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Fukushima Falling Apart … Because Plant Operator Has No Incentive to Spend Money to Fix It
After visiting Fukushima a year ago, Senator Ron Wyden warned that the situation was worse than reported … and urged Japan to accept international help to stabilize dangerous spent fuel pools.
A year ago, an international coalition of nuclear scientists and non-profit groups called on the U.N. to coordinate a multi-national effort to stabilize the fuel pools. And see this.
A year ago, former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura – whose praises have been sung by Mikhail Gorbachev, U.S. Ambassadors Stephen Bosworth and Glenn Olds, and former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Goldman Sachs co-chair John C. Whitehead – noted:
The current Japanese government has not yet mentioned the looming disaster, ostensibly to not incite panic in the public. Nevertheless, action must be taken quickly. *** We believe an independent, international team of structural engineers and other advisers must be assembled and deployed immediately.
Yesterday – after Fukushima reactor operator Tepco’s recklessness and nickel-and-diming cheapness in dealing with the post-accident response caused new releases of radioactivity – the New York Times reported:
Increasingly, experts are arguing that the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, cannot be trusted to lead what is expected to be decades of cleanup and the decommissioning of the plant’s reactors without putting the public, and the environment, at risk.
***
“The Fukushima Daiichi plant remains in an unstable condition, and there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident,” Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, said at a news conference.
***
“No wonder the water is leaking,” said Hideo Komine, a professor in civil engineering at Ibaraki University, just south of Fukushima. He said that the outer protective lining should have been hundreds of times thicker.
***
Muneo Morokuzu, a nuclear safety expert at the Tokyo University Graduate School of Public Policy, said that the plant required a more permanent solution that would reduce the flood of contaminated water into the plant in the first place, and that Tepco was simply unable to manage the situation. “It’s become obvious that Tepco is not at all capable of leading the cleanup,” he said. “It just doesn’t have the expertise, and because Fukushima Daiichi is never going to generate electricity again, every yen it spends on the decommissioning is thrown away.”
“That creates an incentive to cut corners, which is very dangerous,” he said. “The government needs to step in, take charge and assemble experts and technology from around the world to handle the decommissioning instead.”
This is just like BP’s massive efforts to hide the extent and damage from the oil spill – even though their approach led to greater oil pollution – in order to avoid costs. (And the big banks’ cover up of the extent and damage from criminal fraud on the U.S. economy.)
AP provides additional details:
A makeshift system of pipes, tanks and power cables meant to carry cooling water into the melted reactors and spent fuel pools inside shattered buildings remains highly vulnerable, Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka acknowledged Wednesday.
***
The problems have raised doubts about whether the plant can stay intact through a decommissioning process that could take 40 years, prompting officials to compile risk-reduction measures and revise decommissioning plans.
***
Just over the past three weeks, there have been at least eight accidents or problems at the plant, the nuclear watchdog said.
***
Experts suspect the radioactive water has been leaking since early in the crisis, citing high contamination in fish caught in waters just off the plant.
***
“The nuclear crisis is far from over,” the nationwide Mainichi newspaper said in a recent editorial. “There is a limit to what the patchwork operation can do on a jury-rigged system.”
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"Increasingly, experts are arguing that the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, cannot be trusted to lead what is expected to be decades of cleanup and the decommissioning of the plant’s reactors without putting the public, and the environment, at risk."
Noooooooooooo, really Captain Obvious? What led NYT to believe this, the fact that Tepco's gross incompetence and criminal negligence prior to and after the tsunami led to this totally avoidable mess in the first place?
Every top exec of Tepco should be rotting in prison. Too bad they can't return to the traditions of their eastern culture and, instead of running off to their private islands like western corporate scumbags, perform the proper ritual once deemed appropriate when such blatantly dishonorable performance was exposed.
Tepco execs and family should live within 2 miles of their failure....permanently, without special gear. Until the spent fuel rods are removed. Also the radioactive waters should be left within a man made toxic pond locally rather than the world food supply.
Since everything is going to be glowing in the dark, guess it's time to short flashlights.
Nuke it, NOOOOOOK it, turn it all into energy
Wouldn't it be funny if Kim Jung Un nuked the problem away?
Related:
Exxon Mobil Cleans Up Major Tar Sands Oil Spill with PAPER TOWELS
At what point do we charge the Tepco brass with crimes against humanity, escort them to the Hague - and hang them?
Yes hang them over one of the reactors.
I think someone has to die first.
Frontline has an interesting documentary on this.
A lot of very brave men risked their lives.
There are some brave people working at ClusterFukushima (the volunteers are heroes).
And if you want to see mind-blowing bravery at Chernobyl, WATCH THIS:
You mean stupid people..Dying for your company? Insanity..maybe for the world yes..
Sooner or later, you're going to die for something. Might as well go out in a blaze of glory...
These heroes should be celebrated. I tip my hat to them.
No we stone(d) them here, we are civilized...
O wait, you are talking about brass here, allmost looks as gold right.
