Apparently there are rats in the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima-ken, and they are causing problems.
Now the first thing I wondered about these rats at a damaged and somewhat leaky nuclear power plant was if they had mutated in some way, and were now 20 feet tall with radioactive breath, or did they just have three eyes?
No such luck. These rats appear to be of a normal size - which still gives me the heebee-jeebies.
This past March 2013, there was a blackout at the facility that knocked out power to a cooling system. Now this blackout wasn't just for a few hours, rather it was for a few days.
Now, I don't know what disturbs me more - the fact that a rat was discovered to have been the cause, or the fact that a vital cooling system to the nuclear reactors was down for days rather than hours.
Apparently a rat chewed on cables IN a switchboard. What the hell it was doing IN a switchboard is beyond me.
But what the fug are rats doing in a nuclear power plant? Is there food for them to eat? Do rats like glowing green cheese? Why aren't these rats dying? Maybe there isn't such a big epidemic of escaped radiation at the place after all! Could Tokyo's politicians be correct? Rats!
Ah, but wait - they found that the switchboard operator rat was dead. So... maybe it got a shock from chewing on the wires. Or maybe there was a leak in its little radiation suit.
And still there's more. The headline mentioned a 'plural'.
In April, a second dead rat was found in the plant's electrical work - which caused, you guessed it - another power outage - but at least this time it wasn't to anything so important as a cooling system!
So - what's worse, folks? The rats in the system or the rats running the system? And by that I mean TEPCO (Tokyo Electric POwer Company), the privately-owned company that owns the nuclear power facility in Fukushima.
Of course, while all of this rat crap is going on, TEPCO has been dealing with radioactive water leaking out of storage pools. TEPCO's workers have to pump the water out of the reactor to avoid flooding cooling systems that help control the facility's melty reactor cores. They need to be kept cool.
Loosing power to a cooling system would be bad. So what's with the rats?
It seems as though TEPCO and the Fukushima area are involved in a rat race of a different kind.
Cheers,
Andrew Joseph
0 comments:
Post a Comment