Japan - 8.9 Earthquake - Fukushima Meltdown
- Thread starter Vulcan59
- Start date
Thanks, I'll just copy paste this first post back to where i put it in the first place. ;)
Cheers
Cheers
Fukushima False Flag Thread opened at the Conspiracy theory section
Pashalis said:
Thanks, had not check their site in a while - Arnie presents a good overview of the site, especially the excavated grades down into the water table (horrible engineering). Concerning the fixes (some) - hmm, ice trenching; will have to wait and see.
A new article has come out 28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Fried With Fukushima Radiation
Tuesday, October 22, 2013 0:45
_http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/10/28-signs-that-the-west-coast-is-being-fried-with-fukushima-radiation-2800890.html
Over the last week there have been big articles about the Fukushima accident in the newspapers. The reality of the problem is leaking out as is the radioactivity.
Much of the leaking radioactivity from Fukushima is going into the Pacific, but the waters are already contaminated from past accidents. On this French page there is an overview of the known radioactive spills and wastefill in the oceans _http://archivesmillenairesmondiales.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/bombe-a-retardement-nucleaire-mondiale-des-millions-de-milliards-de-becquerels-reposent-au-fond-des-mers/ where I found this picture
If the past is anything to go by the world will see more wastelands and waste-seas in the future.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013 0:45
_http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/10/28-signs-that-the-west-coast-is-being-fried-with-fukushima-radiation-2800890.html
Over the last week there have been big articles about the Fukushima accident in the newspapers. The reality of the problem is leaking out as is the radioactivity.
Much of the leaking radioactivity from Fukushima is going into the Pacific, but the waters are already contaminated from past accidents. On this French page there is an overview of the known radioactive spills and wastefill in the oceans _http://archivesmillenairesmondiales.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/bombe-a-retardement-nucleaire-mondiale-des-millions-de-milliards-de-becquerels-reposent-au-fond-des-mers/ where I found this picture
If the past is anything to go by the world will see more wastelands and waste-seas in the future.
Fukushima whistleblower exposes yakuza connections, exploitation of cleanup workers
Published time: October 25, 2013 15:16
Revelations from a Fukushima cleanup worker-turned-whistleblower have exposed the plant’s chaotic system of subcontractors, their alleged mafia connections and the super-exploitation of indigent workers doing this dangerous work.
The allegations, contained in an investigative report by Reuters, have also exposed deeply-rooted problems within Japan’s nuclear industry as a whole. In the report, detailing the everyday realities of workers at the stricken facility, Reuters interviewed an estimated 80 casual workers and managers. The most common complaint voiced was the cleanup effort’s utter dependence on subcontractors – which it is alleged endangered not just workers’ rights, but also their lives.
Tetsuya Hayashi, a 41-tyear-old construction worker by trade, applied for a job at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, after he suspected that the plant was in deeper trouble than it was willing to admit. The $150 billion cleanup effort, which is expected to last several decades into the future, has already required up to 50,000, mostly casual workers.
However, Hayashi only lasted two weeks on the job, as it became apparent that the vast network of subcontractors involved in the cleanup efforts could not care less for his rights (or his health), while Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, was doing little except giving subcontractors a slap on the wrist.
Hired to monitor the exposure to radiation of plant workers leaving the job during the summer of 2012, Hayashi was assigned to the most bio-hazardous sector and given a protective anti-radiation suit. However, even with the suit on, we exceeded his safe annual radiation quota in less than an hour.
The subcontractor who hired Hayashi was not following nuclear safety rules, according to exposure guidelines by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Reuters reported.
Furthermore, after Hayashi’s first two-week period of employment, he suspected that his passbook, a document showing the extent of a worker’s exposure to radiation, had been falsified by his employer, RH Kogyo, to reflect that he had been hired by a company higher up on the contractor food chain. The passbook shows that Suzushi Kogyo employed him from May to June 2012, while another firm, Take One, employed him for a brief 10 days in June. The truth was that RH Kogyo had given him a one-year contract.
"My suspicion is that they falsified the records to hide the fact that they had outsourced my employment," Reuters reported Hayashi as saying.
The above was the start of his troubles.
"I felt cheated and entrapped…I had not agreed to any of this," Hayashi told the news agency.
After complaining to a higher-level contractor, Hayashi was fired. When he complained to labor regulators, his plea went unanswered for a year. He landed another job at the plant, building a concrete foundation for the cooling tanks used to hold nuclear fuel rods.
