Slowly, just as slowly was the Soviet government, the Japanese bureaucrats are imposing increasingly draconian restrictions on the areas being contaminated with this deadly fallout: Evac area to soon be declared ‘off-limits’ | The Japan Times Online
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The 20-km evacuation zone around the crisis-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant will soon be turned into a legally binding off-limits zone, senior officials said Sunday. The step is aimed at increasing government control over the area. Desperate residents have been braving radiation fears for quick return trips to pick up essential belongings. Officials suggested Sunday that they will now be able to force anyone out of the evacuation zone who refuses to leave. Japan’s agony continues with yet another major earthquake, this one centered nearly where the out of control nuclear reactors are in Fukushima.
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What doesn’t astonish me all that much is how closely this catastrophe mirrors Chernobyl. The pro-nuke people tried very, very hard to pretend Chernobyl was a one-time event caused by dirty commies who didn’t have the know-how of the capitalist West. The same secrecy, lies and evasions of the Politburo in the Kremlin are being repeated in Tokyo. A totally different economic and political system has led to the exact same sort of impossible crisis.
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The debate about which is better, communism or capitalism still continues with the capitalists in full bellow that their way is better but we see that this is false. The pursuit of profits leads to disaster every bit as much as a command economy is not a good working model. Capitalism can’t run nuclear power plants which is why governments insure them and subsidize nearly all of the processes including the all important waste disposal/decommissioning process: Government’s doomed £6bn plan to dispose of nuclear waste in the UK.
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It was hoped that Japanese contracts with Sellafield to make mixed oxide (Mox) nuclear fuel would underpin the economic and political case to tackle Britain’s plutonium stockpile with a second multi-billion-pound Mox fabrication plant on the Cumbrian site.
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However, Japanese power companies have told Sellafield that concerns about Fukushima have forced them to indefinitely postpone a shipment of French-made Mox nuclear fuel that would have been transported on British vessels operated from Sellafield.
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The postponement is significant because the Mox shipment was not destined for the stricken reactors at Fukushima operated by Tokyo Electric, but for the unaffected Hamaoka reactors operated by Chubu Electric, the same company that was supposed to be one of the first customers of the existing Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP)….This would mean that the existing Mox plant at Sellafield, which was designed to supply more than 1,000 tons of Mox over 10 years, is likely to produce a tiny fraction of this before it is due to be decommissioned, at enormous cost to the British taxpayer.
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Like with toxic loans, the people of Britain will have to pay for EVERYTHING. They, not the banks nor the utility corporations in foreign countries, will have to shoulder the overhead costs of this mess. And it is extremely expensive just like bailing out the bankers was tremendously expensive, too. And the return for the public will be nil: this is all about cleaning up a huge, painful, toxic, deadly mess used by others to get rich but now is worse than worthless, it is dangerous.
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Since it is a danger to everyone on earth for many, many years, the difficulty of securing this safely is monstrously huge and so far, totally inadequate in the long run. We have zero ability to safely secure nuclear by products at all. We can sort of secure them but not until they are safe. We can only TEMPORARILY secure them and pray no future generations are faced with dealing with this junk. Which will remain toxic for a tremendously long time.
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This goes hand in glove with global cooling: our plan was to use nuclear power so we would have a cooler earth. I sometimes think that the real plan is to have nuclear plants all over the place and to fix this, we will create another ice age and have glaciers wipe them all out, bury them all for about 200,000 years and then when the glaciers melt, animals, plants and perhaps humans will have already evolved into newer forms so they won’t notice some radioactive meltwater flowing all over the continents.
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The hyper-huge earthquake that moved Japan physically into a new configuration continues to have many major quake aftershocks: BBC News – Japan: Powerful earthquake hits north-east
The 7.1-magnitude tremor triggered a tsunami warning, and forced the evacuation of workers from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. The epicentre of the quake was in Fukushima prefecture, and struck at a depth of just 10km (six miles).
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A lot of major quakes are at the 10k level. I suspect this is a key stratus in the layers of the earth’s crust which is why it is so prominent in mega-quake events. Some quakes are much, much deeper, down by even 700k but the tectonic plate slip movements are generally at the 10k level. In the last few hours, another Magnitude 6.6-quake jolts Japan coast. These two quakes are causing fires and bringing down buildings already weakened by previous quakes. The stress on structures accumulates over time.
