“We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you the following news bulletin.”
The fate of our civilization (all of humanity), indeed, the entire living ecosystem of this planet is hanging on a few, damaged, concrete support columns and the quarter inch steel rebar that holds them together. If one or more of those columns gives way from a bit of an earthquake or simple fatigue this planet will become uninhabitable by any life beyond some bacteria level organisms or, perhaps cockroaches. Everything else that we know on land or in the sea, will die and this includes you, your children, your dog named Spot and your cat named Fluffy.
“We now return you to Dancing With The Stars followed by America’s Funniest Videos”
Our capacity for self-delusion never ceases to amaze me. Maybe it’s the fluoride in the water. Most people out there believe exactly what they want to believe (or what they’re told to believe) even though the truth is staring them right in the face. The fact is, what’s happening in Japan (that the mainstream media and/or your government is failing to bring to your conscience awareness) may, very soon, render life (as we know it) on this rock called ‘Earth’, past tense.
The photo below is of the storage pool on top of the reactor building (#4). The building is destroyed and the fact that the storage pool is still standing is a miracle. If the columns holding this already wrecked structure fail and the holding pool comes down or even if this tips at an angle much more than it is, changing the geometry of the placement of the stored fuel rods within the pool, there will result an uncontrolled radiological event unlike anything ever seen.
Considering the number of earthquakes continuing in the general area, it’s only a matter of time before what little is holding this up, lets go. The dumb-asses wanting to sugar coat this possibility, so that you’ll not stop buying flat screen TVs, minimize this by saying: “the possibility that the pool collapses and the spent fuel rods are scattered on the ground with the result that the complexity of dealing with the problem is magnified.”
“Magnified”. Hmmm, one might coin that quaint phrase we use with toddlers when they “fall down – go boom” for perspective in this matter and, while there would be no “boom” in the present case described, the lack of noise or mushroom cloud wouldn’t change the facts that would result in life on this planet ending. Those are the facts folks.
Some of us have an inkling of the concept of ‘doom’. When I was a little kid during the Cuban missile crisis we had some significant thoughts of “doom”. While too young to connect the dots of much of what was happening around me, there were ‘snippets’ that I can remember clearly which scared the crap out of me. I remember a day, in the front yard of our house on the hill, overlooking the bay in Pocasset and watching the fighter jets scrambling out of Otis AFB heading for their patrol positions off the coast of Cape Cod. I remember the hushed conversations between my parents and our neighbors, gathered at the split rail fence between our yards about “Russians” and “communists” and the confrontation taking place beyond our front yard. I remember my Mom, later that day, doing the family ironing while listening to yet more jets screaming over our house headed out to sea and softly crying. I remember asking her if we were going to war and her reply that she hoped not but that it seemed so. I remember the ‘drills’ in school, during the same time frame, where the alarms would sound and our teachers would rush us out of our classrooms and into the windowless, interior corridors of our school. We were instructed to sit with our backs against the cold brick walls on either side of the hallway, tucking our heads into our knees with our hands over our heads in the foolish belief that when the bombs fell we might survive the blast of a thermonuclear detonation, never knowing if today’s drill was real or practice for the inevitable. There was, for a time, a very real feeling that at any time, the world as we know it, could well end in massive explosions and poisoning atomic clouds of ‘fallout’. In retrospect, it was a rather disconcerting time. If one was able to fog a mirror, one understood the meaning of “impending doom” in the context of day to day life.
Today, that reality appears far less poignant; indeed your government and their media are very careful NOT to provide you with awareness of anything that might worry your little head, thus we can all focus (seemingly) on matters that have more relevance in our lives. ‘Issues’ of great importance to us these days are day to day concerns like our eventual ‘problematic’ retirement, our 401Ks quickly turning into 101Ks, which idiots to vote for in the next election who might offer some relative sanity in Washington DC while knowing in our hearts that nothing 99% of them say can be trusted, whether our jobs will survive the next round of layoffs and just what the hell we’ll do about the mortgage if we’re on the next list to be kicked to the curb, perhaps simply which household project will get addressed this summer with the limited amount of cash available or the even more mundane nonsense of who’s saying what on Facebook.
So, while 1,565 fuel rods (460 tons of nuclear fuel – including plutonium) is teetering in a pool on top of a barely intact, structurally unsound building that’s been leaning oddly since the earthquake last year, your government wants you to go about your business remaining blissfully unaware of what’s happening that has a direct bearing on your survival while, (I note), the Federal Business Opportunities network shows the Defense Logistics Agency — the Troop Support branch — seeking large quantities of potassium iodide tablets to ensure “critical operational forces are protected in the event of nuclear fallout.”
While the government’s media obsess, day after day, over Iran’s make-believe intent to build a nuke (which, if true, on a good day, might level a few city blocks), the critical condition of a few rebar reenforced, damaged and crumbling concrete columns in Japan (which could/will take out all the planet’s inhabitants) is not in the least bit noteworthy. Apparently, we can readily contemplate attacking Iran in what may escalate into a global war over the theoretical development of a few nukes but will stand by idly while the fools at TEPCO and within the Japanese government do little beyond putting up a few aluminum lally columns to brace the existing structure and pouring water over a leaking storage pool, risking planetary extinction.
Were it me, since no one’s willing to consider my idea posted in April of 2011: (https://resistancetononsense.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/fukushima-daiichi-tepco-fubar/) I think as a stopgap measure, I might (at the least) be creating a rather large berm up around that building and backfilling the berm (under the #4 storage pool) with concrete until that pool is resting on a new and solid foundation (30-40 feet thick) rather than its crumbling columns. When the next quake comes the building won’t be able to collapse because it will be encased in concrete essentially being a solid concrete pyramidal block that the pool was resting on.
To those who say this is Japan’s problem, it should be noted that this stopped being a Japanese ‘sovereign’ jurisdictional issue when their radiation exited Japanese territory and the government of Japan authorized pumping spent nuclear coolant water (and the toxic chemicals contained therein) into the Pacific food chain. Japan’s actions and inaction has created a very real threat to all of our survival. Unlike the fabricated ‘threat’ of Iran and the few nuclear weapons they may someday decide to build (were it true), Fukushima, without question, is a threat to planetary survival. The Japanese should either openly request assistance from the world community or be forced to accept guidance and resources from the world community.
If not, we may not have to wait for the Mayan’s goofy 2012 prophesy to bear fruit. We may end up watching our kids, our dogs and our cats dying (along with every other living thing) as a result of some rat-bastard not wanting to bankrupt TEPCO (or Japan) and hoping some already wrecked building will continue to stand as long as the Giza Pyramids while some minimum wage workers keep their garden hoses trained on the leaky fuel rod storage pool.
P.S.: If you’re NOT in hurry to see what the effects of radiological poisoning does to you, your family and your pets you might want to run a geiger counter over any imported Japanese TV or made-in-Japan car you choose to buy as the Russians are doing. Or, you can maintain your blissful ignorance of the isotope exposure coming here in the form of exports and believe the government/media who tell you there’s no concern at all.
resistancetononsense 