Fukushima Meltdown Gets Worse and Worse
Dr. Tatsuhikn Kodama of the Radioisotope Center, University of Tokyo, recently stated to the Japanese Parliament that the total amount of leakage from the site is already about 29.6 times the amount of contamination caused by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Tokyo Electric Power Company remains mostly silent in the face of a disaster that it is helpless to remedy. The mass media have all but ignored the news coming out of Japan.
See also:
Dahr Jamail: Fukushima Radiation Alarms Doctors
TEPCO Releases Rare Video From Inside Fukushima Daiichi (This one seems to me to be a Japanese version of “Industry on Parade”)
Former U.S. envoy critical of Japan's nuclear crisis response
TVA Commits to Nuclear Energy
Fukushima: "Biggest Industrial Catastrophe'
We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.
A nuclear waste specialist stated that approximately 966 square kilometers near the power station are now uninhabitable. 966 square kilometers is 238,704 acres. Considering the fact that the reactor is sitting on the ocean, we can calculate the radius of a half circle with an area of 966 square kilometers thusly: 966 = .5 x π x r2. Solving for r, we get r = sqrt(966)/(.5xπ) = 24.8 km.
That means that everything within 24.8 km (15.4 miles) of the plant is uninhabitable. And since the damaged reactors are still emitting radioactive particles into the atmosphere, that radius will grow, although its direction of growth depends on the direction of the wind.
The U.S. mainstream media has been unusually quiet about the developing disaster to the west, even though the western United States has received substantial fallout. Researchers have already connected the fallout with a spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred in the ten weeks immediately following the disaster. In the case of NBC and MSNBC, the silence can possibly be attributed to the fact that GE, the manufacturer of the reactors in question, owns the two networks, but there is no excuse for the others not to take more interest. An accident described by an authority in the field as “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind” ought to be on the tongue of every anchorperson.
Read Dahr Jamail’s article in AlterNet.
The Fraud that Kills - Nuclear Fraud
Here are the facts about Tokyo Electric and the industry you haven't heard on CNN:
The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.
Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification." That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.
The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York. Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from 'failed' to 'passed.'
The company that put in the false safety report? Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction which will work with Tokyo Electric to build the Texas plant, Lord help us.
Scary, huh? Now I am beginning to appreciate Black Swan Theory. Meltdowns are one of the things that simply can’t happen. The finest engineers in the world, it is said, have prepared for every contingency, even on the earthquake-prone rim of the Pacific Ocean, so there is no danger of a reactor going out of control and spewing radioactive isotopes all over the world. This must be true, because the giant corporations that build these monstrosities and the equally giant power companies that operate them have told us that they are safe.
So much for trusting large corporation when big money is at stake. Palast:
TEPCO and Toshiba don't know what my son learned in 8th grade science class: tsunamis follow Pacific Rim earthquakes. So these companies are real stupid, eh? Maybe. More likely is that the diesels and related systems wouldn't have worked on a fine, dry afternoon.
Back in the day, when we checked the emergency back-up diesels in America, a mind-blowing number flunked. At the New York nuke, for example, the builders swore under oath that their three diesel engines were ready for an emergency. They'd been tested. The tests were faked, the diesels run for just a short time at low speed. When the diesels were put through a real test under emergency-like conditions, the crankshaft on the first one snapped in about an hour, then the second and third. We nicknamed the diesels, "Snap, Crackle and Pop."
(Note: Moments after I wrote that sentence, word came that two of three diesels failed at the Tokai Station as well.)
In the US, we supposedly fixed our diesels after much complaining by the industry. But in Japan, no one tells Tokyo Electric to do anything the Emperor of Electricity doesn't want to do.
I get lots of confidential notes from nuclear industry insiders. One engineer, a big name in the field, is especially concerned that Obama waved the come-hither check to Toshiba and Tokyo Electric to lure them to America. The US has a long history of whistleblowers willing to put themselves on the line to save the public. In our racketeering case in New York, the government only found out about the seismic test fraud because two courageous engineers, Gordon Dick and John Daly, gave our team the documentary evidence.
In Japan, it's simply not done. The culture does not allow the salary-men, who work all their their lives for one company, to drop the dime.
Comforting isn’t it? Read the entire article.
Tokyo Electric to Build US Nuclear Plants: The no-BS info on Japan's disastrous nuclear operators
What’s worse is that the Obama administration asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for the Texas reactors.