Maybe because Vermont Yankee and the stricken Fukushima power plants are of the same age and design, I figured the owner might have the same habit as Entergy of releasing bad or embarrassing news on Fridays. But after considering Tepco’s two-year-long inability to control the flow of just about everything from that facility, I hope controlling the news cycle is a low priority.

At Fukushima #3 on Friday there were reports that rats, yes rats, for a second time since March no less, had caused a power outage at the “stricken” Fukushima nuclear power complex. “Stricken” has become most of the media’s unofficial first name for Fukushima, “disabled” is the middle name.

Tepco has since installed mousetraps at the site and promised to plug holes through which rats and other rodents might enter buildings and gnaw on important equipment. It has also promised to speed up work to install backup power cables to the fuel pools.  

But Friday afternoon, four workers using wire meshing to seal a space around electric cables caused a ground fault, or the accidental flow of current to the ground. No one was injured, but the ground fault shut off electricity to the cooling system at the No. 3 reactor fuel pool.

By Saturday however, other news leaked out that not only had the rat-catching efforts caused a three-hour shutdown of the cooling system in number 3 reactor but that contaminated water was leaking outside the plant from a lined storage pool. Early in the week when radiation levels outside the plant spiked, workers detected new water leaking from one of seven underground pools at the plants

[…] up to 120 metric tons of contaminated water may have leaked into nearby soil surrounding the plant but that the leak is unlikely to have reached the sea, half a mile (800 meters) from the cooling pool.

Officials offered no explanation on why it is “unlikely” the radioactive water has not traveled the 800 meters (2,624 ft.) to reach the sea.

So two years into this emergency, plagued – or rather stricken – by rodents and massive leaks, Tepco declares:

"We need to revise our water management plans."

Atomic strength mops and mousetraps must be in it for the long haul, since according to Japanese government estimates it will take 40 years to fully clean-up the site.

Now we just need someone to build a better mousetrap.