Boiling Fuel Pools at Japanese Nuclear Plant May Pose Bigger Threat Than Meltdown
Japan's nuclear disaster continues to unfold this morning, and as workers at the Fukushima Daiichi continue to pump seawater into the crippled reactors there a new threat is emerging: the spent fuel rods in the cooling pools at each reactor. While reactors Nos. 1-3 remain unstable due to core heating, the cooling pool at reactor No. 4 was boiling as of late Tuesday (local time), and the temperatures were rising in the cooling pools at No. 5 and No. 6. The pools sit atop each reactor building and contain the spent fuel rods from the reactors, which are no longer hot enough for ideal power generation but are still very hot and quite radioactive. The spent fuel is kept in pools to control that heat--like the reactors, they require cooling systems to keep the water at a low temperature to offset the heat from the fuel rods. Related ArticlesHow Nuclear Reactors Work,...