It’s
already well established that Tepco, the operator of Fukushima, is in control
of very little in the devastated nuclear plant. Not the ongoing, endemic
contamination of the atmosphere and of the sea, not the status of nuclear fuel
reduced to a state of three coriums which either can’t be localized or are stocked
in pools from which they cannot be removed. Nor, even less so, the potential impact
of new seismic shocks on the battered systems, including in the first instance
that of Reactor N° 4’s cooling pool , a tremendous source of worry given the
enormous mass of fuel it contains.
1535 fuel assemblies*
are stocked 30 metres (110 feet) above the ground in a structure which has had
to be consolidated and which is open to the air, representing 85 times the
quantity of Cesium-137 released during the explosion of the Chernobyl
reactor…..Enough to render the whole of Japan uninhabitable and beyond, for it
is on this kind of scale that the potential danger can be measured.
