Reversed Opinion

From the ex-SKF blog comes this bit:

I posted this on my Japanese blog for the Japanese readers. I'm putting out the summary for the English readers here, too.

A nuclear researcher at Kyoto University (which is considered one of the two most prestigious national universities, the other one being Tokyo University) has reversed his opinion and now says the Reactor 1 may be experiencing the "recriticality".

His name is Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute who belongs to the Nuclear Safety Research Group at the Research Reactor Institute. He has given interviews on TV and radio, mostly in Kansai stations and not aired in Kanto (where Tokyo is), and would be considered one of the "sceptics" of the official story about Fukushima I Nuke Plant that everything is safe, getting under control.

There ARE researchers in Japan who go against the mainstream government scholars. Koide is one of them (and far from being the most critical), and there are others from universities other than the top few schools (and therefore they don't get hardly any airtime on the Japanese MSM). But thanks to talk radio shows and the Internet (hey it's the same as in the US), at least a small portion of the Japanese people are getting the "alternative" reality other than what's given by the government and the MSM.

Go to the link for an interview with Hiroaki Koide.

Now is the inadvertent criticality question very important in light of the rest of the accident? No. Where it is important is in the competence and truthfulness of the people running the show.

And for those of you who like technical stuff I'm going to repeat (approximately) a few comments I have posted around the net:

It should be possible to tell how much of each isomer is made by taking a sample. Dividing it in two. Running one through the GCMS "instantly" and running the second sample one or two (short) half lives later. You would probably need a stop watch to get exact results but a go/no go a few days after shut down would be easy. i.e. the fact that they don't give the results for each isomer is suspect. As are most of the reports given out.

This is like an intel project. You have to try to get the correct information out of a mass of conflicting data.

I assume the data is being fudged. Or totally fabricated. Or "corrected" if the truth gets out by accident.

So the deal is - it is not hard to tell which isomers are in the sample. Actual quantities to a few percent is more difficult. But it should be easy to tell if there is any of the short lived isotope at all assuming they are made in roughly equal proportions. (i.e. not more than a 5 to 1 ratio).

This is not a hard question to resolve with a GCMS. So why wasn't it done?

Or suppose they were just using an energy spectrometer (measure the energy and amount of emitted gammas and/or betas) to determine what is there. All they needed to do was to split the sample and delay for about an hour or three the second measurement.

You have to ask yourself why the measurement wasn't done. Or if it was done why it wasn't announced.

Cross Posted at Classical Values