#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Case of Disappearing Paragraphs, NY Times Version

Reference to Reactor 3 containment vessel being cracked has been scrubbed clean.

Washington's Blog links and cites a segment from New York Times March 25 article in which an anonymous Japanese executive in the nuclear industry says there is a huge crack on the containment vessel of the Reactor 3 in Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

I somehow managed to get to the said NY Times article and looked for that segment. There is no such segment:

Concerns about Reactor No. 3 have surfaced before. Japanese officials said nine days ago that the reactor vessel might have been damaged.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, mentioned damage to the reactor vessel on Friday as a possible explanation of how water in the adjacent containment building had become so radioactive.

Michael Friedlander, a former nuclear power plant operator in the United States, said that the presence of radioactive cobalt and molybdenum in water samples taken from the basement of the turbine building raised the possibility of corrosion as a cause.

But I located the missing paragraphs between the 1st and the second paragraphs above, by locating a cached article on the mirror site. Thank you Google. And after these missing paragraphs, Michael Friedlander appears, not Nishiyama.

Here's the segment in the original New York Times, from the cached article of the mirror site (NDTV.com). So up till March 30, the article continued to have the reference to the anonymous executive saying Reactor 3's containment vessel has a huge crack. NY Times writers say "reactor vessel", which is rather imprecise but means the containment vessel:

Concerns about Reactor No. 3 have surfaced before. Japanese officials said nine days ago that the reactor vessel may have been damaged.

A senior nuclear executive who insisted on anonymity but has broad contacts in Japan said that there was a long vertical crack running down the side of the reactor vessel itself. The crack runs down below the water level in the reactor and has been leaking fluids and gases, he said.

The severity of the radiation burns to the injured workers is consistent with contamination by water that had been in contact with damaged fuel rods, the executive said.

"There is a definite, definite crack in the vessel -- it's up and down and it's large," he said. "The problem with cracks is they do not get smaller."

The contamination of the water in the basement of the turbine building where the workers were injured -- a separate building adjacent to the one that houses the reactor -- poses a real challenge for efforts to bring crucial cooling pumps and other equipment back online.

"They can't even figure out how to get that out, it's so hot" in terms of radioactivity, he said. A big worry about reactor No. 3 is the mox fuel. The nuclear industry has no experience with mox leaks, and it is possible that unusual patterns in the dispersal of radioactivity from the plant partly result from the mox, he said.

But Michael Friedlander, a former nuclear power plant operator in the United States, said that the presence of radioactive cobalt and molybdenum in water samples taken from the basement of the turbine building raised the possibility of a very different leak. ...

Tweet