It’s been a while since Fukushima last made front-page news, but that is only because there have been no positive developments in that arena; and the negatives continue to plague industry spin-doctors.

Fukushima remains a menacing cypher, even though there have been press reports that there will be an attempt to remove spent fuel rods from Unit 4 before the end of the year.  

With multiple reactors in various states of cooldown and collapse, the focus has blurred somewhat.  News of collateral radiation impacts is constantly being “managed” by the industry and  NRC, who are determined not to sour Americans on nuclear.

Fukushima has just become too big and complex a mess for the relatively short attention span of American media.  Most people over here are okay with that.  They’ve heard enough and simply choose to believe the least disturbing prognosis; the one with the least  potential to impact their own lives.

But that is no reflection of the true exigency of unfolding events around Fukushima; and the people of Japan remain vigilantly engaged over the future of nuclear energy use in the island nation.

The urgency of the situation at Unit 4 (see Fairewinds video below) is due in part to the degraded structure of the building which has resulted in loss of containment; and to the fact that #4 holds  the largest quantity and the “hotest” (most recently used) spent fuel.  

Add to that the location of the spent fuel, which is above the reactor, where it is most vulnerable, and the complicating factor that Tepco has never been able to resolve the problem of maintaining the level of cooling water in the pool;  and you have what amounts to a ticking time-bomb.  A single seismic event  could potentially result in a fuel fire that would jettison highly radioactive material all over much of Japan and beyond.

Fukushima Daiichi: The Truth and the Future from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

In Fairewinds newest video, “Fukushima Daiichi: The Truth and the Future,” Maggie & Arnie Gundersen explain that all of the above-ground testing from the 1940’s to the 1970’s didn’t release as much radioactive cesium into the atmosphere as will be released should the spent fuel in Unit 4 catch fire and explode nuclear material into the atmosphere. If this should happen, depending upon the prevailing winds, the city of Tokyo might have to be evacuated.

The concentration of population and limited escape routes make such an evacuation almost unthinkable.  Beyond Tokyo, all of Japan and even the rest of the world would experience significant radioactive distributions that would most certainly represent a high risk to all living things.

Fairewinds has been invited to show this video at the Tokyo Peace Film Festival on June 30, 2012.  It urges the Japanese people not to buckle to industry urging to restart Japan’s nuclear program.

Pointing out that the cost of the Fukushima accident to the people of Japan will run to half-a-trillion dollars, Fairewinds’ Arne Gundersen says that nuclear no more represents an affordable energy future for the country than it does an environmentally safe one.  Instead, Japan could use this opportunity to begin down the path to becoming a world leader in the technology of smaller clean energy distribution systems located all over the country.

Gundersen says it is time to abandon the twentieth century mindset that could only see a single way to deal with the country’s energy needs, by concentrating all energy distribution from a few huge nuclear facilities located on the vulnerable perimeters of the islands.  It was the very scale of the Fukushima operation, with multiple reactors on a single site, that compounded the crisis for that region of Japan.