A year has passed since the accident at Fukushima nuclear power plant. Conditions of the reactors cannot be explained as 'quasi-cold shutdown' as the government asserts. Nuclear fuel has eroded the container vessels and nobody can tell what is happening at the bottom areas. Tanks for contaminated water will be full soon. The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) will not take responsibility to store contaminated soil, rubble and incineration ash at their premises. The company is a mafia addicted with nuclear power.

NUCLEAR MAFIA BOSSES CALCULATE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

The current situation at the Fukushima plant cannot be said to 'be under control'. An extraordinary volume of nuclear fuel (at Reactor No.1 the entire volume was lost) has been melted away to leak out from the pressure vessels and is eroding the bottom of container vessels at the Reactors No. 1, 2 and 3. TEPCO announced in November last year that it estimated the melted fuel erodes the cemented part of bottom to reach the steel plate.

Nobody knows in what speed the erosion goes on, whether it has stopped or not and when the bottom steel will be broken through.

In January an industrial endoscope was inserted to the container vessel of Reactor No.2 to film the interior. The job accompanied a risk of high-level radiation exposure. But visibility was too poor to see the water surface due to thick steam, much less the upper part of fuel. What happens in the lower part of fuel?

Disposal of Contaminated Water

At the crippled plant a thousand tons of highly-radioactive water is purified on the daily basis and a half of it is used as coolant to circulate. But fresh 500 tons of underground water flows daily into the reactor buildings at the Daiichi Plant and this volume of water is sent to tanks as an extra. The reservoir tanks can store in total 170 thousand tons. They will be full soon. What should be done next?

TEPCO is reluctant to build shielding walls to prevent underground water from entering the buildings. It does not either want to isolate the reactors at the bottom of container vessels by reinforcing with materials to endure erosion, heat and earthquakes.

Radioactive materials damage mountains, forests, fields, rice paddies, seas, lakes and swamps. The Tokyo Bay gets contaminated at the bottom. Decontamination efforts do not work at many places.

TEPCO is not willing to process and store inside their own premises such soil, rubble and ashes as contain highly radioactive materials. The wastes are kept in the 'interim storage facilities', but no decision has been made yet to set up some 'intermediate disposal facilities', nor 'final processing facilities'.

Many people are forced to suffer, harm their health and die an earlier death. Families are lost and jobs are destroyed. A life as a human being is crushed.

Don't Allow Mafias to Survive

All the reactors across the country will be shut down soon when regular inspections are made. Total suspension of nuclear power in the country will be a sheer reality soon. It has been proven that electricity is sufficient enough in supply for hot summer, if priority is given to encourage thermal generation, which is combined with an appropriate use of hydropower, flexible cooperation among the nine utility companies, various kinds of independent power generation efforts and building of joint thermal power plants between big users and utilities.

Nuclear mafias, however, have not yet given up. They seek immediate profits and even their tiny shares. Kansai Electric Power Co. is planning to resume operation, beginning at the Oi Plant, Fukui Prefecture. The utility company overlooks the crisis at Fukushima and underestimates a possibility of big earthquake.

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, a mafia boss in charge of political affairs, is to extend lives of nuclear plants and to build up new plants both inside and outside the country, taking advantage of a prospect of resumption.

Including Chairman of Policy Bureau of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), Maehara Seiji, the party's top leaders are in favor of resumption of operation at the nuclear plants. The DPJ's Energy Project Team, headed by former Minister of Economy, Industry and International Trade Ohata Akihiro, who represents the Hitachi group, approves reoperation, too.

As for the previous government party, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), it admits resumption too. The party has set a moratorium of ten years to reach a conclusion over nuclear power generation.

Bosses of mafias, represented by monopolies of electricity, machinery and heavy industries must be isolated further. Let's keep struggling against nuclear power generation!

March 6, 2012