Friday, September 28, 2012

Sometimes It's Helpful To Go Back and Read What the Experts Were Saying About Fukushima Over 1 Year Ago



JUNE 10, 2011 Democracy Now Interview: Japan Admits 3 Nuclear Meltdowns, More Radiation Leaked into Sea; U.S. Nuclear Waste Poses Deadly Risks http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/10/as_japan_nuclear_crisis_worsens_citizen


ROBERT ALVAREZ: Well, I think it means that the accident was much more prompt and severe, and its radiological consequences are going to be — unfold in a more serious way. As you mentioned earlier, the contamination of land nearby, or not so nearby, is proving to be quite extensive. The reports that I’ve seen suggest that land contamination, in terms of areas that are technically uninhabitable because of cesium-137 contamination, is roughly 600 square kilometers, or about 17 times the size of Manhattan Island....

And if you watched the accident unfold at the Daiichi station, the explosions basically showed you that the spent fuel pools were exposed to the open sky. We, in the United States, are currently storing on the order of three to four, five times more radioactivity in our pools than in Japan, and that the amount of radioactivity that we are storing in unsafe, vulnerable pools constitutes the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet....

.... — the Soviet Union and Russia basically have claimed that about 50 million curies of radioactivity were released to the environment — this is roughly comparable to what the Japanese government has currently admitted — and that this site continues to release significant amount of radiation in the atmosphere, nowhere near as large as it did during the first week or two, but it’s still quite significant.... 

[read the entire interview]
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/10/as_japan_nuclear_crisis_worsens_citizen

 

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