Meanwhile, accumulation of radiation during a 25 day period following the March 11 earthquake exceeds (Japan's) permissible levels for a whole year, as far as 60km / 37.3mi. Japan ends up expanding the evacuation zone from 20km / 12.4mi to 30km / 18.6mi. One gets the feeling they still don't have a full grasp of the enormity of the spread of radiation contamination.
Right now, there's a raging battle on the Guardian's website between nuclear energy's apologists and those who are concerned of how the media is downplaying the Fukushima event.
My take: don't be so arrogant to assume that this current disaster cannot get worse, or that it is contained. Considering every large aftershock makes TEPCO nervously run around inspecting everything to see if there was any additional damage, should indicate just how fragile the current "stable" condition actually is.
The UK's Daily Mail has photos from within the exclusion zones showing - among other things - the pets left behind.
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| Via UK's Daily Mail online |
Update 1 4/12/11: Japanese government reports that small amounts of radioactive strontium has been found outside the 30km exclusion zone. Bone cancer anyone?
Update 2 4/12/11: TEPCO says that the amount of radiation leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi plant may eventually equal or surpass that of Chernobyl. But you see, if you read around the internet, there remains a large group of apologists. Apologists have continued to assert that Fukushima is no Chernobyl, except that Fukushima continues to create radioactive waste (where does that water go when the leaks stop and they start trucking the water off-site?), and we have to wait until at some point in the future, they have successfully sealed the reactor cores that continue to remain exposed.
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