"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Alternet has an interview with:
Arnold 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.
The first quote above, and the following are some of the salient quotes. Please read the article in its entirety.Full Meltdown: Fukushima Called the 'Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in the History of Mankind'
"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor.
"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."
And today, as this article is already passed by the events on the ground,Japan Plant Clean-Up Suspended Due To Rising Radiation Levels
TOKYO, Jun 18 (Reuters) - The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, said on Saturday it had suspended an operation to clean up radioactive water only hours after it had begun as radiation levels rose faster than expected.
"The level of radiation at a machine to absorb caesium has risen faster than our initial projections," said a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co .
The plan had got underway on Friday after being delayed by a series of glitches.
Officials had said earlier this week that large and growing pools of radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were in danger of spilling into the sea within a week unless action was taken quickly.
If its too hot to work on, and it its getting worse, and they can see the crises (multiple crisis events) as they grow: "within a week" then further bad news, more radiation, more evacuation, more areas sealed off, will be Headlines in mere days.
Please, read both articles.