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Fukushima Daiichi adds Insult to Injury for the Pacific’s Coral Reefs.

Fukushima Daiichi adds Insult to Injury for the Pacific’s Coral Reefs.

As the El Niño builds to a terrifying crescendo, that won’t peak before April 2024, the Pacific’s Coral Reefs will become stressed, and a bleaching event will unfold as it did in the 2016 El Niño. What is our response? TEPCO and the Japanese government have decided to dump 1.3million tons of radioactive water into my beloved Pacific Ocean. After careful consideration the criminal cohort in Japan have decided to take the cheapest option and dump the radioactive sludge into the adjacent Pacific Ocean.

In the video below, I mentioned that Sea Surface Temperatures hit 38C off the coast of Florida. Here’s the evidence:
“Sea surface temperatures of more than 38C (100.4F) have been recorded off the coast of Florida – potentially setting a new world record.” Sea temperature off Florida reaches 38C- potentially a world record.

Almost every coral reef in the Northern Hemisphere is under stress.
Daily Global 5km Satellite Coral Bleaching Heat Stress Degree Heating Week

“A catastrophic die-off of emperor penguin chicks has been observed in the Antarctic, with up to 10,000 young birds estimated to have been killed.”

This is the consequences of the loss of Antarctic Sea ice in the winter.

What does everyone think will happen down there when the summer rolls around, holding hands with a strong El Nino? Climate change: Thousands of penguins die in Antarctic ice breakup

“This missing area is larger than the size of Greenland, or around ten times the size of the United Kingdom,” Dramatic images show why emperor penguins were hit with catastrophe

Not a chick survived in 4 out of 5 colonies. Not a single Emperor penguin chick survived spring in parts of the Antarctica.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse

Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse

Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY 2.0

Tokyo Electric Power Company-TEPCO- has been attempting to decommission three nuclear meltdowns in reactors No. 1 No. 2, and No. 3 for 11 years now. Over time, impossible issues grow and glow, putting one assertion after another into the anti-nuke coffers.

The problems, issues, enormous danger, and ill timing of deconstruction of a nuclear disaster is always unexpectedly complicated by something new. That’s the nature of nuclear meltdowns, aka: China Syndrome debacles.

As of today, TEPCO is suffering some very serious setbacks that have “impossible to deal with” written all over the issues.

Making all matters nuclear even worse, which applies to the current mess at Fukushima’s highly toxic scenario, Gordon Edwards’ following statement becomes more and more embedded in nuclear lore: “It’s impossible to dispose of nuclear waste.” (Gordon Edwards in The Age of Nuclear Waste From Fukushima to Indian Point)

Disposing of nuclear waste is like “running in place” to complete a marathon. There’s no end in sight.

As a quickie aside from the horrendous details of the current TEPCO debacle, news from Europe brings forth the issue of nuclear power emboldened as somehow suitable to help the EU transition to “cleaner power,” as described by EU sources. France supports the crazed nuke proposal but Germany is holding its nose. According to German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke: “Nuclear energy could lead to environmental disasters and large amounts of nuclear waste. (Source: EU Plans to Label Gas and Nuclear Energy ‘Green’ Prompts Row, BBC News, Jan. 2, 2022) Duh!

Minister Lemke nailed it. And, TEPCO is living proof (barely) of the unthinkable becoming thinkable and disastrous for humanity. Of course, meltdowns are never supposed to happen, but they do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Japan Set To Release 1.2 Million Tons Of Radioactive Fukushima Water Into Ocean, Causing “Immeasurable Damage”

Japan Set To Release 1.2 Million Tons Of Radioactive Fukushima Water Into Ocean, Causing “Immeasurable Damage”

Just in case a global viral pandemic, whose sources are still unclear and apparently now include human feces, wasn’t enough, the global outrage meter is about to go “up to eleven” with Japan now set to flood the world’s oceans with radioactive water.

In a move that will surely prompt a furious response from Greta Thunberg’s ghost writers (unless of course it doesn’t fit a very narrow agenda), a panel of experts advising Japan’s government on a disposal method for the millions of tons of radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant on Friday recommended releasing it into the ocean. And, as Reuters notes, based on past practice it is likely the government will accept the recommendation.

Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, has collected nearly 1.2 million tonnes of contaminated water from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting since the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The water is stored in huge tanks that crowd the site.

