Congratulations to Fukushima, the radioactive planetary abscess voted the top environmental news story of 2013 by a blogger in British Columbia. Good. The damned story gets no where near enough coverage. Also, H/T What is Happening on Top of Fukushima Reactor No. 3? I now offer a righteous rant about the soon-enough to be potentially worldwide tragedy, spreading from Fukushima, the accursed spot on the East coast of Japan, where corporate greed and government indifference joined forces to create a door to hell on Earth.
Said rant is out in the tall grass.
The radioactive wound that used to be Fukushima Reactor No. 3 sits within a completely inoperative wreckage. Imagine action-adventure disaster movie aftermath. Reactor core No. 3 melted down because the people whose job was to control the fission reaction didn't do it. Flash. Bang. Sizzle. Wow!
The aforementioned people whose job was TEPCO, which, not withstanding some personnel shakeups, remains in charge of the disaster scene and responsible for its containment. From the very beginning, every reassurance TEPCO has given about conditions and its control of them has proven, sooner or later, to have been wrong. The news always gets worse.
RT News explains that the damaged No. 3 building has vented visible plumes at various times for the last six months. TEPCO, which can't safely inspect the area inside that structure, prevaricates about possible sources:
The steam was first spotted on December 19 for a short period of time, then again on December 24, 25, 27, according to a report TEPCO published on its website.
The company, responsible for the cleanup of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, has not explained the source of the steam or the reason it is rising from the reactor building. High levels of radiation have complicated entry into the building and further inspection of the situation.
snip
In a similar incident, small amounts of steam escaped from the reactor 3 building in July 2013, Asahi Shimbun reported. However it was unclear where the steam came from. TEPCO said that radiation levels did not change, adding that the steam could have been caused by rain that found its way to the primary containment of the reactor, and because this vessel was still hot, the water evaporated. On 23 July the steam was seen again coming out of the fifth floor just above the reactor containment, the Japanese newspaper reported.
TEPCO has admitted, in supposedly unrelated news, that beta emitting isotopes are now in ground water deep beneath building No. 4. Again,
according to RT News:
Meanwhile, TEPCO’s latest examination of deeper groundwater beneath the #4 reactor's well has raised new concerns that there might be another source of radioactive substances leakage into the ocean.
For the first time, the analysis of water samples taken from a layer 25 meters beneath the No. 4 reactor's well that is facing the ocean has revealed radioactivity in groundwater.
TEPCO investigators detected 6.7 bq/liter of Cesium 137 and 89 bq/liter of strontium as well as other beta ray-emitting radioactive substances.
Those isotopes of those elements don't just pop up in nature.
These isotopes are produced in a fission reaction, in this case, an uncontrolled reaction at an unknown place under poorly understood conditions. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that, real scientists. Thanks.
Even if I am wrong about that, the slo-mo unfolding of the creeping, growing, spreading disaster that is Fukushima, teaches that the news about Fukushima always gets worse.
For example, and who could have seen this coming? Fear of Fukushima fish has knocked the Japanese fishing industry hard. According to, again, RT News:
Due to radiation fears, Fukushima Prefecture fishermen have to dump most of their catch. Two years into the nuclear disaster, the world is growing weary of Japan’s seafood, with South Korea even banning Japanese fish and seafood imports.
Fish has traditionally not only been an integral part of Japanese food culture, but also one of its prized exports. In 2011, before the Fukushima disaster, Japan maintained one of the world's largest fishing fleets and accounted for almost 15 percent of global catches, according to Forbes.
They also report there's been a kind of dead cat bounce in the fortunes of Fukushima fisheries. Still, the real news is bad, as usual:
“There is significant contamination in the bottom segment, especially in the pond and the river system, where we can find a very high amount of radioactive cesium accumulated,” Yamashike Yosuke, Environmental Engineering Professor at Kyoto University, told RT.
Many Japanese seafood firms are under threat as there are five prefectures possibly affected by contamination in the sea, accounting for almost 40,000 tons of fish per year, RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky reports from Soma, a coastal town in the Fukushima prefecture.
The article concludes by pointing out that TEPCO uses government bailout money to buy radioactive seafood that some local fishermen appear content to sell to the nuclear utility. There is nothing encouraging about that tidbit. Fukushima is a Japanese national crisis with existing regional international damage and threat of sustained or increased Pacific Ocean release of radioactive isotopes.
Some may say I am ignoring TEPCO's legitimate accomplishments doing important and dangerous work, like the Reactor 4 fuel rod relocation project. Yes, I am ignoring stuff like that. Dealing with those rods is a rear-guard action to protect TEPCO from a fresh acute disaster. Jobs like that, however tough or successful, don't address the problems from the blob(s) of feral corium TEPCO has set loose on Japan's Pacific coast.
Some may say the Pacific, that vast sponge of an Ocean, can sop it all up, no muss, no fuss. Sure. Maybe. But all experience teaches that Fukushima news only gets worse. Fukushima remains a growing source of trouble for Japan and its people.
Experience also teaches that a troubled nation can become a troubled region, which can become a troubled World. It remains to be seen how wide a door to hell Fukushima turns out to be. It will take years to find out as the true story of Fukushima continues to unwind in super slo-mo.