Arms Control Wonk

For those of you who follow South Korea’s interest in pyroprocessing spent nuclear fuel (or “recycling used fuel” as proponents are apt to say) Dick Stratford made an unusually straightforward comment at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference that pyroprocessing is reprocessing.

Below the jump, please find today’s FEPC info sheet. I wanted to pass along two other items of interest, which perhaps ought to inform the stories we are going to start seeing over the next couple of days as the situation continues to worsen.  First, my friend Mike Levi wrote an excellent blog post about …

I was too busy yesterday to post the FEPC information sheet.  Here it is, belatedly, with the disturbing news that now we have plutonium in the soil, which indicates a containment breach.  

My colleague at MIIS, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress has written a paper, What Was The Cause Of The High Cl-38 Radioactivity In The Fukushima Daiichi Reactor #1.  Ferenc  concludes that we cannot exclude the possibility that little pockets of melted fuel have gone critical, even if for a short period of time.  The possibilty of localized criticalities …