Tepco expects the wastewater storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to run out of capacity around 2022 

The panel under the industry ministry came to the conclusion after narrowing the choice to either releasing the contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean or letting it evaporate – and opted for the former, even though it means that Japan’s neihgbors will now have to suffer the consequences of the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Previously the committee had ruled out other possibilities, such as underground storage, that lack track records of success. At the meeting, members stressed the importance of selecting proven methods and said “the government should make clear that releasing the water would have a significant social impact.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles

Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles

As the decade comes to an end, the future of nuclear power in the west remains in doubt. Almost nine years ago, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a 15-meter tsunami that disabled the power supply and cooling at three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The accident caused the nuclear cores of all three damaged reactors to melt down, prompting the government to issue evacuation orders for all people living within a 30 kilometer radius of the damaged reactors, a group that included roughly 100,000 people.

And the evacuation zone:

Now, the Epoch Times reports that Japan’s Economy and Industry Ministry has proposed that TEPCO gradually release, or allow to evaporate, massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water being stored at the power plant. TEPCO, or the Tokyo Electric Power Co, is the owner of the Fukushima plant, and is also responsible for leading the clean-up of the damaged reactors.

But as regulators have stepped in to try and guide TEPCO as it struggles to dispose of all the contaminated water, one ministry has offered a proposal that is almost guaranteed to anger the fishermen who have resisted all of TEPCO’s other plans for dumping the contaminated water.

In its Dec. 23 proposal, the ministry suggested a “controlled release” of the contaminated water into the Pacific. Offering another option, the ministry also suggested allowing the water to evaporate, or a combination of the two methods.

The government is stepping up the pressure on TEPCO to do something as Fukushima’s ‘radioactive water crisis’ worsens. The problem is that TEPCO is running out of room to store the contaminated water. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Contaminated Fukushima Water Storage Tanks “Close To Capacity”, TEPCO Admits

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it’s also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo – and it’s a miracle it hasn’t run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

Fukushima

At some point, TEPCO and the government will need to make a difficult decision. Until then, ground water will continue to seep into the ruined reactor, where it becomes contaminated. Afterward, TEPCO can treat the contaminated water to purify it, but they can’t remove the tritium, which is why the supply of water contaminated with tritium continues to grow.

As one government official pointed out, Japan can’t simply store the radioactive water forever. As of now, the company should be able to store water until 2020.

Efforts have been made to increase storage capacity by constructing bigger tanks when the time comes for replacing the current ones. But a senior official of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry said, “Operation of tanks is close to its capacity.”

TEPCO plans to secure 1.37 million tons of storage capacity by the end of 2020, but it has not yet decided on a plan for after 2021. Akira Ono, chief decommissioning officer of TEPCO, said, “It is impossible to continue to store [treated water] forever.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Locals Furious At Plan To Dump Radioactive Water From Fukushima Into Pacific Ocean

Locals Furious At Plan To Dump Radioactive Water From Fukushima Into Pacific Ocean

In the latest sign that the area surrounding the destroyed Fukushima power plant is far from ready for the return of human inhabitants, locals and fishing groups are criticizing a plan to release water containing radioactive tritium from the ruined Fukushima power plant into the ocean, according to the Telegraph. Officials of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the plant, say tritium poses little risk to human health and is quickly diluted by the ocean. But for some, the plan undoubtedly dredges up uncomfortable memories from 2013, when it was revealed that 300 tonnes of radioactive material had been leaking into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated plant every day. It was also revealed that TEPCO had known about the leaks, but had tried to cover them up.

TEPCO has been tasked with decommissioning the plant, and has been using robots to find and clean the melted nuclear fuel debris that is believed to be creating exorbitant levels of radiation in the area surrounding the plant. Though the company had to pull some of its robots out in February after radiation reached such high levels that not even machinery could function correctly, according to the International Business Times.

In March 2011, a magnitude 9 undersea megaquake triggered a massive tsunami that battered coastal North Eastern Japan, and triggered the level seven meltdowns of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and the evacuation of 160,000 residents and the implementation of a 310 square mile uninhabitable zone. The quake was the worst to ever hit Japan, and it caused the worst nuclear disaster the world had seen since Ukraine’s Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant melted down when the tsunami caused a blackout at the plant that shut off its cooling systems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima Aborts Latest Robot Mission Inside Reactor; Radiation At “Unimaginable” Levels

Fukushima Aborts Latest Robot Mission Inside Reactor; Radiation At “Unimaginable” Levels

Two years after sacrificing one robot, TEPCO officials have aborted their latest robot mission inside the Fukushima reactor after the ‘scorpion’ became unresponsive as it investigated the previously discovered hole where the core is believed to have melted.

A “scorpion” robot sent into a Japanese nuclear reactor to learn about the damage suffered in a tsunami-induced meltdown had its mission aborted after the probe ran into trouble, Tokyo Electric Power company said Thursday. As Phys.org reports, TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, sent the remote-controlled device into the No. 2 reactor where radiation levels have recently hit record highs.

