Hey, remember Fukushima? Wasn't that kind of a big deal or something? Hey, Sorkin even made an episode about it.
Highly radioactive water from Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is pouring out at a rate of 300 tonnes a day, officials said on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the government to step in and help in the clean-up. The revelation amounted to an acknowledgement that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) has yet to come to grips with the scale of the catastrophe, 2 1/2 years after the plant was hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami. Tepco only recently admitted water had leaked at all. Calling water containment at the Fukushima Daiichi station an "urgent issue," Abe ordered the government for the first time to get involved to help struggling Tepco handle the crisis. The leak from the plant 220 km (130 miles) northeast of Tokyo is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in a week. The water is spilling into the Pacific Ocean, but it was not immediately clear how much of a threat it poses.
Oh, great, just so long as the threat's not immediately clear, unless you're a fish.
As early as January this year, Tepco found fish contaminated with high levels of radiation inside a port at the plant. Local fishermen and independent researchers had already suspected a leak of radioactive water, but Tepco denied the claims.
That's kind of an ass-backwards way for Reuters to point out that Tepco was lying its glowing radioactive ass off there, but I'll take it.
The ability of stories to flare up and disappear is of endless fascination to me. For example, not only do we have Fukushima here, poisoning the northern Pacific while nobody's really watching, but BP's lawyered up sufficiently in New Orleansto change the narrative from Sorry-We-Lit-The-Gulf-On-Fire to All-You-Coonasses-Be-Crooks. Meanwhile, FEMA has wised up and declared West, Texas to be a disaster area, a belated decision that has the added benefit of making Rick Perry's every public utterance look like eight pounds of hypocrisy in a 10-pound bag, and his vaunted TEXAS IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS malarkey look like a come-hither ad for every unregulated exploding fertilizer plant in the country.
Perry, who had written a letter to Obama protesting the earlier denial of a presidential disaster declaration, said in a statement on Friday that the federal aid will help the proud town of about 2,800 people piece itself back together. "The approval of the state's appeal for a major disaster declaration is great and welcome news for the people of West," Perry said in the statement.
You're welcome, moocher.
All of these were very big deals at the time, and they've virtually vanished from our media consciousness. Radiation is forever. The news is yesterday.
