Disaster that is Fukushima still gathering pace
The greatest enemy of nuclear power development is uncertainty. The Fukushima nuclear plant in north eastern Japan has worked over time to intensify the uncertainty surrounding how they work and what happens when then go wrong.
Today, a month on from the tsunami which devastated every level of the plant’s “fail safe” safety systems, the Japanese nuclear authorities have finally escalated the plants disintegration as a power producing entity to level 7. That is the very highest level that a nuclear power generating disaster can be rated. The rating is based on the potential harm the disaster may have on human health.
The Japanese authorities go on to bask in the claim that whilst this now puts Fukushima on the same health threat level as Chernobyl, Fukushima has only produced “around a tenth of the radiation that escaped from the former Soviet plant”. When I went to school the phrase “around a tenth” was regarded as scientifically vague. I don’t suppose it is regarded as any more exact today.
Even whilst I was in the area around Fukushima three and a half weeks ago, the nuclear operators seemed vague, indistinct, even unwilling to admit what was actually happening. Today I feel more forgiving, I suspect they simply did not KNOW, and still do not KNOW.
The exclusion zone is being expanded. Three communities beyond even twenty miles are to be evacuated this week…two more inside the zone have been told to pack up today. Twenty one workers at the plant have now exceeded the radiation levels any man is supposed to be able to tolerate without serious life threatening consequences.
Read more: Fukushima crisis is ‘serious blow’ to nuclear power
The disaster that is Fukushima is still gathering pace, even according to Japan’s regulatory authority. The attempts to stabilise the radioactive iodine-131 and caesium 137 leaking furiously fromthe plant, are being held back by the rising levels of radioactivity right across the plant, which is now rapidly filling with “highly radioactive” cooling water.
So, this was an old 1970s plant subjected to wholly unpredictable events. It is somehow unique and for some reason would not happen here. The UK doesn’t have tsunamis etc. But if the unknowns are so considerably unknown; and the fail safes so considerably unsafe; and the authorities are so incapable of telling the truth (whether deliberately or not) what are the implications for nuclear trust here, in a time when we apparently need to build many new nuclear plants?
In Pictures – Fukushima nuclear crisis worsens
Click on the image to see more photos from Fukushima