27 March 2011

a view from the washing machine

[click image]

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I do not recommend reading entire news wire articles.
Officials say they still don't know where the radioactive water is coming from, though government spokesman Yukio Edano earlier said some is "almost certainly" seeping from a damaged reactor core in one of the units.

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A top TEPCO official acknowledged it could take a long time to clean up the complex.

"We cannot say at this time how many months or years it will take," Muto said, insisting the main goal now is to keep the reactors cool.

Workers have been scrambling to remove the radioactive water from the four units and find a place to safely store it. Each unit may hold tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive water, said Minoru Ogoda of Japan's nuclear safety agency.

Safety agency officials had been hoping to pump the water into huge, partly empty tanks inside the reactor that are designed to hold condensed water.

Those tanks, though, turned out to be completely full, said Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Meanwhile, plans to use regular power to restart the cooling system hit a roadblock when it turned out that cables had to be laid through turbine buildings flooded with the contaminated water.

"The problem is that right now nobody can reach the turbine houses where key electrical work must be done," Nishiyama said. "There is a possibility that we may have to give up on that plan."

Despite Sunday's troubles, officials continued to insist the situation had at least partially stabilized.
It's bad enough when you go in for the snippets. Only snippets seem to correlate with something distantly connected to actual.

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I took the "geiger counter" link off my sidebar, not just because it was better labeled "radiation monitor", but because the radiation monitors are not registering anything quantifiable except in the very widest sense. The government [which includes universities because of funding considerations] and the nukes plants are the only ones with equipment up to the job, and they're not telling... even where they still have functioning monitoring equipment. If you want to put yourself through it, here's the citizens' network and here's the feds'....

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love, 99
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8 comments:

  1. Cover it concrete, I can't believe they are still thinking that they might be able to save their investment. They'll end having to leave this little island for a new home.

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  2. I have tried to think what decent reason they could have for this, and the ONLY excuse I can come up with is that the proximity to the ocean makes the concrete thing problematic or impossible... except, if that were the case, SURELY we'd've heard about it by now, no?

    I keep hearing that they intend to do the cement thing, but only AFTER they have it all thoroughly cooled... a matter of years. This would seem like a smart plan, since it would mean they could then cap it and not have to go re-cement it every few years for the next millions of years, BUT the price of this "pragmatism" is every living thing, at least in the area, but ALSO the world.

    So, you might have some understanding for the denizens of Out There who are screaming 007-like scenarios for what's really going on. WHO could take all this at face value? Face value is suicide.

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  3. Memories of William Beaumont!

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  4. A dash of Wisconsonia....

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  5. “To a layman, you’d be scared to death,” said Lake Barrett, a nuclear engineer who directed the cleanup of Three Mile Island. “You’re working with saltwater around your feet. This is not the way electricians usually work.”

    Not to mention that pesky radiation thing...

    Radiation levels at Japan nuclear plant reach new highs

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  6. I only see a worsening of ignorance for anyone reading these news accounts of the situation. The obliviousness to the lives and health and suffering of sentient beings is beyond the pale. We were all scandalized by the Soviets' brutality at Chernobyl. Now we can see they were veritable SAINTS... relatively, anyway. The heedlessness and INGRATITUDE are knocking my pins out.

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  7. It seems no matter the horrific content of these news stories they are all inject with some hopey-feely-goody thing to make it all go away!
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  8. Would that it were only that bad. The assaults on common sense; the retractions and corrections and inability to keep the story straight from one reactor to the next; the failures to mention the INSANE threats to humans and wildlife; the silence on the matter of Tokyo turning into a ghost town; all manner of failures and obfuscations; and UTTER void of any pressure to get this HANDLED....

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