Nuclear Expert Predicts Parts of Japan Might Be Uninhabitable

Were Michael Mariotte some sort of hotel expert, and not the executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, his appearance today with Imus would have probably been a whole lot less depressing.
 
“If you’d asked me a week ago if it was even possible that you could have four nuclear meltdowns going on simultaneously, I would have said no,” Mariotte said, referring to the ongoing situation at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the aftermath of Friday’s massive earthquake. “Unfortunately, this week I can’t say that.”
 
To Mariotte, the most telling sign of the situation’s increasing seriousness is the evacuation of the plant’s workforce this morning. “They’ve gone from 800 people to 50 people,” he said. “So they’ve got 50 heroes out there.”
 
Those heroes are trying to cool the reactor’s fuel pools, which hold spent fuel rods, in an effort to avoid meltdowns in all four reactors at the same time. Should they fail, Mariotte warned, “It means there will be very high releases of radiation into the air, meaning that part of Japan will be probably uninhabitable for centuries.”
 
Imus was surprised to hear that parts of the country could be so totally devastated by radiation exposure, but Mariotte reminded him that areas of Ukraine and Belarus remain uninhabitable more than 20 years after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident there, which bears some resemblance to the situation in Japan.
 
“The containment system at Chernobyl was somewhat similar to the containment system at these reactors,” Mariotte said. “But it was not particularly robust, and I don’t think any containment would have withstood the explosion of Chernobyl. We’re not having that kind of explosion in this case.”
 
But with several containment vessels already lost at Fukushima, the only structure left to rely on for protection is a thick steel liner. “The question is, can it withstand temperatures that are likely to get up into the 5,000 degree range?” Mariotte said. “My experience tells me that if they can’t cool these reactors, eventually containments are going to fail.”
 
While Mariotte thinks the Japanese government and officials from The Tokyo Electric Power Company were initially minimizing the potential for nuclear disaster, he believes their recent statements have been more realistic. But Mariotte remains concerned with the notable lack of improvement in the situation. “It just continues to deteriorate,” he said.
 
It seems to him that nobody knows what to do. “They don’t have any power to run the cooling system,” he said. “And if you can’t cool a reactor, it’s going to melt. And if you can’t keep the fuel cool, they’re eventually going to boil off, and the radiation’s going to get out.”
 
He recommended the U.S government begin installing radiation monitoring systems on the West Coast of this country to track levels as the radiation crosses the Pacific Ocean. “In the days to come, what’s important to know is how much that’s going to be, and whether there are any protective actions that might be appropriate,” Mariotte said.
 
As for how this story ends, Mariotte stressed the importance of monitoring radiation levels at the gate of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. “They have gone down a little bit over the course of the day,” he noted. “If that continues, that will be a hopeful sign.”
 
Here’s hoping.
 
-Julie Kanfer