If you are in Hawaii, make immediate preparations to shelter in place or get out now while you still can. Prepare to lose all commercial air traffic to the islands. No airline is going to risk losing commercial aircraft to radioactive contamination. The cost, time, and difficulty of decontaminating a commercial aircraft of radioactive contamination is exceedingly high; the aircraft will basically have to be stripped down to the green. The tooling, supply chain, and EPA requirements would make it near impossible to decontaminate a commercial aircraft. The level of radiation reaching Hawaii need not even reach deadly levels to the shut down commercial air traffic. Air planes act like accumulators and concentrators for radioactive debris and even low levels of uranium and plutonium will build up in and on an airplane.
Given that the probabilities of a losing commercial air service is high even with low levels of contamination, a parametric estimation of the scope of the Fukushima disaster to Chernobyl would indicate a strong possibility of dangerous levels of radiation reaching US soil. The Chernobyl disaster involved approximately 190 tons of Uranium. I estimate the Fukushima site to contain roughly 19,625 tons of Uranium. This potentially makes the Fukushima disaster 103 times greater than Chernobyl (and that’s not even counting the Plutonium on site) These values would explain why the Japanese government is not taking the Chernobyl approach to addressing the issue; if they don’t hold the line they face a MASSIVE potential exponential increase in fallout compared to Chernobyl. It’s for these reasons why it would be extremely prudent to be prepared to be stranded in Hawaii.
I calculated the Fukushima stored uranium tonnage by using Japan’s annual 6,000 ton consumption of uranium and allocated yearly tonnage to Fukushima by its percentage of installed Mega Watt capacity relative to Japan’s total nuclear generation capacity. I then apportioned those yearly values to each of the 6 reactors based on its in-service date. The result was roughly 19,625 tons of uranium stored on site. Chernobyl was less than 1% of the disaster that Fukushima has the potential to be.
Friday, March 18, 2011
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