The Fukushima farce continues: a month after a rat (no really) caused the cooling system at the exploded Japanese nuclear power plant to fail, history repeats itself, leading to the second cooling failure in a month. As the NYT reported, "Workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant who were installing wire nets Friday to keep rats away from a vital cooling system instead tripped that system, causing it to fail for the second time in weeks. Cooling was restored by late evening on Friday, and there was no imminent danger to the 566 nuclear fuel rods stored in the pool, according to the company. It would have taken at least two weeks for the pool to have risen above the safe level of 149 degrees Fahrenheit, Tepco said." Of course, TEPCO would certainly tell the truth to all those it lied to for weeks in March 2011, the same TEPCO where a rat is the weakest link in its meltdown avoidance planning.
This time however, TEPCO, credibility and professionalism once again in tatters, was forced to reveal a little more, namely that "radioactive water may have leaked into the ground from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the latest of a series of troubles at the facility."
Blame the rats again? And don't worry, it was just "this much" caesium leaking into the ocean, so who's really counting. Sadly, it will be years before the irradiated fauna - both fish and humans - has a sense, over the daily lies, of just how vast the damage has been. By then, however, Japan will have enough hyperinflation to keep it sufficiently distracted from the third arm growing on the back.
The fresh leak on Sunday comes a day after Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said up to 120 tonnes of contaminated water may have escaped from another of the seven underground reservoir tanks at the tsunami-damaged plant.
TEPCO said radioactivity was detected in water outside a tank in the latest leak but that the contaminated water was unlikely to flow into the sea.
"We have determined that a minimal amount of water was feared to have leaked from the tank although there was no decline in the level of water inside the tank,"it said in a statement.
The tanks store water used to cool down the reactors after radioactive caesium is removed but other radioactive substances remain.
The series of leakages came after one of the systems keeping spent atomic fuel cool at the plant temporarily failed on Friday, the second outage in a matter of weeks, underlining the precarious fix at the plant.
Yes, "minimal" - just as it is a "minimal" amount of price increases in imported energy that face the local population following a 30% devaluation in the currency. Don't worry - just like Fukushima is contained, so local companies can't wait to hike wages for everyone to make the 2% inflation targeting "fair" for everyone.