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Page added on August 10, 2013
Radioactive Water Spills Over Fukushima Barrier, Flooding Surroundings
It was only last week that yet another conspiracy theory became fact when we learned, for the first time after nearly three years of lies, that Tepco had been deceitful and wrong with its “all clear” message about Fukushima, and that instead some 300 tons of contaminated, irradiated water had been flowing into the Pacific ocean every day. So now that the opportunity cost of telling more lies is zero, and the radioactive cat is out of the bag, so to say, the news about the absolute, unmitigated disaster that Fukushima is, and will be for decades, are coming fast and furious. Sure enough, moments ago Tepco reported, and Kyodo confirmed, that radioactive water has risen above the protective barrier and is freely leaking into the surrounding environment.
Contaminated groundwater accumulating under the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has risen 60cm above the protective barrier, and is now freely leaking into the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator TEPCO has admitted. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which is responsible for decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, on Saturday said the protective barriers that were installed to prevent the flow of toxic water into the ocean are no longer coping with the groundwater levels, Itar-Tass reports.
The contaminated groundwater, which mixes with radioactive leaks seeping out of the plant, has already risen to 60cm above the barriers – the fact which TEPCO calls a major cause of the massive daily leak of toxic substances.
Earlier on Friday, the company announced it started pumping out contaminated groundwater from under Fukushima, and managed to pump out 13 tons of water in six hours on Friday. TEPCO also said it plans to boost the pumped-out amount to some 100 tons a day with the help of a special system, which will be completed by mid-August. This will be enough to seal off most of the ongoing ocean contamination, according to TEPCO’s estimates.
However, Japan’s Ministry of Industry has recently estimated that some 300 tons of contaminated groundwater have been flowing into the ocean daily ever since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the disaster.
TEPCO also promised it will urgently reinforce the protective shields to keep radioactive leaks at bay. The company has repeatedly complained it is running out of space and has had to resort to pumping water into hastily-built tanks of questionable reliability, as more than 20,000 tons of water with high levels of radioactive substances has accumulated in the plant’s drainage system.
The other “plan” contemplated by Tepco, as we wrote last week, is to literally freeze Fukushima in a giant ice wall. To wit: “To prevent futher leakage, an underground wall will be built to freeze to the reactor building, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported. To achieve this, pipes with chemical refrigerants to chill reactors 1 to 4 are being laid in the ground. The thus created barrier was expected to have a length of 1.4 kilometers.” Another brilliant strategy which will likely require its own nuclear power plant to generate the energy needed to keep the ice, well, cold. And one can only imagine at the wonders of mutagenesis that will result when one mixes alpha, beta and gamma rays with nearly a mile of spilled highly reactive coolant. All questions which will be promptly answered after the next, and final, destructive Japanese earthquake.
In retrospect, one can see why Japan no longer cares what happens, and why Abenomics, doomed to failure anyway, is being attempted. After all, what’s the downside?
Finally, for those Americans who think all of this is irrelevant…
[…] A mathematical model developed by Changsheng Chen of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and Robert Beardsley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found that radioactive particles disperse through the ocean differently at different depths. The scientists estimated that in some cases, contaminated seawater could reach the western coast of the United States in as little as five years. [Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has analyzed thousands of samples of fish from the area]thinks the process occurs a bit more rapidly, and estimates it might take three years for contamination to reach the U.S. coastline. […]
Luckily by then the richest 0.0000001% will be ready to LBO the entire world courtesy of QE666, and their propaganda media will be mainlining Xanax straight into the veins of over 300 million sheep (or 400 million depending on what happens with “immigration reform”).
9 Comments on "Radioactive Water Spills Over Fukushima Barrier, Flooding Surroundings"
Beery on Sat, 10th Aug 2013 11:11 pm
But how can this be? Nuclear power is safe and clean!
BillT on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 12:15 am
Keep in mind that we have over 40 of these time bombs in the US and some are near major fault lines … and built by GE about the same time, 40 years ago.
Norm on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 1:02 am
If anybody wants to get practical about it, just pour cement over the whole damn thing. make one big block out of it, kinda like Hoover Dam.
Why remove anything, even the fuel? Dig it whats contaminated from Fukushima, to bury it somewhere else?
