It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Exacerbating widespread suspicions of a cover-up, this February Tepco admitted it had waited for two months after the accident before announcing the meltdowns—which possibly delayed evacuations and endangered lives. The uranium fuel in three of the six reactors eventually melted, and explosions blew holes in the roofs of three reactor buildings, releasing radioactive iodine, cesium and other fission products over land and sea. Emergency managers on site, desperately trying to cool the molten cores, poured water into the damaged reactor buildings using fire-hoses. As a result, highly contaminated water flowed directly into the Pacific Ocean.
Crippled Fukushima Reactors Are Still a Danger, Five Years after the Accident
originally posted by: autopat51
it appears the fuku problem will be with us forever as no one knows what to do except cover up and lie it away.
originally posted by: Mianeye
As we speak, a thousand people are working on the site, so it's not like they are not doing anything.
I don't think Tepco realized the seriousness of the disaster at first, they thought they could save the reactors, no body knew how bad it was in the first month after the quake, so i wouldn't say they were lying.
originally posted by: Mianeye
a reply to: Raggedyman
The pacific is very very big, the fukushima is very very small compared, locally it's bad but the pacific ocean will be fine.
We can look at Chernobyl to compare, and the wild live is thriving unaffected from the disaster.
The wild life does not live long enough to develop cancers, humans do, otherwise, why the huge dome?
originally posted by: Mianeye
We can look at Chernobyl to compare, and the wild live is thriving unaffected from the disaster.
The Exclusion Zone encompasses an area that crosses the border between Ukraine to Belarus that is now teeming with wildlife in the absence of people. There are lots of wild boar, tested to be highly radioactive since they feed on mushrooms and truffles in the contaminated ground. The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl didn't just affect Ukraine — wild boar as far away as Germany have been found to be radioactive.
The findings run counter to previous hypothesises that chronic long-term exposure to radiation would hit animal populations.
Wolves in Chernobyl exclusion zone
“What we do, our everyday habitation of an area – agriculture, forestry – they’ve damaged wildlife more than the world’s worst nuclear accident,” said Prof Jim Smith, professor of environmental science, University of Portsmouth, and one of the paper’s authors.
“It doesn’t say that nuclear accidents aren’t bad, of course they are. But it illustrates that the things we do everyday, the human population pressure, damages the environment. It’s kind of obvious but it’s an amazing illustration of it.”
The explosion of reactor four on 26 April 1986 killed dozens of plant staff and rescue workers, and led to high radiation doses in the first weeks and months that had significant effects on animal health and reproduction around Chernobyl.
But after analysing previously unpublished animal track records and aerial surveys from Belarusian authorities and scientists, the authors of the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found no long-term impact to population numbers from the radiation released by the accident.
“Chernobyl caused a lot of human damage. The social and economical problems were huge. If you set that aside – if you can set that aside – it’s hard to argue that it’s really damaged the ecosystem as a whole,” said Smith.
I don't think it will be with us forever. In 100,000 years the danger will be reduced and after some millions of years you might not even know it happened.
originally posted by: autopat51
it appears the fuku problem will be with us forever as no one knows what to do except cover up and lie it away.
As I reported last week, there are four kidns of carcinogenic isotopes released when a nuke plant blows: iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239. Plutonium is not only the most lethal of the four (“extrordinarily toxic” is how Dr. Ira Helfand, a board member for Physicians for Social Responsibility, describes it), it also hangs around the longest. It’s half life is a whopping 24,000 years, and since radioactive contamination is dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of the isotope’s half.life, that means plutonium emitted in Fukushima today will still be around in close to half a million years.