[Prospero]

Just lovely. I hope this doesn’t distract from the methodical but imperative removal of those fuel rods, This ant-crawl pace is unnerving.

[stanne]

The Long Island housewives called it back in the 70s

When they prevented LILCO from building Shoreham

The schtuff is just not safe

[gunsequalfreedom]

What a disaster, and I don’t mean the original one.

- Water pumped into a tank that was already full and 100 tones of highly radiocative water spills out.

- They don’t think any of the water made it to the Pacific Ocean but are not sure.

- One of the two thermometers they have to monitor the temperatures of the fuel was accidentally shorted out by workers.

- And they have to keep pouring water on the fuel rods to keep them cool, then find a place for the water.

- Booming business for storage tanks of highly radioactive water in Japan right now. New models said to have a sight glass so workers can tell if it is full or not.

[Prospero]

1000 metric tons, at 2205 lbs, at 8.35 lbs per gallon of water (ideally), means 2,205,000 lbs of water, or 264,072 gallons, which, for context sake, I believe is about 81 percent of an acre foot (325,853 gal.), and thus is the equivalent of a cube roughly 28.52 feet in length on each edge, or a sphere of water 35.382 feet (10.783 meters) in diameter.

That's less than the size of an Olympic-class swimming pool, and must be considered in the reported amount of water reported to have leaked from the site since March 11, 2011.

This is not to make this reported leak seem unimportant, only to note that reported leaks measured in metric tons is misleading, and not in a way favorable to "TEPCO."

Water weighs a lot.

And, Of course, water is never "radioactive." It can hold radioactive matter in suspension, but water does not ionize.

A month or so ago calculations estimated that the total amount of water holding radioactive matter in suspension water leaked from Fukishima from March 11, 2011 through January 4, 2014) was estimated at 2/3ths the capacity of a Boeing 747 "large cargo freighter" aircraft.

Of course, press reports upon which such estimations were calculated sis not specify which "ton" they were referencing; Metric (2205 lbs) or English (2,000 lbs.), etc.

Again, I'm not downplaying the ass-hattery, cover-ups, real deaths of personnel, long-term threats to everyone in the Home Islands or any other real danger. But these reports are meaningless without referencing measurements of water using normal liquid terminology, nor without reports that also estimate the degree of radioactive contamination in the water.

In short, just saying "tons" of "radioactive (or contaminated) water" is essentially meaningless and useless.

[Republican1795.]

The horrors never end with that disaster.