The job was meant to pay $1,500 a month, but a third of his earnings were skimmed off by the subcontractor, Reuters cited him as saying. The problem is common to many of the thousands of cleanup workers, with little hope of TEPCO restoring any justice, according to the report. This is because Asia’s largest power utility is only the tip of an iceberg of firms, which has been the main complaint from workers associated with the cleanup. While TEPCO is in charge of the cleanup as a whole, it also comprises four giant Japanese corporations, otherwise known as the ‘Big Four’: Kajima, Obayashi, Shimizu Corp and Taisei Corp. These in turn provide hundreds of companies with funds and projects around the Fukushima prefecture, which end up receiving little to no supervision.
Critics of the plant’s cleanup say that this unregulated hiring of workers through subcontractors opens them to the risk of rights violations, extortion and blackmail from organized crime syndicates. But the lawyers of workers from around the Fukushima prefecture say that even that is a good deal compared to being unemployed.
While neither the eight main subcontractors nor the plant’s operator could be reached for comment on Hayashi’s case, TEPCO’s general manager for nuclear power, Masayuki Ono, told Reuters that the company “[signs] contracts with companies based on the cost needed to carry out a task… the companies then hire their own employees taking into account our contract. It’s very difficult for us to go in and check their contracts.”
After being advised by a journalist, Hayashi claims to have kept copies of his work records, including pictures and videos to back up his story.
A worker shortage crisis continues to deepen at the same time – both inside the plant throughout the surrounding Fukushima prefecture. Government data suggests that the number of job openings exceeds the number of applicants by 25 percent.
But despite research suggesting that raising the wages could bolster employment, TEPCO remains under pressure from the government to boost profits by March 2014. In response, the power utility has cutting workers’ wages at the plant by 20 percent.
In this race to the bottom over workers’ rights and pay, many subcontractors with allegedly questionable connections gained control of the impoverished Fukushima prefecture’s market for cleanup jobs. It is those companies that have taken advantage of the staggering shortage of cleanup workers and allowed companies associated with the plant with alleged ties with Japan’s organized crime syndicates, the yakuza, to flourish. And there are close to 50 gangs affiliated with three major syndicates in the prefecture alone – a fact that had an effect on the local labor market long before the tragedy of March 2011.
With subcontractors only focused on their own bottom line, their activities are not scrutinized by any governing authority. Worst of all, the subcontractors often have little or no experience in the nuclear cleanup sector.
A survey earlier this year revealed that close to 70 percent of small firms provided with decontamination work contracts did not follow labor regulations. The fact was reported by the labor ministry in July.
But Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, who is in charge of decommissioning the plant, has claimed that he can only go so far in telling TEPCO to improve workers’ conditions. "To get work done, it's necessary to cooperate with a large number of companies," he said.
When a police task force was set up to target criminal involvement in the cleanup efforts, huge amounts of money were found to have been embezzled. But akin to TEPCO’s apparent inability to supervise any activities outside its own immediate agreement with the government, a spokesman for Obayashi, one of the Big Four, claimed that the corporation “did not notice” that one of its subcontractors was hiring workers from the yakuza.
Obayashi pointed instead to its deals with subcontractors, in which they “have clauses on not cooperating with organized crime.”
Fukushima reliant on cheap labor
TEPCO is also finding that decommissioning Fukushima is a particularly cumbersome task and a nightmare to oversee. The cooling system alone requires thousands of workers to daily maintain its operation, and has to deal with the equivalent of 130 Olympic-sized stadiums full of contaminated water each day. A total of 12,000 workers will need to be hired before 2015, TEPCO forecasts. That is in comparison to slightly more than 8,000 workers currently registered at the plant. Recently that number was 6,000.
Making things even more complicated, the problems faced by Fukushima’s chaotic labor market have their roots dating back all to the 1970s.
Japan’s nuclear industry has been relying on cheap labor for over four decades, often recruiting workers from impoverished areas around Tokyo and Osaka, which are awash with indigent men seeking employment. Hayashi is but one of an estimated 50,000 workers hired so far for the clean-up. These indigent workers, known colloquially as “nuclear gypsies,” are easy targets for subcontractors looking to hire workers on the cheap.
“Working conditions in the nuclear industry have always been bad,” Reuters cited Saburo Murata, deputy director of Osaka’s Chuo Hospital, as saying. “Problems with money, outsourced recruitment, lack of proper health insurance - these have existed for decades.”
