#Fukushima Reactor 4 Demolition

A security camera inside the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant reveals the final steps in the demolition of a ferroconcrete structure. A mobile crane-mounted plasma torch cuts through the skeletal remnant of a three-story building, methodically cleaving the few remaining support beams, releasing dust clouds of burnt slake lime.

Though the digital mosaic is often blurry, it's clear that only one side of the structure is left standing, indicating that the three other walls had been either removed earlier at nighttime or collapsed in the Richter 5+ earthquakes that struck northeast Japan between June 17 and June 22.

The obvious conclusion could be drawn from the scene, which still goes unreported by the media, but once again as throughout this crisis I have always wished to be pleasantly wrong rather than painfully correct. In response to my skeptical query, Japanese activists responded: "It was definitely the No 4 reactor. We have not heard anything else about it. It (the demolition) was done on the day when the nation was focused on the government decision to raise the consumer tax."

The demolition of Reactor 4 - yet to be officially announced by TEPCO or the Economy Ministry - has been overlooked by the mass media and even the anti-nuclear movement, which are preoccupied by the ongoing protests in the capital Tokyo against the reopening of the Oi nuclear power plant and a parliamentary vote for a higher consumption tax. On June 26, after a divisive debate among his party members, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and his supporters in the ruling Democratics introduced a bill doubling the consumption tax - timed to divert public attention from the deteriorating conditions at Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant. If the videoclip is indeed of a collapsed Reactor 4, then Japan and the rest of the world are in for a long hot summer and much worse ahead.

Synergistic Blasts

Three days after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant, its Reactor 4 sustained massive damage in an engulfing blaze on March 14 and in the subsequent re-ignition two days later. Then and ever since, TEPCO and the government has claimed that the fire at unit 4 was triggered by "hydrogen gas released from a nearby reactor," which would have been Reactor 2.

At the time of 3.11 disaster and soon thereafter over Rense radio, I stated without equivocation that hydrogen leakage could not have been the cause of the Reactor 4 fire, since extremely overheated gas would have combusted in contact with the air before reaching any other reactor. I suggested then that the actual cause was a "never-before seen type of nuclear explosion involving high-energy nuclear isotopes."

My logical deduction back then - and since confirmed by leaks and official disclosures - was that Reactor 4 had been recently loaded with fresh fuel rods in preparation for start-up on March 12. Its planned operation was kept secret and unscheduled, and therefore had to be linked to illegal enrichment of weapons-grade uranium for the purpose of making nuclear warheads.

In contrast to the official story about hydrogen, the timeline of those initial days indicates a reverse chain of cause and effect: A nuclear blast inside Reactor 4 created enough heat to set its spent-fuel pool on fire, and also intensified the neutron bombardment against a degraded Reactor 3, which exploded in a mushroom cloud on the next day, March 15. That huge explosion, in turn, re-ignited the Reactor 4 spent-fuel fire. These synergistic high-energy nuclear events did not constitute a classical chain reaction, for if complete fission had occurred an area many times larger than Nagasaki would have been leveled. Instead of a single nuclear explosion, the Fukushima crisis is a protracted series of nuclear events, unleashing a Pandora's Box of troubles onto the world.

My appraisal during last year's meltdowns led to the conclusion that melt-downs of fuel rods would quickly burn through core-reactor shrouds, the steel containment chambers beneath, and then the concrete-block footing. The consequences were obvious then, though not to the corps of nuclear engineers: That the corium would tunnel into the landfill of rock and sand, and on contact with water release enough high-pressure steam to create a sinkhole under each reactor. Huge vents of steam, as reported by nuclear workers, have since blown out through the ground surface.

The unstable landfill would eventually become too weak to support the combined weight of the reactors, spent-fuel pools, ferroconcrete structures and all the water being pumped inside The inevitable result is a collapse into a sinkhole, after which recovery of intact fuel rods would be impossible.

Finished Off by Earthquakes

Starting in the first hours of New Year's Day of this year, 2012, the loose soil under Fukushima underwent liquefaction during a series of earthquakes. The Fukushima 1 plant was completely evacuated in secret, as police barricades were set up on incoming roads and military helicopters sped in to evacuate remaining workers and engineers. Nighttime helicopter flights were heard in the darkness over Minami-Soma town, indicating that fuel rods were being airlifted into nearby river estuaries.

During the solemn New Year's holiday, when Japanese families rest at home, few residents went outdoors. Those who did venture out with dosimeters reported a major spike in radioactivity across northeast Japan. The suddenly higher readings across the Northern Hemisphere indicated that the piping for the No.4 core reactor and containment chamber had ruptured, probably when a reactor fell into a sinkhole.

