The situation at Fukushima seems dire if even Reuters started portioning bad news. What upsets me most is that 1.5 year after the accident there is no permanent solution – not even proposed, let alone implemented like it was done in the case of Chernobyl. They continue holding onto the stop-gap measures, pumping the cooling water into the nuclear fuel melt and filling new and new tanks with that used water at a rate where they barely keep up assembling these tanks. Which then leak…I wonder, has Japanese Government asked assistance from Russians? Remember, they are the only nation that has experience of managing a nuclear crisis of similar scale. And events on the ground show, russians dealt with Chernobyl better than Japanese are doing with Fukushima… Of course, a complication is that Fukushima has 400 tons of nuclear fuel to take care of – ten times the amount Chernobyl had… Nevertheless, in the wake of Chernobyl Russians have incorporated the “controlled meltdown” option in the design of their water moderated reactors. If I understand this correctly, they simply fill a vessel unnderneath the reactor with some kind of steel shot, probably mixed with cadmium, so that if nothing else works fuel melts into this metal, they mix together and nuclear reaction stops. I wonder, perhaps they could design something to do similar controlled meltdowns at Fukushima?
