to focus on Libya and meaningless side-issues like the death of Elizabeth Taylor, the nuclear nightmare only worsens, as Japanese authorities admit that reactor number 3, which is the only reactor to contain MOX plutonium, is now leaking.
“Japan’s nuclear regulator said one reactor core at the quake-damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant may be cracked and leaking radiation,” reports Bloomberg.
“It’s very possible that there has been some kind of leak at the No. 3 reactor,” Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman at the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in Tokyo today. While radioactive water at the unit most likely escaped from the reactor core, it also could have originated from spent fuel pools stored atop the reactor, he said.”
The water now leaking from reactor number 3 has radiation levels 10,000 times above the level of normal reactor water. Yesterday, two Fukushima technicians received instant radioactive burns when they stepped in the puddle of water, as it burned right through their boots.
The leakage of plutonium and uranium from reactor number 3 is the nightmare scenario that many experts predicted would turn the situation at Fukushima from a crisis to a catastrophe.
The dire consequences of any major leak in reactor number 3 are exemplified by the fact that 4,000 tons of water have been dumped on the reactor, five times more than any of the other five units.
Reactor number 3 runs on MOX or Mixed Oxide fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium is the most deadly radioactive isotope known to man, and MOX is two million times more deadly than normal enriched uranium. The Half-life of Plutonium-239 in MOX is 24,000 years and just a few milligrams of P-239 escaping in a smoke plume will contaminate soil for tens of thousands of years.
On March 14, reactor number 3 was hit with a massive explosion that sent debris hurtling hundreds of feet into the air in an orange fireball. Authorities claimed that the explosion was caused by a build up of hydrogen pressure and that the blast did not damage the reactor containment unit. Is the damage to the reactor only recent, or have the Japanese been covering up the leak for almost two weeks since the explosion?
According to the Nuclear Information Resource Center (NIRS), “In the event of such accidents (involving the accidental release of MOX), if the ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection) recommendations for general public exposure were adhered to, only about one mg of plutonium may be released from a MOX facility to the environment. As a comparison, in [sic] uranium fabrication facility, 2kg (2,000,000 mg) of uranium could be released in the same radiation exposure.”
In the case of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the vast majority of the plutonium was not released during the explosion and subsequent fire.
As part of the bizarre sweeping apathy that the mass media has cultivated over the last week surrounding the Fukushima crisis, the threat of MOX plutonium has been completely downplayed.
Similarly, the longer the crisis drags on and the worse it gets, the less the media pays attention, despite disturbing reports of yellow rain now falling in Tokyo and surrounding areas. Just like the victims of Chernobyl, Japanese authorities are telling the people that the substance is merely pollen.
Radiation emitted by the Fukushima reactors is already approaching Chernobyl levels.
“Iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl,” reports the New Scientist.
According to a new study by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), “Nearly 25 years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, exposure to radioactive iodine-131(I-131, a radioactive isotope) from fallout may be responsible for thyroid cancers that are still occurring among people who lived in the Chernobyl area and were children or adolescents at the time of the accident.”
Despite UN and World Health Organization studies that claim Chernobyl led to a maximum of 9,000 deaths and 200,000 cases of radiation sickness, more contemporary studies have shown that nearly a million people have been killed from cancers caused by the disaster over the course of the last 25 years.
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