The mainstream news media have lost interest in Japan’s ongoing nuclear disaster, but that doesn’t mean things are better. On the contrary, matters are getting worse. The situation at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Daiichi actually is worse than what Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) and the Japanese government have disclosed.
The latest news from Reuters is that Fukushima’s reactor No. 1 had a meltdown of its fuel rods and now has a hole several centimeters in diameter in its main vessel, leading to a leakage of radioactive water.
Experts now believe that at one point in the immediate wake of the disaster, the 4-metre-high stack of uranium-rich rods at the core of the reactor had been entirely exposed to the air and thus, had been spewing invisible odorless radiation. Radiation has also be seeping into the Pacific Ocean and nearby ground water from the hundreds of gallons of water that have been pumped — and are still being pumped — to cool at least 3 of the 6 reactors to bring their nuclear fuel rods to a “cold shutdown” state. Boiling water reactors like those at Fukushima rely on water as both a coolant and a barrier to radiation.
U.S. nuclear experts said that the company may have to build a concrete wall around reactor no. 1 because of the breach, and that this could now take years.
According to this alarming video, a large cloud of radiation mass is making its way across the Pacific Ocean and will hit North America in the next several days. You can also read about this in “Secret Map Shows Massive Radiation Cloud Heading Toward U.S. and Canada.”
The video refers to high levels of Caesium-137 and Xenon- 133 drifting our way.
Caesium-137 is a radioactive isotope of caesium which is formed as a fission product by nuclear fission. This is what Wikipedia says about the health risks of Caesium-137:
Caesium-137 reacts with water producing a water-soluble compound (caesium hydroxide), and the biological behavior of caesium is similar to that of potassium and rubidium. After entering the body, caesium gets more or less uniformly distributed throughout the body, with higher concentration in muscle tissues and lower in bones. The biological half-life of caesium is rather short at about 70 days. Experiments with dogs showed that a single dose of 3800 μCi/kg (approx. 44 μg/kg of caesium-137) is lethal within three weeks.
Xenon-133 (or Xe-133) is also a nuclear fission product, but via the decay of Iodine-135. As explained in Wikipedia, Iodine-135 is a fission product of uranium with a yield of about 6%. Iodine-135 has a 6.7 hour half-life and decays to Xe. Thus, in an operating nuclear reactor, Xe is being continuously produced.
I am not a medical expert and so cannot dispense advice about potassium iodide tablets, which the FDA has approved (since 1982) to protect thyroid glands from radioactive iodine emitted in nuclear accidents or fission emergencies. I suggest you read this Wikipedia article on potassium iodide or this other article for yourself. Alas, to my knowledge, potassium iodide does little, if anything, against Caesium-137 or Xenon-133.