Several days ago the AP reported as if the all clear had been sounded, nuclear power could dust itself off and get back to work.
Initial fears that erupted in the wake of the crisis, threatening to derail the nuclear renaissance of the last several years, have largely subsided.
Emergency. There's an emergency going on. It's still going on. …
Full meltdown.TEPCO has been able to explore the damaged plant and they discovered
…that No. 1's containment vessel has been leaking water and today discovered a sizeable hole they believe was created by fallen fuel pellets.The water leakage not only indicates that the clean up efforts will take longer than originally expected but also that the worst case scenario was already underway when TEPCO said it had been avoided.
In addition to this and everything else Japanese authorities are also dealing with what is left in the expansion of the 20 kilometer exclusion area to a zone of no entry. In scenes likely as eerie as a disaster movie, farm livestock and dogs left in the no-go zone have been filmed scavenging for food. Many animals died in their cages from starvation.
Farmers living inside the evacuation zone had no choice but to abandon their pigs, chickens, beef cattle and dairy cows when they were ordered out by the government. Recent footage taken inside the no-go zone shows cows running in herds across empty roads and dogs left behind by their owners prowling for food.
The area is estimated to have about 3,400 cows, 31,500 pigs and 630,000 chickens. Of these, officials guess 1,300 cows and 200 pigs remain alive. Authorities have been killing livestock for health reasons and will start to cull the thousands of remaining animals but need the farmers consent.
We take over responsibility for their lives for the benefits they yield to us humans; and then, when an emergency strikes, they often get left in harms way.
It’s even worse when that emergency has resulted from human hubris.
The Entergy, their lackeys at the NRC, and various nuke lovers, such as Atomic Rod, here in America keep reminding us that this can never happen here because our Mark 1 “Completely Different®™” than those in Japan!
Entergy has sued the State of Vermont for the rights to do to Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts what TEPCO has done to Fukushima prefecture.
With core breaches and burning spent fuel as the result, creating huge ‘exclusion zones’ for decades, how exactly does this serve the Public Good? Electricity that’s ‘too cheap to meter’?
We certainly can’t make Entergy pay for decommissioning, because that would interfere with profits and make their stock price go down, which is the single worst sin in American politics.
And the interference with stock prices and profit-taking supersedes Contract Law any day of the week, which is why Entergy is demanding that they don’t have to abide by Contract Law. The Memorandum of Understanding that they happily signed with Vermont is a legally binding contract, which must be broken the second it might possibly be enforced!
The Rule of Law doesn’t apply to big corporate citizens like Entergy, just like it doesn’t apply to top-level politicians like Bush, Cheney and Obama. Entergy would be well within it’s rights to extort a license extension from Vermont by threatening an intentional melt-down if they are forced to close next year on schedule, no one would be able to stop them.
Remember how LILCO fired up Shoreham on Long Island AFTER they knew it would NEVER generate power? They did that solely to irradiate the core and intentionally make it way more expensive to deal with it’s high-level radioactivity! They got away with that one, setting a precedent for Entergy.
If Entergy were to threaten to open the valves and dump core coolant into the CT river unless they get their way, who would stop them?
If it’s not being reported, then the crisis is over. Just please don’t read NHK or Kyodo…
One point that had eluded me until recently is that typically, spent fuel pools have no “containment” enclosures, unlike the reactors themselves.
If you have access to the New Yorker, (or just click here) Elizabeth Kolbert has a relatively short and informative piece in the March 28 issue.
So, when the circulation pumps fail, and the backups fail and the pool walls crack, all of which happened in Fukushima Daiichi, the spent fuel pool leaks into the environment, and the “spent” fuel generates a lot of heat, even burning, and um, melting (emphases added):
And on this side of the Pacific, Kolbert writes:
To anyone following the Gundersens, this is likely old news. But I can let in only a little bit of this disaster at a time.
One does have to wonder why we all heard about strontium 90 in milk in Europe and eventually around the world fairly soon after Chernobyl, even though it is to the East of the US in a globally prevailing West wind current; but we are hearing next to nothing about spreading contamination from Fukushima Daiichi, to the west of us, where the prevailing winds will hit the US sooner than nearly anywhere else.
NanuqFC
The human race has today the means for annihilating itself … by careless handling of atomic technology through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure. ~ Max Born (Nobel Prize winner for Physics, 1954; from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1957)
http://www.google.com/hostedne…
This had already happened:
http://lucaswhitefieldhixson.c…
Then this a week later:
How industry or anyone can suppose it’s back to ‘business as usual’ is far, far beyond the pale as well as stunning example of arrogance which got them into this mess as well as all of the others.