Foreign Analyses of Radiation Leak More Accurate Than Government Statements

The Magnitude of the Crisis

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is still in the midst of a critical situation following the accident that resulted from the great Eastern Japan earthquake at its Fukushima I nuclear power plant. The Japanese people are paying close attention to any statements or explanations from the government or TEPCO, but they are impatient at still not understanding enough about the state or the magnitude of the crisis. On the other hand, foreign experts and media, particularly in Europe and the U.S., are closely monitoring the accident, and their analysis is often deeper than Japan’s. Clear images from the site of the accident are being distributed around the world, and on the basis of those images, research facilities in leading atomic energy countries are using independently developed systems to carry out computer simulations of the accident and are actively releasing information.

Sixty-three-year-old U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a nuclear physicist and a Nobel laureate in Physics, declared in an April 1 interview with the New York Times that forensic modeling tells us “that about 70 percent of the core of one reactor had been damaged and that another reactor had undergone a 33 percent meltdown.”

Specific Numbers

Whereas statements from the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Trade’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency have been along the lines of “It is believed that part of Reactor No. 3’s pressure vessel has been destroyed” and “There is a possibility of partial meltdown of the fuel rods in Reactors No. 1 and 3,” Secretary Chu’s comments give specific numbers, which gives us an idea of the depth of his analysis.

In the aftermath of the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in the U.S. (a large-scale core meltdown) and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union (a nuclear reactor explosion), the U.S. and France, the world’s two leading atomic energy countries, developed a simulation system for investigating what happened in the reactors. These simulations were based on a precious few images and scraps of information at the time of the accident. Michael Golay, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, told The New York Times, “These systems have become more precise in recent years, and the abundance of high-precision photos in this case should give us a fairly detailed image of the situation. Whether or not that information should be released is another matter.”*

Stanford University held a panel discussion on March 21 concerning the Fukushima I nuclear accident and the future of nuclear energy. One panelist was Alan Hanson, the executive vice president of Areva NC, a unit of the French nuclear energy conglomerate Areva, the world’s largest. He commented that “drops in cooling water exposed up to three-quarters of the reactor cores, and … peak temperatures hit up to 2,700 degrees Celsius.” Any expert who heard this would be astounded.

Core Information

The fuel rods are nuclear fuel pellets fused together and encased in a zirconium alloy cladding (outer shell). The zirconium alloy begins to melt at about 1,100 degrees Celsius; the steel of the nuclear reactor pressure vessel is designed to withstand temperatures of up to 2,800 degrees Celsius in the event that the fuel itself falls to the bottom of the pressure vessel. If the bottom of the pressure vessel were to rupture from further overheating and fuel were to get into the containment building with the building housing the reactor having collapsed, it would be on the verge of turning into an accident surpassing the large-scale core meltdown that caused the Three Mile Island disaster.

The weight of core information and its influence on the people of a country where an accident occurs are worlds apart from that of an outside country. The government must put a stop to its ongoing cover-ups, lies and underestimations.

Secretary Chu also said that it will still take time to resolve, but “the worst moments of the crisis [appear] to be receding.” We want to believe those words.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.