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Japan's apocalypse continues. Emergency conditions persist. No end in sight looms. Fukushima's radioactive discharges can't be stopped. They continue. They're uncontainable.(BBC) reports ~ Japan nuclear agency upgrades Fukushima alert level
Japan's nuclear agency has upgraded the severity level of a radioactive water leak at the Fukushima plant from one to three on an international scale. Highly radioactive water was found to be leaking from a storage tank into the ground at the plant on Monday. It was first classified as a level one incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Ines). But Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority proposes elevating it to level three on the seven-point scale.
........Tepco had failed to spot the leak for days - maybe weeks - despite patrols that are supposed to check each storage tank twice every day. Workers had also left a tap open in the safety barrier that surrounds the base of the leaking storage tank. That had allowed highly toxic water to trickle away into the ground. Latest reports from the plant suggest some of it may already have reached the nearby Pacific Ocean. The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo says it all adds to the impression that the clean-up operation is riddled with complacency and incompetence.
A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, Kyodo news agency said earlier this week. Masayuki Ono, general manager of Tepco, told Reuters news agency: "One hundred millisieverts per hour is equivalent to the limit for accumulated exposure over five years for nuclear workers; so it can be said that we found a radiation level strong enough to give someone a five-year dose of radiation within one hour." Teams of workers at the plant have surrounded the leaking tank with sandbags and have been attempting to suck up large puddles of radioactive water. But our correspondent says it is a difficult and dangerous job. The water is so radioactive that teams must be constantly rotated and it is clear that most of the toxic water has already disappeared into the ground.Also see:
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