And the fallout from the March 2011 Fukushima disaster only serves to highlight these long-standing issues.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Japan’s parliament agreed to direct funds for the facility’s decontamination and closing. But the bill failed to include existing regulations applied to the construction industry. This detail meant that contractors supplying casual workers were not required to disclose their management practices or be subject to any background checks. Consequently, anyone could become a nuclear contractor, with neither TEPCO nor the government any the wiser.
The contractors quickly rushed in to secure job deals, and to stay ahead of the competition they often used brokers to do the recruitment for them; naturally, without asking questions.
In some cases, workers in debt to the yakuza would be hired, with brokers deducting their debts direct from their wage packets – often brown envelopes. What would follow was labor at sharply reduced wages, as the men worked tirelessly to pay back the brokers that hired them. The wages they were promised in the beginning are one-third below the national average. TEPCO does not publish its hourly rates, prompting Reuters to raise the issue with the workers themselves. Averaging $12 an hour, pay can dip as low as $6.
Speaking to Reuters, Lake Barrett, a former US nuclear regulator and an advisor to TEPCO, said that changing the system quickly would be impossible.
"There's been a century of tradition of big Japanese companies using contractors, and that's just the way it is in Japan… you’re not going to change that overnight just because you have a new job here, so I think you have to adapt.”
In other cases, workers have been known to be employed by one contractor, while managed by another. Workers complained to one court that they had been packed in small rooms, given their daily bowls of rice and – following a road accident, to get rid of their work uniforms and find separate hospitals to take care of them. And despite almost no oversight and widespread claims of gross rights violations, no company has yet been penalized.
The lawyer for a group dedicated to protecting Fukushima workers’ rights explained that they are “scared to sue because they're afraid they will be blacklisted… You have to remember these people often can’t get any other job.”
Stories like the one Hayashi told have led to the emergence of worker rights’ groups, such as the one he is now involved in. "Major contractors that run this system think that workers will always be afraid to talk because they are scared to lose their jobs,” he explained. “But Japan can’t continue to ignore this problem forever.”
The revelations come on the heels of a string of mishaps at the troubled plant – some natural, others caused by human error. The cleanup has a upcoming operation in November – by far the riskiest to date. It will involve the extraction of 1,300 spent nuclear fuel rods from the cooling tanks suspended 18 meters above ground. The task will require absolutely precise coordination from all workers at the power plant, as each rod will be handled manually, not by a computer, as many of the rods are now tilted at an angle or not in their previous location. Any mistake, or a failure to move the rods without collisions, could result in a catastrophe bigger than Chernobyl, says Christopher Busby, an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation and Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. The combined radioactive yield of the fuel rods is more than that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
rt.com/news/fukushima-workers-violations-yakuza-730/
Published time: October 25, 2013 15:16
Revelations from a Fukushima cleanup worker-turned-whistleblower have exposed the plant’s chaotic system of subcontractors, their alleged mafia connections and the super-exploitation of indigent workers doing this dangerous work.
The allegations, contained in an investigative report by Reuters, have also exposed deeply-rooted problems within Japan’s nuclear industry as a whole. In the report, detailing the everyday realities of workers at the stricken facility, Reuters interviewed an estimated 80 casual workers and managers. The most common complaint voiced was the cleanup effort’s utter dependence on subcontractors – which it is alleged endangered not just workers’ rights, but also their lives.
Tetsuya Hayashi, a 41-tyear-old construction worker by trade, applied for a job at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, after he suspected that the plant was in deeper trouble than it was willing to admit. The $150 billion cleanup effort, which is expected to last several decades into the future, has already required up to 50,000, mostly casual workers.
However, Hayashi only lasted two weeks on the job, as it became apparent that the vast network of subcontractors involved in the cleanup efforts could not care less for his rights (or his health), while Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, was doing little except giving subcontractors a slap on the wrist.
Hired to monitor the exposure to radiation of plant workers leaving the job during the summer of 2012, Hayashi was assigned to the most bio-hazardous sector and given a protective anti-radiation suit. However, even with the suit on, we exceeded his safe annual radiation quota in less than an hour.
The subcontractor who hired Hayashi was not following nuclear safety rules, according to exposure guidelines by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Reuters reported.
Furthermore, after Hayashi’s first two-week period of employment, he suspected that his passbook, a document showing the extent of a worker’s exposure to radiation, had been falsified by his employer, RH Kogyo, to reflect that he had been hired by a company higher up on the contractor food chain. The passbook shows that Suzushi Kogyo employed him from May to June 2012, while another firm, Take One, employed him for a brief 10 days in June. The truth was that RH Kogyo had given him a one-year contract.