The “scorpion” robot, so-called because it can lift up its camera-mounted tail to achieve better viewing angles, is also designed to crawl over rubble inside the damaged facility.

But it could not reach its target destination beneath a pressure vessel through which nuclear fuel is believed to have melted because the robot had difficulty moving, a company spokeswoman said.

“It’s not immediately clear if that’s because of radiation or obstacles,” she said, adding that TEPCO is checking what data the robot was able to obtain, including images.

The robot, 60 centimetres (24 inches) long, is made by Toshiba and equipped with two cameras and sensors to gauge radiation levels and temperatures.

“Scorpion’s mission is to take images of the situation and collect data inside the containment vessel,” TEPCO spokesman Shinichi Nakakuki said earlier.

“Challenges include enduring high levels of radiation and moving on the rough surface,” he said.

Radiation levels inside the reactor were estimated last week at 650 sieverts per hour at one spot, which can effectively shut down robots in hours.

This is not the first robot to become disoriented under the extreme stress of the Fukushima environment…

The robot sent to inspect a reactor’ containment vessel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant stopped responding three hours into the operation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Radiation Levels Reach Record Highs As Hole In Reactor Discovered

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Radiation Levels Reach Record Highs As Hole In Reactor Discovered

With just 3 years left until the 2020 Olympics, Japan is likely desperate to reassure the world’s athletes that all is well, but an admission from TEPCO – the Fukushima nuclear plant operator – that they discovered a hole at least one square meter in size beneath the reactor’s pressure vessel, and lethal record-high radiation levels have been detected, will not likely reassure anyone.

Radiation levels of up to 530 Sieverts per hour were detected inside an inactive Reactor 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex damaged during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami catastrophe, Japanese media reported on Thursday citing the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). A dose of about 8 Sieverts is considered incurable and fatal.

As RT reports, a hole of no less than one square meter in size has also been discovered beneath the reactor’s pressure vessel, TEPCO said. According to researchers, the apparent opening in the metal grating of one of three reactors that had melted down in 2011, is believed to be have been caused by melted nuclear fuel that fell through the vessel.

The iron scaffolding has a melting point of 1500 degrees, TEPCO said, explaining that there is a possibility the fuel debris has fallen onto it and burnt the hole. Such fuel debris have been discovered on equipment at the bottom of the pressure vessel just above the hole, it added.

The latest findings were released after a recent camera probe inside the reactor, TEPCO said. Using a remote-controlled camera fitted on a long pipe, scientists managed to get images of hard-to-reach places where residual nuclear material remained. The substance there is so toxic that even specially-made robots designed to probe the underwater depths beneath the power plant have previously crumbled and shut down.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Former-PM Admits “Future Existence Of Japan Was At Stake” As Mutations Appear In Fukushima Forest

Former-PM Admits “Future Existence Of Japan Was At Stake” As Mutations Appear In Fukushima Forest

“The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake,” admits Japan’s prime minister at the time of the 2011 quake and tsunami, revealing that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people. Naoto Kan expressed satisfaction at the three TEPCO executives facing charges over negligence, but this shocking admission comes as AFP reports, conservation group Greenpeace warned that “signs of mutations in trees and DNA-damaged worms beginning to appear,” while “vast stocks of radiation” mean that forests cannot be decontaminated.

In an interview with The Telegraph to mark the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, Naoto Kan described the panic and disarray at the highest levels of the Japanese government as it fought to control multiple meltdowns at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

He said he considered evacuating the capital, Tokyo, along with all other areas within 160 miles of the plant, and declaring martial law“The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake,” he said. “Something on that scale, an evacuation of 50 million, it would have been like a losing a huge war.”

Mr Kan admitted he was frightened and said he got “no clear information” out of Tepco, the plant’s operator. He was “very shocked” by the performance of Nobuaki Terasaka, his own government’s key nuclear safety adviser. “We questioned him and he was unable to give clear responses,” he said.

“We asked him – do you know anything about nuclear issues? And he said no, I majored in economics.”

“When we got the report that power had been cut and the coolant had stopped working, that sent a shiver down my spine,” Mr Kan said. “From March 11, when the incident happened, until the 15th, the effects [of radioactive contamination] were expanding geographically.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima’s 5th Year of Full-Blown Crisis

Fukushima’s 5th Year of Full-Blown Crisis

shutterstock_286493465 (1)

March 11th is the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Japan’s NHK broadcaster recently conducted a poll of how citizens feel about nuclear power. According to NHK’s poll results, over 70% are in favor of completely or partially abandoning nuclear power plants. Nothing too surprising about that, but on the other side of the spectrum, the Abe administration is pushing real hard to re-open closed nuclear power plants, in fact some are already splitting atoms like crazy.

