NUCLEAR EXPERT: IODINE -131 IN NO. 4 POOL SUGGESTS THAT “SPENT FUEL HAS STARTED ITS OWN CHAIN REACTION"

In unit 1, there’s so much mud in the reactor that they can’t get water into the core, which they would normally need to do to prevent it from overheating and melting down. Instead, it appears that they are flooding it from the outside, and cooling it that way.

That’s working, except that the containment structure on unit 1 was not designed to handle all the excess weight from the water. If there’s an earthquake — not a magnitude 9 on the Richter scale, like the one that kicked off the accident, but one just over 7 — the containment could fail.

If that happens, unit 1 could become a Chernobyl on its own.

But my biggest fear right now is the unit 4 spent fuel pool — the area outside the containment where they store the degraded but still-radioactive fuel that they’re no longer using to power the reactor. That worries me a lot.

There was a report this week that they found iodine-131 in that fuel pool. Iodine-131 can only come from nuclear fission, and because it has a short life, it disappears after about 80 days.

In other words, the presence of iodine-131 suggests that the spent fuel has started its own chain reaction without any human intervention.

[link to www.globalpost.com]