Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) say they don’t know what to do if Reactor 4 collapses, instead declaring it safe from earthquakes after finding it leaning and with a bulged exterior wall.
The Wall Street Journal reported that TEPCO doesn’t have a plan to deal with the collapse of Spent Fuel Pool 4 at the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan. The revelation comes as a US army general warns the entire Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable if the building collapses, which is a sentiment being echoed by a host of scientists, nuclear experts and researchers.
Instead, they assure their computer simulation shows the building is strong enough to handle another strong earthquake. They make this claim even though they have just found the entire building leaning to the northwest and an exterior wall is bulging.
TEPCO claims the wall is far enough from the spent fuel pool to present no danger.
The Wall Street Journal instead deflects worry to the ‘jury-rigged leaky pipes’ being used to cool the reactors implying they are much more likely to fail in an earthquake. TEPCO’s only plan, in the event they can no longer keep the fuel rods cooled, is to fill the pool with concrete, which is only a viable plan if the rods are still in the pool.
Of course, if the building does collapse that isn’t an option and TEPCO admits they don’t know what they would do in that scenario and claim they haven’t run any simulations of what the consequences of such a collapse would be.
