TV: “Japan’s worst nuclear nightmare” — Yale Professor: Fukushima Unit 4 pool “has me very scared”
One slip-up in the latest step to decommission Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant could trigger a "monumental" chain reaction, experts warn.
Within days, Fukushima nuclear plant operators will begin what is being described as the most dangerous phase of the decommissioning process so far.
In an operation never before attempted, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) will start removing 1,331 highly radioactive used fuel assemblies from a deep pool which sits high above the ground in a shattered reactor building.
The Fukushima nuclear plant's reactors were sent into meltdown by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011 in the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Experts around the world have warned ever since that the fuel pool is in a precarious state - vulnerable to collapsing in another big earthquake.
Yale University professor Charles Perrow wrote about the number 4 fuel pool this year in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
He said one pool contains 10 times the amount of radioactive caesium present in the Chernobyl disaster and warned one slip-up with the removal could trigger a chain reaction.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-31/fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-tepco-tokyo/5059514
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