Friday, Apr 19th
Last update07:17:01 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
Radioactive tritium has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites of commercial nuclear power sites in the United States, investigations have shown.
According to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission records, tritium -- a radioactive form of hydrogen -- has leaked through corroded pipes into the ground and that the number and severity of the leaks are escalating, The Washington Post reported.
The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats — and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.
Delegates called for urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health.
The report summary (released 21 June 2011) outlines the main findings and recommendations. The full report will be released at a later date.
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
Ft. Calhoun is the designated spent fuel storage facility for the entire state of Nebraska...and maybe for more than one state.
Calhoun stores its spent fuel in ground-level pools which are underwater anyway - but they are open at the top. When the Missouri river pours in there, it's going to make Fukushima look like an x-ray. But that's not all. There are a LOT of nuclear plants on both the Missouri and Mississippi and they can all go to hell fast.
In the desert of Nevada, a hundred miles from Las Vegas, engineers have drilled a tunnel through the heart of Yucca Mountain. The hole is 25 feet wide and five miles long. It’s dark in there. The light bulbs have been removed. The ventilation has been turned off. There’s nothing inside but some rusting rails that were supposed to carry 70,000 tons of nuclear waste to a permanent grave.
Outside, the gates are locked. When three members of Congress visited in March, the federal government spent $15,000 just to reopen the place for a few hours.
Recent readings taken roughly 19 miles out to sea from the Fukushima nuclear power facility in Japan have revealed radioisotope levels ten times higher than those measured in the Baltic and Black Seas after the massive Chernobyl disaster. Because Fukushima is much closer to water than the Chernobyl plant is, the ongoing fallout there is shaping up to be far worse than Chernobyl, at least as far as the world's oceans are concerned, and time will tell just how devastating this massive disaster will be on the entire world as radiation continues to circulate around the globe.
The nuclear fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has melted through the base of the pressure vessels and is pooling in the outer containment vessels, according to a report by the Japanese government.
The radiation will also have contaminated the soil and plant and animal life around the facility, making the task of cleaning up more difficult and expensive, as well as taking longer.
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