News from Fukushima leaks into the mainstream press with relentless morbidity. Japanese newspapers cover the still out-of-control situation on a daily basis, but US media run a blurb only when yet another staggering revelation or admission comes from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., Tepco.
 
On Aug. 20, the company admitted that 300 tons of highly radioactive water (80,000 gallons) had leaked from yet another of the 1,000 tanks it hastily constructed at the site to hold contaminated water — waste water generated by cooling both the extremely hot melted uranium fuel that has burned through the bottom of three destroyed reactors, and the hot waste fuel rods stored in damaged cooling pools. The leaked waste water is poisoned with cesium, strontium, americium, tritium and other ferociously radioactive isotopes. Tepco said it had not found the spot in the 1,000-ton cylindrical steel tank from which the water was still leaking. It said it was transferring the water from the bad tank to one that was sounder.
 
Tepco claimed that the radioactivity in the 300 tons amounted to 24 trillion becquerels, or 80 million becquerels per-liter. Reuters interviewed professor emeritus Michiaki Furukawa of Nagoya University who said, “That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse.” Hideka Morimoto, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, told the AP “We are extremely concerned.”
 
The AP reported that at least five of the giant new storage tanks have sprung major leaks. The faulty tanks were constructed with “rubber seams that were intended to last about five years.” Altogether, 350 of the 1000 tanks were made with rubber seams rather than more expensive and “more watertight” welded joints.
 
Tepco’s 8/20 announcement came 13 days after the company admitted that huge quantities of radioactively contaminated water have been leaking from the Fukushima-Daiichi site ever since the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Tepco said August 7 that 300 tons of contaminated water a day has been leaking to the sea from destroyed reactor buildings — for over two years. The math is this: at least 264,000 tons of contaminated water to the Pacific since the catastrophe began. (The company has not explained why it waited until after Japan’s July 21 elections to reveal the massive leakages, but since the Liberal Democratic Party won control of the upper house of Parliament it has been pushing for the re-start of currently shut down power reactors.)
 
From bad to worse
 
The massive ocean contamination stems from the depth and breadth of the earthquake’s unquantifiable underground destruction of reactor infrastructure, piping, trenches, tanks and buildings. Giant breaks and fissures in these structures allow what Tepco estimates are 400 tons of contaminated groundwater to run into the reactor buildings every day. Since the company’s system of partial de-contamination filters only about 100 tons per day, 300 tons are running through the destroyed reactor complex and into the Pacific Ocean every day.
 
The Great Easter Japan Earthquake, the worst in Japanese history, and a resulting 52-foot tsunami smashed the six-reactor Fukushima-Daiichi compound, causing explosions and three reactor meltdowns. The triple meltdowns began spewing a colossal amount of cesium, strontium, plutonium, radio-iodine and other deadly elements to the atmosphere and to the Pacific Ocean and in many respects never stopped doing so.
 
Long before Tepco made its Aug. 7th admission, Science and Nature magazines reported (in October 2012), that the initial dispersal of radioactivity from Fukushima — both as atmospheric fallout and direct discharges to the Pacific — represented the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history — ten to 100 times more than the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine.
 
Co-authored by oceanographer Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the study’s findings were initially denied by both Tepco and the Japanese government.
 
Unprecedented amounts of radioactive fluids are building up at the site as Tepco floods the reactor cores using a haphazard system to cool the melted fuel rods. The water in the ad-lib cooling scheme runs into basements and trenches that were cracked open by the earthquake and have been leaking since the disaster began.
 
Tepco also reported Aug. 20 that measurements of radioactive tritium in seawater near reactor No. 1 are the highest in the measurement history — higher than at the height of the company’s deliberate if panicked dumping of primary reactor coolants directly into the ocean in March and April 2011 following the triple meltdown and triple explosion catastrophe.
 
The company also acknowledged last month that the number of workers who have been exposed to high levels of radiation is 11 times more than estimates it had previously given to the World Health Organization, about 1,987 workers. Tepco said at the same time that 10 percent of employees involved in the emergency response were at risk of developing thyroid cancer.
 
The Nation reported Aug. 19 that Dale Klein, a past chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission blasted Tepco’s executives from his position on an independent advisory committee. Klein told them, “These actions indicate that you don’t know what you are doing, and that you do not have a plan….”