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I am betting that it is a matter of time before we hear that in fact Plutonium has leaked out of Reactor 3 at Fukushima Dai-ichi. The Time blog reported on a potential breach in the reactor containment vessel, and I heard a similar report on CNN today.
Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a news conference that a reactor vessel of the No. 3 unit may have been damaged. That raises the possibility that radiation from the MOX fuel in the reactor — a combination of uranium and plutonium — could be released. The three workers who suffered skin burns were working on the No. 3 reactor, which is one of the clues that the vessel may have been damaged.
As a matter of fact, unless the situation is improved markedly two more weeks of radiation leaks would place this at a level similar to Chernobyl. Reuters reported:
Based on measurements made at monitoring stations in Japan and the United States, Wotawa said the iodine released from Fukushima in the first three-four days was about 20 percent of that released from Chernobyl during a ten-day period.
For Caesium-137, the figure could amount to some 50 percent.
This means that the levels of the longer lasting Cesium 137 isotope are already potentially 50% of Chernobyl, and the situation is not over yet. Japan has pegged this at a Level 5 Nuclear disaster, I am betting that the scale of the problem will be raised to a Level 6 nuclear disaster in the coming week, making it worse than Three Mile Island and only second in severity to Chernobyl. I read today a report which I will try to find again that pegged the amount of escaped radiation and the area affected make it a Level 6.
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“The mixed oxide fuel rods used in the compromised number three reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi complex contain enough plutonium to threaten public health with the possibility of inhalation of airborne plutonium particles. The compromised fuel rods supplied to the Tokyo Electric Company by the French firm AREVA”
“Masashi Goto, a reactor researcher and designer for Toshiba, told the Foreign Correspondents Club in Toyko the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel used in unit 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility uses plutonium, which is “much more toxic than the fuel used in the other reactors”
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103151304/Natural-Resources-News-Service/is-airborne-plutonium-a-threat-from-reactor-number-three.html
When will we be informed that Plutonium has leaked?
When too many people die in ways that can’t be covered up or blamed on an earthquake and tidal wave.
Water needs to be kept over the fuel rods when the fuel rods burn off the water and the rods get exposed to air they react to the air and radiation is released.
Damage or accidents at unit 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility is what we need to worry about.
“One reason proponents of MOX reactor fuel support its use is because, once the fuel is burned in a reactor, it is so hot that terrorists would not be able to steal a fuel assembly.”
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103151304/Natural-Resources-News-Service/is-airborne-plutonium-a-threat-from-reactor-number-three.html
Ironically this also means that f there is a natural disaster nuclear clean up crews will also find it to hard to work with.
“The U.S. amassed 111.4 kg of plutonium from its nuclear arsenal; all the countries that are reprocessing have amassed 250 kg of plutonium with no place to go. The plutonium that has been used for MOX by the French is a very, very small fraction, and they have discovered that they can only use it once because this spent fuel is so hot and the cost of disposing of this spent fuel goes dramatically up compared to the other stuff. ..The French may be recycling 12 percent. The rest is sailing into burials as de facto radioactive waste. So there are dreams and there are realities. The reality is that this costs a lot of money. It is not working…,” Alvarez says.”
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103151304/Natural-Resources-News-Service/is-airborne-plutonium-a-threat-from-reactor-number-three.html
We need numbers on how much it costs to process and store plutonium MOX fuel.
Alvarez told DCBureau.org the idea of MOX fuel does not add up anymore. “They are largely overtaken by events and the system is just ill-equipped, unable, structurally fixed into decisions that don’t make much sense anymore…The only prospect that you have here, which you should not dismiss, is that it has the potential of rendering a large amount of plutonium into a form that makes it extremely useful to reuse. And that was the original intent of the MOX program. It was not meant to be a way to generate energy and make money. Because the money is losing, this plutonium has negative value. They probably know this might not work and cause problems to reactors, and they might shut down reactors and lose money.”
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103151304/Natural-Resources-News-Service/is-airborne-plutonium-a-threat-from-reactor-number-three.html
Why reuse Plutonium?
Mixed oxide fuel is a combination of finely ground up plutonium particles and uranium oxide fabricated into fuel rods at an AREVA subsidiary in La Hague, France. The fuel is made from reprocessing old reactor fuel. Reprocessing was abandoned by the United States in the 1970s because of the dangers of weapons proliferation.
The CIA has reported that Japan’s nuclear power program was not limited to the peaceful production of electrical power. The program had its roots in a secret weapons program that caused the CIA to conclude as far back as 1964 that Japan could assemble within months a nuclear weapon.
Because of the Japanese public’s fear of nuclear weapons, the various subsequent Japanese governments have kept the program secret and have repeatedly denied its existence when news organizations made inquiries.
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103151304/Natural-Resources-News-Service/is-airborne-plutonium-a-threat-from-reactor-number-three.html
This news gets out in Japan the Japanese government fall.
In another direct comparison between wind and nuclear power, the European Union’s climate chief recently announced that offshore wind generated electricity is actually less expensive than nuclear, the Guardian reported.
“Some people tend to believe that nuclear is very, very cheap, but offshore wind is cheaper than nuclear. People should believe that this is very, very cheap.” said Connie Hedegaard, Climate Change Commissioner of the EU, from the European Wind Energy Association’s annual conference in Brussels.
http://offshorewindwire.com/2011/03/23/international-roundup-offshore-wind-in-japan-unaffected-by-disasters/
Nuclear Power is not about the jobs, or the money, wind power does both better at less cost. Never mind the cost what a Japanese sized nuclear accident would do to the American economy.
This is all about Fuel for nuclear bombs, nuclear research for more weapons, and of course fat government contracts.
MSNBC announcing right now that “traces” of plutonium have been detected.
They finally detected some, or announced it publicly. I heard it’s much harder to detect, so I’m not sure they’ve been hiding this information. So far it’s only been detected near the plant, though that may be the only area they’ve conducted the tests for it or where the results have completed. Of course I’m hoping the “experts” are right in that due to the low amount of Plutonium used and it’s heavy weight, the likelihood of any drifting far past the plant is low.
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/81589.html
“its heavy weight”
governments and media pretend to be clueless;
plutonium dust mixed into air, ground, and water
Thats all thats needed to make things worse gamma rays.
Check thus out:
“# 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror” (based upon transcript from January 14, 2008 at Rense.Com)
Japan
Holy Shit. Outrageous, and oh, sooooooooo obviously true.
To answer the question your title posits, the answer is “When the US media get around to telling us.”
In the rest of the world, it’s already been reported. As of about 1130 AM ET today, Munich’s Suddeutsche Zeitung ran with this story http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/japan-hochradioaktive-spaltprodukten-verseuchen-wasser-1.1078556 which states in its headline/bullet points that plutonium has been found in the soil surrounding the Fukushima plant. It also states that Japan’s government has acknowledged there was a partial core melting, and that contaminated water is escaping through a leak and threatens to contaminate the groundwater.
this whole thing is insanity.
the whole world should step in, any country that has the ability to deal with this,
should be involved.
this has atrocity written all over it.
They also reported it on NPR around 4:30 pm on All Things Considered. It doesn’t drift atmospherically very far, it has an atomic weight of 239 (highly radioactive) to 244 (stable), far too high to stay in the atomsphere long.