Al Jazeera, June 17, 2014: Fukushima ‘ice wall’ looking more like a dirt Slurpee […] Skeptics of the plan to build a massive ice wall […] didn’t have to wait particularly long for their first “I told you so.” […] “We have yet to form the ice stopper because we can’t make the temperature low enough to freeze water,” a TEPCO spokesman said. […] What if freezing causes the ground to sink? What if the ice and the ensuing expansion and contraction interrupts or further damages drainage in the reactor buildings? […] TEPCO’s experiment around the margins does nothing to address the hot mess at the core (as it were) of the crisis, and is cold comfort to those people still displaced or a country and hemisphere facing generations of radiologic contamination.
Christopher Morris, Muon Radiography Program Leader, June 16, 2014: “It’s certain that the reactor cores melted and the material moved around. By using muons going through the cores, we can make a radiograph of the uranium material and find out how much is left inside the pressure vessel, how much has leaked out of the pressure vessel.”
Duncan McBranch, Los Alamos Lab’s Chief Technology Officer, June 18, 2014: “The material itself may have melted and flowed to a different part of the building. Invasive techniques such as video endoscopy or introduction of robots run the risk of releasing radiation.”
New York Times, June 17, 2014: […] there are three wrecked reactor cores, twisted masses of hundreds of tons of highly radioactive uranium, plutonium, cesium and strontium. […] most of the material in the plant’s reactors resolidified, in difficult shapes and in confined spaces, wrapped around and through the structural parts of the reactors and the buildings. […] that is what the engineers think. Nobody really knows, because nobody has yet examined […] “nobody knows what happened inside,” [McBranch] said. “Nobody wants to go in to find out.” […] concrete, steel and water will all be distinguishable from uranium, plutonium and other very heavy materials. […] Testing will begin later this year, officials say, and final images will be produced next year.
KRQE, June 18, 2014: LANL technology to examine Fukushima damage […] “This is a major humanitarian crisis,” said Matt Durham, a post-doctoral researcher at Los Alamos […] “They are much too radioactive to go in and look at things,” said Christopher Morris, the lead researcher on the project. […] LANL hopes the detectors will be used in about a year. >> Full broadcast here