With reactor #4 still teetering near total disaster, more and more information is filtering onto the net. The latest I have found is from the Nuclear Department of University California, Berkeley.
The piece concludes with this "... Many of our readers might find it difficult to appreciate the actual meaning of the figure, yet we can grasp what 85 times more Cesium-137 than the Chernobyl would mean. It would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival... "
Here are some fun facts:
- 11,421 rods total at Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant.
- 1,231 irradiated spent fuel rods in pool No. 4
- 100' ft. No. 4 pool above ground, damaged and exposed to open elements (spewing radioactive material).
- 37 million curies (~1.4E+18 Becquerel) of long-lived radioactivity.
- 134 million curies of Cesium-137 (~85 times Chernobyl).
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 reprocessing plants combined.
Read more here, please.
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