TEPCO continues to fail at Fukushima

The news from Japan isn’t good.  There is a contamination disaster unfolding at Fukushima that even the best efforts at spin can’t disguise.

They may have secured the 2020 Summer Olympics for Tokyo, but even that bit of good news may fall under a shadow if resolution to the radiation leaks does not soon come about.

Now, seventeen international experts have come together as signators of a  letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that pleads with him to intercede on behalf of the world so as to remove TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Country) from control of the Fukushima site.   TEPCO has proven hopelessly inadequate for the job of remediating the worst industrial accident in history.

According to Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer of Fairewinds Associates:

TEPCO…has no expertise in engineering and dismantlement.  The wrong skills are being used by the wrong people to attempt the present Fukushima cleanup.  In order for true progress to be made, TEPCO must be replaced and the Japanese people must be informed that their national liability from the accident exceeds a half a trillion US dollars.

The letter goes on to cite the wholly inadequate and fundamentally flawed guidelines that are currently in use regarding “safe” levels of radiation.  The false assumptions in those guidelines  mean that  women and children in particular are at risk.

About Sue Prent

Artist/Writer/Activist living in St. Albans, Vermont with my husband since 1983. I was born in Chicago; moved to Montreal in 1969; lived there and in Berlin, W. Germany until we finally settled in St. Albans.

9 thoughts on “TEPCO continues to fail at Fukushima

  1. Fifty-leven comments on gun control and a similar number on open meeting laws in Bennington.

    Consider: We are one moderate earthquake away from Japan becoming a failed state.

    127 million people. To quote Wikipedia: “Japan has the world’s third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the world’s fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the world’s fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer.”

    A quake of 7 or so on the Richter scale would crack open (and perhaps topple) the shaky spent fuel pool at reactor #4, exposing the fuel rods, which would light up like sparklers. That’s 8 Chernobyls. Not even suicidal people could get near the site after that, meaning that the other jury rigged fuel pools would eventually dry up and burn. 80 Chernobyls.

    So, half the quantity of radiation ever released into the atmosphere since 1945 released all in a few weeks. Japan gone. World economic collapse. A plume of radiation equivalent to a small nuclear war.

    Look up a USGS seismic plot of Japan over the past month. It looks like someone has been throwing darts at the place. Last Thursday there was a 5.3 quake 32 miles SW of Fukushima.

    And the world is dicking around. The US congress is flailing and tottering around like a half squashed bug. The UN performs its annual kabuki show.

    When there is a ticking time bomb with an unknown detonation time stuffed down your trousers, you deal with that first, and then tend to other important matters.    

  2. shakes head in remorse, facepalms self in mirror.

    In  actuality I made a comment shortly (hours or less) after this was posted & it ‘poofed’ into cyberspace & is now drifting through the blogosphere perhaps in a black cyber-hole somewhere…

    Thanks Sue once again for your committment to keeping this front & center. And, you have some company in MSM. Wow! Every 10 days or so I hear something from BBC or NPR, occasionally from cable news CNN or Fox, sometimes repeating stories you have broken here on GMD w/a little help from Arnie, Maggie & Enformable.

    It is difficult to think about this for long as the sheer magnitude is incomprehensible on many levels as well as the creepy implications of some side-stories:

    US-Japan deal could lead to more organic options

    The deal between the United States and Japan will make it easier for both countries to import each other’s organic products.

    3 days ago| By Mary Clare Jalonick of Associated Press

    http://news.msn.com/us/us-japa

    Mmm! Just what I always wanted, radioactive contaminated food.

     

  3. just wanted to get that up before the evil poofing-spirits got a hold of it.

    *all emphasis in posts are added

    The Japanese basically lied about what happened with the reactors for months. They said they were trying to prevent a meltdown, when in fact they knew within the first couple of days Reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi had melted down, and they actually melted through the steel containment vessels.

    So there was a worst case scenario that they were trying to hide, they even knew that at that time enormous amounts of radiation were released over Japan and some of it even went over Tokyo […]

    The melted core cracked the containment vessel, there really is no containment. So as soon as they pump the water in it leaks out again.

    http://www.washingtonsblog.com

    Location of molten reactor fuel still unknown at this time unless there has been a new finding.

    Difficult to quantify which present the greatest threat — this ranks high in my mind and it is not even a new one but worsening with each drop they spray onto this mess:

    Tokyo Professor: Ground beneath Fukushima reactors becoming increasingly unstable – “Potential catastrophe unfolding in plain sight”

    Published: August 20th, 2013 at 1:49 pm ET

    By ENENews

    69 comments

    http://enenews.com/japan-profe

    The readingsare high enough to provide a lethal radiation dose to someone standing near contaminated water without protective gear within hours. Inside the reactor

    buildings, the radiation is UNLIVEABLE – but 1,300 fuel rods need to be removed because the entire building is SINKING INTO THE GROUND…

    This is your bullet-point check list in our countdown to global contamination;

    – Saltwater cooling has caused corrosion of the pool walls, and probably the fuel rods and racks.

    – The No.4 reactor building is sinking because the ground is saturated with radioactive sea water.

    – The cranes that normally lift the fuel were destroyed. Robots don’t work becausethe radiation wipes the chips within a few minutes of the robots appearing on

    scene.

    – TEPCO cannot attempt this process without humans, which will manage thisenormous task while being bombarded with radiation during the extraction and

    casking.

    – The process of removing each rod will have to be repeated over 1,300 timeswithout incident.

    Includes litany of new reports of the spreading contamination of the Pacific:

    Saturday, September 07, 2013Fukushima is killing the Pacific

    http://the-tap.blogspot.ro/201

    Updates from Gregory Jaczko – very long but worth it:

    Gregory Jaczko: The Ongoing Fukushima Daiichi Crisis 9/24/2013



    Comments to National Geographic Q & A:

    Wayne Anderson

    Aug 16, 2013

    My back of the envelope math indicates that the fukushima disaster has already released INTO THE SEA more irradiated water than all of the buried storage facilities of Hanford nuclear site.

    Not including the original 3 million gallon dump during the crisis itself, at about 71,000 gallons a day (and change) since March 11, 2011, we are at more than 61 million gallons drained into the sea.

    Typical banana bullshit from the nuclear numbskulls:

    Mike Todd

    Aug 20, 2013

    @Wayne Anderson Let’s also keep this in perspective.  650 Becquerels per liter is about 4x the amount of radiation given off by an equivalent volume of normal, everyday bananas.

    Aagghh! * Facepalm *

    http://news.nationalgeographic

    Inside Fukushima’s Evacuation Zone — small but recent slideshow:

    http://www.nytimes.com/slidesh

    Lots of video links on same page:




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