Along similar lines, I've wondered about seafood from the Gulf after Deepwater Horizon. That's gotta be one of the biggest science experiments around, pouring millions of gallons of Corexit into the ecosystem. Where did all that crude go? The question you gotta ask is, "Does anyone profit from warning us? Does anyone profit from NOT warning us?"

Well, another option is the "Charlie Brown and Lucy playing football" trick--right when you're about to hit the alarm button to warn people about levels being too high, just raise the "acceptable" level of radiation even higher and all that radioactive worry just sails right on by.

But back to Fukushima, the situation seems to be getting worse again, with all the recent news about contaminated groundwater flowing into the sea, or even worse, undetected leaks of highly contaminated reactor cooling water from storage tanks on site. And by "leaks," I'm talking tons of water per day. TEPCO has no idea how to stop either problem. There's talk of raising the nuclear disaster threat level from a 1 back to 3 over these issues.

They're so lucky that they haven't had another big quake in the immediate area for a long time. I don't think most of these jury rigged external storage tanks and cooling systems are that robust, from what I've read.

TEPCO is getting closer (that's a relative term) to starting to actually remove fuel assemblies from the spent fuel pool, from Reactor 4 first, IIRC. No easy task. The original overhead cranes and equipment were destroyed. The area is highly radioactive. The fuel assemblies were buried in debris from the cranes and building, the rods were overheated, and sat in salt water for all this time. No telling what condition they are in or whether they can even be removed safely without bursting into flames once in the open air and releasing radiation, or worst case, triggering a nuclear reaction right in the fuel pool if they jostle enough fuel assemblies close together. Sounds like the script from a movie but unfortunately, it's real life and going on right now.