Can We Stop With the Silly Now Please?

The scaremongering is still going on with regard to the Fukushima plant.
But the latest news appears to quash any of the nonsense that people were running for months after the incident — that the cores of the reactors that melted down had breached the containment.
Nope.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. says solidified lava-like rocks heaped up from the bottom inside of a main structure called the pedestal that sits underneath the core inside the primary containment vessel of Fukushima’s Unit 3 reactor. Experts believe the melted fuel fell to the chamber’s bottom and is now submerged by radioactive water.
That would be where you’d expect it to be. The reason for all the screaming harpy stuff is that thus far they hadn’t found it (which means it could have remained inside the pressure vessel itself, and a good part of it probably is.)
This also explains the radiation readings in the containment building and their “lumpiness”; in some places levels in the 100-500 Sievert range have been recorded or estimated (levels at that degree are high enough that accurate measurement is basically impossible — not that it really matters much) in some places, where in others it’s in the 1-10 Sievert range in the same containment. There are many technical reasons why this happens (you can actually get “shine” effects with radiation just like sun will reflect off water, for example, while if your dosimeter is behind a solid metal or concrete object it provides very material shielding, etc.) all of which is consistent with the containment doing exactly what it’s designed to do in a situation like this.

This post was published at Market-Ticker on 2017-07-24.