EcocentricUncategorized
The news from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan just keeps getting worse. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that at least a “partial meltdown” seemed to be happening, and today the U.S. government advised its citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the Fukushima plant. The worst-case scenario—a release of a large amount …
EcocentricUncategorized
Update 3/16/11 3:03 PM: The news doesn’t get better. At an afternoon Congressional hearing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko said that the all the water in the spent fuel pod in the number 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has almost certainly boiled away:
We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which
…
EcocentricUncategorized
On Monday, my colleague Jeffrey Kluger wrote an insightful post, “Butterfly Wings and Nuclear Disasters,” about how—with all respect to the Greek dramatists— there really is no such thing as a single “tragic flaw”; rather, tragedy results most often in the real world from the accumulation of small but significant mishaps. While that …
EcocentricUncategorized
As workers at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant scrambled to prevent a meltdown of cores of several reactors on Tuesday, a new problem emerged: the failure of cooling systems for several pools containing spent fuel rods. Late Tuesday, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said that the water meant to cool spent fuel in three reactors was becoming …
EcocentricUncategorized
Shan Nair is a British nuclear safety expert who was part of a panel that advised the European Commission on its response to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. For almost twenty years, he worked within the UK nuclear industry for Britain’s national energy supply company analyzing both waste arising from spent nuclear fuel and also the …
EcocentricUncategorized
Today I was scheduled to attend a press briefing in London with Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government. Sir David was due to address the future of nuclear power in the U.K.. This morning, I received a hurried voicemail from Sir David’s press spokesman: thanks to the events in Japan, the meeting had …
EcocentricEcocentric
The news keeps getting worse at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, with the AP now reporting that the fuel rods in all three of the stricken facility’s reactors are experiencing partial meltdown. In one of the reactors, the level of cooling water has fallen effectively to zero, leaving the fuel rods fully …
EcocentricEcocentric
I’ve been traveling and reporting for the past few days, out of email and cell phone most of the time, so I haven’t been able to blog on the terrible Japan quake and ongoing nuclear disaster. I know little of what’s going on, though an explosion just occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi 3 reactor. I’m thinking about the country I lived …
EcocentricUncategorized
Government officials have confirmed that radiation has leaked from the Fukushima power plant site in Northern Japan, where workers are scrambling to prevent a meltdown at two damaged reactors. The surrounding area has been evacuated. It’s difficult to ascertain how much radiation has already leaked from the plant–or what the …
EcocentricEcocentric
There are few environmental dangers that spook people more than radioactivity. And there is surely no country in the world that comes by that fear more rightly than Japan — which, alone among nations, has felt the pain of a nuclear conflagration first hand. So it’s understandable that the Japanese public is terrified by the danger …
