World nuclear specialists and government leaders are keeping a close eye on the damaged Fukushima power plants in Japan because they say the potential for the worst nuclear disaster in world history exists at the site.
Some believe another earthquake at the site, or any other natural or man-made disaster, will make the severely disabled facility go into total destruction and trigger a total meltdown that could destroy most of Japan and possibly even affect the world’s ecosystem to a point where it may be impossible for life to thrive on the planet.
Well-known theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, in a recent interview by Flashpoints Daily News Magazine, said: “people don’t realize that the Fukushima reactor (Number 4) is on a knife’s edge. It’s near the tipping point. A small earthquake, another pipe break, another explosion could tip it over and we could have a disaster much worse, many times worse than Chernobyl. It’s like a sleeping dragon.”
Kaku said the reactors in Unit 2 have “completely liquefied. We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power, a 100 percent liquefaction of a uranium core.”
He said there are about 1,500 fuel rods in a pond high above the ground in what is left of plant four that were left exposed to the open air by the quake and subsequent explosions last April. They are being kept barely covered by water to keep them cooled. But if the water cannot be maintained and the rods go into meltdown, they could start a chain reaction that would set off another spent pond with 6,000 rods, and eventually start a meltdown of all of the 11,000 rods at the site.
Mitsuhel Murata, Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland, during a March public appearance, warned that he believed such a meltdown would cause “a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced.”
Murata stated on his website that the spent fuel rods at Fukushima contain about 336 million curies of long-lived radioactivity. At least a third of this is Cesium-137. “The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl and world-wide processing plants,” the Murata report stated.
He said the reators at Fukushima were operating for decades and in that time generated “some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on this planet.”
So why can’t the threat of such a global disaster be repaired? Japanese volunteers have been working on this problem, but the radiation levels are so high at the facility that it is virtually a death sentence for anyone to get close and remain there, even in protective suits, for more than a few seconds.
“The workers are like Samurai warriors, they’re like suicide workers,” Kaku said. “They can only go in, seconds to minutes at a time doing work, and then the next batch (of volunteer workers) has to come in.”
He said even robots fail at the site. This is because they operate on delicate micro-circuitry that cannot withstand the intense bombardment of radiation. “It will take years to invent a new generation of robots” able to work in these conditions, he said.
In a recent session we asked The Abba Father about the Japanese problem. He agreed that the situation there is a threat to “all humans on Earth” but said the disaster will be diverted by a decision to surround unit number two with “a mass of concrete” that will strengthen the cracking walls and keep the fuel rods in place for now.