A British nuclear expert has told The First Post that the explosion at the Fukushima I nuclear plant looks likely to be a "significant nuclear event" with a bigger impact on public health than the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island.
Fukushima I is just 40 miles from the epicentre of the closest of 248 separate seismic shocks which have taken place in the past week off the coast of Japan. A 'boiling water' plant, it has six reactors.
Dramatic footage of an explosion at the plant's No 1 reactor on Saturday has commanded global attention. Now the Japanese government says it is fighting to prevent a second meltdown at No 3 reactor.
Meanwhile, sister plant Fukushima II, which is just 11km further away from the earthquake epicentre, is also in trouble. Cooling systems have broken at three of its four reactors – and at least one reactor has failed.
Efforts are underway to evacuate 210,000 people living within 20km of Fukushima I. Earlier, on Friday, 2,800 people were taken from their homes by coach.
Japan's nuclear agency says up to 160 people may have been exposed to radiation as they waited to be evacuated from the nearby town of Futaba. Twenty-two workers were exposed today and yesterday as they struggled to prevent a major leak at the plant.
However, the Japanese government has insisted that the accident is only a '4' on the International Nuclear Event Scale – an "accident with local consequences". Chernobyl is at the top of the scale with '7' while Three Mile Island was assigned a '5'.
Nuclear expert John Large today questioned Fukushima's '4' status, telling The First Post: "We're not getting the information out of the government but I would say this is a significant nuclear event. You don't blow the top off a building and say it's not."
Japanese Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said today that there was the possibility of an explosion at the No 3 reactor but he was confident the steel containing vessel around the core of the reactor would withstand the blast – as it did when No 1 reactor blew up on Saturday.
Large said he found this hard to believe. The "jellyfish" shape of Saturday's explosion and the decision to vent the reactor's secondary containment – releasing radioactive vapour and necessitating the evacuation of local people – all suggest fuel rods had melted and leaked from the primary containment.
Large suggested the Japanese government could be hiding the true severity of the accident from its people in order to avoid a large-scale panic in which citizens might put themselves in harm's way by self-evacuating, fleeing into the dispersal zone instead of out of it.
Nuclear radiation has deep resonance for Japan, as the only country to have had nuclear weapons used against it. Visiting Fukushima I, Large said he found the Japanese view of nuclear power to be "very polite, very rational but also very sensitive"
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Large was told that young women from Hiroshima or Nagasaki would still move to the country to stay with relatives before trying to find a husband – in order to advertise themselves as being nuclear-free. He added: "Even if you pass through the immediate generations affected by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there's a generic memory of it."
Tokyo-based campaign group the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre said yesterday: "A nuclear disaster which the promoters of nuclear power in Japan said wouldn't happen is in progress. It is occurring as a result of an earthquake that they said would not happen."
Large was critical of the response from the nuclear industry in the UK which he sees as trying to downplay the incident. He said: "The nuclear industry is crashing around trying to recover its position.
"It doesn't want this to become known as another Chernobyl. They can't say this was dodgy technology [as they did of Chernobyl] so they are downplaying it.
"I would say this is going to put back the British nuclear industry for some considerable time."
In the meantime, the biggest worry facing the Japanese authorities is that an explosion at No 3 reactor could have more dire consequences than a leak from No 1 because the two devices run on different fuel. No 3 runs so-called MOX fuel, based on plutonium.
Large said MOX was "effectively an experimental fuel". In addition to having a more complex radiological footprint than uranium-based fuel, making it harder to deal with in the event of a leak, more fuel is usually released in a plutonium meltdown than when a uranium-based reactor fails.
There is another problem on the horizon: seismologists say there is a 70 per cent chance of another quake measuring at least 7.0 magnitude striking in the coming days.
Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76297,news-comment,news-politics,japan-nuclear-accident-could-be-second-chernobyl-fukushima#ixzz1GYhqthuu
