The silence surrounding the Fukushima disaster recently has been deafening, it is one year in fact since any reliable information has been released from Tokyo Electric Power Co, the owners of the stricken plant.

Last year, Tokyo Electric Power Co said a system meant to purify contaminated water had failed to remove dangerous radioactive contaminants.

A report from Reuters today, claims most of that water - stored in 1,000 tanks around the plant - will need to be reprocessed before it is released into the ocean, the most likely scenario for disposal.
Reprocessing could take nearly two years and divert personnel and energy from dismantling the tsunami-wrecked reactors, a project that will take up to 40 years, (which is only an estimate as Tepco still haven't invented the technology to fix the problem, they could still be trying to fix the problem in 2060.)

It is unclear how much that would delay decommissioning. But any delay could be pricey; the government estimated in 2016 that the total cost of plant dismantling, decontamination of affected areas, and compensation, would amount to 21.5 trillion yen ($192.5 billion), roughly 20 per cent of the country’s annual budget.

Tepco is already running out of space to store treated water. And should another big quake strike, (which is a question of when and NOT if), experts say tanks could crack, unleashing tainted liquid and washing highly radioactive debris into the ocean.

Exactly one year ago today, The Big Wobble released an article, claiming during the summer of 2017, 50,000 trillion Becquerel’s of radiation leaked into the Pacific, however, Tepco continue to claim tritium poses little risk to human health and is quickly diluted by the ocean.

300 tons of radioactive water is leaking daily into the Pacific and there is no known technology to fix it.

In one of the world's worst nuclear disasters, the Nos. 1 to 3 units experienced fuel meltdowns while the No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 units were also severely damaged by hydrogen explosions following a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

To prevent leakage of tainted water,  Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) had installed a costly “ice wall” to keep groundwater from seeping into the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, however, data from the operator shows, it had failed.


The aim was to freeze the soil into a solid mass that blocks groundwater flowing from the hills west of the plant to the coast.

However, the continuing seepage has created vast amounts of toxic water that Tepco must pump out, decontaminate and store in tanks at Fukushima that now number 1,000, holding 1 million tonnes, which will at some time be dumped into the Pacific.

Last July TEPCO released around 770,000 tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
A study by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have revealed almost 50% of fish consumed on the islands of Hawai’i were contaminated with caesium 134 the radioactive finger-print of Fukushima.

The report also showed that migrating organisms can transport the Fukushima-signature (caesium 134) over significant distances as they showed detectable 134Cs (6.3±1.5 Bq/kg) in Pacific bluefin tuna caught off the California coast only a year after the incident.
Another study found caesium 134 in longfin tuna (Albacore) along the western coast of the US just one year after the Fukushima disaster.
It's another blow for the stricken nuclear plant with TEPCO claiming the clean-up of the site will take at least 40 years.


Last year The Big Wobble received an email from Bill Laughing Bear, our friend in Alaska who is monitoring the radiation in fish along the Alaskan coast: