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Endoscopic Exam of Fukushima Reactor
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald: "Radiation-blurred images taken inside one of Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear reactors show steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by 10 months of exposure to heat and humidity. The photos — the first inside-look since the disaster — showed none of the reactor's melted fuel or its cooling water but confirmed stable temperatures and showed no major ruptures caused by the earthquake last March, said Junichi Matsumoto, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company." Here's a video.
It's more a lack of confirmation than an actual problem.
It's like saying "Well, this telescope is aimed at the night sky, but it's not in focus so we can't see Jupiter" rather than "OMG, the planet Jupiter is missing from the Heavens!"
Sorry, I ran out of car analogies.
"He said it would take more time and better technology to get to the melted fuel, most of which had fallen into an area the endoscope could not reach."
The current tools simply can't go where the fuel is, so they can't yet inspect it. They've confirmed there are no major breaches and are now looking over the information they've been able to gather to see what everything looks like inside. The fuel comment was a regret about the limitations of the tools they have to use, not so much a cause for alarm about anything being amiss.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Re What are the possibilities?
http://fairewinds.com/content/cancer-risk-young-children-near-fukushima-daiichi-underestimated
January 17, 2012 Arnie Gundersen - energy advisor with 39-years of nuclear power engineering experience -(Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in nuclear engineering)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.
Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.
Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.
It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
In other words, it's about as radioactive as Denver, Co..
Show me one case where a melted core traveled 500 m into the earth. One. There isn't any. At Chernobyl there is a big blob of it that traveled a few meters within the building and froze before burning through the concrete floor. At three mile island it didn't leave containment. Give the China syndrome a rest. It ain't real. There are enough REAL dangers without making shit up.
Also, it took a combination a flood bigger than the dam was designed to control and seriously under-designing the dam and shoddy construction of that design and operating it poorly and failure to evacuate the flood-prone regions in order to cause this many loss of lives.
Also, it took a combination of an earthquake bigger than the plant was designed to withstand and the biggest tsunami wave in recorded history and the backup pumps flooding and failing and still there was no radiation-caused loss of life at Fukushima.
So let's tally up the deaths then, shall we:
Direct deaths: Banqiao: 26.000 Fukushima: 0
Indirect deaths: Banqiao: 140.000 Fukushima: 0
No matter how anyone trembling in their pants at the thought of the invisible bogey-man radiation tries to spin it, nuclear power is safer than any other means of producing electricity we have - even when it goes badly wrong.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
That's intellectual laziness and you damn well know it. Several cores melting down "near" each other doesn't make their individual blobs of melted fuel any hotter.