Earth Equity News

Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril. By Ken Belson and Hiroko Tabuchi, NYTimes, 3/ 29/11. “After workers switched on the first set of control room lights at Japan’s crippled power plant in Fukushima last week, the Japanese government offered its strongest assurances yet that its nuclear crisis was close to being under control… But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nuclear fuel cool are producing increasingly dangerous side effects…

“The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its “feed and bleed” strategy of cooling the reactor’ fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources. That cooling strategy… has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere… making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to further critical repair work… The continuing crisis also underscores the unprecedented scale and complexity of the problems facing Fukushima… containing more long-lived radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research [IEER], based in Takoma Park, Md.”