Charlie Stross:
Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl: If this report is true, then: a) Reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi melted down within sixteen hours of the quake (about eight hours after all active cooling was lost), b) TEPCO management knew about it, c) The press were systematically nobbled (an early report of the meltdown was withdrawn), d) Going by his rather extraordinary remarks during the subsequent weeks, the Prime Minister, and presumably the rest of the Japanese government, were systematically misled by TEPCO.
I'm taking this report with a pinch of salt for the time being... residual thermal activity after a 450Mw reactor is scrammed is around 1-2% of full power — around 4-8Mw of heat. A BWR contains fuel rods probably totaling on the order of a hundred tons of metal, and some hundreds of tons of water: is the residual activity (sufficient to boil roughly one ton of water per hour) enough to account for a meltdown — which implies raising the temperature of the fuel rods from their operating temperature to over 800 celsius — so soon after shutdown?.... The best case is that this report is false..... Worst case: if the report is true, then TEPCO management is so dysfunctional that they thought they could sweep a fricking' complete core collapse meltdown and primary containment breach under the rug. ("Disgust" isn't a strong enough word to describe such conduct, if indeed it's what has been going on. "Wondering when the arrest warrants will be signed" is beginning to get there.)... [S]eeing an elderly reactor undergo a reactor meltdown in the wake of an extraordinary one-in-500-years quake and a tsunami exceeding the worst case projections by 500% is unfortunate. Lying about it for two months afterwards, however, would be criminal...