"My suspicion is that they falsified the records to hide the fact that they had outsourced my employment," Reuters reported Hayashi as saying.
The above was the start of his troubles.
"I felt cheated and entrapped…I had not agreed to any of this," Hayashi told the news agency.
After complaining to a higher-level contractor, Hayashi was fired. When he complained to labor regulators, his plea went unanswered for a year. He landed another job at the plant, building a concrete foundation for the cooling tanks used to hold nuclear fuel rods.
The job was meant to pay $1,500 a month, but a third of his earnings were skimmed off by the subcontractor, Reuters cited him as saying. The problem is common to many of the thousands of cleanup workers, with little hope of TEPCO restoring any justice, according to the report. This is because Asia’s largest power utility is only the tip of an iceberg of firms, which has been the main complaint from workers associated with the cleanup. While TEPCO is in charge of the cleanup as a whole, it also comprises four giant Japanese corporations, otherwise known as the ‘Big Four’: Kajima, Obayashi, Shimizu Corp and Taisei Corp. These in turn provide hundreds of companies with funds and projects around the Fukushima prefecture, which end up receiving little to no supervision.
Critics of the plant’s cleanup say that this unregulated hiring of workers through subcontractors opens them to the risk of rights violations, extortion and blackmail from organized crime syndicates. But the lawyers of workers from around the Fukushima prefecture say that even that is a good deal compared to being unemployed.
While neither the eight main subcontractors nor the plant’s operator could be reached for comment on Hayashi’s case, TEPCO’s general manager for nuclear power, Masayuki Ono, told Reuters that the company “[signs] contracts with companies based on the cost needed to carry out a task… the companies then hire their own employees taking into account our contract. It’s very difficult for us to go in and check their contracts.”
After being advised by a journalist, Hayashi claims to have kept copies of his work records, including pictures and videos to back up his story.
A worker shortage crisis continues to deepen at the same time – both inside the plant throughout the surrounding Fukushima prefecture. Government data suggests that the number of job openings exceeds the number of applicants by 25 percent.
But despite research suggesting that raising the wages could bolster employment, TEPCO remains under pressure from the government to boost profits by March 2014. In response, the power utility has cutting workers’ wages at the plant by 20 percent.
In this race to the bottom over workers’ rights and pay, many subcontractors with allegedly questionable connections gained control of the impoverished Fukushima prefecture’s market for cleanup jobs. It is those companies that have taken advantage of the staggering shortage of cleanup workers and allowed companies associated with the plant with alleged ties with Japan’s organized crime syndicates, the yakuza, to flourish. And there are close to 50 gangs affiliated with three major syndicates in the prefecture alone – a fact that had an effect on the local labor market long before the tragedy of March 2011.
With subcontractors only focused on their own bottom line, their activities are not scrutinized by any governing authority. Worst of all, the subcontractors often have little or no experience in the nuclear cleanup sector.
A survey earlier this year revealed that close to 70 percent of small firms provided with decontamination work contracts did not follow labor regulations. The fact was reported by the labor ministry in July.
But Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, who is in charge of decommissioning the plant, has claimed that he can only go so far in telling TEPCO to improve workers’ conditions. "To get work done, it's necessary to cooperate with a large number of companies," he said.
When a police task force was set up to target criminal involvement in the cleanup efforts, huge amounts of money were found to have been embezzled. But akin to TEPCO’s apparent inability to supervise any activities outside its own immediate agreement with the government, a spokesman for Obayashi, one of the Big Four, claimed that the corporation “did not notice” that one of its subcontractors was hiring workers from the yakuza.
Obayashi pointed instead to its deals with subcontractors, in which they “have clauses on not cooperating with organized crime.”
Fukushima reliant on cheap labor
TEPCO is also finding that decommissioning Fukushima is a particularly cumbersome task and a nightmare to oversee. The cooling system alone requires thousands of workers to daily maintain its operation, and has to deal with the equivalent of 130 Olympic-sized stadiums full of contaminated water each day. A total of 12,000 workers will need to be hired before 2015, TEPCO forecasts. That is in comparison to slightly more than 8,000 workers currently registered at the plant. Recently that number was 6,000.
Making things even more complicated, the problems faced by Fukushima’s chaotic labor market have their roots dating back all to the 1970s.
Japan’s nuclear industry has been relying on cheap labor for over four decades, often recruiting workers from impoverished areas around Tokyo and Osaka, which are awash with indigent men seeking employment. Hayashi is but one of an estimated 50,000 workers hired so far for the clean-up. These indigent workers, known colloquially as “nuclear gypsies,” are easy targets for subcontractors looking to hire workers on the cheap.
