AAP, Reuters & Yahoo!7
March 17, 2011, 11:12 am
A US official says a pool cooling rods at Fukushima has run dry which could result in a disaster as bad as Chernobyl.
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Japan's nuclear crisis may have taken its most dangerous turn yet after a U.S. official said one of the pools containing highly radioactive spent fuel rods at the stricken plant had run dry.
One nuclear expert said that there was now even a possibility that the disaster may approach the extent of the Chernobyl accident, the worst ever in the industry's history. When the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986 it spewed a radiation cloud over a large area of Europe.
And a nuclear engineer said that it may be time to consider ways to bury or cover the entire complex in some kind of material that would stop radiation from leaking into the atmosphere.
Triggering the new levels of alarm were comments by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko in Congress on Wednesday. "There is no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures," he said.
Japanese officials have been working desperately for two days to try to get more water into the pool to cover the rods, which remain hot for months after they are removed from the reactors and can quickly release radioactive components if exposed to the air.
"If they don't get water to these spent fuel pools in view of the containment breaches in the other plants the actual radiation releases could approach that category of Chernobyl," said Victor Gilinsky, who was an NRC commissioner at the time of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, which was the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
Earlier Japanese authorities told the International Atomic Energy Agency that radioactivity was being released directly into the air at the pool for the No.4 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Experts say the pools could present a bigger threat to public health than the reactors, which appear to be still encased in steel containment systems.
"Up until now they have not been able to get close to the spent rods, as even with protective clothing it only stops workers from breathing in radioactive particles, not from radiation itself," Dr Peter Hosemann PHD of the University of California Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Department said Tuesday.
While the building holding the rods has been rocked by fire and a blast, officials in Japan had not said how much water remained in the 40-foot deep tanks.
James Acton, Associate in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an interview before Jaczko's comments that it appeared there was a leak in the pool.
"There is either a leak in the spent fuel pool or the rods are hot enough to cause evaporation," Acton said.
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