Japan’s nuclear reactor situation worsening

by David Safier

No one knows how bad the situation is at Japan's stricken nuclear reactors. The problems are all hidden from sight. The experts are reduced to reading radiation detectors and tea leaves.

Of the three problem reactors, the one earlier declared the most stable is now causing the greatest alarm. They couldn't get water into the core for a few hours, which led to melting fuel rods.

Here are a few alarming passages pulled from some articles:

"Although we cannot directly check it [whether the fuel rods are melting], it's highly likely happening," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. [MSNBC]

Officials held out the possibility that [melting through the reactor's innermost chamber], too, may be happening. "It's impossible to say whether there has or has not been damage" to the vessels, Kumagai said. [MSNBC]

“They’re basically in a full-scale panic” among Japanese power industry managers, said a senior nuclear industry executive. The executive is not involved in managing the response to the reactors’ difficulties but has many contacts in Japan. “They’re in total disarray, they don’t know what to do.” [NY Times]

[T]he situation a reactor No. 3 was being closely watched for another reason. That reactor uses a special mix of nuclear fuel known as MOX fuel. MOX is considered contentious because it is made with reprocessed plutonium and uranium oxides. Any radioactive plume from that fuel would be more dangerous than ordinary nuclear fuel, experts say, because inhaling plutonium even in very small quantities is considered lethal. [NY Times]

“The real situation they found themselves in is not really planned for,” Mr. Lochbaum said. “Those plants are designed to be highly resistant to damage by earthquakes, and as immune as possible to tsunami. The problem was the one-two punch. We design against these sorts of things in isolation, and the combination is a little beyond what they would have anticipated.” [NY Times]

None of this is reassuring, to say the least. Combine human fallibility with corporate profitability, and you have a guarantee that things will go wrong. The problem is, the acceptable margin of error is much smaller for radioactive materials than for just about anything else. It looks like the Japanese situation passed the acceptable margin of error a few days ago.