I decided to start this blog today to provide some information to our clients and anyone interested. Our company (Radiation Technical Services, Co.) is one of only a handful of firm's licensed to perform Decontamination and Decommissioning on old radioactive waste sites. We have listened to the news with alarm as have many of you. Unfortunately many of the media outlets have resorted to using unqualified news people to discuss the situation in Japan. Yesterday CNN had their weatherman talking about the issues of fallout.
Reading today's report from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) was particularly alarming. The IAEA reported front gate readings had fallen from 11.9 milliSievert / hr to 0.6 milliSievert / hr. If this report is correct, the problem is much greater than anyone is reporting and would indicate serious, serious fuel problems. To understand these numbers consider that 11.9 milliSieverts / hr would be the radiation exposure rate a worker INSIDE the reactor building might expect to encounter working in the worst of conditions. In very, very simple terms, gamma radiation from a point source reduces at an inverse square of the distance it travels. For instance, if you were to measure 100 milliSievert / hr at 1 foot from a point source, you would generally expect the levels to be reduced to 10 milliSievert / hr at 2 feet. In the simplest terms, the levels in and around the actual reactor MUST be in the many hundreds of Sievert per hour (or likely thousands). Those kind of doses can kill very quickly. I assume (always dangerous to do) that the gate is a significant distance from the reactor building.
These reactors are much closer to Chernobyl type problems than Three Mile Island. TMI was a minor issue which worked itself out with safety systems and some dumb luck. The Japanese were hit with a number of events which overwhelmed even their many redundant systems.
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