Japan admits delaying upgrading of nuclear crisis

[jpak]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8445946/Japan-admits-delaying-upgrading-of-nuclear-crisis.html

Japanese regulators only yesterday said that the radiation leak from the plant, crippled by last month's tsunami, ranked as a seven – the highest grade – on the International Atomic Energy Agency's accident scale.

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They said the change was made after high total levels of contamination had been found in air, tap water, vegetables and seawater in the surrounding area.

The IAEA states that the radiation released in such a "major accident" will cause a variety of short- and long-term health problems and lasting environmental dangers.

One official from the plant operator, Tepco, admitted: "Our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl."

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[flamingdem]

1. All about saving Yen or saving face, which is a more lame excuse? nt

[caraher]

2. They were never fooling anyone anyway

It's been way past a 5 for a long time

[Peace Patriot]

3. They were "fooling" a lot of nuke power propagandists here at DU...

...or they were pretending to be "fooled"--by the bullshit coming out of Tepco and the Japanese government (not to mention our own government and the UN nuke regulators). It can never be Chernobyl, the DU propagandists said. We (who were raising the alarm) were "alarmists," they said. We didn't know our science, and blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that SIX OLD NUCLEAR REACTORS packed together at ONE SITE, NEAR THE OCEAN, with SIX+ FIRE-PRONE SPENT FUEL TANKS stacked ON TOP OF THE REACTORS--all of this to save costs and push up profits--hit with a wave so big that ALL backup cooling systems were KNOCKED OUT and plant after plant starting blowing its roof off, was ON ITS WAY TO BEING Chernobyl.

This situation has been out of control from the beginning. There was NO emergency plan for THIS earthquake and THIS tsunami. They've been literally playing God with the lives of thousands--and potentially millions--of people, and with the unfixable poisoning of vast ecosystems and food production areas, in the immediate vicinity and thousands of miles away--with "seat of the pants" decisions by exhausted company and government officials--and, course, by the most imperiled people, the workers--who were simultaneously dealing with the destruction and displacement caused by a 9.0 earthquake.

I strongly suspect that, early on, unknown to the rest of us, company and government officials were TRYING TO "SAVE" THIS BILLION DOLLAR NUKE FACILITY. That is WHY they REFUSED all help. I just began to suspect this about ten days ago, when the word "save" with regard to the facility began cropping up in news accounts of quotes by company and government officials. It hadn't been there before. Before, they'd said that they had flooded the place with sea water, which meant they'd given up on the site ever generating power again (sea water is very corrosive), in order to cool it down, to prevent or contain meltdowns and what would be a hugely catastrophic fire, because all their fresh water systems had been destroyed.

But--if I understand all this correctly--they may have been HIDING the fact that they were trying to save the facility (for future use) at the cost of workers' lives, the lives of people in the neighborhood, and at the risk of much more. They were using sea water on some of the four meltdowns--because they were pouring megatons of irradiated sea water right back into the ocean. But it appears that they were trying to save reactors no. 5 and 6, while "cleaning up" the other horrors. I think this was mix of panic and profiteering. But that PROFIT should play any role in this nuclear disaster is unconscionable and gravely criminal--if it's true. I don't think we know the whole story yet--and, honestly, I FEEL for these decision-makers, and I really don't want to think that they were thinking of profit. I really don't. God knows they had a difficult situation--even if they were bastards who had lied about the dangers of nuclear power. It's possible to feel compassion for people even if you think they should be in jail. I do feel compassion for these particular people, caught in this horror, no matter how badly they have behaved in the past, or recently. In reality, there is NO BENEFIT for anybody in this situation and there never was. That is a reality they couldn't face, probably with mixed reasons including a lot of "denial." Maybe they're facing it now.