TEPCO Admits It Will Take DECADES To Clean Up Fukushima

The Fukushima catastrophe continues on its relentless, geological progress towards final resolution which is, the burning off of the high radiation of the melted cores.  Humans still struggle to control this burn off which produces very toxic effects that can last for generations.  The various actions of the humans seeking to control all of this are giving very slowly away to admissions of helplessness.  Even so, the Japanese still claim they can fix this…in the next few DECADES!  Not months like they pretended in May, not years like they said last month.  No, it is now being admitted that cleaning up this mess will take generations.

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The Japanese government teeters on the edge of collapse.  Before this catastrophe, the head of the Japanese government changed 5 times in less than 4 years.  The chaos at the top shows us the destruction at the bottom of society.  It is now more akin to running around in circles, screaming, rather than leading towards a brighter future.

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Into this cave of darkness which was dug by excessive debt, a ridiculous real estate bubble, refusal to tax the very rich and a desire to run away from a culture that lost its anchor in the past, Japanese are committing suicide in record numbers.  Coupling the nuclear disaster with a terrible job market and we get many people killing themselves since they see no end to this, only death.

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This is beyond sad.  It scares me because this is so anti-life, anti-hope, unlike the restive Muslims who are seeing brave millions confront their own governments and forcibly agitating for something, anything!  The most recent example is the sudden explosion of anger in Malaysia.  Over 1,400 arrested, tear gas fired in Malaysia protest – 1450 WHTC Holland’s Hometown Station.  I get email updates on the situation there over the years and it certainly was growing, these demonstrators brave the authorities in support of Anwar  Ibrahim.  They want economic reforms as do most of the demonstrators in many Muslim countries.

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Japan is ripe, over ripe, actually, in a state of open rottenness and desperately needs energetic young people to take to the streets, demanding some changes.  There is barely a debate about changing at all over there.  Meanwhile, in the US, we have barely begun to debate these matters and like in Japan, the media avoids debate by misstating what is going wrong in the first place.  In the media, for example, they were still debating about whether or not there was a housing bubble when it was painfully obvious and had already long popped.

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The debate about nuclear power was supposedly over in February, 2011.  Those of us who warned everyone that spreading nuclear power plants all over the planet was a very, very dangerous and bad idea were told that we were dinosaurs who were going to destroy mankind via Co2 gasses.  Which is what plants call ‘oxygen’ for themselves!  Plants love CO2 and eras of large amounts of CO2 usually provoke much more plant growth to take it all up (these moments were usually due to volcanic eruptions in the past).

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The cure for CO2 which should mean more trees be planted instead of cutting down all the rain forests, was to electrify everything with nukes.  Now that we see what a true nuclear catastrophe looks like, aside from the atypical Chernobyl facility fire, we can see that fixing nuclear disasters can be literally impossible:  The amount of radiation of a nuclear reactor nuclear reactor nuclear power plant in Fukushima state / Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant

As we see from the above graph, every time there is a huge drop in radiation, the authorities declare the situation is under control and all is now well.  But then there is another event and it shoots suddenly upwards again.  Then falls.  We see in this graph a wave formation.  Even when it is kept ‘under control’ for a few days, it then responds with even higher explosive emissions of radiation.  One might suggest, this is the beast in the reactor core area breathing.  Each time, it sucks in air and then exhales.  That is, it is very much ‘alive’ and growing, not shrinking.

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Efforts to ‘cool’ the mess suppresses this breathing process but then, the slightest glitch and it reacts instantly.  It is not being controlled or suppressed but rather, they are pouring water on this ‘fire’ which isn’t going out, it simply keeps it from exhaling more radiation.  This very dangerous job is hard on the human workforce as summer progresses, they suffer from the heat as well as radiation exposure.  They still can’t go into any of the chambers for more than 5 minutes.  THIS WON’T CHANGE FOR DECADES.

