"Nuke Roulette Disaster" predicted in 2004 by scientist

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Thursday March 17, 2011 · 8:17 AM PDT

2011/03/17 · 08:17

You do not really want to read this article, it is from 2004 and contains the personal report of Leuren Moret, who is a geoscientist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. In 1991 he became a whistle-blower by reporting science fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project.

In 2004 he was invited to come to Japan, to review their nuclear plants, and to inspect the Hamaoka plant, which sits directly over the subduction zone near the junction of two tectonic plates.

Leuren Moret reported that it was not a question of whether Japan was headed for a major disaster involving a nuclear plant, but of when.

However, many of those reactors have been negligently sited on active faults, particularly in the subduction zone along the Pacific coast, where major earthquakes of magnitude 7-8 or more on the Richter scale occur frequently. The periodicity of major earthquakes in Japan is less than 10 years. There is almost no geologic setting in the world more dangerous for nuclear power than Japan -- the third-ranked country in the world for nuclear reactors.
"I think the situation right now is very scary," says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. "It's like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode."

Reading his conclusions now will make your spine tingle.
You would think Moret had a very accurate crystal ball:

After visiting the center a few kilometers from Hamaoka, I realized that Japan has no real nuclear-disaster plan in the event that an earthquake damaged a reactor's water-cooling system and triggered a reactor meltdown.
Additionally, but not even mentioned by ERC officials, there is an extreme danger of an earthquake causing a loss of water coolant in the pools where spent fuel rods are kept. As reported last year in the journal Science and Global Security, based on a 2001 study by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, if the heat-removing function of those pools is seriously compromised -- by, for example, the water in them draining out -- and the fuel rods heat up enough to combust, the radiation inside them will then be released into the atmosphere. This may create a nuclear disaster even greater than Chernobyl.

If a nuclear disaster occurred, power-plant workers as well as emergency-response personnel in the Hamaoka ERC would immediately be exposed to lethal radiation.

He named his report: Japan's Deadly Game of Nuclear Roulette.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/...

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