Fukushima Nuclear Death-throes

There is so much going wrong in the World at the present time that I have been stunned into almost complete silence. So many things wrong and our leaders either doing nothing or making things worse. The two matters at the top of the list of disasters are the chaos in the Middle East and the on-going saga of the nuclear disaster in Japan. I will get onto the Middle East soon but I must comment again on the Japanese power station. It is now 3 weeks since the earthquake hit the coast of Japan and seriously damaged this aging nuclear power station at Fukushima and yet the situation seems to get worse by the day. There is little doubt that the Japanese mentality and quiet stoicism is causing the worst of the facts to be hidden but as contamination is being discovered further and further away from the plant it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to claim that all is well. The pictures from the site now reveal that the installation is totally wrecked. It will never run again and anything being done now is related to getting the whole place permanently shut down - and permanently decommissioned - which will cost many more miilions of pounds. Reports tell us that the power supply has been restored and that this will make controlling the over-temperatures at the reactors easier. This may be true but it remains the case that the machinery for cooling the vessels is wrecked beyond repair. Billions of litres of water are being poured over the vessels to try to get temperatures under control and - they tell us - some radioactive contamination has "leaked" into the sea. The cooling sea water is being pumped over the reactors and the reactors are damaged and inevitably the cooling sea water becomes contaminated. Smoke and steam are still rising from two of the reactor buildings and spreading contamination over many square miles. Periodically now the site workers are being taken from the buildings when pollution levels locally go off the scale. When this happens, of course, things are even more out of control. Anyone who suggests that what is going on here is a controlled emergency shut-down is clearly quite mad. The nuclear lobby world-wide is playing down the problems but the story of this disaster is surely enough to tell the general public and their leaders not to go any further down the nuclear highway. The problems in Japan have stimulated journalists to visit the remnants of Chernobyl. There they have discovered yet again a barren landscape over many, many square miles of territory; abandoned homes, factories, offices and schools still contaminated 25 years after the event. The journalists were taken in and out by buses and each individual was issued with a Geiger counter to check radiation levels continuously and to move fast if a meter reacted - which they did - all the time. Things were reasonably OK along the tarmaced highways - where the radiation was absorbed - but step off the ribbon of road and the Geiger counters went wild. They tell us that the original concrete casings poured over the reactor vessels in 1985 are now in poor condition and need to be renewed - at great cost. Such repairs to the concrete enclosures will be required many times in the next thousand years.

Unless and until the nuclear lobby can say to us that the possibility of these major failures of reactor installations is a complete impossibility, then new reactor systems should not be built. And even when they can say that the risk of failure is zero, there still remains the problem of nuclear waste.

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