Brass is pure like the driven snow...
Boil it!
to decontaminate
has any one found a time line if there is another earthquake and the containment pools are lost i'm buying some puts on the yen just want to know when to cash out before we're all dead
Deep pockets in your shroud ?
Spend money on a unfixable, eh, thing?
Better spend it on bitcoins (it has electrolytes).
Greed, humanities downfall
Love, it's chance
Hope
?
Sad but true.
Our (adult) kids don't want to have kids. They do actually, but they're afraid of what the future may hold.
Cover-ups like this make us understand why they feel that way.
What kind of a world do we live in? I try my best to believe things will change for the better, and hope they do.
I have serious doubts and it's really sad.
What the hell is wrong with Japan. Sounds like a great project for their quantative easing project. I would imagine that this site could absorb 500 billion yen.
they could create a whole host of liquidity (cooling) pools..i guess its just another illustration of how useless fiat currency/qe actually is when you need to work with it in the real "nuclear" society
Wonder what the probability of havign another 6,7+ quake is in the next 40 years? I also thought that it was highly probably that a quake - technically aftershock(s) - of almost the same magnitude as the original were a near certainty within a few years (see New Zealand).
What is the true condition of the destruction of and containment activities at the Fukushima site.
Those with the information have not told us the truth. It is either contained or;
The Japanese government will need independent help from the world community of countries to contain/clean up this site.
Or does no one care for the survival of our planet.
What's the chance of the world chipping in trillions of dollars and tens of thousands sacrificing their lives to try to contain this?
Just wondering, doesn't Tepco have insurance?
On a nuke plant ?
Doubt if anyone would write it.
Probably self insured.
Nope ... nuclear reactors are insured by US - THE TAXPAYERS. No one else will insure.
The AIG's of the world would sell insurance on anyf*ckinthing....
and look what happened when someone claimed.
Amber
Isn't it about time that we openly acknowledge just what pieces of sh_t the Japs really are. Can anyone even come up with one good thing to recommend them as people, as humans, as neighbors, as trustworthy? ..................................................... Didn't think so. How about they pay for cleaning up the ocean - now full of their crap on beaches around the Pacific. And if not, why not? It's their crap, it's our beaches. If your next door neighbor shit all over your property, you would go to court and sue for damages to clean it up. Ok, just let the North Koreans nuke them - problem solved.
Three Mile Island is not in Japan and the "reporting" by MSM was pretty sketchy.
If memory serves... officially nobody got sick from that. And if they did, they "worried themselves sick" in some type of self-induced phenomenon.
There was no leakage from Three Mile Island. The containment dome held perfectly, as designed. Fukushima - not so well designed.
Ever heard of the difference between "boiling water reactor" (Fukushima type), and "pressurized water reactor" (Three Mile Island)? Further, only very modern containments can withstand the maximum pressure which occurs, if ALL coolant vaporizes, they are special constructions. Fukushima didn't have one of those. So your comparison is somewhat flawed.
Too lazy to look it up but wasn't there some controversy over that?
Yup...
Ummmmm.......I have one reason:
At least they aren't Chinese......yet.
The AMERICAN Government Is Dictating Japanese Nuclear Policy
If this is true then our elected politicians have not only lost their moral obligations to lead us, but have condemed us and the world population to nuclear contamination and the permanet change to the structure of human DNA.
It might not be so bad........maybe humans will mutate into something that sucks less.
"If this is true then our elected politicians have not only lost their moral obligations to lead us. . . "
Did you really believe that any of these blood-sucking ticks ever had any moral or ethical fiber anywhere in their being? Wow. These fucks only have one concern, and one concern only: Keeping power so the spice can flow to their masters.
Someone asked Goering or one of the other Nuremberg Trial defendants how come nobody at the top protested against Hitler's bullshit. The answer was that there were only "yes" men left by the end. Basically, anybody who questioned the party line was fucking executed.
Kinda the same thing now, but just a little more stealthy.
I was wondering when you would get around to the continuing saga of this story after reading a story in the NYT on new leaks in the underground pools used to store all the water runoff from cooling the damaged reactors.
We reported it days before the New York Times...
missed it.
/rant
"We're done here." That about sums it up. It would have been necessary to take action long ago. I know that it would be technically possible to do much more. That a completely halfassed idiocracy has decided to let just the dorks who fucked it all up work it out on their own, nearly deprives me of hope.
probably the best blog on fukushima daiichi from an analysis point of view:
www.ex-skf.blogspot.com
Upvoted. Don't know if it's the single best source, but it is a good source.
Maybe the North Korean nuke aimed at Tokyo will go off course and vaporize the mess, that would solve things wouldn;t it? /s
Sucks to live down wind of this.
Down arrow because its too horrible to contemplate...
To the best of my knowledge no one has ever detonated an atomic device over a pile of radioactive waste. So who knows what will happen. Worst case would be it would create a radioactive aerosal spray that would encircle the globe and cause everyone to get lung cancer. Well worth the risk IMO.
I'm in.