Here’s what the March 1st 2016 issue of Scientific American says about the prospects for Fukushima/TEPCO on its 5th anniversary: “Today the disaster site remains in crisis mode… Even more troublesome, the plant has yet to stop producing dangerous nuclear waste,” Madhusree Mukerjee, 5 Years Later, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Site Continues to Spill Waste, Scientific American, March 1, 2016.

According to Naohiro Masuda, Chief Decommissioning Officer for Tokyo Electric Power Company (“TEPCO”), the technology required to remove nuclear fuel from the reactors does not exist yet: “Engineers are studying the problem, but we don’t think that there’s no way to remove the fuel. There’s huge risk involved. If you make one small mistake, it might cause a huge problem for the local people, or even worldwide. We have to be aware of that possibility,” Steve Featherstone, Fukushima: Five Years Later, Popular Science, March/April 2016.

“There’s huge risk involved. If you make one small mistake, it might cause a huge problem for the local people or even worldwide.” Those are the words of the Chief Decommissioning Officer for TEPCO. Here’s the problem: TEPCO doesn’t even qualify for “small mistakes,” all of their mistakes, and there have been many, mucho mistakes, have been huge, big, gigantic, elephantine mistakes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima Amplifies Murphy’s Law

Fukushima Amplifies Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law has found a permanent home in Fukushima: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

For instance, only recently, radioactive cesium in tunnels at Fukushima suddenly spiked by more than 4,000 times similar measurements from one year ago. This spooky/huge spike in radiation levels hit 482,000 Becquerels per liter. TEPCO intends to investigate the reason behind the enormous anomalous increase, Radiation Spikes in Fukushima Underground Ducts, NHK World, Dec. 9, 2015. Over the course of a year, 4,000 times anything probably is not good.

Not only that but the barrier constructed at the Fukushima nuclear power plant to hopefully prevent contaminated water from leaking into the ocean is tilting and has developed a crack about 0.3 miles in length along its base. The wall is 0.5 miles long and 98 feet below ground.

An ocean barrier, indeed: “Higher levels of radiation from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident are showing up in the ocean off the west coast of North America, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported,” Higher Levels of Fukushima Radiation Detected Off West Coast, Statesman Journal, Dec. 3, 2015. Fortunately, so far, the detected levels still remain below U.S. government-established safety limits.

In the meantime, TEPCO battles one of the most perplexing disasters of all-time with an average number of daily workers more than 7,000. The difficulty of procuring workers at the site is beyond imagination. Homeless people are hired off the streets to do the dangerous decontamination work.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics 

The situation better get better really soon because the Olympics are scheduled for 2020, which brings to mind perilous lost corium, the sizzling hot melted core in Plant #2, that hopefully, keeping one’s fingers crossed, has not burrowed into the ground, spreading deadly isotopes erratically, ubiquitously throughout. Still, nobody knows where this Missing Corium-Waldo of the Nuclear World is located.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Declassified U.S. Government Report Prepared a Week After Fukushima Accident: “100% of The Total Spent Fuel Was Released to the Atmosphere from Unit 4”

Declassified U.S. Government Report Prepared a Week After Fukushima Accident: “100% of The Total Spent Fuel Was Released to the Atmosphere from Unit 4”

The same year, we reported in 2011 that the U.S. knew within days of the Fukushima accident that Fukushima had melted down … but failed to tell the public.

We noted in 2012:

The fuel pools and rods at Fukushima appear to have “boiled”, caught fire and/or exploded soon after the earthquake knocked out power systems. See thisthisthisthisand this.

Now, a declassified report written by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 18, 2011 – one week after the tidal wave hit Fukushima – states:

The source term provided to NARAC was: (1) 25% of the total fuel in unit 2 released to the atmosphere, (2) 50% of the total spent fuel from unit 3 was released to the atmosphere, and (3) 100% of the total spent fuel was released to the atmosphere from unit 4.

FukushimaNARAC is the the U.S. National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center, located at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. NARAC “provides tools and services that map the probable spread of hazardous material accidentally or intentionally released into the atmosphere“.

The fuel pools at Units 3 and 4 contained enormous amounts of radiation.

For example, there was “more cesium in that [Unit 4] fuel pool than in all 800 nuclear bombs exploded above ground.”

