The following article explains
just a few of the reasons I believe this
is so, and why I think the world over
needs to begin converting the entire
nuclear industry, including energy and
defense, into humanitarian, medical,
and sustainable energy industries
operated and managed by qualified
civilian oversight organizations and
corporate, government, and NGO
partnerships that have enough
experience in industry conversion to
start engineering the shift immediately.
Environmentalists, scientists,
academics, and activists have been
saying to shut down the nuclear
industry for decades already because
of their own research into the
destruction of life caused by nuclear
weapons use and testing, industrial
accidents, and the general waste the
industry creates. The thousands of
protestors who showed up in New
York to demand an end to dirty energy
and corporate waste prior to the U.N.
environment summit proves there is
huge support in the U.S., and
worldwide, to stop further
contamination of the earth by big
industry, including those industries
profiting from nuclear energy and
defense. In my opinion, Fukushima put
the last nail in the coffin, but the
nuclear industry is still profiting and
expanding in to all kinds of new realms
and activities even as I write this. So
let me explain why I think we continue
to be misled about the real dangers of
the nuclear industry and why we
should all be paying more attention.
On Dec. 19, 24, 25, and 27,
2013 TEPCO workers reported seeing
steam rising from Unit 3 at the
Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant. A Jan.
1, 2014 RT article reported that
TEPCO was not explaining why the
steam was occurring, and that, “Unlike
the other five reactors, reactor 3 ran
on mixed core containing both
uranium fuel and mixed uranium and
plutonium oxide, or MOX nuclear fuel.
The Reactor 3 fuel storage pond still
houses an estimated 89 tons of the
plutonium-based MOX nuclear fuel
c o m p o s e d o f 5 1 4 f u e l ro d s . ” 2
Immediately following the reports of
the steam an online press release was
issued by a so-called Turner Radio
Network, which said the west coast of
the United States should immediately
prepare for emergency measures
should the reactor blow and go into
total meltdown. Soon after, the press
release was debunked and the Turner
Radio Network owner labeled as a
racist by tons of online news writers
who said there was nothing too
unusual about the steam and that the
Turner Radio Network was just
sensationalizing the event to attract
viewers to its site, to increase fear, or
for some other personal interest. By
that time TEPCO had put out its own
report detailing where the steam was
coming from, explaining that it was
most likely due to rain water
evaporating near the hot shield plug of
the primary containment vessel.3
What I didn’t fully catch at the
time though was that Unit 3 had
already blown up and gone into a total
meltdown over two and a half years
prior, sometime between March 12
and March 14, 2011, after the
hydrogen explosion millions saw on TV
had already taken place inside Unit 1.
In fact, it wasn’t until Aug. 6, 2014 that
online media such as japantimes.co.jp
reported that all the fuel rods in reactor
3 “melted down and fell onto the
bottom of the containment vessel”
sometime after the cooling system
shut down at 8 p.m. March 12, 2011.4
The news article states TEPCO had
previously announced that only 63
percent of the fuel had melted down
and that the cooling system in reactor
3 had shut off at 2:42 a.m. March 13,
2011, not at 8 p.m. the next day. In the
book Fukushima, The Story of a
Nuclear Disaster, it states, “Although
there is some uncertainty about the
timing, by approximately 9:00 a.m. on
the morning of March 13, the fuel rods
became uncovered, triggering the
same sequence of events that had
occurred at Unit 1 some thirty-six
hours earlier: overheating of the fuel,
oxidation of the fuel cladding,
hydrogen formation, and release of
fission products. The Unit 3 core was
melting down, and vessel and
containment pressures were rising
fast.”5 The book says an explosion
took place in Unit 3 at 11 a.m. on
March 14, 2011. Most of the media I
found reported that there was only a
partial meltdown at Fukushima for
almost an entire year after the disaster
occurred, not a full on triple meltdown
as was the reality of the situation. In a
Scientific American timeline of the
events at Fukushima it says another
hydrogen explosion took place at Unit
2 on March 15, 2011, which was
followed by a fire in the Unit 4 reactor
building. The timeline states that on
March 16, 2011 “TEPCO estimates
that many of Fukushima Daichi’s fuel
rods have suffered damage, including
70 percent of the fuel in Unit 1 and 33
percent in Unit 2. The utility suspects
that Unit 3’s core is also damaged.”6
More than likely the fuel in Units 1 and
3 were more than just “damaged,” and
may have already melted down
completely by the time TEPCO had
released the March 16 statement.
The hydrogen explosions that
had rocked the reactor buildings of
units 1, 2, and 3 made the buildings
too dangerous and radioactive for
TEPCO workers to enter or attempt to
remove the fuel rods from, which
partially explains why TEPCO initially
got it wrong about the timing of the
reactor 3 meltdown, but the
misreporting seems to be a little too
consistent for me to fully accept all
these explanations. But before I get
into the discrepancies in the reporting,
let’s take a look at why Fukushima was
an awful place to have a nuclear plant
from the get go. From my
understanding, the people who
decided Fukushima was a good place
to have a nuclear power plant knew all
along that it was