Let’s have a look at what we knew 2 years ago, but is now mass media confirmed:
1. 40 year clean up at the least – check
2. robots can’t even get near it – check
3. Tepco confirmed to have released radioactive water directly into the ocean – check
4. radiation into the ground water – check
5. fish not eatable due to radiation – check
6. Dosimeter and safety gear lacking for res-ponders – check
Previous disasters have cost huge sums and taken years to clean up
“We will have to be creative,” a government spokesman says
“I hope now that the whole town will move to another place,” one evacuee says
Tokyo (CNN) — The worst may have passed in the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl, but cleaning up when it’s finally over is likely to take decades and cost Japan an untold fortune.
A six- to nine-month horizon for winding down the crisis, laid out by plant owner Tokyo Electric Power this week, is just the beginning. Near the end of that timeline, Japan’s government says it will decide when — or whether — the nearly 80,000 people who were told to flee their homes in the early days of the disaster can return….
…For those displaced, Japanese authorities have promised to decontaminate “as much of an area as possible,” as Goshi Hosono, an adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, told reporters earlier this week. But they have no decontamination plans prepared, and no real model for trying to clean up whole municipalities….
Shikata said the situation at Fukushima Daiichi was “somewhat different” than at Chernobyl, were the amount of radioactivity released was 10 times higher that is believed to have escaped from Fukushima Daiichi.[*cough]…
“A substantial amount of core had melted and burned its way into the reactor vessel, which we previously didn’t know about,” said DeVine, now retired. About 25 percent of the fuel assembly had melted, leaving behind a depression in the center of the core “like a giant ice-cream scoop.”
Cleaning up and shutting down the damaged Unit 2 took 10 years, Devine said — and unlike Fukushima Daiichi, little radiation was released at Three Mile Island. In Japan, workers are dealing with “essentially four Three Mile Islands,” plus levels of radioactivity “which will be an impediment for all the work on-site.”…
The CNN report on the TV was more scathing…..