As a part of the world's continuing fixation on the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, Bloomberg is reporting that there may be a crack in one of the containment vessels. Some workers have suffered severe radiation exposure.
“It’s very possible that there has been some kind of leak at the No. 3 reactor,” Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman at the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said in Tokyo today. While radioactive water at the unit most likely escaped from the reactor core, it also could have originated from spent fuel pools stored atop the reactor, he said ...While we worry about possible future deaths due to radiation, it's a good bet that real people are dying real deaths right now due to a lack of electricity. For example, in the areas without power, what are the people who require dialysis doing? I'm sure you can think of plenty of other examples of lives threatened because of prolonged power outages, particularly in an area where transportation is problematic.
Two plant workers were hospitalized yesterday with radiation burns after stepping in the water, which was found to have radiation levels 10,000 times higher than water used in reactor cooling, Nishiyama said earlier today.