Japan's NRA finally comes clean: "We have an emergency"

They don't say 'emergency' unless it really is an emergency

Well, i admit it. From a little over a year ago since my last post, i actually bought into the seductive idea that the crisis in Fukushima was in under control. Perhaps it was based on Tepco's repeated assurances that the situation was being managed properly. Maybe it was due to the volume of news and information, slowly reduced to a trickle, or blind faith in the the counter-intuitive explanations provided by Tepco for employees who seemed to be dying shortly after working on site, like first responder and plant chief Masao Yoshida of an 'esophageal' cancer that officials say had absolutely "no connection with his radiation exposure at the time of the disaster". Quite frankly, Tepco's updates and explanations had become so diminutive, and news sources for the topic became so scarce that U.S. google news searches for "Fukushima" yielded more results in foreign languages than those written in English.

Nevertheless, here we are back in crisis mode with Japan's NRA admitting the truth - that highly radioactive water is breaching the 1.8 meter deep underground barrier and is now just one meter below the surface, that ground water will reach the surface within three weeks, and that 85% of Fukushima's 380,000 ton water storage capacity is already full. Where do they go from here? Hopefully we will hear a slew of viable options within the coming days. However, recognizing Tepco's propensity to understate bad news, we can expect them to characterize the underground containment breach and subsequent unfettered flow of highly radioactive water into the ocean as an acceptable situation, because everyone knows that the ocean is a very big place and the dilution of all that radioactive water will keep things "manageable".

Links:

Tepco's "sense of crisis is weak," Kinjo said. "This is why you can't just leave it up to Tepco alone" to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

Fukushima radioactive water leak an 'emergency'

"If the water reaches the surface, "it would flow extremely fast."