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Japan: New video shows Fukushima nuclear plant was hit by 48-feet-high wave: The panic and fear of more tsunamis are causing people to rush in and out of buildings, run into hills, and in general, this is wearing down everyone. My sympathies to all. Social and psychological problems will definitely proliferate afterwards. Japan doesn’t have much in the way of a mental health culture like we have in the US where we are quite fond of getting psychological aid. So the people there will struggle with this as best as possible.
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Considering how Japan is growing increasingly pessimistic due to the long, long wage and housing depression (warning: we are getting this, too) and the long fall in child bearing/child rearing is taking a huge toll, I fear that the appearance of acceptance of events is more due to giving up, not being energetic and fighting off things. The economic stress of these many large associated quakes deals a further blow to manufacturers which is reaching deep into the US as Toyota Cuts North America Output as Parts Shortage Reaches U.S.
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Japan is now the world’s #3 economy and will probably fall further behind as commerce gets hammered. For example, China Expands Ban on Japan Food Imports. Japan is physically quite small and its economy is hugely involved in the world export business so any disruptions that would be a problem in any country of any size are magnified many times over when compared to the US or China both of which are quite large in size. The distresses hammering Japan are in about one quarter of the country. This would be like the summer of 2005 when many hurricanes hammered nearly all sections of the Gulf of Mexico. Only the nuclear toxins makes the Japan business much, much worse. Thank goodness, we didn’t have that nightmare, too.
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The equivalent of this would be if the summer of hurricanes was also during a New Madrid Earthquake 9.0 mag event. Or even that summer with a San Andreas event in California. The fact is, the US took on immense amounts of debt to deal with the hurricane damages and if we had another $400 billion in damage from an earthquake, this would have sent us into an economic tailspin.
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One of my readers in Japan sent me this link 福島原発 1号機 / 福島原発原子炉の状態 原子炉の放射線量 which shows a sudden surge in the #1 nuclear reactor:
As I correctly predicted, the pauses in the output of nuclear radiation, the fires seeming to slow down, etc. didn’t mean the process of the meltdown ceased. It merely meant it was entering a new phase. This process is slowly destroying the buildings housing the out of control nuclear rods. The MOV business whereby ‘hotter’ rods (hot rods!) were being used to replace the older rods so the plants could run longer is where many of the worst problems are coming from. The business of using recycled nuclear waste is a disaster in itself and wisely, everyone hoping to do this is having second thoughts, as we saw in the article from Britain which mentions how taxpayers have to clean up everything.
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The pollution problem grows and grows on a daily basis: asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：High radiation levels found beyond 30-km radius – English
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A study of soil samples has revealed that as much as 400 times the normal levels of radiation could remain in communities beyond a 30-kilometer radius from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, where explosions spewed radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
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This is so bad, Fukushima Gov. Sato rejects meeting with TEPCO president. One thing is certain, the irresponsible way the entire Japanese nuclear plant business is run has finally been exposed to the light of day. Like in the US, the owners of these facilities believed in hiring part-time contractors who had no healthcare, etc. They saved money by running the place as if it were a third world country, not the world’s #2 or #3 economy: Day Laborers Brave Risks at Japan’s Nuclear Plants – NYTimes.com
.…thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries, lured by the higher wages offered for working with radiation. Collectively, these contractors were exposed to levels of radiation about 16 times as high as the levels faced by Tokyo Electric employees last year…Of roughly 83,000 workers at Japan’s 18 commercial nuclear power plants, 88 percent were contract workers in the year that ended in March 2010, the nuclear agency said. At the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 89 percent of the 10,303 workers during that period were contractors…..
…Tetsuen Nakajima, chief priest of the 1,200-year-old Myotsuji Temple in the city of Obama near the Sea of Japan, has campaigned for workers’ rights since the 1970s, when the local utility started building reactors along the coast; today there are 15 of them. In the early 1980s, he helped found the country’s first union for day workers at nuclear plants..
The union, he said, made 19 demands of plant operators, including urging operators not to forge radiation exposure records and not to force workers to lie to government inspectors about safety procedures. Although more than 180 workers belonged to the union at its peak, its leaders were soon visited by thugs who kicked down their doors and threatened to harm their families, he said.
“They were not allowed to speak up,” Mr. Nakajima said. “Once you enter a nuclear power plant, everything’s a secret.”
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The NYT is very good, covering this story. You can bet, things are probably quite similar here, too. Workers being forced to lie is common, too. Once, I was fired from a job for trying to enforce OSHA standards so I called in the Feds who raided the place and forced compliance. There was some grim satisfaction in doing this (it was a computer fabrication ‘clean room’ facility…these rooms are TOXIC if not patrolled properly!!!!).