Highly radioactive particles littering the ground were soon spotted by local residents - the first of the "black dust" reports - which I suggested, were fragmented pieces of heat-cracked fuel rods airlifted from atop Reactor 4. The New Year's season was not the first occasion for helicopter airlifts. In the days immediately after the March 11 disaster, a long cigar-shaped casket - suspected of containing weapons-grade fissile material smuggled in from the U.S. military stockpile in Armadillo, Texas - was hooked and pulled out of the Reactor 4 fuel pool by a Special Forces helicopter.

From June 17 to June 22, another series of 5+ quakes apparently snapped the heat-weakened steel beams that supported the spent-fuel pool, sending more than 1,500 fuel rods tumbling down over the twisted-metal wreckage of Reactor 4. Thus, the nuclear-emergency minister, Goshi Hosono, must have rushed out a secret order to tear down the heat-warped concrete structure, while his prime minister diverted media coverage and public attention with a grandstand speech to double the consumption tax. Behind this media spectacle staged less than 18 months after the 3.11 disaster, the Fukushima nuclear crisis has reached the point of no return.

In an otherwise hopeless situation, I stick to my early-on recommendation that the only feasible method to neutralize sunken reactors is to pump in borax brine (not boric acid, which eats away at metal) that will gradually crystalize to create a vast subterranean neutron-absorbing barrier, an artificial salt bed that an take solid form even under watery immersion.

Secret Activities by GE-Hitachi

The nuclear industry, regulatory agencies and the IAEA deliberately lied about the presence of nuclear fuel inside Reactor 4 and 5 (and earlier inside No.3 before it exploded), which all supposedly had been emptied for scheduled maintenance and down time. Only three reactors - Nos. 1, 2 and 6 - were authorized for electric-generation in the month of March 2011. In fact, uranium enrichment for weapons-production was being prepared inside the supposedly idle reactors.

Nearly a year after the blast at Reactor 4, TEPCO finally gave into the public pressure and disclosed the refitting of its core reactor with a new shroud, needed for the switch from uranium fuel rods to more powerful MOX, or mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium. In total secrecy, GE had brought in an American crew for the work with Hitachi engineers to install the denser neutron shield.

While in the autumn of 2010, a Diet committee had approved experimental test-runs of MOX fuel, Japanese legislators were never informed of the specifics and most understood that only Reactor 3 would be tested. Some Diet members had protested in committee hearings with TEPCO and the Economy Ministry representatives that the GE reactors were not designed to handle MOX fuel, but their objections were brushed aside under the rubric of nuclear safety.

The executives of GE, Hitachi and Toshiba, Economy MInistry officials, and nuclear regulatory agencies, including the IAEA and DOE, are undoubtedly guilty of falsification of safety studies, deliberate subversion of democratic procedures, and at the very least manslaughter abetted by corruption and bribery.

Justice Must Be Served

These murderous business executives and government leaders - salesmen of death, disease and destruction - still maintain the pretense that nothing is happening inside Fukushima 1, while they shamelessly bribe government officials and politicians in Lithuania, Britain and dozens of other countries for multi-billion euro contracts to install new nuclear reactors, practically identical in design to the ones that exploded in Fukushima.

Their plans are nothing short of diabolical. GE-Hitachi (hybridized as GEH) is proposing to build a plutonium breed reactor at the troubled British Sellafield plant, which once reprocessed Japan's MOX fuel just south of the Scottish border. This type of reactor, which produces more high-grade plutonium than it consumes, has already failed years of money-wasting and radiation-leaking operations at the Monju facility in Tokai Province, Japan.

GEH is now getting ready to test its new laser plasma extraction technology, which is claimed to separated out uranium and plutonium from spent MOX rods more efficiently than the tributyl phosphorus chemical treatment system. Disastrous laser plasma accidents have been routinely covered up since an initial test run in the 1960s torched the U.S. lab facility and seared a tunnel through solid rock. Like stupid little boys who play with matches and lighters, the nuclear industry never worries about burning down the neighborhood.

At an ethical level, our leaders are guilty of a fast-approaching mass murder and environmental devastation, and possibly genocide, depending on how the cancer toll over the coming decades is counted. The dead, the dying and the soon-to-die cannot rest until justice is done. Those responsible must be brought before stern justice to receive the ultimate punishment and nothing less.

If the undeclared war against victims with radiation-triggered illnesses across northeast Japan offers any indicator of things to come, it will not be long before the World Health Organization, partner agency of the IAEA, unleashes a super-flu virus and then distributes cyanide capsules to the sickly survivors around the world. The globalist madmen who dare claim ownership of this once living, now dying planet must be stopped - taken out - by people who still have a conscience and their courage intact before the clock runs out.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former general editor of The Japan Times Weekly, is an environmental consultant working in Southeast Asia and Japan.