Nuclear Meltdown in Fukushima, Political Meltdown in US, No End in Sight for
Either
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
18 October 20
I
nce again the people in charge of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power
plant are talking about flushing 1.2 million tons of highly radioactive
water into the Pacific Ocean. That's more than 265 million gallons of water
so toxic that it currently has to be stored on-site to keep it safe. This is
not a new problem. Radioactively toxic water has accumulated constantly
since three of Fukushima Daiichi's four nuclear reactors melted down in the
aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The present
situation, as reported by Reuters on October 16, suggests some uncertainty
about the actual release of radioactive wastewater:
Nearly a decade after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan's government has
decided to release over one million tonnes of contaminated water into the
sea, media reports said on Friday, with a formal announcement expected to be
made later this month.
This is a "decision" that authorities at the Tokyo Electric Power Company
(TEPCO), which owns the plant, and the Japanese government, which is
responsible for it, have wanted to make for a long time as a safety shortcut
and money-saving stopgap solution to a problem that's not going away for
decades to come. TEPCO and the government have been floating the Pacific
dump for more than a year without ever carrying it out. No one knows what
impact such a massive amount of radiation will have on the Pacific Ocean.
Neighboring countries object to being guinea pigs in an experiment that has
no fail-safe. The Japanese fishing industry in the Fukushima region, already
battered by the after-effects of the meltdowns, adamantly opposes further
release of radioactive water into the ocean.
TEPCO and the government have been trying to shed responsibility for the
Fukushima disaster for years. A report in 2002 predicted the possibility of
an earthquake and tsunami. The power company took no precautions. Government
regulators failed to compel the company to take precautions. On September
30, ruling in a suit filed seven years earlier, the Sendai High Court found
that TEPCO and the government are responsible for the Fukushima nuclear
disaster. This is the first time a High Court has ruled on a Fukushima case,
and the first time a High Court has sought to hold TEPCO and the government
accountable for their actions and inactions. TEPCO and the government have
appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
As matters now stand, radioactive water seeps continuously into the Pacific
at a presumably low but unmeasured rate. This is uncontrolled groundwater
that enters the melted cores clean but becomes irradiated by the cores that
remain highly radioactive and all but unapproachable even by robots. The
cores, inherently more dangerous than the original accident, are kept in
check by cooling water pumped into the containment vessels. This water also
becomes highly irradiated and is stored in huge tanks on site, which is
running out of storage space.
Dumping radioactive water into the ocean won't solve the problem. It will
only free up storage space that will slowly fill until it needs to be dumped
again - depending on whether the presently proposed dumping results in a new
disaster. TEPCO has promised to treat the wastewater, removing all
radioactive elements except Tritium. Nuclear wastewater with low levels of
Tritium is routinely dumped by nuclear operations around the world. This
dumpage is from normal nuclear operations, not plants in meltdown crisis.
TEPCO's treatment of Fukushima wastewater is expected to take another two
years. Whether the treatment is effective remains uncertain.
Uncertainty is the key word when it comes to Fukushima. Reuters, having
reported the dumping decision had been made (above), later in the same story
quotes the Japanese industry minister as saying that no decision had been
made, but that a decision needed to be made quickly to "prevent any delays
in the decommissioning process." That is nonsense, if not sheer dishonesty.
The "decommissioning process" has no effective timetable, the melted cores
are years if not decades from being brought under control, and the buildup
of radioactive wastewater is only a visible sideshow to the largely
invisible ongoing nuclear calamity at the bottom of the destroyed reactors.
By way of analogy, imperfect as all analogies are, the current state of
American politics is all too much like Fukushima: a long-term crisis for
which no foreseeable solution is available. And the American crisis seems,
if anything, of longer standing and much greater intractability. Fukushima
is at least subject to the laws of physics. American politics are
increasingly unsusceptible to any laws at all.
The analogy goes something like this:
In 2000, an electoral earthquake struck the United States. The election
failed to produce a clear winner.
This was followed by a tsunami of litigators and Republican intimidators
swamping Florida and drowning the vote count under a flood of litigation.
The partisan tide overwhelmed the Supreme Court, and American democracy
melted down, votes went uncounted, and the people were denied their choice,
whatever it might have been.
The initial burst of deadly fallout was an illegitimate president and
thuggish administration that soon lied us into war, committed war crimes and
crimes against humanity, and escaped impeachment and prosecution by virtue
of the broken system they had created.
For years, the two parties responsible for the multi-meltdown of American
institutions worked hard at denying the core crisis while blaming the other
party for its effects. No one was called to account. Republicans went on
behaving as if the melted-down one-party state was not only natural but
preferable to any system centered on the common good.
The continuing fallout crippled the next President, already weakened by his
exposure to the withered state. Minor treatments of some of the symptoms
failed to slow the national exposure to ever higher levels of vitriol, greed
and criminality, until many Americans came to see those as the problem, not
the rot of the melted core institutions that went untended and unrepaired.
So here we are in 2020, our politically radioactive wastewater storage near
capacity. Dumping vast amounts of Trump-waste into the ocean, as it were, is
no solution, although it might buy time for the beginning of a solution to
emerge.
Electing Joe Biden might improve the situation, but the underlying reality
would remain the same on January 20, 2021: the Congress, the Supreme Court,
and the Presidency have all melted down. They won't be fixed by a mere
change of leadership, least of all by leadership that emerged from one of
the guilty parties. Although America's political meltdown was led by
Republicans, the crisis of a democratic state is a bipartisan achievement of
profound dimensions.
Neither Fukushima nuclear power plants nor American government institutions
have any easy fix. Both require, first and foremost, honest and clear
assessment. That won't be easy for those most responsible, and there's
little sign that it's about to happen on either front. And once reality is
clearly illuminated in either case, it gets harder, because someone has to
figure out how to fix it. With Fukushima, at least, the framework is clear,
applying nuclear physics to make a dangerous situation safe. At its cores,
it's not all that subjective. And it will still take decades.
Fixing or reinventing America's system of self-government is much trickier,
with no applicable laws. It took us decades to get here. We need to be
prepared to invest decades to achieve a desirable future.
