Nuclear time bombs

The problems at Fukushima keep getting worse:

Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.

... In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.

Don't think it couldn't happen here. Dr. Jaczko, now retired regulator says we should shut down every reactor in the US.

All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday. Shutting them all down at once is not practical, he said, but he supports phasing them out rather than trying to extend their lives.

Meanwhile the current regulatory commission is talking about extending their operating licenses for another 20-40 years beyond what was supposed to be the life of the plants.

Once you poison the earth with radioactive waste, it can't be unpoisoned. We've already saddled further generations well beyond our lifetimes with enough spent fuel rods to destroy every living thing. We should be shutting them down as fast as we can.