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The label ‘clean rooms’ to describe the toxic business of computer chip fabrication is used to fool people into giving their OK to these businesses. They have to have huge roof blowers to disseminate the contaminated air to the community. We had alarms on the roof and would have to shut down the processes if roof repairs were made otherwise, anyone on the roof would have been poisoned or killed by the toxins! And yet, at the same time, the corporations would tell people, this is all very ‘clean’.
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This is probably why I am so very irritated with the global warming people lying about nuclear power. It ain’t clean at all. They should have an honest talk about things. Well, history is being made in the usual way, people die, homes are lost, vast farmlands contaminated by nuclear power and everyone is noticing this. The residents of the land around Fukushima were patiently waiting to return home. It is just filtering in this week that the day of return is…NEVER. So the anger will now grow.
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Note in the NYT story, do read the whole thing, that the working conditions of the low level day laborers was extremely nasty and in particular, when an inspection was going to be made, they were sent into very toxic places to wipe everything down with rags! Yikes! Untold numbers now have cancer and this isn’t being tracked by anyone. I can see why. One of the biggest lies about nuclear power is lying about how dangerous it is vis a vis cancers. A huge number of people hope that it has no effect. But the refusal to truly track people to see what happens to them is why there are so contentious statistics. In Japan, not one ‘contract’ worker is followed up to see if they get ill due to this exposure.
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What is really funny, Japan has an election this week. As usual, the usual goes on and on since the country is stuck in neutral: Local elections held amid crisis show voters are looking for stability.
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The first round of local elections took place on April 10, just a month after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit eastern Japan. The most talked-about post of Tokyo governor went to 78-year-old incumbent Shintaro Ishihara, for whom the next four-year period will constitute his fourth term.
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The status quo is wonderful for the elites. The masses see little variations on things and since the basic social care structure isn’t under attack like it is in the US (the GOP wants no Social Security or Medicare but dares not say so too openly): BBC News – Tiffany expects profits to be hit by Japan events Japan’s elites are 20% of Tiffany’s market world share:
GDP (purchasing power parity):
$4.338 trillion (2010 est.)
country comparison to the world: 4GDP – per capita (PPP):
$34,200 (2010 est.)
country comparison to the world: 38 (The US is #10, for instance)
15.7% (2007)Population below poverty line:
Distribution of family income – Gini index:
37.6 (2008)
country comparison to the world: 74
24.9 (1993)
Japan’s rich have almost 30% of the wealth while the poor have less than 5% which is a pretty great imbalance. Germany’s Gini index has it as 26 which is one of the most balanced nations, Norway and Sweden doing even better. The lower the number the more wealth the lower classes have compared to the rich. Sweden has the best ranking at 136 while Japan is significantly worse at 74. The entire EU is 111 which is much better than Japan. The US is 40 with a Gini of 45.0 which is significantly worse than Japan!
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The Japanese elites have ruthlessly exploited the people there for generations. Driving them into endless wars, leading them into suicide missions from hell, lying to them about the safety of nuclear power plants. The Japanese go along with each insane demand, each outrage, silently, cringing with fear.
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The US public has all sorts of romantic notions about Japan that are hard to squelch. Popular Japanese anime and games reinforce this pro-Japan bias. But we have to look hard at Japan and in especial, their culture. Some very toxic ideas are being disseminated. The rich/poor gap being one of the worst.
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Talking about toxins, the US ‘cowboy’ culture and our military madness is also suicidal and dangerous: Suicide Rate of Female Soldiers Triples in War Zones – But rate for male soldiers still higher. This week the Marines’ ‘Poster Boy’ for Suicide Prevention Kills Self – Clay Hunt did ‘everything right,’ still couldn’t be saved. We nearly eliminated deaths in our wars, using robot assassin machines, etc. Still, the natives we are trying to control still manage to kill some of our occupying forces. By the way, the Libya mess continues to devolve the same way all our wars are going: into the pits of hell. Expensive pits of hell.
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Japan has thrown workers under the bus but so has the US: Laid-Off Worker Jumps to Death From Costa Mesa, California, City Hall
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The city sent layoff notices to roughly half its employees yesterday, including 90 firefighters, 12 jail staffers, 30 dispatchers, and 50 maintenance workers, as part of a plan to outsource 18 city services, KTLA-TV reports.
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So, the new workers will be ‘contract’ workers with no benefits. And someone will profit, hiring the cheapest labor working for slave wages. The rift between the rich and poor will widen even more. Even as we spent trillions a decade bombing Muslims and trying to rebuild their nations, we see our own nation firing firefighters, cops and teachers. With yokels cheering this on, hoping that NO ONE in the US will have ANY benefits, health insurance or anything. Yippee! We can all be equally poor.
