Has anyone been talking about what this will mean for the safety of the fishing and seafood industry around the Japanese coast line?
I would assume this may be a very serious consequence for the Japanese in particular, given that they harvest and eat virtually every type of living thing to be found in their seas.
Update: on a related note, the New York Times again proves to have been a pretty good source of reporting on the nuclear crisis, and this report explains in detail that storage of used fuel rods at reactors is a widespread problem not only in Japan, but America too:
Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants: Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while China sends them to a desert storage compound in the western province of Gansu. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever-larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the plants.There will be a lot of re-consideration about the America practices to come out of this, and none too soon, by the sounds.Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves.
The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined.
You're such a pansy
ReplyDeleteOne of my fans from Catallaxy, no doubt.
ReplyDeleteAnother brave anonymous commenter!
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