Fukushima IS the permanent repository for all the Fukishima waste. Anything else is denial.
Whats happening is, the big players like corporations and governments, they know they cant get electricity from this mess anymore, but they can get bailout and cleanup MONEY if they keep pretending to clean it up. But clean-up is a fantasy in this situation.
Pour cement on it and walk away. Anything else is a joke. And enjoy the radioactive fish cause I didnt say there wouldn’t be ongoing bad seepage, but thats just what happens.
Didnt like this article cause they are trying to hype the ‘radioactive barrier’ but reality is the whole ‘spill’ is probably under the soil, its groundwater situation.
Would be a better media feeding frenzy if it was pouring green foamy goo with shaving cream on top, all over the surface of the roadways around the plant. Probably thats next.
Beery on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 2:51 am
You’re right, Norm. It’s been a clusterf*** since day one and it’s just not getting any better. At this rate, Japan should be uninhabitable in about 20 years. It’s looking like Tepco will accomplish what the entire US Air Force and two nuclear bombs couldn’t accomplish in WW2 – the complete depopulation of Japan.
DMyers on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 3:06 am
I’m glad they “.. .managed to pump out 13 tons of water in six hours on Friday.” Where the hell did they put it? What did it accomplish, other than to move contamination from point A to point B? I suppose doing something is better than doing nothing. Let’s keep it out of the ocean, even if that means storing it in back yard swimming pools. It’s not like anyone is really going to escape contamination anyway.
This sounds like a horrifying scenario, that within a few years this rolling foam of irradiated water will lap up onto the sands and stones of the western coastline. I see two possibilities: (1) skull and bones signs on the Pacific shore line, north to south, (2) videos of swimmers screaming out of the water with flaming red splotches of radiation burned flesh.
I mean, something that will drive home the point that this is a very serious problem.
What would that do to the value of beach front property? Hollywood would be packing for the Midwest, and the rest of the west coast would be traveling east as quickly as possible.
It’s coming our way. It doesn’t disappear like those old tires you used to throw in the river. The numbers sound high, even if I don’t know exactly what they mean.
The question everyone should be asking now is should we be taking serious measures toward whatever can be done against the wall of water that cannot be undone, or should we “wait and see what really happens after all the Y2K, 2012, and peak oil stuff never did happen?”
I only hope we get some honest answers about what is coming and what it will really do when it gets here, but I doubt we’ll get the message until Geiger counters from Seattle to San Diego are melting like a pocket watch in a Salvador Dali painting.
SilentRunning on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 5:26 am
For quite a while the most hysterical talk about Fukushima was the danger of another earthquake, and the collapse of the fuel pool resulting in some kind of additional meltdown.
It seems to me that the large number of quickly assembled water storage tanks represent a more likely failure – millions of gallons of coolant water with high levels of Cs137 and Sr90 gushing into the Pacific.
I continue to say that Fukushima is a huge disaster in its local area and a considerable area surrounding it – but the water on the California coast will never become so radioactive that swimmers will run screaming out of the water with radiation burns. The levels will get nowhere near that high.
No – the problem is that events like Fukushima will become more and more common as reactors age and cash-strapped and/or profit hungry organizations push reactors to operate longer and longer. Then we’re likely to see multiple Fukushima like disasters distributed all over the globe.
Arthur on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 7:53 am
“If anybody wants to get practical about it, just pour cement over the whole damn thing. make one big block out of it, kinda like Hoover Dam.”
That’s what they did with Chernobyl. The trouble is that Fukushima is much more complex and that the reactor needs to be cooled for another 10-20 years, otherwise the entire plant might blowup and contaminate mainland Japan rather than the Pacific and the Beachboys:
http://enenews.com/yamada-cover-fukushima-daiichi-reactors-like-after-chernobyl-complex-chernobyl-audio
A commercial for nuclear energy looks rather different.
Kenz300 on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 3:45 pm
TEPCO and government of Japan do not have a workable plan and are just scrambling from problem to problem………. the nuclear industry has been exposed for the dangers they pose to humanity.
Had this been a solar plant or a wind farm the plant would already have been cleaned up and rebuilt.
luap on Thu, 15th Aug 2013 11:02 am
It can’t be that bad …its not on any news channels …