Friday, August 23rd, 2013
Stephan: You hear hardly a word about Fukushima on cable or broadcast television, and not much more in the corporate press. I have to go overseas to get reliable information. As you know I have done a number of stories on this event because, in my view, this catastrophe is just beginning, and it is telling us something very important. Already cancers are showing up in the children of Fukushima, and the projections are that there will be thousands more cancers as a result of this event.
It is now clear that both the government and the company that owned and ran the reactors in Fukushima, TEPCO, have been systematically lying to the people of Japan and the world. But the thing about letting the evil genii of nuclear power out of his bottle is that there is no way to tell exactly what is going to happen, and you can't keep it a secret. Three Mile Island gave us a hint, Chernobyl gave a sense of how bad it could get and, now, Fukushima shows us something of the true dimensions of how bad it can get.
The crisis has now escalated. Just a day after smooth talking government and TEPCO reps assured everyone the situation was now well in-hand and now rated at the lowest level of problem, as an 'anomaly' Japan's Nuclear Agency was forced to revise the situation to the third highest crisis rating, and it may go yet higher.
And it is no longer just a Japanese problem. I live on an island off the West Coast, and we are now getting advisories about things which wash up on the beach. The assumption is that the radioactive water pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima's failing storage tanks and destroyed buildings will be diluted by the vast ocean. But that is just an assumption, and it says nothing about what is happening to the ecosystem of the ocean around the reactors. The fishing industry that was a major income source for the people in the area has now collapsed. But it is increasingly clear there aren't going to be any people there anyway. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a large section of the most previously bountiful part of Japan may be off-limits functionally forever, just as the city of Pribyat in the Ukraine has been abandoned. Am I exaggerating? Here is the latest, and this story is far from over.
apan is to issue its gravest warning about the state of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant since the facility suffered a triple meltdown almost two and a half years ago.
The new warning, expected on Wednesday, comes only a day after the nuclear watchdog assigned a much lower ranking when the plant’s operator, Tepco, admitted about 300 tonnes of highly toxic water had leaked from a storage tank at the site.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority has now said it will dramatically raise the incident’s severity level from one to three on the eight-point scale used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for radiation releases. Each single-digit increase in the scale actually represents a tenfold increase in the severity of a radiological release, according to the IAEA.
The NRA on Tuesday classified the leakage only as an ‘anomaly’ on the IAEA scale but now considers it a ‘serious incident’.
The leak is the single most dangerous failure at the plant since the 2011 meltdown, which warranted the maximum level of seven on the severity scale, putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster 25 years earlier.
‘Judging from the amount and the density of the radiation in the contaminated water that leaked […]
