Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Dr. Strangelove would be proud...


Look at the area of reactor unit 3, which I have cropped and enlarged in the second screenshot (taken from the first):


Feb 2, 2016 23:08


The purplish discoloration visible above but not visible in the screenshot taken a moment later (below) is in the vicinity of unit 3, the unit at Daiichi that was running MOX (mixed oxide plutonium-uranium fuel) at the time of the disaster:


Unit 3 produces a steady stream of discoloration and "sparks" that have been monitored by the webcam watchers since the cams went online.

The public narrative about Fukushima Daiichi is strangely missing information about what really happened at unit 3 and the state of that unit's reactor core today. If you recall, the explosion at unit 3 produced a cloud that resembled the type of cloud produced by nuclear explosions.

Despite the terrible damage and radiation contamination wrought by unit 3, Japan insists on resuming its troubled pluthermal program, which is based on the reprocessing of uranium fuel and the production of MOX fuel to be used in light water reactors.

MOX fuel burns hotter and presents more operational and contamination risks. Despite these obvious liabilities, the LDP is committed to its pluthermal program (with strong US support).

Indeed, the LDP has pushed the pluthermal program forward in reactor re-starts occurring across the country despite the fact that re-starting idled reactors is an inherently dangerous process:

KEPCO begins to insert nuclear fuel into No. 4 reactor at Takahama plant, The Mainchi, February 1, 2016, http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160201/p2a/00m/0na/018000c

Kansai Electric Power Co. (KEPCO) began on Jan. 31 to insert fuel rods into the No. 4 reactor at its Takahama Nuclear Power Plant in preparation to restart the unit, company officials said.

The move follows the resumption of operations at the plant's No. 3 reactor on Jan. 29.

The utility will insert 157 fuel rods, each measuring 21 centimeters by 21 centimeters and 4.1 meters long, into the reactor by Feb. 3 and plans to reactivate the unit in late February. Four of the 157 fuel rods are so-called mixed oxide (MOX) fuel containing plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel and mixed with uranium.
In my opinion, the reason this is occurring is because Japan's pluthermal program has been linked to its "national security." That is, plutonium is key to the LDP's national security program so the pluthermal program will remain in place despite obvious risks.

The Rokkasho re-processing plant in Japan is located on an earthquake fault. Experts have warned that a disaster at the site could produce lethal clouds of chemicals and radiation. Yet, Japan, with the strong support of US officials (Poneman) is going ahead with plans to reprocess uranium fuel to extract still more plutonium at Rokkasho. Japan already possesses more plutonium than most countries in the world, despite lacking a (officially acknowledged) nuclear weapons program.

We live in a world run by sociopaths.



6 comments:

  1. Carl Grossman has been taling about plutonium on the space shuttle challenger that exploded. Thiw article was censored when it first came out. http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/kg8801tn.htm

    Plutonium is awful stuff. Anyone have to work around it or reprocessing it is in trouble. How stupid and crazy can people be?

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  2. Sociopaths! One hundred years ago, at the start of the Great War, Americans of Anglo Saxon descent were beginning to use various words and phrases to characterize Germans/Krauts--and images such as babies skewered by bayonets. At one end of Christianity, where brimstone and hell fire were frequent usages, I suppose the term was great sinners or operating under the influence of Satan. Main stream Christians probably settled for evil doers; some Catholics might have thought those possessed by demons. In any case we now use the term psychopath or sociopath and have somewhat scientific definitions. Still it is hard to find just the expression for these people who seem to lack foresight as well as compassion. The genocidists seem exceptionally busy these days. While we might be shocked by photos of soldiers wearing necklaces of ears, still we understand the environments they have been thrust into. But these technocratic sociopaths generally live a luxurious life. Dirty hands but also now hands and arms drenched in blood. Like the men who killed the buffaloes and the passenger pigeons, they have separated themselves from what they murder in an orgy of destruction and see no connection to others. Somehow mere wealth has made of them a new species which is superior and can treat regular humans as subhumans. We are now just Palestinians and our lives are a Gaza. Who knows what it is like to target practice on children and shoot them between the eyes? We can easily identify with the newly dead children but balk at grasping the depravity of the shooters.
    One of Agamemnon's relatives as an act of revenge invited a person to a meal where at the man's children were slaughtered and served for the main course. Now this is the sort of type we are dealing with. Who would serve up one's child at meal time . . . Hecuba, a tragedy by Euripides, entails such misery and atrocity that it was for long avoided by polite, educated society--and probably still not popular. This is where we have to look to see the sociopaths at work. Modern humanism has been seduced into blindness; we need Greek eyes for this on going calamity.

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  3. there just might be more insanity on this planet than this planet can handle... http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/editorial/AJ201601280025 "The first thing to point out about the plan to bring the reactor at the Takahama plant back on stream is that the 'safety first' principle has been ignored." what in the world are they thinking of ? the public risk factor, obviously not

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  4. If another mox reactor blows and melts down in japan, most of ajapan wil be completely saturated with radioisotopes and uninhabitable. It is worse now in places like Korea and Taiwan than we know, from Fukushima. Extreme nihilistic criminal activity.

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  5. That was an eloquent and almost poetic rant William. Thanks

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  6. This is what happens to the people who really have to handle the plutonium and radioactive crud. http://nuclear-news.net/2015/12/30/page/2/
    The nuclear scientists and politicians who lie about plutonium and nuclear energy are far removed from the technicians who get cancer from this crud. Far removed from all the waste generated. They lie about mox explosions.

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