In early August,an actual Fukushima worker emailed to his friends.
“A lot of the cracks came up in the ground,massive steam is coming up from there.It’s too smoggy here,can’t see a thing.It seems like nuclear reaction is happening underground.Now we are evacuating.Watch out for the direction of wind.”
Whistle-blower in the gov
“I’ve heard that steam is coming up from the cracks in the ground.We are afraid of it.”
Another Fukushima worker,
“Near the reactors,there are a lot of the cracks in the ground,steam splashed out from there sometimes.and we have detected 10Sv/h at 6 places unlike gov’s announcement.”
In Fukushima plants,ground is cracking and radioactive steam is splashing out from the cracks.
This has been known among our Japanese community,but we were not sure if it was really true. We did not want to go over the top.
We couldn’t trust it fully because of tweets of another nuc worker. He’s a well known person on Twitter.
He kept stating ,he hasn’t heard of such a thing.
However,this evening,Tepco “confessed” a new fact.
That’s there is a huge pool on the basement floor of Fukushima,which is shared by units 1~4. They stock 6400 nuclear spent fuel rods in it,and groundwater is flowing into the pool through broken duct.
Now the massively contaminated water is in it at least 9.0t.
6400 fuel rods is about 140% of the total fuel rods in the reactors.
Actually Fukushima nuc plants are built on underground water vein,they always needed to pomp up groundwater. However,because of the accident,they stopped pomp up the water.This fact has not been published yet.
They say Tepco “found” this trouble on 8/13,but they can’t not know the fact since the very beginning of the accident.
Massive steam might have something to do with this.
Possibility 1)
Melt-out fuel rods are reacting underground and keep having hydrovolcanic explosion with groundwater.
Possibility 2)
6400 spent fuel rods are boiling the ground water and it splashes steam from the cracks.
Possilibity 3)
Both.
As a matter of fact,most of the aftershocks have epicenter in Fukushima,just around the nuclear plants.
and Fukushima live camera sometimes misses Units because of the too thick smog.
It’s above 30C in Fukushima. Considering the heat,the steam must be really thick.
I wonder what would happen in winter.