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The Status of the Fukushima Clean-Up
doom writes "Ian Sample at the Guardian UK does a really thorough write-up of what's going on with the Fukushima Clean-up. From the article: 'Though delicate and painstaking, retrieving the fuel rod assemblies from the pools is not the toughest job the workers face. More challenging by far will be digging out the molten cores in the reactors themselves. Some of the fuel burned through its primary containment and is now mixed with cladding, steel and concrete. The mixture will have to be broken up, sealed in steel containers and moved to a nuclear waste storage site. That work will not start until some time after 2020.'"
And I have two things to say.
1. It's an incredibly difficult job where new challenges have to be met with new thinking every day.
2. The people who are doing the difficult work deserve a huge gratitude of thanks for their effort. Working in full radiation suits and masks in 35C temperatures in summer took extraordinary strength of purpose and determination.
All of you that are going to make jokes about glowing whatever and Godzilla can go fuck yourselves. And I mean it. Go Fuck Yourself.
This will get little coverage in news outlets around the world, but its worth spreading and this article is as good as any to mention it. The Japanese Lower House, in the Diet, passed a bill which set up a National Secrets law. Essentially it is an anti-whistleblower law. It has many of the usual sections present in other countries save for one. The bill sets forth that all information dealing with "nuclear energy" will be considered a national secret and releasing any information without the oversight of the government will basically be illegal.
This means that if something bad is happening at the Fukushima plant, then we have to rely on someone doing the moral thing and telling the world and then going to jail.
The bill still has to go through the Upper House but it's likely to pass without much opposition even though the media and the public have been strongly opposed to it. It seems very likely that the bill is there to cover up any bad information that might tarnish Japan or TEPCO's image.
Japan state secrets bill on track to become law despite protests
They are filtering the waste water and using ion exchange systems, zeolite cartridges and the like to remove the radioactive materials in solution. That's how they're "treating" contaminated water (irradiation isn't the problem).
The water itself isn't radioactive, it's just hydrogen and oxygen. There may be some tritiated water in there but very very little, same with radioactive isotopes of oxygen. The contamination they are dealing with is radioactive particles in some cases, in others chemical substances in solution like cesium and strontium. Until the levels for all the contaminants are below international standards then the water can't be released into the sea.