The Fukushima Disaster

We noted a few days after the Japanese earthquake that the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima dwarfs that at Chernobyl … and that the cesium fallout from Fukushima already rivaled Chernobyl (we also noted that Fukushima radiation could end up on the West Coast of North America. And see this.).

The next month, we pointed out that Tepco admitted that the radiation from Fukushima could exceed that from Chernobyl.

And that Fukushima’s reactors had actually suffered something much worse than a total meltdown: nuclear melt-throughs, where the nuclear fuel melted through the containment vessels and into the ground. A few months later, we reported that radiation will pollute the area around Chernobyl for 5 to 10 times longer than models predicted – between 180 and 320 years.

The following year, we pointed out that the operator of the Fukushima plant admitted that they couldn’t find the melted fuel from Fukushima reactor number 2 … and that the technology doesn’t yet even exist to clean up Fukushima.

Highest Radiation Level At Fukushima Now Dwarfs That At Chernobyl

The highest radiation levels ever measured at Chernobyl were 300 sieverts per hour … an incomprehensibly high dose which can kill a man almost instantly.

To put this in perspective, radiation is usually measured in thousandths of a sievert, called millisieverts. For example, most people receive around 2.4 millisieverts per year from background radiation, or only 0.0002739726 per hour.

But a radiation level of 530 sieverts per hour has just been measured at Fukushima’s number 2 reactor.

This new record at Fukushima is 70% higher than that of Chernobyl. (The highest level previously measured at Fukushima was 73 sieverts per hour, in March 2012.)

Postscript: For background on how this could have happened, see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.