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Sunday
Jun122011

"China syndrome," or not quite yet, at Fukushima Daiichi?

The London Telegraph doesn't go as far as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (see post below): the Telegraph reports that molten nuclear fuel has burned through reactor pressure vessels (presumably at Units 1, 2, and 3), but not yet through primary containment structures. It reports that the molten nuclear fuel has "merely" pooled on the steel floor of the primary containment structures, but desperate efforts to cool the molten fuel have stabilized the situation there for now, preventing further melt-throughs. However, the article does admit the obvious: at least a portion of the massive amounts of cooling water inundating the reactor units is leaking out into the exterior reactor buildings, and even into the outside environment, revealing escape pathways out of containment that already allow catastrophic radioactive contamination to reach the soil and sea. But the motherlode of catastrophic radioactivity, this Telegraph article implies, still resides within the molten fuel on the primary containment structures' floors.