A remarkable advance in actinide separations in used nuclear fuel has been discovered.

[NNadir]

7. I am very conscious of nuclear energy as a factor in our lives.

I've spent more than thirty years in the primary scientific literature reading all about it, and have many thousands of scientific papers in my files on the subject.

Nuclear energy saves lives, and frankly, I suspect that more people have died from the air pollution that resulted from running computers to complain (or worry) about Fukushima than have actually died from radiation.

Seven million people die each year from air pollution. ( Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240)

This means that every seven or eight years, more people die from air pollution than died from all of the genocide, bombing, combat, and deprivation associated with World War II.

I generally know what kind of question I'm being asked when someone says "'They' don't know...." Who exactly are "they?" Do you, or the authors of the website know everything everyone anywhere knows about the reactor cores at Fukushima?

In 1988, two years after Chernobyl (about which I'm often asked) 167 oil workers were instantly vaporized on the Alpha Piper oil platform. Piper Alpha A similar event in the Gulf of Mexico, Deepwater Horizon, spread million ton quantities of carcinogenic petroleum over huge areas of the Gulf. Is there a "they" who know how to keep the benzene from the disaster from killing people?

In fact, pumping gasoline at a gas station involves exposures to carcinogens, as anyone can see if one pumps gas in California, where the Proposition "so and so" requires the true statement that "California" knows that gasoline, in particular the copious amounts of benzene in it, is a carcinogen. People generally ignore these signs, but they don't ignore the bogeyman "Fukushima" even though in comparison to petroleum, all of the nuclear accidents associated with more than half a century of commercial nuclear operations are, frankly, trivial.

The website to which you have linked is an anti-nuclear website designed to utilize specious scare tactics. The point of these web-based scare tactic websites is claim that nuclear energy is not perfect, and not without risk, which of course, it isn't. However nuclear energy need not be perfect and without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

I began my nuclear energy research when Chernobyl blew up. I was an idiotic nuclear opponent at the time, but I justify my ignorance at that time by noting that previous to Chernobyl there was no experimental evidence of what the worst case for the destruction of a nuclear plant was. Because I was "concerned" about nuclear energy, and only relied on pop literature produced by say, the morons at "The Union of Concerned Scientists" (of which I was member at the time, even though my membership required me to provide no information proving that I was, in fact, a scientist) I expected millions of deaths from Chernobyl.

In the last 30 years, I must have read tens of thousands of pages of information about Chernobyl and Fukushima. You can do the same thing I did. To do this, I simply dragged my ass to university libraries, found out at each library to which I went about their policies for "guest users" and where necessary, paid the fees, and um, read all about many highly technical issues concerning nuclear energy, changing many of my ideas about many of the particulars of the technology, but coming to the conclusion that overall, this is the only technology that has a shot of saving humanity from itself.

I am not in a position where I feel obligated to answer your question in any detail about what "they" know about the status of the core of the Fukushima reactors. Twenty five thousand people died in the Sendai earthquake that also destroyed the reactors. They were killed by buildings, cars, drowning, etc because they lived in a coastal city at low elevation. In 2004, roughly a quarter of a million people, mostly in Indonesia, died in roughly the same way as the overwhelming number of people who died from the Sendai earthquake. Almost no one died from radiation at Fukushima. How come we don't have the same level of concern as we have for the reactors for, um, coastal cities?

Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent?

I know that the most serious energy disaster before humanity is climate change, followed by the toxicology associated with the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels and biomass, followed by the toxicology of dangerous fossil fuel mining. To my mind, based on decades of autodidactic self education, I've concluded that nuclear energy is the last, best hope for humanity. Nuclear energy is not risk free, but it's risks are trivial compared to everything else.

Sorry, but I'm not going to dignify your question with an answer.

Have a very nice day tomorrow.