– Hot particle found 400 kilometers from Fukushima with radioactivity over 40 billion Bq/kg — Large black puddles of fallout along roadsides might well be from inside failed fuel rods (VIDEOS) (ENENews, Dec 17, 2013):
Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds, Dec. 16, 2013 (at 3:30 in): Large puddles of black particles have been found on the side of the road, each individual grain is extraordinarily radioactive. This is fall-out, this is hot particles that have coalesced together on the side of the road. Recently a hot particle was discovered 250 miles [400 kilometers] away from Fukushima. It was so radioactive that if it were a pound of material instead of just a particle, the pound would be giving off 20 billion disintegrations per second [44 billion becquerels per kilogram] […] That small speck could easily be lodged in someone’s lung. >> Watch the video here
Japan’s Black Dust, Fairewinds Energy Education, July 10, 2013: Marco Kaltofen, President at Boston Chemical Data Corp. & Doctoral student researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute: […] We kept hearing reports about something unusual, a black dust […] we finally got a very small sample […] It’s a single substance. It’s not a mix of mineral particles and pieces of dead bugs and plant matter and dust particles […] it doesn’t look like the surrounding soils. And it is much more intensely radioactive than any other soil or dust sample we’ve gotten from around Fukushima Daiichi. […] There’s something unusual happening with this stuff. […] this particle contains not only fission waste products from the reactor but very likely contains a concentrated unburned nuclear fuel. And that’s unusual. This sample had by far the highest level of uranium daughters that we’ve seen in a dust or soil sample. We’re actually seeing material that might well have come from inside a failed fuel assembly. >> Watch the video here