Sorry to disappoint you:
If you read between the lines, they are practically admitting that the chernobyl case already has happened. I am currently listening to the latest press conference of the government spokesman, and he reports (more or less):
1. Fire in reactor #4
2. Reactor #2 blew up
3. Reactors #1 and #3 are being moderately cooled by sea water injection up
For me the fire in #4 is the worst news, because this reactor ws not working at the time of the earthquake and has no combustion rods deployed, those are stored in a pool outside the containment vessel. A fire there means that probably the inactive rods circonium coating reacted with oxygen and so producied the fire. As the inactive rods are not within the containment vessel and normally completely covered with water in the pool we can speculate that this pools water level sank (evaporation) and now with the fire massive quantities of radioactive material are set free.
Radiation level around the plant has risen to the
milisievert range (which is 1000x the level of the
microsievert range that we were listening about yesterday), and this is a serious indicator of radioactive combustible being exposed to the outside. As far as I understand there is a high probability that the #2 containment vessel has been damaged in the explosion, which is the 2nd really bad news and qualifies for the Chernobil scenario just by itself.
Dont expect this to become better, once this stage is reached even working on the reactors 1-3 or fighting the fire in #4 becomes a very challenging task, humans may only be exposed for very short times to those radiation levels: The radiation dose limit of a nuclear energy worker is 20 miliSieverts
per year, the reported level
now is 400 miliSieverts
per hour. Make you calculation: Legally you may work there for 3 minutes before passing the allowed radiation exposure.
So, from my POV we have now reached or even passed the Chernobyl scenario, even if a core meltdown has not happened (yet) and definitely wont happen in #4 (as it was inoperative).
Another problem is the combustible used: I have heard (dont recall where, so no source) that the combustible in those reactors is of an experimental nature, a mix of uranium AND plutonium (versus the normal straight uranium filling), and - contrary to uranium - plutonium apart from being radioative is also highly poisenous, really bad thing if set free.
20 km around the plant now have been evacuated, people living in a radius of 30 km of the plant are urged to decon and not leave their houses anymore. Tokyo is 12 hours windwards of the plant, a logistic nightmare if the worst should happen (meldown of one or more cores and damage to the stainless steel containment vessels). I dont even want to imagine the scenario where Tokyo cannot be lived in for the next 20.000 years or so, that would be the end of Japan and probably the death blow to oour economy in general.
Live News feed in English:
http://wwitv.com/tv_channels/6810.htm
Rattler
