Who’s In Charge?

The CBC reports on Japanese irritation with a US official:

Japanese officials have rejected a dire appraisal of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility by the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who says water is absent from a reactor’s spent fuel pool, raising the potential of a meltdown.

“There is no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures,” NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko said.

Without any water in the spent fuel pool, the fuel rods would eventually overheat and melt down, causing the outer rods to burn and spread radioactive fuel widely.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency and Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima complex, denied that water was gone from the spent fuel pool. Company spokesman Hajime Motojuku said “the condition is stable,” at the Unit 4 reactor, one of six at the plant.

Jaczko made his statement Wednesday before a U.S. House energy and commerce subcommittee in Washington, D.C., and did not provide the source for his claim, but the NRC and the U.S. Department of Energy have experts in Japan.

The spent fuel rods are located on the top floor of each reactor’s building, without the greater protection of thick steel walls that surround the reactor cores. As well, the containment building for Unit 4 has been punctured.

According to the BBC, the information on the spent fuel comes from TEPCO and they have a nice explainer as to why the spent fuel pond is the point of greatest concern.

TEPCO is running cable to put the plant back on the grid, but the plant’s control room was flooded by the tsunami and isn’t likely to be functional, so I don’t know what they are going to do with the electricity if they get it.

The Japanese have “dancing robots”, so why aren’t they using robots to position hoses to cool down the plants rather than people? You could run steel water pipe in and direct it without endangering anyone, and you could add the boric acid at any concentration you wanted. This looks a lot like the BP response to the Well from Hell.