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Of course, this fixes global warming. People won’t be able to heat their homes and they will then freeze to death. Or the obesity epidemic will end with people getting little to eat. There are many aspects to this. One thing is certain: the rich don’t care. Just as Japan’s wealthy elites buy a huge amount of jewelry as their government runs of trillions in public debt, so it is here, our rich do exactly the same thing.
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On to another news item I have watched a lot. Germany continues to court Russia and it is giving the Russians great glee: Russian Gas Beckons for Germany as Merkel Turns From Nuclear – Bloomberg.com
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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s shift away from nuclear power is set to make Germany more reliant on Russian gas and Merkel more dependent on her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder.
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Merkel’s pledge to speed the exit from atomic power after the crisis in Japan is helping push natural-gas prices higher as Germany scrambles to identify energy alternatives. Gas supplied by OAO Gazprom may be the easiest way for her to meet Germany’s climate goals and keep Europe’s largest economy running.
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So, the Japanese earthquake/tsunami is reaching across the other side of the earth to change the political landscape. To think that just three years ago, Germany was sneering at Russia and declaring they would be free of all Russian energy sales. My, my, how time flies!
Elaine! Been a long wait for your trademark shrieking, foam-flecked-spittle-flying-from-the-mouth dispatches from the crystal ball that portends the End Of The World As We Know It!
After your entertaining diversion of full-bore Nazi-style Jew hatred a couple of posts ago (no swastika though! wink wink!!), you are now back to doing what you do best.
Elaine, you are my favorite and #1 deranged Internet harpy! Never stop!
Finaly the idiots in Japan stopped lying about the severity of the radiation leak and raised severity level to 7 from 5.
http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20110411D11NY121.htm
Japan May Raise Nuke Accident Severity Level To Highest 7 From 5
TOKYO (Kyodo)–The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan released a preliminary calculation Monday saying that the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been releasing up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour at some point after a massive quake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan on March 11.
(10,000 terabecquerels/hr is 10^16Bq per hour.)
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The Japanese recently dumped TONS of MOX polluted radioactive water into the ocean without informing the rest of Asia, and when Asia went nut the Japanese simply said “We’ve got permission from the US”, which made us even more pissed off.
So we’re pretty much waiting for Mount Fuji to erupt, 300 years ago it erupted 49 days after a huge quake, so we’re hoping it’ll erupt in 3 weeks.
FYI Last thursdays 7.1 earthquake was at a depth of 49km +/- 7km and it was much closer to Sendai than Fukushima, typical of the BBC to not worry too much about the correct details.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2011/usc0002ksa/
Seems like there a troll loose (Hammerhead) never mind him, Elaine. I (as well as others) enjoy your writings. Anywho, one of my old war buddies who is in the Pacific says that both the Japanese and U.S. Governments are on high edge regarding what to do next..A communique for a information blackout was in effect but the situation is continually escalating beyond the abilities of all Governments who understand the nature of the situation to cover up.
Reactors 1, 2 and 3 are are in a state of meltdown..the real number for core damage for all three reactors is in the range of 85 – 90 percent. My friend in the Pacific is giving it a month to get the situation rectified, however, he’s not so concerned about the actual radiation but the geopolitical ramifications.
Detonating a nuclear device at the plant would create enough power to blast the cores into dust, however, this would pose a great threat to the Japanese citizens (who are still haunted by WWII) but would stop the exposure to other surrounding countries. If Japan is unable to accomplish regaining control of the plant (it’s speculated!) that one of the nuclear armed countries would launch a tactical nuke towards the plant to destroy the cores without Japanese approval.
Not to drone on but this is what is scaring the U.S. and Japan specifically. Destruction of the cores in this method is the only way to stop the crisis but we shall soon see how this turns out in the next couple of months.
“Destruction of the cores in this method is the only way to stop the crisis”
Yes!! More 100% Grade A USDA approved insanity!
That’s why I keep coming back here for more.
Hammerhead, do you know that your method of speaking appears even more immature than the people you try to ridicule? If you have nothing constructive to say, best to keep quiet.
Worst case scenario is fuel melting through containment, then melt through floor into ground. Not exactly a life-and-death situation, so no one will blow up core to try to stop this. As fuel sinks into ground, it will spread out naturally and eventually lose criticality and cool off.
In short, no biggie. Best they can do is to entomb the place quickly to reduce aerial particles pollution.
