Remember Godzilla?
He was what the Japanese call a kaiju,
or "mysterious monster," the Japanese film industry's answer to King
Kong. In the beginning, Godzilla,
originally called Gojira (1954), was awakened from the frozen depths by an
American nuclear explosion. Ever since
then, many Godzilla sequels have been produced, but for the past four years, an
all-new kaiju has been afoot, one far
more mysterious, and more terrible, than anything seen in a disaster film. This post was prompted by the news of last
week's typhoon-induced floods in Japan which affected the area north of Tokyo
where three of four irreparably damaged reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daichii
nuclear energy plant have been leaking radiation since March 11, 2011. The Chernobyl nuclear accident (Ukraine,
1986) received much more publicity. That's
the one in which 31 workers were killed on the spot and which has provoked hundreds
of thousands of cases of illness among plant workers and former inhabitants. Both the Chernobyl and the Fukushima Daiichi
accidents have been classified as Level 7, the worst possible on the
International Nuclear Event Scale. The
disaster at Chernobyl, a town which will not be liveable for another 20,000
years, was a relatively manageable event in contrast with what is still happening
at Fukushima along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The Chernobyl plant, at least, could finally be
buried beneath a cement "sarcophagus" following the successful location
of its melted nuclear fuel rods, a blob dubbed "the elephant's foot"
for its resemblance to same. The melted
fuel at the Fukushima plant, on the other other hand, can no longer be located. In any case, it is disturbed by ground water running
under and around the plant; for that reason, 
Fukushima cannot simply be buried. So its reactor buildings remain to this day a
festering source of radiation, most of it ending up in the Pacific Ocean. The idea of a nuclear "meltdown"
seemed unthinkable back in 1979 when the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant
in Central Pennsylvania (U.S.A.) experienced a partial meltdown and inspired
the movie "China Syndrome." But
what has occurred at Fukushima--three different meltdowns--would be any script
writer's worst case scenario: A strong
quake caused Units 1, 2 and 3 to shut down; that same day, diesel generators had
to take over the indispensable business of cooling the reactor cores until a huge
tsunami arrived about an hour later and disabled the diesel generators. Authorities began evacuating everyone in the area
of the Fukushima plant. Shortly
afterwards, the three reactors experienced full meltdown together with a series
of hydrogen explosions. A total disaster. The private, for-profit company in charge of
this plant, TEPCO, has seldom been forthcoming.
The fact is, no one knows how to fix such an unprecedented situation. The code of honor so prevalent in Japanese
society may be the reason that no one in charge wants to admit how miserably
the collective has been failed by this non-stop nuclear nightmare. TEPCO continues to pretend to have solutions,
but no one has any idea where the melted cores are: the immediate area is far too contaminated to
investigate further. Someone has suggested
that Fukushima is now a "melt-through," continuing to burn through soil
and rock, even under the ocean, liquifying and contaminating everything it
reaches. Reactor 4, meanwhile, is
another disaster waiting to happen; its overall structure is badly compromised,
perhaps even sinking. If another bad
earthquake were to affect the site and trigger Reactor 4, the effect in terms
of radiation released would be equal to another 14,000 atomic bombs of the kind
used at Hiroshima. The Pacific Ocean has
officially become a dumping ground for Fukushima's huge stored stock of radioactive
water, "purified" or not. On
September 10, a TEPCO spokesperson noted that during the recent flooding, the
drainage pumps at the site were overwhelmed.
"Hundreds of tons of contaminated water have flowed into the ocean,"
he admitted. (He didn't admit that
hundreds of tons of radioactive water have been flowing into the ocean for
years.) In addition, the flood waters washed
untold stacks of bagged radioactive soil into the Pacific Ocean. One would think that a small nation which
sits on the earthquake-prone Ring of Fire, the same nation which experienced
the lethal effects of nuclear radiation following the U.S. atomic attacks on
the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WW2, would reject all things nuclear
on principle. But no, the same country
which gave the world the gigantic, atomic ray-emitting, reptilian kaiju, has recklessly embraced the
nuclear energy monster. No one can
control isotopes of iodine, cesium and strontium in the atmosphere. No one can prevent their bio-accumulation in soil,
rain, cells, and eventually, the food supply.
No one can prevent sickness and mutations caused by tasteless, odorless,
invisible radiation. No one can bury
this kaiju again. One can only oppose nuclear energy wherever
it rears its ugly head. As noted in a
book authored by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A
Unifying Vision, "Historically as well as technically, nuclear power
and nuclear weapons are inextricably linked.
Nuclear plants are essentially bomb factories, perpetuating grave
concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism." In light of the new deal with Iran, that statement
encompasses the long and short of it. As
if it weren't bad enough that the kaiju
which is now Fukushima may threaten to show up at the 2020 Olympics, not to
mention on our dinner plates. un'Americana
a Venezia
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