The Status of the Fukushima Clean-Up 136
doom writes "Ian Sample at the Guardian UK does a really thorough write-up of what's going on with the Fukushima Clean-up. From the article: 'Though delicate and painstaking, retrieving the fuel rod assemblies from the pools is not the toughest job the workers face. More challenging by far will be digging out the molten cores in the reactors themselves. Some of the fuel burned through its primary containment and is now mixed with cladding, steel and concrete. The mixture will have to be broken up, sealed in steel containers and moved to a nuclear waste storage site. That work will not start until some time after 2020.'"
Re:I Live 90 Miles From the Site (Score:3, Insightful)
Humour is a coping strategy. If people are not allowed to make jokes about stuff that scares them it gets much scarier for them.
Live with it.
Re:I live on the Pacific (Score:4, Insightful)
And I've stopped eating Sushi.
So you were happy when the coal plants were dumping untold amounts of mercury and other crap into the sea (it all winds up there eventually), but now you've stopped eating fish because of Fukishima?
You need to evaluate your risk assessment strategies.
Re:Fukushima NO-HYPE information sources (Score:4, Insightful)
The hysteria is whipped up by the more extreme hippy enviromentalists and their patsies in the ignorant media and governments (hello Germany). The hippies have a deep seated hatred of anything nuclear simply because SOME power stations in SOME countries were used to generate plutonium. So regardless of its benefits they damn the best form of power generation we have to offset climate change - and don't anyone bloody start about fucking stupid windfarms that cost a fortune, blanket god knows how many square miles and produce sod all power most of the time - simply because of their political leanings and their mindset being stuck in the 1980s along with whats left of CND.
Frankly these people are a disgrace and should be ashamed of themselves, but instead they just make more and more noise. The only consolation is they'll all be dead in a few decades and hopefully sanity will prevail once more. And anyone who still thinks nuclear power is dangerous should think twice about visiting France. Though I'm not aware of it being radioactive yet.
Re:TL;DR version : Dump it all in the ocean (Score:4, Insightful)
That post's own source article says quite the opposite, that the water will only be returned to the Pacific after treatment. Not exactly being honest with the readership, there.
Re:Fukushima NO-HYPE information sources (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry but where is this hysterical coverage? The Guardian article you're critiquing here ends with:
"Two years ago there was a huge earthquake and tsunami that killed around 20,000 people. But every day when I read the paper, it said, 'nuclear disaster, nuclear disaster, nuclear disaster'. In actual fact, not one person has died of radiation, nor is anyone likely to. The straight story is the Japanese didn't have a nuclear response plan. There were a lot of human errors during what happened at Fukushima. It was old technology, badly maintained, and the regulator was not respected. Those are the facts. They have to be faced and dealt with."