Eugene Robinson: Spent Fuel’s Toxic Legacy

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from truthdig:




Spent Fuel’s Toxic Legacy
Posted on Mar 17, 2011

By Eugene Robinson


The most urgent focus of Japan’s worsening nuclear crisis is the threat from radioactive fuel that has already been used in the Fukushima Daiichi reactors and awaits disposal. In the United States, the nuclear industry has amassed about 70,000 tons of such potentially deadly waste material—and we have nowhere to put it.

U.S. officials’ increasingly dire assessment of the situation in Japan stems largely from the fact that spent fuel rods—which were stored in pools of water to keep them cool—have apparently become uncovered. The material is “cool” only in the relative sense: Once exposed to air, the fuel rods rapidly heat up and release large amounts of radiation.

This is just one of several calamitous system failures at the Fukushima plant, but it is the most immediately perilous. For days, Japanese officials denied that there was any problem with the spent-fuel pools, which are located in the same structures that house the reactors. On Thursday, however, authorities acknowledged the seriousness of the situation and began doing everything they could to address it.

They even used helicopters to scoop up buckets of seawater and try to dump it onto the spent fuel rods in two of the plant’s six reactors. But the rods were giving off so much radiation that chopper pilots, for their own safety, had to release the water from a great height. Almost all of it missed, and the effort was halted after just four passes. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/spent_fuels_toxic_legacy_20110317/