Lethal Radiation now outside Plant Boundary – Multiple Containment Breaches confirmed March 28, 2011

In this interview from Saturday, Candy Crowley makes one mistake, quoting a report, current as of when she stated it, that radiation on site was “10 million times” above normal. That erroneous number has since been lowered to a mere 100,000 times normal.

The rest of the interview is still current, and with todays news, maybe even more urgent.

From Bloomberg:

Radiation levels that can prove fatal were detected outside reactor buildings at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant for the first time, complicating efforts to contain the worst disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Water in an underground trench outside the No. 2 reactor had levels exceeding 1 sievert an hour, a spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. told reporters in the capital yesterday. Exposure to that dose for 30 minutes would trigger nausea and four hours might lead to death within two months, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. —

“There’s not much good news right now,” said Gennady Pshakin, a former IAEA official based in Obninsk, the site ofRussia’s first nuclear power plant. “There’re questions arising on how much fuel will leak out, what isotopes will be carried and how quickly they will settle. It’s becoming less predictable.”

TEPCO is now, apparently, admitting that there may be core breaches at 3 of the afflicted reactors.

This and more important items, especially if you know anyone in China or Korea, below the fold…

Here’s a translation from Asahi Shinbun:

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) admitted to the possibility in its early March 28 press conference that the steel Reactor Pressure Vessels that hold nuclear fuel rods in the Reactors 1, 2, 3 at Fukushima I Nuclear Plant may have broken. TEPCO explained the situation “Imagine there’s a hole.” Because of this “hole”, contaminated water that’s been poured into the Pressure Vessels to cool the fuel rods continues to leak, it is assumed. In the Reactors 1, 2, and 3, the water level within the Pressure Vessels are not rising as much as desired. TEPCO admitted in the March 28 press conference that the reason why the Pressure Vessels haven’t been filled with water was “probably a hole near the bottom, that’s the image we have”. Asked why there was a hole, TEPCO answered they did not know.

If you know anyone in Korea, or China, tell them to avoid dairy products, and listen carefully to news about the safety of any agricultural products.

Kyodo News:

BEIJING, March 28, Kyodo China has detected a tiny amount of radioactive material in the air over the nation’s southeastern coastal areas, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday. Xinhua quoted China’s Nuclear Emergency Coordination Commission as saying that the radioactive level detected does not affect human health and no preventive measures are necessary. The radioactive material is believed to have drifted from Japan as a result of radiation leaking from the earthquake-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex. China detected low levels of radioactive iodine-131 in the air over Heilongjiang Province in the northeast for the second day on Sunday, Xinhua said, adding that public health and the environment were not affected. Chinese monitoring stations detected radioactive material in the air for the first time on Saturday, according to China’s Nuclear Emergency Coordination Commission.