I finally get the “Hammerhead” handle! Clearly this dude has a hammer in his head, instead of a brain. And I thought I was clueless.
Here is today’s lesson for Hammer-in-the-Head (GE mouthpiece):
@ Retired Vet Marc: You are 100% spot on, validating my intel.
@Retired Vet Marc, what size device is postulated?
The problem is that there are four reactors in deep doodoo, and a short distnce away there are another 2 reactors that also will be in trouble if a device is used. These reactors are construced out of steel and concrete. A 10 kiloton Nagasaki device will not be sufficient especially if used as a gound burst.
Gotta nuke something!
You people make L. Ron Hubbard look sane
First you get a Blues,
The you lose a Blues but get a Buffalo Ken
Then you lose a Buffalo Ken only to have it replaced by a Nah
Then you lose a Nah and wait for its replacement. Didn’t have a long wait.
ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ
ELAINE: Yup. I am patient.
@w3g
If the cores melt down to the water table the possibility of another explosion comes into play not to mention extreme contamination of any underground water sources. It’s an unknown really but theyre running out of time and non destructive solutions.
@billi
Speculation is a double digit megaton yield device in the mid teens would be sufficient to destroy the entire plant and cores. Mind that I said the entire plant..
That’s quite a blunt hammer that fellow up above keeps smashing himself in the head with! But careful! Too much “brain” seepage interferes with logical thought… ouch!
Even if melted fuel comes in contact with ground water, there will be no explosion. The explosion you are expecting only comes about if you dump 5000 degrees fuel into a pool of water.
Ground water does not exist in pools, if you have ever dug a well, you will know that the water seeps in slowly and takes a long time to fill up to any level. In this case, even below the water table, the heat from fuel will vaporize the small amount of water that seeps up to it constantly, and there will be no explosion.
As for extreme contamination to ground water, that is already a done deal. The contaminated water on site has polluted the ground water beyond any hope already, so adding more radiation won’t make them any more unusable.
As I said, no biggie. There is not a chance in hell that they will detonate the core here.
Hammer, what do you mean, an African or European swallow?
I was very afraid of this outcome when I learned that the winds would shift towards China and Russia in the spring. Since the entire plant is doomed and will melt down entirely, China or Russia could easily claim the right of self-defense of civilian populations when nuking this doomed plant.
Russia has less right to do so, since it brought us Chernobyl, but I think the Chinese would rather Russia do it than them. At some point, they are going to have to decide on it. China cannot afford to have its main produce region contanminated just because the Japanese don’t care. China has to feed one billion people.
For those who think they have no right, keep in mind that our leaders want to nuke Iran just because they “might” have a bomb in ten years or so. China, Korea, and Russia are not dealing with possibilities, but a reality whose outcome is all too predictable.
And while we and the Japanese remain silent, they are running out of time.
I don’t think using a nuclear bomb to supposedly stop an out of control nuclear reaction is a good idea in the least.
There must be an easier way, or at least a way that is more gentle.
If the Russian engineers were there they would have already come up with a solution. In my humble opinion of course.
I mean check out this video:
(searching)
Peace,
Ken
plus – Go Sabres!
The idea of a nuke is a good one.
1. The radiation after impact decreases dramaticaly (in relation to a continuous unstoppable bleeding into the atmosphere)
This can be varified by looking up the tables available.
2. The area is already unlivable.
3. Fallout is laughable, just look at what is happening now, and again, IS A ONE OFF.
4. It will vapourize the problem including the Plutonium.
5. Japan can order mass evacutions if they do it quickly before everyone is irradiated.
6. After TEPCO admitted lying about repairs and hid the amount of spent fuel, they should suck it up.
And finally, after the big ka-boom, they can clean it up like they did Hiroshima.
Simple…… sort of…..
PS Best case scenario for a worst case senario and Apocolypse
3. Plutonium
The idea of a nuke is a good one.
1. The radiation after impact decreases dramaticaly (in relation to a continuous unstoppable bleeding into the atmosphere)
This can be varified by looking up the tables available.
2. The area is already unlivable.
3. Fallout is laughable, just look at what is happening now, and again, IS A ONE OFF.
4. It will vapourize the problem including the Plutonium.
5. Japan can order mass evacutions if they do it quickly before everyone is irradiated.
6. After TEPCO admitted lying about repairs and hid the amount of spent fuel, they should suck it up.
And finally, after the big ka-boom, they can clean it up like they did Hiroshima.
Point is it will stop it now. BTW look up the MOX they use… it’s frickin scary.
Simple…… sort of…..
PS Best case scenario for a worst case senario and Apocolypse