Let's go over the basics again folks:

More bad news coming from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. While speaking to Swiss lawmakers last month - Japan's former ambassador to Switzerland, Mitsuhei Murata, warned that if the building housing reactor four at the plant were to collapse - as many officials fear might happen - then it would lead to a global catastrophe like the world has never seen before. As Reader Supported News reports - a former official with the U.S. Department of Energy commented on the consequences of a building collapse around reactor four saying, "If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident." And if that fire were to consume the thousands of other radioactive spent fuel rods at the Fukushima plant - then the radiological event could be 85-times greater than the Chernobyl disaster. So just how dangerous is the situation still at the Fukushima plant - and what are the consequences for the United States? Kevin Kamps if back - he is the Nuclear Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear.

Published on Apr 19, 2012 by TheBigPictureRT



*Note: Single radiation dose of 2,000 millisieverts (200,000 millirems) and above causes serious illness. See also exposure list below.
Half-life of some radioactive elements

[NOTE: Half-life is the time taken for a radioactive substance to decay by half.] * Cesium-134 ~ 2 years * Cesium-137 ~ 30 years * Iodine-131 ~ 8 days * Plutonium-239 ~ 24,200 years * Ruthenium-103 ~ 39 days [Ruthenium is a fission product of uranium-235.] * Ruthenium-106 ~ 374 days * Strontium-90 ~ 28.85 years [Strontium-90 is a product of nuclear fission and is found in large amounts in spent nuclear fuel and in radioactive waste from nuclear reactors.] * Uranium-234 ~ 246,000 years * Uranium-235 ~ 703.8 million years * Uranium-238 ~ 4.468 billion years


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