This story is so full of bull puckey, it’s hard to know where to start shoveling. As a retired Nuclear Reactor Operator, maybe I should start with
the reactor.
From the American Free Press article:
“… the journalist says that 20 minutes before the Fukushima plant’s nuclear meltdown, Israel … double-crossed Japan by unleashing the Stuxnet
virus on the plant’s computers”
First of all, the journalist seems to be confused about the timeline of events. The events that happened at Fukushima were very well recorded and
studied by nuclear experts from the US, Japan, and international organizations. There’s no doubt about what happened. At about 2:46 in the afternoon
local time, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck. Prior to that, the 3 reactors that were operating were functioning perfectly and stayed that way until
the shock from the earthquake arrived. The Boiling Water Reactors that were at Fukushima were designed in the US by General Electric and built by
Japanese contractors under license. US reactors have earthquake sensors on them that automatically shut the reactor down if the shaking exceeds a
certain threshold. Usually, the control rods are held out of the reactor core by electromagnets. All the sensors have to do is interrupt the current
to the magnets, and the control rods will fall into the core by gravity and stop the chain reaction. This kind of quick shutdown is called a
“SCRAM”. As soon as the earthquake hit, the sensors worked perfectly and caused a SCRAM in all 3 reactors. The earthquake also cut off any outside
power. None of this had anything to do with any computer at all.
When a Uranium reactor is operating at some power level and it is shut down by a SCRAM, the heat production in the core does not immediately go to
zero. It goes to about 6% of the operating power level, and then slowly decays over time. For a big reactor, that’s still a lot of heat. This is
why they need to be actively cooled for some period of time after they shut down. At Fukushima, they started up the backup diesel generators and
started cooling the reactors right after the earthquake.
About an hour later, the tsunami that was caused by the earthquake arrived and took out the diesel generators which stopped the cooling of the cores.
About 4 hours after that, enough water had boiled off that the reactor cores were not being cooled by the water and they began to melt down. There
were no computers involved in this scenario. The only failure was mechanical—the generator room was flooded by the tsunami.
The journalist goes on to say:
… these nuclear materials were shipped to the plant in 2007 on the orders of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush … The shipment was in the form of
warhead cores secretly removed from the U.S. … facility BWXT Plantex near Amarillo, Texas. …
This is a nice fantasy, but it ignores the fact is that neither the President nor Vice President has the authority to transfer Highly Enriched Uranium
(HEU) or Plutonium to another individual or country. Under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (still in effect today) if they had done so or tried to do
so, that would have been a capital crime. That means that if they had tried to do so it would have been a criminal conspiracy. All HEU and Plutonium
in the US is the exclusive property of the Department of Energy. For that reason, any conspiracy to divert Special Nuclear Materials would have to
have involved a large string of individuals from the Secretary of Energy all the way down to the guards with guns at the facility. (By the way, the
facility is PANTEX, not Plantex). It would have involved probably dozens of individuals, at minimum. The security system surrounding nuclear weapon
cores (or “pits” as they are known) is extreme and designed to prevent exactly this kind of scenario. Also, as you might expect, all nuclear pits
are subject to a strict inventory. They can’t just go missing without anyone noticing.
The journalist continues:
“Israel transported warheads from the port of Houston, and in the process kept the best ones while giving the Japanese older warhead cores that had
to be further enriched at Fukushima.”
The idea that warhead cores had to be or could be further enriched at Fukushima is total nonsense. The mythological pits at Fukushima supposedly
consisted of one HEU pit and one Plutonium pit. HEU consists of a mix of 90% or more of U235 and the remainder U238. That isotope ratio is stable on
the time scale of hundreds of millions of years. That means that once a HEU pit is manufactured, there is no further enrichment required for that
length of time. Furthermore, if you did need to enrich Uranium, you would want to use a (very large) centrifuge facility, not a power reactor. A
power reactor actually reduces the enrichment level of the Uranium in it.
A Plutonium pit is not produced by isotope enrichment of naturally occurring Plutonium. A Plutonium pit is produced by breeding Pu239 from U238 in a
light water reactor (which the Fukushima reactor was not). After Pu239 is produced in a breeder reactor, it is separated from all the other crud that
is present by chemical processes.
Now, it is possible that either a HEU or a Plutonium pit could be mechanically damaged or chemically contaminated (by oxidation, for example) and need
to be reworked. That does happen. That kind of work, however requires specialized radiochemistry and metallurgical laboratories. Japan does have
those kind of laboratories in its national nuclear research program, but they are not located at Fukushima.
In other words, there is no physically meaningful reason whatever to bring nuclear warhead pits to Fukushima to somehow get refurbished.
This story is classic Russian dezinformatsiya. The “American Free Press” is probably a GRU front.
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RussianTroll