What Me Worry?
September 21st, 2011
Typhoon Roke Approaches Leaking Fukushima Reactors
The U.S. and Japan have played down the level of radiation escaping above and below ground at the stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Plant since day one of the disaster, and not much has changed since the original whitewashing of the dangers not only to Japan but to the rest of the world.
The press remains eager to minimize threats to a still very unstable situation at Fukushima by issuing only a flood alert, never mind that ground water in the immediate area has already been impacted by a melt through at two of the reactors and the race is underway to provide temporary roofs to three of the reactors that blew their roofs off on or shortly after the March 11 quake/tsunami.
Kenji Okada, a forecaster at the Japan Meteorological Agency, says that Roke is fast moving and carrying sustained winds of 144 km (89mph) with gusts up to 216 km. Unlike Talas, a slower moving storm that brought rain well south of the region earlier in the month, Roke is headed straight north for Fukushima and surrounding prefectures.
As of September 13, workers sought to contain 102 million liters of contaminated water leaking into the basements and trenches through cracks in walls of the reactor buildings. Although Tepco has speeded up the process of pumping out contaminated water, the addition of 150 millimeters of rain forecast to fall into the exposed reactor cores will present new challenges to the temporary cooling systems. Workers have still been unable to bring the water below the 100 Celsius which is needed to safely shut the reactors down.
If nothing else, the storm promises a temporary surge of nuclear waste entering the ground water and the ocean coastline. And there remains the constant threat of continued hydrogen explosions and the saturation of the atmosphere with multiple types of radioactive particles.
There are also problematic reports of contaminated groundwater actually seeping back into the basements via cracks in the encasements.
All of this shows us that it is too soon for anyone to rest easy on the subject of Fukushima, although the press in Japan and the U.S. seem to be doing just that. This continues to be an ongoing and daily battle against unnatural elements being released into the natural environment, and a good many of these elements will outlive us and many future generations to come.
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This is the year of the Presidential election. How many of you are diligently watching all the stuff going on with the political figures ... 
Could the economy get even worse? 2011 will be remembered as the year of disaster capitalism. Almost $6.3 trillion was wiped from the global markets. ... 
What happened in Fukushima is such a tragic incident. Let’s hope that they will be able to come up with a viable solution to this problem, and that no further calamities will occur on Fukushimawhich will probably add insult to injury. Also, pray that an incident like this will never happen again.
My husband is a big news fanatic,and you are right you never hear anything about this any longer it is like they have swept it under the rug and left it for the next generation to handle.