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The ability to fix things depends on getting to the mess and doing something physical.  This is nearly impossible:  Govt., TEPCO draw roadmap to reactor decommission

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A roadmap toward decommissioning of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant indicates that the removal of melted nuclear fuel rods at the plant may begin in 10 years…The roadmap shows that reactor buildings could be finally demolished and cleared away after the removal of melted fuel rods is completed, and that it will possibly take dozens of years.

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TEPCO halts water decontamination system after chemical leakage is the latest news showing the futility of all efforts at even containing the mess, much less, fixing it for good.  The sense of despair in Japan is now reaching epic proportions.  When the Japanese people read today’s news that the cleanup will take dozens of years, they saw the real news, this means DECADES.  This means, if we were to put a date to this mess, the optimistic appraisal is to clean it up by 2060 or so!  How insane is this?  The Toxic Radioactive Find Adds to Hanford Cleanup Woes.

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The soil under a research building at this major nuclear facility in Washington state is so radioactive, the soil can kill on contact!  Wow!  And this is scary stuff indeed.  It is right now under a concrete slab so as long as no one touches it or goes there for the next few eons, it is OK!  This radioactive disaster area is over 500 square miles and no humans can live there…essentially forever.  The Federal government has been trying to ‘clean up’ Hannaford for around 20 years.  That is, this is taking decades.

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There is over 50 million gallons of polluted water held in 177 underground tanks there.  No one has any idea what to do with this toxic water.  Japan has dealt with it by polluting the Pacific Ocean with tremendous amounts of toxic water.  The government in the US hopes to clean up these many toxic tanks by 2040.  That is the optimistic evaluation.  With Congress cutting everything at home (the latest victim being the House Pitching Death of Hubble Space Telescope  Successor, the Webb multi-mirror array telescope) the resolve to clean this up will vanish due to lack of political will.

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The fact of the matter is, once the mess is created, cleaning it up is virtually impossible.  The many nuclear messes in Russia are still menaces to all living things and render huge areas uninhabitable.  Spreading this all over the planet is beyond irresponsible, it is insane.

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Just like we saw in the Great Boxing Day Quake, Japan still shakes frequently from aftershocks: Major earthquake strikes off the northern coast of Japan.  This increases the fear and despair there.  It seems as if the quakes will never end.

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Fukushima gov’t inspects farm over beef radiation concerns as the radiation spreads all over the biosystems.  That is, radiation has this insidious ability to move from one level to another.  It lodges inside of organisms which take it in via air, water and eating radiated food.  As radiation rains literally down on everything, it gathers in pools, is in the grasses eaten by cows, is all over the place.  Recently, children have become the latest victims:  45% of kids in Fukushima survey had thyroid exposure to radiation.

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I have the ‘radiation necklace’ myself due to removal of part of my own thyroid system which became a tumor back when I was a child.  Children are very sensitive to radiation lodging itself in the thyroids.  Recently, children were sent out to clean out the school’s pools in a non-evacuated town in Japan and they cheerfully picked up all the dirt and debris there which a parent then checked for radiation and was horrified to discover, due to rainfall, it was very hot.  Children in a large section of Japan cannot be near any rain downspouts.  This is how insidious radiation is.

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One issue pro-nuclear power people refuse to understand is how terrible things are for people permanently evacuated from their homes suffer.  Suicides rise.  Elderly Fukushima woman kills self ‘to evacuate to grave’

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Her four suicide notes addressed to her family, ancestors and a close neighborhood friend were later found in the house. “My heart is in my mouth everyday due to news of the nuclear power plant,” she wrote to her family.

“Doing things like this (killing myself), I am disgracing my children and grandchildren and relatives, but it cannot be helped in this day and age,” said her note to her parents.

