Experts wonder: How reliable are the Japan nuke plant's containment vessels?

“We’re not at that point yet,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear. “But these vessels are brittle. They were going to retire Fukushima Daiichi in just a few more months, and so this particular Mark 1 with its substandard design was reaching its endlife, and so it raises a lot of concerns.”…

In 1986, a top official at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission raised concerns about the GE containment system’s design.

“I don’t have the same warm feeling about GE containment that I do about the larger dry containments,’’ said Harold Denton, director of NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation during an industry conference, according to a report at the time by the publication, Inside N.R.C. “There has been a lot of work done on those containments, but Mark I containments . . . you’ll find something like a 90 percent probability of that containment failing.’’