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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Post-Crash Index-Moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (12089)	3/16/2011 2:23:11 PM
From: Les H	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 119360

US military preparing for a worst-case scenario stripes.com Nuclear scientists use the term “core-on-the-floor” to describe radioactive fuel burning through protective containment layers, hitting groundwater and bursting into the atmosphere in a huge steam explosion, spreading clouds of radioactive gas and dust. It’s never happened before, but experts fear it may soon become reality in one or more reactors at the Fukushima nuclear complex, which was gravely damaged in last Friday’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami. “We are right now closer to core-on-the-floor than at any time in the history of nuclear reactors,” said Kenneth Bergeron, a former Sandia National Laboratory researcher who spent his career simulating such meltdowns, including in reactors of the type at the Fukushima plant. Even in such a scenario, only people very near the plant — and well inside the 12-mile exclusion zone the Japanese government has set up — would be in danger of burns and other acute radiation effects, experts say. But on U.S. bases hundreds of miles away, people still would need to take quick steps to limit exposure or else risk long-term cancer effects. In the most devastating nuclear accident to date, at Chernobyl, there was no meltdown. Instead, the reactor exploded and burned for days, hurling radioactive dust laced with cesium, strontium, and radioactive iodine high into the air, which later menaced broad swaths of Europe as the materials fell back to Earth. If one or more of the Fukushima reactor cores melt out of their containment vessels, the release could be smaller and less violent. But whether the effects would be less risky than Chernobyl, which officials estimate killed 50 people initially and will eventually lead to the cancer deaths of thousands, is an open question. Fukushima “could even be more dangerous, depending on wind and weather,” said Bergeron, who is now a nuclear safety consultant and writer. Large concentrations of radioactive material were found hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl’s ground zero, said Mettler, who, as the U.S. representative on radiation danger to the United Nations, was deeply involved with Chernobyl. “What tends to go out are the things that are volatile, or gases,” he said. “Cesium 137 can easily go hundreds of miles.” That means they could hit U.S. bases after a meltdown. Defense Department policies require commanders to have emergency procedures for distributing potassium iodide and Prussian blue, medications that block the uptake of radioactive iodine and cesium, respectively.