This guy, Karl Stephan, knows his stuff. I’ve been reading his blog for more than a year and I don’t always agree with his conclusions but his science and engineering knowledge is superb.

In short, I trust him.

This is from his post on Sunday –  (I am serious — Go read the whole thing.)

Nevertheless, things are still dicey. Even if the nuclear reaction is shut down by emergency flooding or moderator-rod insertion, you still have a tremendous amount of heat to deal with, and the failure of the cooling-water pumps means that the reactors have already overheated and sustained a certain amount of damage. And of course, most of the instrumentation that engineers would normally use to figure out what is going on inside the plants has also gone flooey. Plus, nobody wants to get near the things with radioactive fuel sloshing around. Possibly it is a job for some radiation-hardened robots. If there are any such things, you can bet they have them in Japan and they’re trying to use them now.

A late report mentions that engineers working with at least one plant have thrown in the towel, and are pumping seawater mixed with boron into one reactor vessel. This is a last-ditch emergency measure that will cool the reactor core fast, but will also corrode it to the point of destruction. It’s likely that the reactor was beyond salvaging anyway, but this action seals its fate. At this point, this is an appropriate action that puts public safety ahead of the power company’s investment.

I’m asking him for an update and will put it up as soon as I can.

James Pilant