“Working conditions in the nuclear industry have always been bad,” Reuters cited Saburo Murata, deputy director of Osaka’s Chuo Hospital, as saying. “Problems with money, outsourced recruitment, lack of proper health insurance - these have existed for decades.”
And the fallout from the March 2011 Fukushima disaster only serves to highlight these long-standing issues.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Japan’s parliament agreed to direct funds for the facility’s decontamination and closing. But the bill failed to include existing regulations applied to the construction industry. This detail meant that contractors supplying casual workers were not required to disclose their management practices or be subject to any background checks. Consequently, anyone could become a nuclear contractor, with neither TEPCO nor the government any the wiser.
The contractors quickly rushed in to secure job deals, and to stay ahead of the competition they often used brokers to do the recruitment for them; naturally, without asking questions.
In some cases, workers in debt to the yakuza would be hired, with brokers deducting their debts direct from their wage packets – often brown envelopes. What would follow was labor at sharply reduced wages, as the men worked tirelessly to pay back the brokers that hired them. The wages they were promised in the beginning are one-third below the national average. TEPCO does not publish its hourly rates, prompting Reuters to raise the issue with the workers themselves. Averaging $12 an hour, pay can dip as low as $6.
Speaking to Reuters, Lake Barrett, a former US nuclear regulator and an advisor to TEPCO, said that changing the system quickly would be impossible.
"There's been a century of tradition of big Japanese companies using contractors, and that's just the way it is in Japan… you’re not going to change that overnight just because you have a new job here, so I think you have to adapt.”
In other cases, workers have been known to be employed by one contractor, while managed by another. Workers complained to one court that they had been packed in small rooms, given their daily bowls of rice and – following a road accident, to get rid of their work uniforms and find separate hospitals to take care of them. And despite almost no oversight and widespread claims of gross rights violations, no company has yet been penalized.
The lawyer for a group dedicated to protecting Fukushima workers’ rights explained that they are “scared to sue because they're afraid they will be blacklisted… You have to remember these people often can’t get any other job.”
Stories like the one Hayashi told have led to the emergence of worker rights’ groups, such as the one he is now involved in. "Major contractors that run this system think that workers will always be afraid to talk because they are scared to lose their jobs,” he explained. “But Japan can’t continue to ignore this problem forever.”
The revelations come on the heels of a string of mishaps at the troubled plant – some natural, others caused by human error. The cleanup has a upcoming operation in November – by far the riskiest to date. It will involve the extraction of 1,300 spent nuclear fuel rods from the cooling tanks suspended 18 meters above ground. The task will require absolutely precise coordination from all workers at the power plant, as each rod will be handled manually, not by a computer, as many of the rods are now tilted at an angle or not in their previous location. Any mistake, or a failure to move the rods without collisions, could result in a catastrophe bigger than Chernobyl, says Christopher Busby, an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation and Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. The combined radioactive yield of the fuel rods is more than that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
rt.com/news/fukushima-workers-violations-yakuza-730/
gdpetti said:
Indeed, organized crime is never far away and will always exploit; with the silent allowance of course of the corporate government systems overseers. The same government/corporate systems like to use the "low bid" system, which often attracts the pathological unfit, who then exploit workers, using many a method to deliver their deal - with never ending examples.
Thanks for the article.
Esote
Dagobah Resident
I know, it's "only" a petition, but...
Urgent international petition calling for immediate action on the uncontrolled radioactive discharges at Tepco’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant : https://fs220.xbit.jp/n362/form2/
Urgent international petition calling for immediate action on the uncontrolled radioactive discharges at Tepco’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant : https://fs220.xbit.jp/n362/form2/
Just saw this article that mentions another from a couple years ago which I haven't heard of before, not sure if it's been posted here before or not, but mentions a fatal flaw from its inception, then later sums up the mess which everyone's heard of. The link has the diagram and videoplay feature attached. Guess is another example of 'Oops' 
Too bad Tepco and their friends in govt. haven't followed the honorable Japanese traditions, then at least the mess could be cleaned up, but like Wall Street and every other pathological out there, it's 'pay the fine and do no time'... or 'kick the can'. 