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Radiation Leaks Have Spiked Sharply

TEPCO Admits Fukushima Radiation Leaks Have Spiked Sharply

Just weeks after the completion (and failure) of one supposed ‘containment’ wall (and as the construction of the “ice wall” begins), TEPCO, the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, has admitted that the levels of radioactivity in underground tunnels has risen sharply (4000x last year’s levels)As NHKWorld reports, TEPCO officials have stated that they plan to investigate what caused the spike in radiation… yes, that would seem like a good idea.

With the newly constructed 780-meter ‘containment’ wall “already leaning,” news that the radiation leaks are growing is a grave concern. As NHKWorld details,

Tokyo Electric Power Company has detected 482,000 becquerels per liter of radioactive cesium in water samples taken from the tunnels on December 3rd. That’s 4000 times higher than data taken in December last year.

The samples also contained 500,000 becquerels of a beta-ray-emitting substance, up 4,100 times from the same period.

Around 400 to 500 tons of radioactive water, including seawater washed ashore in the March 2011 tsunami, is still pooled in the tunnels.

The tunnels lie next to a structure used to temporarily store highly radioactive water, which cooled melted nuclear fuel inside the damaged reactors.

TEPCO officials say it is unlikely the wastewater stored in the building has seeped into the tunnels.

They say the water level in the tunnels is higher than that in the building and measures are in place to stop the toxic water from leaking out.

They plan to investigate what caused the spike in radiation.

Do not panic though, since…

They say there has been no leakage out of the tunnels as radiation levels in underground water nearby have not risen.

Because why would they lie (again)

Inspired By Game Of Thrones, TEPCO Resumes Building “Ice Wall” Around Fukushima

Inspired By Game Of Thrones, TEPCO Resumes Building “Ice Wall” Around Fukushima

14 Months after abandoning the “Game of Thrones”-esque frozen-water-wall containment plan for FukushimaBloomberg reports that TEPCO expects to begin freezing a soil barrier by the end of the year to stop a torrent of water entering the wrecked Fukushima nuclear facility, moving a step closer to fulfilling a promise the Japanese government made to the international community more than two years ago. Officials noted, rather uninspiringly, the frozen wall, along with other measures, “should be able to resolve the contaminated water issues before the Olympic games.”

When they unveiled this “Pacific-Rim-like’ 1.4km long ice-wall a year ago, we snarkily wished them luck, questioning their sanity. Of course, we got a hint when TEPCO admitted that we have yet to form an ice plug because we can’t get the temperature low enough to freeze the water.” 

At the time, there was no Plan B – though we noted that ‘wasting’ JPY 32 billion on the project so far was likely helping GDP.

But now Plan B appears to be the same as failed Plan A… (as Bloomberg reports)

“In the last half-year we have made significant progress in water treatment,” Akira Ono, chief of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, said Friday during a tour of the facility north of Tokyo. The frozen wall, along with other measures, “should be able to resolve the contaminated water issues before the Olympic games.”

Solving the water management problems would be a major milestone, but Tokyo Electric is still faced with a number of challenges at the site. The company must still remove highly radioactive debris from inside three wrecked reactors, a task for which no applicable technology exists. The entire facility must eventually be dismantled.

Currently, about 300 metric tons of water flow into the reactor building daily from the nearby hills. Tepco, as the nation’s biggest utility is called, has struggled to decommission the reactors while also grappling with the buildup of contaminated water.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima police sends nuclear contamination case against TEPCO execs to prosecutors

Fukushima police sends nuclear contamination case against TEPCO execs to prosecutors

Water tanks storing radiation contaminated water are seen at Tokyo Electric Power Co's (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture. © Shizuo Kambayashi
Fukushima police have finally reacted to a criminal complaint filed against TEPCO and 32 of its top officials two years ago over the contamination caused by the 2011 nuclear disaster. They have referred the case to prosecutors.
The Fukushima District Prosecutors’ Office will now determine whether to pursue criminal charges against the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and its top management over the leaks of highly radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.

The criminal complaint alleges that the company and its executives failed to manage storage tanks of contaminated water or build underground walls to block the flow of radioactive material into the sea at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Notable people on the list include TEPCO’s President Naomi Hirose, former Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and former President Masataka Shimizu.

Police have reviewed claims filed by local residents after 300 tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from TEPCO tanks.

Investigators say that since the complaint was launched in 2013, they have conducted interviews with TEPCO officials and analyzed other relevant information on suspicion of environmental pollution offense law violations. The police will document their observations and present the case to the Prosecutors’ Office.

TEPCO has not made any public comments on the matter, but has said that company officials were in contact with investigators, according to NHK.

The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is considered to be the world’s worst environmental catastrophe since Chernobyl. As of March, about 600,000 tons of contaminated water are still contained within TEPCO tanks. According to preliminary estimates, site cleanup may take up to 40 years.

Olduvai IV: Courage
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