But then it caps that with a scarier scenario: if the spent-fuel
pools leak enough water and air reaches the stored fuel assemblies, there could
be an uncontrollable fire, releasing far more radiation into the atmosphere than
happened at Chernobyl – Fukushima was using about 9 times more fuel than the
Russian operation[2]
In Mid-August, RT.com reported[3]
the operation to remove spent fuel from under the No. 4 reactor; a minor
earthquake or dropping a fuel assembly could also trigger a nuclear fire.
Last March, Robert Alvarez of the IPS in Washington gave a
presentation[4]
explaining the difficulties and dangers of Fukushima – including terrorism. He
pointed out that US regulations allow for much larger spent-fuel pools, and
that these are rapidly approaching capacity, so a plan for additional (and
preferably dry) storage is urgently needed.
The technology is still in its infancy, despite the twisted
assurance of some UK nuclear shill years ago who claimed that the industry had
100,000 (or was it a million?) years’ experience, as though 50 yearling babies
could be credited with the knowledge of a 50-year-old adult. Yet the implications
of shutdown and cleanup are very far-reaching: the half-life of Uranium 238 is
4.5 billion years, longer than the distance between us and the first
monocellular life on Earth (see Slide 11 for other examples).
If not nuclear, what? Perhaps, since there is growing doubt
about CO2’s contribution to global warming, we should reconsider coal. Maybe
Arthur Scargill’s repeated point about the UK's reserves of deep-mined coal
was apt, after all. Can they be recovered now?
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