www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-11-04/tepco-tore-down-natural-seawall-which-would-have-protected-fukushima-tsunami
Tepco Tore Down the Natural Seawall Which Would Have Protected Fukushima from the Tsunami
George Washington's picture
Submitted by George Washington on 11/04/2013 17:42 -0500
The Wall Street Journal noted in 2011:
Many Other Negligent Or Criminal Errors
Tepco has made many other negligent or criminal errors:
- Engineers warned Tepco and the Japanese government many years before the accident that the reactors were seismically unsafe … and that an earthquake could wipe them out. For example, the team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake. But Tepco covered this up
-The Fukushima reactors were fatally damaged before the tsunami hit … the earthquake took them out even before the tidal wave hit
-Tepco admitted to repeatedly falsifying safety tests. Tepco covered up cracked reactor core containment vessel and other serious problems for decades
- An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design
-Tepco knew right after the 2011 accident that 3 nuclear reactors had lost containment, that the nuclear fuel had “gone missing”, and that there was in fact no real containment at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for 2 and a half years … instead pretending that the reactors were in “cold shutdown”
- Tepco just admitted that it’s known for 2 years that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the groundwater and Pacific Ocean
-Tepco – with no financial incentive to actually fix things – has only been pretending to clean it up. And see this
-Tepco has been directly hiring Yakuza gang members from criminal shell companies as a regular, ongoing practice
-Tepco’s recent attempts to solidify the ground under the reactors using chemicals has backfired horribly. And NBC News notes: “[Tepco] is considering freezing the ground around the plant. Essentially building a mile-long ice wall underground, something that’s never been tried before to keep the water out. One scientist I spoke to dismissed this idea as grasping at straws, just more evidence that the power company failed to anticipate this problem … and now cannot solve it.”
Letting Tepco remove the fuel rods is like letting a convicted murderer perform delicate brain surgery on a VIP.
Top scientists and government officials say that Tepco should be removed from all efforts to stabilize Fukushima. An international team of the smartest engineers and scientists should handle this difficult “surgery”.
Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear (who sent us the Wall Street Journal article) sums it up pretty well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD3EuTKzcQ#t=586
Too bad Tepco and their friends in govt. haven't followed the honorable Japanese traditions, then at least the mess could be cleaned up, but like Wall Street and every other pathological out there, it's 'pay the fine and do no time'... or 'kick the can'. www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-11-04/tepco-tore-down-natural-seawall-which-would-have-protected-fukushima-tsunami
Tepco Tore Down the Natural Seawall Which Would Have Protected Fukushima from the Tsunami
George Washington's picture
Submitted by George Washington on 11/04/2013 17:42 -0500
The Wall Street Journal noted in 2011:
Many Other Negligent Or Criminal Errors
Tepco has made many other negligent or criminal errors:
- Engineers warned Tepco and the Japanese government many years before the accident that the reactors were seismically unsafe … and that an earthquake could wipe them out. For example, the team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake. But Tepco covered this up
-The Fukushima reactors were fatally damaged before the tsunami hit … the earthquake took them out even before the tidal wave hit
-Tepco admitted to repeatedly falsifying safety tests. Tepco covered up cracked reactor core containment vessel and other serious problems for decades
- An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design
-Tepco knew right after the 2011 accident that 3 nuclear reactors had lost containment, that the nuclear fuel had “gone missing”, and that there was in fact no real containment at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for 2 and a half years … instead pretending that the reactors were in “cold shutdown”
- Tepco just admitted that it’s known for 2 years that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the groundwater and Pacific Ocean
-Tepco – with no financial incentive to actually fix things – has only been pretending to clean it up. And see this
-Tepco has been directly hiring Yakuza gang members from criminal shell companies as a regular, ongoing practice
-Tepco’s recent attempts to solidify the ground under the reactors using chemicals has backfired horribly. And NBC News notes: “[Tepco] is considering freezing the ground around the plant. Essentially building a mile-long ice wall underground, something that’s never been tried before to keep the water out. One scientist I spoke to dismissed this idea as grasping at straws, just more evidence that the power company failed to anticipate this problem … and now cannot solve it.”
Letting Tepco remove the fuel rods is like letting a convicted murderer perform delicate brain surgery on a VIP.
Top scientists and government officials say that Tepco should be removed from all efforts to stabilize Fukushima. An international team of the smartest engineers and scientists should handle this difficult “surgery”.
Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear (who sent us the Wall Street Journal article) sums it up pretty well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD3EuTKzcQ#t=586
Esote
Dagobah Resident
Here is a video documentary of the testimony of a Fukushima evacuee from Iwaki city, with English subtitles : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlWslcjHlPo
l apprenti de forgeron
The Living Force
A nightmare that never ends. Thanks for sharing.eoste said:
