This is not the type of “crisis” or “leak” that ends quickly even with the Japanese government now taking over from TEPCO:
radioactive water has been seeping into groundwater and the Pacific
Ocean for two years, many of those tanks
holding radioactive water,
built with rubber seams only meant to last five years,
are leaking,
and the containment wall next to the ocean is making groundwater rise behind it,
spreading into the aquifer and spilling over it into the ocean,
with
every tuna caught off California bearing radioactive signatures from Fukushima.
The radioactive uranium cores are somewhere in
or under
their containment buildings, with no known way to extract them,
still requiring cooling water poured over them for some unknown number of years,
and continuing to be radioactive for thousands of years.
Remember, the Fukushima reactors are the same GE Mark I model as Plant Hatch
on the Altamaha River.
Why are we building more nuclear reactors in Georgia when
ten U.S. nukes have been cancelled or will never be built in the past year?
Google already installed on time and on budget
almost as much solar and wind as both new Plant Vogtle
nukes would produce and for less than what has already been spent on them,
plus solar panels and wind farms don’t leak radioactivity.
Photograph by Kyodo/Reuters
Latest Radioactive Leak at Fukushima: How Is It Different? by Patrick J. Kiger
for National Geographic 21 August 2013,
The water from the leaking tank is so heavily contaminated with
strontium-90, cesium-137, and other radioactive substances that a
person standing less than two feet away would receive, in an hour’s
time, a radiation dose equivalent to five times the acceptable
exposure for nuclear workers, Reuters reported. Within ten hours,
the exposed person would develop radiation sickness, with symptoms
such as nausea and a drop in white blood cells.
Mari Yamaguchi wrote for AP 28 August 2013,
Fukushima Leak Upgraded To Level 3 Severity, Continue reading →
And on August 26, his words made it into the Mainichi Shimbun. If he were an active politician, he’d want “to convince lawmakers to move in the direction of zero nuclear plants,” he said. Now would be the ideal time to move that direction. All 50 nuclear reactors were off line. All opposition parties favored zero nuclear power. It could be done “as long as the prime minister made the decision” — putting the onus squarely on his former protégé. And nuclear politics in Japan haven’t been the same since.