TEPCO now admits that three Fukushima reactors have melted, large holes present in containment vessels

by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer 

(NaturalNews) The Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) house of cards is toppling, as it has now been revealed that three reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility all melted shortly after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit them on March 11 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...). TEPCO also now admits that holes likely exist in the reactors' containment vessels as a result, which explains the persistent water leaks and drastic temperature fluctuations that led to continuous containment problems (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english...).

TEPCO officials claim that the company has never hidden any of this information from the public, but that recent data analysis has confirmed what many scientists and experts had correctly predicted weeks ago based on observation of the situation. And rightfully so, many remain critical of TEPCO's drastic underestimation of the true condition of the plant, and say the company's unrealistic optimism since the disaster first occurred has been wholly misleading, and not at all based in reality.

The entire faulty approach taken by TEPCO throughout this unfolding mega-disaster can be compared to the following scenario:

A major vehicle accident has caused the engine of a semi-truck carrying a large fuel tank to catch fire and explode, which has obviously destroyed the truck's internal computer monitoring system and rendered it non-operational. The large fuel tank on the back of the truck has not yet caught fire, but instead of making a logical assessment based on simple observation that the situation is very serious, and that the fuel tank could soon catch fire, emergency responders (TEPCO) instead say that, because there is no way to run a computer analysis of the truck's engine, there is no way to know for sure to know exactly what is going on. So they instead pour water all over the engine and allege that everything is just fine, instead of making the logical decision to unhinge the truck from the fuel tank and fix the situation as quickly as possible. In the end, more explosions take place, and eventually the disaster escalates into a much worse one.

The only difference between this truck scenario and Fukushima is the fact that large explosions already took place very early on, which should have been an obvious indicator that things were out of control at the plant. But TEPCO officials, with the apparent approval of the Japanese government, minimized the severity of the situation since nothing could be confirmed with concrete data, despite the fact that nuclear experts everywhere observed the "symptoms" of the disaster, and had come to logical conclusions early on that meltdowns were likely taking place.

So instead of doing what most people would consider to be the right thing, and admitting that the plant was most likely beyond containment -- and that entombing it as quickly as possible in order to avoid the continuous spewing of radioactive particles into the environment was the best option to take -- TEPCO has instead been playing around with ocean water (http://www.naturalnews.com/031978_r...) and ridiculous polyester tents (http://www.naturalnews.com/032400_F...), all while radioactive materials continue to leak into the atmosphere, groundwater, and oceans. Clearly, things are amiss in the way the entire thing is being handled by those who are expected to be most privy to the nature of nuclear technology and how it behaves under current conditions.

The most recent reports available explain that a shocking 94 percent of the fuel in Reactor 3 may have melted into containment water just three days after the May 11 disaster (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/R...). Reactor 3, of course, contains the deadly, plutonium-based MOX fuel that is actually capable of "breeding" itself and regenerating beyond its original mass. And at this point in time, Reactors 1, 2, and 3 have all likely had their entire fuel rods completely melt, creating holes in the containment vessels that are leaking and spreading unknown levels of radiation directly into the environment (http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201...).

And to make matters even worse, a "very intense" super typhoon, Songda, is making its way across the Pacific Ocean where it is expected to hit Japan in the next couple of days. This Category 5 storm is seeing sustained winds of 161 miles per hour (mph) and gusts of up to 195 mph, according to CNN (http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/2...). Though the storm system is expected to drop to a Category 2 by the time it hits Japan, it has the potential to exacerbate the Fukushima situation by causing more flooding, or by further spreading radioactive particles (http://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/1102.html).