Fukushima Vs Atom Bombs - Putting Things In Perspective

Hi folks,

I read a comment on enenews talking about the amount of radioactive material stored at the Fukushima nuclear plant and how this compared to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. I have had this in the back of my mind for quite some time but other events taking place have put me off from doing a post about this. Well now is the time.

Lets start with how much radioactive material is stored at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Actually it would be more correct to say how much was stored until the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Because reports show that Plutonium and spent fuel along with other radioactive material have scattered around the plant and the surrounding area.

The spent nuclear fuel:

Reactor Building 1: 50 tons
Reactor Building 2: 81 tons
Reactor Building 3: 88 tons Uranium / Plutonium (UO2/MOX)
Reactor Building 4: 135 tons
Reactor Building 5: 142 tons
Reactor Building 6: 151 tons
Common Spent Fuel Storage Facility located at ground-level: 1,097 tons Uranium / Plutonium (UO2/MOX)
Dry Storage also located at ground-level: 70 tons

The reactor unit cores contain less than 100 tons of nuclear fuel.
Numbers given by Marvin Resnikoff, a radioactive waste management consultant.

Location	Unit 1	Unit 2	Unit 3	Unit 4	Unit 5	Unit 6	Central Storage
Reactor Fuel Assemblies	400	548	548	0	548	764	0
Spent Fuel Assemblies	292	587	514	1331	946	876	6375
Fuel	UOx	UOx	UO2/MOX	UOx	UOx	UOx	UO2/MOX
New Fuel Assemblies	100	28	52	204	48	64	N/A

Now lets put things in perspective. Little boy the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima had 150 lbs Uranium-235. While the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the Fat Man contained 13.6 lbs Plutonium-239.

Both bombs leveled the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki and brought great destruction to the Japanese.

However Soviet Union's most powerful 50 megaton Tsar bomba the biggest nuclear bomb ever made weighed 27,000 kilograms (60,000 lb).

The explosion of the Tsar Bomba put out the equivalent of 1,400 times the combined power of the two nuclear explosives used in World War II the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Little Boy (13–18 kilotons) and Fat Man (21 kilotons). Tsar bomba alone had 10 times the combined power of all the explosives used in WWII. And one quarter of the estimated yield of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa.

But still the 27 tons of radioactive material in the Tsar Bomba is nothing compared to the amount at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It’s hard to try and imagine but I hope these numbers will give you a little more understanding of the situation.