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The situation at Fukushima is going to drag on for years and years..look at the exclusive photos.

Image via Wikipedia

The media does not want you to see these photos. I KNOW they have them because our source got them from the same place as the major media.

Noting that the press has largely turned its resources off of the Fukushima complex, and needing up-to-date information on the status of the damage control efforts there, we secured the most up-to-date satellite photo from DigitalGlobe (dated March 31st), which we analyze below. This is the first photo of the damaged reactor site at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility made available to the public in over a week. That means you, our readers, are the first public eyes anywhere to see this photo.

Drawing upon the expertise of our resident nuclear engineer and Ann Stringer, imaging expert, we conclude that the situation at Fukushima is not stabilized: things are not yet at a place of steady progress in the containment and clean-up efforts. It’s still a dance, forwards and backwards, with the workers making gains here and there and the situation forcing them to react defensively.

In this report, we will tell you what we know for sure, what we are nearly certain of, and what we remain forced to speculate about.

Here is a portion of a much larger image (covering 25 square kilometers in total) showing the reactor complex as of March 31, at roughly mid-day:

No equipment and no workers

Photo Credit, 2011, DigitalGlobe

What We Can See

Here’s what we can directly observe in the larger satellite image:

Steam is still rising from reactors #2, #3 (circled in green) and #4.
Of the four reactor buildings, three are nearly or totally destroyed, while the outside (at least) of the fourth is in relatively better shape.
We can count 7 fire trucks ‘on site’ with another 7 just to the north, all with water lines strung out across the ground.
There is only one ship/vessel to be seen, located inside of the breakwater and nearly as far to the north as it can go inside that boundary.

A significant number of the vehicles that can be seen at the core of the site have not moved since the first released photos on March 12.
There is a parking lot slightly to the north and west with approximately 250 passenger vehicles in it and a side lot with 30 large green tanks neatly arranged in rows.
The rest of the area is one, two, and four lane roads (no traffic at all), worked farmland, residential and commercial areas, mostly empty parking lots, and two baseball diamonds.

http://www.yamazaki-k.co.jp/airphoto/sinmoe1.JPG

Here’s what we don’t see

Nowhere in the 25 km area in the main photo can we find anything that looks like a staging area with a large collection of assets such as tanker trucks, pumpers, cement trucks, piles of pre-staged materials, ambulances, and fire trucks.
The cement pumper truck seen a week ago has been apparently replaced by the boom at reactor #4.
There’s no obvious barge delivering fresh water for the rector cooling efforts as recently reported (it may have come and gone?).
Any obvious changes to the roofs of any of the reactors.
Any people outside the plants working.

Shocking photos of Fukushima Nuclear Reactor

Things we can logically conclude

The steam that is venting is a mixed blessing. It implies that cooling water is getting to some hot material, which is a good thing, but it also means that something is hot enough to vaporize water and the continued release of radioactivity into the surrounding environment.

This means that the lack of steam coming from reactor #1 is either a very good sign, or a very bad sign. Good because it could mean that the containment vessels are intact and cooling water is circulating. Bad because it could imply that no water is getting to it and it is a very hot mass right now. According to TEPCO, reactor #1 has had seawater, and now freshwater, circulating through the reactor vessel – and since both containment vessels are intact, we’ll conclude the lack of steam is a good sign.

The situation at Fukushima is going to drag on for years. First there’s the matter of stabilizing the situation which has not yet been fully achieved. Recent surprises in terms of the amounts and locations of radioactivity are one sign that the situation is not fully stabilized. Still, nothing has blown up in quite a while, the steam venting appears consistent, and the major surprises seem to be over for now. While the TEPCO workers are still reacting to things as they arise, these are smaller things than last week, which is another hopeful sign.

The detected presence of neutron beams, I-134, and radioactive chlorine are all strongly supportive of the idea that criticality has resumed. Our best guess is that these are localized pockets, probably of short duration, and do not involve the entire core mass of any particular reactor conflagrating in some gigantic, greenish blob of uncontrolled fission. The geometries of the fuel in relation to neutron moderators requires precise conditions to support sustained fission and so it is rather unlikely to be occurring in anything other than localized pockets. If the entire reactor in its fully operational state was capable of supporting what we might scale to 100% fission, the amount of fission happening after a partial (or complete) meltdown will be a far lesser percentage. Still, any amount of fission is unwelcome at this point because it is adding to the heat and radiation removal difficulties.