Fukushima Reactor Wreckage

I've been thinking about the picture associated with this post.  Its from a video on the WSJ (www.wsj.com) site.  A recent picture showing two of the Fukushima reactor buildings.

If you follow the railing along the bottom of the picture (silver/grey) to the very right of the image you will see a small bulge.  This is the hood of a car (to give some idea of scale).

You can see the reinforced concrete reactor building smoking in the foreground.

One has to wonder what sort of explosive force is required to destroy a reinforced concrete structure like this.  (Reinforced concrete contains steel reinforcing rods, e.g., "rebar", to make it stronger.)

The second reactor building, to the right of the smoking, collapsed one, doesn't look to be in much better shape.

We have been reading how the plants have been reconnected to the power grid in order to run things like cooling pumps.  These pictures might give one second thoughts about the integrity of the cooling systems.

The above picture, from a slightly different angle, provides additional perspective on the extent of the damage.

Had this been a regular coal or gas-fired plant you'd probably see constructing equipment on-site removing debris and clearing access for repair crews.

Unfortunately, in the case of nuclear power, this is not possible.  I read one article where workers at these plants accidentally stepped into a puddle - a puddle with 10,000 times the normal amount of radiation - and were immediately burned and hand to be taken to the hospital.

One puddle.

Here is a schematic of what's inside the wrecked building.

As you can see the top of the reactor appears to extend up through the second-to-topmost floor of the building.  From the pictures its pretty clear that for at least one reactor the building no longer has that floor.

Supposedly the reactor containment (the kind of metal tube in the center) is still intact.  This would prevent nuclear material from the core leaking out.  I'm not so sure from these pictures that things around the core are still in good shape.

From the perspective of the plant operations personnel things are pretty grim.  Here is a link to images from inside the plants.  From these images it looks like some of the control rooms have been destroyed along with the reactor buildings.

And finally, a picture from the air.