Last September, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe told Olympic dignitaries in Buenos Aires in an address that helped Tokyo win the 2020 Games: "Let me assure you the situation is under control." It would seem, just as he 'assured' his people that Abenomics would 'fix' Japan, in the case of Fukushima, he lied. As Japan Times reports [5], the manager of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has embarrassingly admitted that repeated efforts have failed to bring under control the problem of radioactive water.
Just 8 months ago, Abe sounded the all-clear...
Last September, Abe told Olympic dignitaries in Buenos Aires in an address that helped Tokyo win the 2020 Games: “Let me assure you the situation is under control.”
But, as Japan Times reports, things keep going wrong...
Last week, Tepco said it had directed 203 tons of highly radioactive water to the wrong building, flooding its basement. Tepco is also investigating a leak into the ground a few days earlier from a plastic container used to store rainwater.
In February, a tank sprouted a 100-ton leak of radioactive water, the most serious incident since leaks sparked international alarm last year.
A hangar-like structure houses Toshiba Corp’s ALPS system, able to remove all nuclides except for less noxious tritium, found at most nuclear power stations, its planners say.
It sat idle for 19 months after a series of glitches. The latest miscue occurred on Wednesday, when a ton of radioactive water overflowed from a tank.
Which has forced admissions of guilt and failure...
Abe’s government pledged half a billion dollars last year to tackle the issue, but progress has been limited.
“It’s embarrassing to admit, but there are certain parts of the site where we don’t have full control,” Akira Ono told reporters touring the plant last week.
He was referring to the latest blunder at the plant: channeling contaminated water into the wrong building.
Ono also acknowledged that many difficulties may have been rooted in Tepco’s focus on speed since the 2011 disaster.
“It may sound odd, but this is the bill we have to pay for what we have done in the past three years,” he said.
“But we were pressed to build tanks in a rush and may have not paid enough attention to quality. We need to improve quality from here.”
In summary, Tepco had pledged to have treated all contaminated water by March 2015, but said this week that was called a “tough goal.” But building the giant wall of ice remains more fact than fiction for now (still)...
Plans also call for building an experimental 1.4-km underground freezer to create a wall of ice around the plant to block the groundwater. Tests began last month and Tepco hopes next year to begin construction — sinking giant refrigeration rods into the ground to create an impermeable wall of frozen earth.
We hope that this works out better than the failed belief that devaluing your currency can solve a nation's indebtedness...