Head of Japan Atomic Energy Commission blames flawed GE design as cause of Fukushima’s triple meltdown and US expert says they may have blown their lids

American’s should take notice to a recent Associated Press interview (02/14/2012) with Shunsuko Kondo, the head of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, who blames the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe on the design of the General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor.  Mr. Kondo had been commissioned by Japan Prime Minister Naoto Kan to write a secret worst case scenario for the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster including possibly evacuating Tokyo’s 35 million people, 140 miles away, out of harm’s way.  Mr. Kondo “acknowledged that the design for Fukushima Dai-Ichi had been faulty and he never expected a Chernobyl-style disaster.”

What is now described as Japan’s Chernobyl could be the “American Chernobyl” at any one of the 23 Mark I reactors still operating in the United States.

Beyond Nuclear has repeatedly warned that these 1960’s vintage reactors are accidents waiting to happen. The warnings about the Mark I design vulnerabilities  began in 1972 when a top safety official then with the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Steven Hanauer,  urged the federal regulator to “adopt a policy to discourage further use of the pressure suppression containment system” because the Mark I containment system is too small volumetrically to contain a severe nuclear accident and the catastrophic release of radioactivity. That warning only has more meaning today with these reactors now 40 years older than ever. Shut them down.

More recently, Arnie Gunderson of FaireWind Associates, a nuclear expert in the public interest, theorizes and explains that the over heated GE Mark I reactor pressure vessels at Fukushima Dai-Ichi then over-pressurized and literally lifted the lid off the reactor vessel allowing explosive hydrogen gas and the radioactive contents to vent into the reactor building. The hydrogen gas found an ignition source and blew the containments and the reactor buildings apart.