Doneul-

I haven't been watching Fox News. I can't bear to watch them do their work.

Oh, the other structural update is the roof was now reported caved in at Unit 4.

But I was favorably impressed with what Elliot Spitzer was doing this evening on his CNN hour. Among his guests was a whistle-blower nuclear engineer who heading up a study group that concluded the Mark-1 reactor (the type at Futushima) could not safely deal with a lose of coolant from a pipe break. He was not satisfied with the response from GE and eventually quit. His concerns were proven true in this case, not because of a coolant pipe break but because the back-up generators which powered the pumps were disabled by the tsunami, which produced a similar type of problem.

I also learned a bit more about the spent fuel pool design of the Mark-1. The reason the pool is located above the primary containment is for convenience in moving the spent fuel assemblies out of the reactor to the pool. After the spent fuel is cooled for a year or so, it would then be shifted to a larger common spent fuel pool that would service all six reactors at the Fukushima complex.

Because reactors 4, 5, and 6 were shutdown prior to the earthquake for maintenance, their fuel was removed to the adjacent pools and was quite fresh and hot. That is part of the problem, especially if there is a loss of coolant for the pools from a pool container rupture or from a breakdown in coolant resupply.

I still wonder what the status is of the spent fuel pools in units 1, 2 and 3, after the various hydrogen explosions. And I've posed that question to the Union of Concerned Scientists on their website.

Charley Noble