Japanese reactor crisis

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Linus

Is this a good thing?

I was thinking about this on my drive in this morning. My honest answer is that I'm not sure. I think it is improvement while still not being out of the woods.

The reason I think it is improvement was that early in the week, we were looking at six on the scale. The scale that IAEA uses goes like this:

1. Anomaly
2. Incident
3. Serious incident
4. Accident with local consequences
5. Accident with wider consequences
6. Serious accident
7. Major accident

So, TMI was an accident with consequences for the region the plant was located in but not more widely. (And contra what you might have heard, most epidemiological studies have not demonstrated an increase in incidents of cancer.) Chernobyl was an accident with consequences far beyond the region the plant was located in. So since around Tuesday this event looked like a 6 and possibly a 7, if it's now been classified as a level 5 incident that means things are trending in the right direction. A level 5 is not good but it's a damn sight better than a level 7.

That said, there's all of that spent fuel which is now in a state we don't know about right now. I'm encouraged that there is now serious discussion on the ground of implementing the same solution used at Chernobyl--hit the place with a mixture of sand and boron and then encase the whole thing in concrete. Since the site is absolutely never coming back for power generation encasing all of the damaged reactors in concrete might be the best solution.

Cheers
Aj