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When debating the horrific death effects of Chernobyl, pro-nuclear power people tried desperately to keep the statistics of deaths strictly to those who died directly from radiation, not cancers later or suicides or other deaths.  We see from Fukushima, the deaths accumulate over time and take sometimes decades but each one was caused by nuclear power, not natural.  That is all that matters.  Whether it is psychological or physical, it doesn’t matter.  If nuclear power drives people to kill themselves, there is something very wrong with it.

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Here is another story of sad despair due to learning she would never, ever come home again:  Woman living in Fukushima shelter burns herself to death in apparent suicide 

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The body of a 58-year-old woman was found in front of her home in Kawamata, Fukushima Prefecture on Friday after she apparently burned herself to death, police said Saturday.

The woman, who had been living in an organized refuge area, was found by her husband Friday morning outside their former home, which is in a no-go area due to radiation. Residents have been permitted to make short visits home a few times since the evacuation began.

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When Mother Nature swept away thousands of Japanese, the survivors were shocked and badly hurt, emotionally fragile.  But they have some solace that this was natural.  They have various cultural coping mechanisms for this and though it is very heart breaking but the losses in the Fukushima area are human created which means there has to be a burning desire for justice which is right now being denied.  So people fall into deepest despair.  Each visit home to view the loss hurts more and more and being cut out of society due to radiation fears isolates the victims living near Fukushima.

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Even as the disasters hitting Japan barely began to sink in, Japan suicide rates hit 2-year high in May  and will probably rise over time.  Instead of fighting back, most people are giving up.  This may change, Japan has pulled back from the brink in the past.

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The number of people who committed suicide indicating “failure to get jobs” rose to 424, up 20 percent from the year before and more than doubling from 180 in 2007, the report said. About one-third were in their 20s, including new graduates seeking jobs.

The results underscore the tough reality for student job seekers as companies cut back on hiring amid a lengthy economic slump.

A record one-third of university students graduating this month have not found jobs, a separate government survey said in January.

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The wretched export economy of Japan is collapsing rapidly due to radiation, the destruction of port facilities, the looming bankruptcy of the government, as the Japanese outside of Fukushima isolate and avoid the victims there, the rest of Asia is avoiding Japanese exports, too.  A third of suicides in Japan are young people who see no way of fixing their despair except to die.  This is just so sad.  In the US, the youth in many places are turning to crime, drugs and body mutilation.

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The elderly are focused on the past As reconstruction progresses at a crawl, priests help rebuild graveyards 

Reconstruction efforts are moving slowly on the tsunami-stricken Miyagi Prefecture coast, but with the Bon festival coming up in a little over a month, priests and other locals are working to get ready for the annual festival in which dead ancestors are honored…Sakano has been staying at his father’s house, which is located in the same town but was spared damage, and goes everyday to the temple, where he returns tombstones one by one to their proper places using a 10-ton crane that he’s borrowed from a stone dealer. He’s lost 12 kilograms in the three months since the tsunami.

“I want families to be able to honor their ancestors in the place where they had long been resting,” Sakano said. “This is just the beginning.”

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The tsunami victims can honor their dead but the Fukushima ones can’t do this.  Again, this leads rural Japan into dark territory where basically, whole clans can’t save themselves from literal hell since they cannot honor their ancestors anymore.  In the US, we are accustomed to moving here or there and graves of my ancestors are scattered about the lands and it is hopeless to visit their graves, much less, honor them. But in Japan, people ‘come home’ for burial, they are not buried in Tokyo where the majority have congregated today.

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Back to the mess clean up and how impossible this is:  Man freed after arrest for collecting radiation-contaminated rubble in Fukushima.  This has to be watched for the next few hundred years.  This was and still is a huge problem for Chernobyl.  Many radiated things put under wraps were cannibalized and resold.  So the mess has spread insidiously and anyone who dies later will not be part of the official death tolls, of course.  Guarding the debris is politically impossible.  Eventually, the guards leave.  The government ceases caring.  But the Nuclear Beast continues to live on.  It doesn’t care.  It exists.  And this existence is a danger to us all.

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