A little bit of good news coming out of Japan, a radioactive leak that was dumping into the Pacific Ocean has been stopped according to the BBC. Chemical agents were were injected to solidify the soil at the source of the leak. That's basically where the good news ends though, because there is now a build-up of hydrogen in the No. 1 reactor. They're looking into pumping nitrogen into the reactor to stop the expansion of hydrogen but that has yet to be decided. Also, they have found that the fish in the ocean south of Fukushima to contain high levels of radioactive iodine, about twice the legal limit for vegetables.
Oh... and Fukushima had to be evacuated because of a 7.1 earthquake on April 7. Luckily there was no obvious damage. [1]
I am glad that they finally have the contaminated material contained to the sight, but there is a bigger problem in that they don't exactly know where that contamination came from. The radiation being detected in the ocean is due largely to released controls of low level contaminated water. They are pumping this out to sea to make room in their storage tanks for the more highly contaminated water. As far as the hydrogen goes, I don't think we will see another explosion from it as the last explosions were a result of the releases being a necessary measure to keep control of the reactor. Now that the reactors are more or less under control, they have other options as you have mentioned here to keep another explosion from happening. I that that this is what they are worrying about now is good news in itself. It means that the worst is passed...aka the reactors have cooling to them and we aren't going to see anything like the China syndrome. Though this stuff sounds really bad, it is not near as bad as it was a couple of weeks ago. They are now transitioning into the cleanup mode, which is good news for us. I suspect we are going to hear a lot more about the releases over the next few weeks as they work to cleanup. I would venture to guess what we are going to hear about has already happened. But hey, who really knows?
ReplyDeleteAlso, you say that the fish had twice the legal limit for vegetables? Do they not have a legal limit on fish? I am pretty sure the body absorbs fish differently than vegetables so the limits would be different?