A few days ago, with over a three year delay, Japan finally admitted what was clear to most from day one: the consequences of the Fukushima disaster have been far, far worse than officials had reported, and not only is the containment effort out of control, but that morenuclear fuel had melted at the Fukushima nuclear reactor than previously reported, suggesting that neither TEPCO nor the government have had any success in mitigating what is now the worst – and ongoing – nuclear disaster in history.
So now, perhaps to celebrate its truth-telling ways, TEPCO has announced that it is planning to release thousands of tons of radioactive groundwater from the Fukushima disaster site into the ocean. Actually scratch that: officially the water dumped into the Pacific will be “decontaminated“, because TEPCO has that rare habit of “telling the truth.” It will also do so only after getting permission from local fishermen, who apparently have a choice: whether to catch five-eyed tuna after giving TEPCO “yes” for an answer, or merely catching five-eyed tuna, period.
As NHK confirms, TEPCO “is seeking approval from fishermen to discharge decontaminated ground water into the ocean.”
The spin: dumping “decontaminated” water into the ocean is an improvement because Fukushima is already leaking some 200 tons of contaminated ground water per day into the ocean. So why not slap a “treated” sticker on the water and just dump it all. It’s not as if the idiotic plan lifted straight from Game of Thrones, which Japan came up with last year to encase Fukushima in a frozen sarcophagus had any chance of working. So now it is straight to what anyone with a functioning frontal lobe said would happen anyway: thousands if not millions of tons of radioactive water will enter the Pacific anyway. Only this time TEPCO is at least pretending to care about the truth and/or the environment.
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