The Myth Of Progress

24 May 2016: The Fukushima clean-up team remains in the dark about the exact locations of 600 tons of melted radioactive fuel from three devastated nuclear reactors, the chief of decommissioning told the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program in an exclusive interview. Following the tsunami-caused 2011 meltdown at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant uranium fuel of three power generating reactors gained critical temperature and burnt through the respective reactor pressure vessels, concentrating somewhere on the lower levels of the station currently filled with water.

The melted nuclear fuel from Reactor 1 poured out completely, estimated 30 to 50 percent of fuel from Reactor 2 and 3 remained in the active zone, Masuda said. The official estimates that approximately “200 tons of [nuclear fuel] debris lies within each unit," which makes in total about 600 tons of melted fuel mixed up with metal construction elements, concrete and whatever else was down there. Five years after the Fukushima tragedy, the exact location of the highly radioactive “runaway” fuel remains mystery for TEPCO. The absolutely uncontrollable fission of the melted nuclear fuel assemblies continue somewhere under the remains of the station.

“It's important to find it as soon as possible,” acknowledged Masuda, admitting that Japan does not yet possess the technology to extract the melted uranium fuel.

“Once we can find out the condition of the melted fuel and identify its location, I believe we can develop the necessary tools to retrieve it,” Masuda said. TEPCO’s inability to locate the melted fuel could be explained by huge levels of radiation near the melted reactor shells. It is so high that even custom-built robots sent there to get information about the current state of affairs there get disabled by the tremendous radioactivity flux. Human presence in the area is understandably out of the question.

The company’s decommission plan for Fukushima nuclear power plant implies a 30-40 year period before the consequences of the meltdown are fully eliminated. Yet experts doubt the present state of technology is sufficient to deal with the unprecedented technical task.

Fukushima is the most under-reported story in human history.  Why?  It exposes the unbridgeable chasm between man and God.

When God's creation sinned, He had a plan for its redemption. . .

God created something: man.  It broke. . .but God knew how to fix it.

Playing god with his science and technology, man's creation sinned. . .and he has no fucking idea what to do:

Yet experts doubt the present state of technology is sufficient to deal with the unprecedented technical task. . . 

Man created a nuclear reactor, it broke. . .and man sits clueless, absorbing its cesium one Becquerel at a time.  The consequences are virtually eternal.  The radiation will poison its creator until the End. . .

Playing god with his science and technology, man creates biotechnological, nanotechnological and cognitive-technological creations that he has no eschatological understanding of.  He sets these creations loose without foreknowledge.  Man, a weakling god, hopes for the best. . .

This is how man has acted since the beginning:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Aiming to be as God, Adam and Eve created new versions of themselves with their chemical experimentation. . .they forever altered mankind's cognition by eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They doubted God's death warning, and man has continued to doubt it every generation since.

In this age of unending hype over the promises of artificial intelligence, robotics and bio- and nanotechnological miracles, the wonders of man's science and technology, which tease immortality, Fukushima is a story told only in a whisper, because it ends in man's defeat, and not his enthronement.