MAKHIJANI: Well, I think there's no call--you know, it's not a panic type of situation. So if there are people who are panicking and talking about evacuations and so on on the west coast, I think that that is out of proportion. But at the same time, there is a real cause for concern because, as we know, there are hundred of tons of radioactive water that are flowing into the ocean every day.
BBC 8 Nov 2013: Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from inside Reactor Building 4 at Fukushima..... It comes down to what is, in the next few weeks, going to start happening inside one building at the destroyed nuclear plant. ... So what can I report? Mainly that I feel somewhat reassured by what I have seen. The preparations for the fuel removal appear meticulous.
A Quick Solution Is Unlikely BY Von Marco Evers, SPIEGEL Sept. 14, 2013: Every day, TEPCO pumps 400 tons of contaminated cooling water and groundwater out of the radioactive wreckage of Fukushima. This water is too heavily contaminated with cesium, strontium and tritium to be emptied into the ocean. Instead, TEPCO stores the liquid in numerous tanks, the largest of which are 12 meters (40 feet) across and 11 meters high, hastily riveted together rather than welded. Satellite images show how these behemoths have proliferated at the Fukushima site, with a few dozen of them in mid-2011, then several hundred by mid-2012. Currently, there are over 1,000 such tanks, with plans for over 2,000 of them by 2015. TEPCO is veritably drowning in contaminated water.
Some 1,400 people have filed a joint lawsuit against three companies that manufactured the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, saying they should be financially liable for damage caused by its 2011 meltdowns.
Heart disease and depression are likely to claim more lives than radiation after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, experts say By Katherine Harmon | March 2, 2012 |
By Monique Sené, physicist, Honorary Research Director at the CNRS, member of the Higher Committee for Transparency and Information on Nuclear Safety, and President of the GSIEN Raymond Sené, physicist, GSIEN member Dominique Leglu, physicist, editor-in-chief of Sciences et Avenir
Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton Mar 10th 2012 | from the print edition "But if nuclear power teaches one lesson, it is to doubt all stories of technological determinism. It is not the essential nature of a technology that matters but its capacity to fit into the social, political and economic conditions of the day."
By Yoshifumi Takemoto and Alan Katz - March 12, 2008 "From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, Japan Steel Works Ltd. controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance. There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak."