America's Nuclear Spent-Fuel Time Bombs - Robert Alvarez

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/americas_nuclear_spent-fuel_time_bombs

June 6, 2011 · By Robert Alvarez
Japan's nuclear disaster should serve as a wake-up call for the United States.

Now that many Americans have stopped paying attention to Japan's nuclear catastrophe, shocking new details about its severity are finally coming to light.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently revealed that the cores of three of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station's reactors started to melt within hours after the loss of offsite power, right after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Tokyo Electric Power, which owns the wrecked reactors, has announced that the accident probably released more radioactivity into the environment than the Chernobyl debacle. That would make it the worst nuclear accident on record. Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 373 square miles near the power station — an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan — may now be uninhabitable.

The Fukushima accident should be a wakeup call for the United States to address the hazards posed by our own dangerous spent fuel pools at nuclear reactors. They are a time bomb. America's reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production.


Nearly 40 percent of the radioactivity in U.S. spent fuel is cesium-137. The 4.5 billion curies of radioactive cesium in U.S. spent reactor fuel is roughly 20 times more than what all worldwide atmospheric nuclear weapons tests released. The United States has 31 boiling water reactors (BWR) with pools elevated several stories above ground, similar to those at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station. Consider this: the pool at the Vermont Yankee reactor, a BWR Mark I (the same design as the four crippled Fukushima nuclear reactors), currently holds nearly three times the amount of spent fuel stored at Dai-Ichi's Unit 4 reactor.

who think nuclear is a bad idea?

That seems as good a recommendation for it as any. :thumbsup:

Something to do with putting down those with more credentials that thee?