No end in sight for Fukushima disaster as bureaucrats battle the laws of physics

Monday, April 11, 2011 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Fukushima, physics, health news

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(NaturalNews) As the famous physicist Dr. Michio Kaku said on April 4th, "The situation at Fukushima is relatively stable now... in the same way that you are stable if you hang by your fingernails off a cliff, and your fingernails begin to break one by one." (http://bigthink.com/ideas/37705). That same article also refers to the Fukushima damage assessment by the NRC's Nuclear Safety Team, which concluded that "cooling to the core of Unit 1 might be blocked by melted fuel and also by salt deposits left over from the use of sea water."

That's the same sea water, of course, that has been sprayed onto the fuel rods to prevent them from going Chernobyl. The unfortunate side effect of boiling off tens of thousands of gallons of sea water, however, is that is leaves behind a lot of salt. Japan now appears to have an abundance of radioactive sea salt that's unfortunately caked on top of the spent fuel rods and actually preventing much more water from reaching those rods. In a sense, spraying salt water on spent nuclear fuel rods is sort of like spraying them with a slow-acting insulation. It's only a matter of time, it seems, before that insulation make it impossible for water to keep the rods below meltdown temperatures.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry has mysteriously stopped reporting the dry well radiation reading in Reactor No. 1. Why would they do that? Because no readings are far more politically correct than extremely high readings, of course. It all happened right after an "off-the-charts" reading of radiation in the drywell of Reactor No. 1, which TEPCO officials quickly dismissed as a broken radiation gauge (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11100/1138412...). Sure, it probably is broken by this point due to its exposure to massive doses of radiation!

The only way a drywell reading can attain such high readings, by the way, is if the nuclear fuel rods have breached their containment core.

Some of the readings coming out of Fukushima are admittedly "immeasurable," reported NHK World:

"A radiation monitor at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says workers there are exposed to immeasurable levels of radiation. The monitor told NHK that no one can enter the plant's No. 1 through 3 reactor buildings because radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. He said even levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places." (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/05_38.ht...)

The truth gets diluted far more than the radiation

You're not supposed to know any of that, of course. Although the mainstream media claims that all the deadly iodine-131 gets dissipated across the Pacific Ocean before it can reach North America, the greater truth is that the facts about Fukushima are diluted and dispersed long before they reach our shores. The result is an ongoing dangerous cover-up of what's really happening there.

The mainstream media, of course, is blatantly engaged in an effort to suppress any scary-sounding information that might emerge about Fukushima. For example, a Forbes blog entitled "Radiation Detected In Drinking Water In 13 More US Cities, Cesium-137..." which contained the text, "Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by EPA..." mysteriously disappeared, leaving just an empty shell of a page in its place. (After we published this article, the page was soon restored, by the way. We were contacted by the author who explained that he typo'd something in the Forbes content system, causing the article to appear blank. So it is accurate that this article mysteriously didn't show up, but the reason behind it thankfully wasn't censorship but rather just a typo. That's a relief because Forbes.com has actually been a solid source for a lot of information about the national debt, economic news and other topics.)

With a few exceptions, the only stories that appear to be allowed to remain online are those that claim current radiation levels are "harmless." For example, this story from AZCentral.com parrots the usual "don't worry about radioactive milk" line:

Testing of milk samples in Arizona shows radiation levels that are thousands of times lower than a federal threshold that would cause authorities to take action, a state oversight agency said Friday. While the Arizona Department of Health Services has logged some concerns from the public following the Japanese nuclear incident, there is no reason to stop drinking milk, a department spokeswoman said. "I don't want to trivialize it, but it is trivial," Laura Oxley said. "It's thousands of times below any action level that we would need to do." (http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2...)

Here come the pumping trucks

Have you ever seen an airplane swallow a truck? Check out the photos at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375...

There, you'll see a massive Russian cargo plane gulping down a 95-ton "Putzmeister" concrete pumping truck that's being flown to Fukushima in order to spray more water on the nuclear fuel rods which continue to spew deadly radiation. The fuel rods are still in danger of reaching criticality (further meltdown with explosions), so the plan for now is to keep hosing them down with water.

This water, of course, becomes highly radioactive and eventually gets released into the Pacific Ocean. Right now, the amount of radioactive water being released tops 50,000 tons (over 12 million gallons). (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/10_03.ht...)

This process of dumping radioactive water into the Pacific will reportedly continue for decades unless some other clever solution can somehow be put in place. Alongside all this, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), has mastered the art of Jedi mind tricks, saying, "We cannot say what the outlook is for the next stage... As soon as possible we would like to achieve stable cooling and set a course towards controlling radiation." (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/10/ja...)

In other words, these are not the droids you're looking for.

Notice, if you read between the lines, he is admitting the radiation is NOT controlled, and stable cooling has NOT been achieved. And really all they're doing is hoping to have a plan on how to somehow achieve that.

Far from stable

Remember when we were told two weeks ago that Fukushima was "on the verge of stabilizing?" How's that for clever spin?

In contrast, ABC News (which has probably had the very best reporting among the MSM) recently carried this sentence: "A confidential assessment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission obtained by The New York Times suggests that the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant is far from stable. The report concludes that the Fukushima plant is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely." (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/fukushima-leak-...)

It continues with:

...though a major leak in a maintenance pit of the plant has been plugged, there is still a great likelihood that significant amounts of radioactive water will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean; the worldwide Just-In-Time manufacturing cycle has been interrupted; and increased levels of radiation have been detected on the U.S. East Coast.

Remarkably, CNN is now carrying a story that appears to openly acknowledge the Fukushima situation may be all but hopeless. Written by Matt Smith, the article says: (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04...)

A month into the crisis, the utility acknowledges, there is no end in sight. The problems are so far "beyond the design capacity" of the plant that the Japanese are working in uncharted territory, said Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at U.S. nuclear power plants. "No nuclear power plant has ever considered the inability to get on long-term core cooling for more than a week, much less three weeks," Friedlander said.

Murphy's Law strikes again

Ah, that pesky Murphy has worked his magic yet again, it seems, interfering with the best-laid plans of arrogant men who stupidly believe they have conquered the laws of physics by having a backup diesel generator nearby. Now we're hearing announcements out of Japan that all future nuclear power plants must have TWO diesel generators on site, not just one.

Murphy laughs at such ignorance. How is two diesel generators better than one when they're both fifteen feet under water?

That such a preposterous suggestion is even being considered proves once again just how utterly out of touch with reality the nuclear industry remains. Why not just pass a government rule that outlaws earthquakes? It would have approximately the same effect.

Meanwhile, a citizen video showing a nightmarish drive into the Fukushima zone is making the rounds on YouTube and other sites. We've posted it on NaturalNews.TV for distribution across the NaturalNews articles. Watch it at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=2343E0664DE63F...