Is Fukushima Nuke Disaster A Threat To The Planet?

By James Donahue

Some people believe the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster caused by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011 remains an even worse disaster waiting to happen. Of the four damaged plants at the site, reactor 4 appears to be in such a precarious state that another earthquake could set off a chain reaction that would make the entire Northern Hemisphere of the world uninhabitable.

This was the warning issued by Mitsuhei Murata, former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland and Senegal, and executive director for the Japan Society for Global System and Ethics.

The plant owners, Tokyo Electric Power Company, on the other hand is assuring us that the emergency at the plant is contained and people have nothing to worry about.

So what is the potential danger at Fukushima and why is Murata expressing so much concern?

Mike Adams, editor of Natural News, quoted the following from Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U. S. Department of Energy:

The No. 4 pool (for cooling 1,535 spent radioactive fuel rods) hangs about 100 feet above ground, and is so structurally damaged and exposed to open elements that it could collapse. If this were to happen, Alvarez said "this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.

"The infrastructure to safely remove this material was destroyed as it was at the other three reactors. Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming re-construction effort and will be charting in unknown waters."

While Alvarez is guessing a release of ten-times the Cesium-137 released at Chernobyl, others say it could be up to 85 times that amount. "Nobody is 100 percent certain of what would actually occur because this has never happened before. We are in uncharted territory as a civilization, facing a unique and imminent threat to our continued survival."

Adams sums up the Fukushima situation as a potential disaster still poised to happen, without anybody coming up with solutions to fixing this problem. He wrote:

--The infrastructure to safely remove the radioactive spent fuel rods was destroyed in all four reactors. If Reactor 4 explodes, the fire is sure to spread to all of the other reactors igniting a total of 11,421 rods contained in six reactors standing side-by-side at the Fukushima Daiichi site.

--These old reactors have been operating for decades and generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on earth. The release of this amount of Cesium-137 would "destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is an issue of human survival," Murata was quoted as saying.

Why hasn’t this been a major news story? Adams wrote that "the mainstream media is, in large part, owned by General Electric, the very company that designed the Fukushima reactors. It is clear that GE is diligently running a total blackout on this news in order to cover its own ass and prevent people from asking questions about the faulty engineering and nuclear facility site selection that led to this catastrophe."