Radioactivity levels skyrocketed in the sea surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan late last week, raising fears that a new leak in the facility needs to be sealed.
As experts now say the area around Fukushima will be uninhabitable for a generation, protests against nuclear development mobilized in Tokyo, Taiwan, India, California and the Northeast US.
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei is being held incommunicado by Chinese authorities after posting a coded protest image to his website. The website remains online, but practically devoid of content—suggesting it has been heavily censored.
Japan raised the severity level of its nuclear crisis to seven—putting it on par with the Chernobyl disaster—as stricken reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex continue to release large amounts of radioactive substances.
A magnitude 7.4 aftershock hit northeastern Japan—raising fears of a deepening of the crisis at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, which is now vulnerable to any further destabilization.
As engineers at Fukushima resort to building silt mounds around the leaking reactor to filter radioactive particles, public advocates insist there is no safe dose of radiation—despite official assurances.
Japan’s Movement for Democratic Socialism asserts: “The Fukushima disaster is not a natural disaster, but one that is politically generated by global capitalism’s promotion of nuclear energy and militarization.”
South Korean environmental activists staged an anti-nuclear rally in Seoul, marking the 32nd anniversary of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania—and two weeks of the ongoing Fukushima disaster.
Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said concrete injections have failed to stop a leak of highly radioactive water from reactor Number 2 directly into the ocean.
A US engineer who helped install reactors at Fukushima, speaking anonymously, said he believes the radioactive core in reactor Number 2 may have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor.
Plutonium has been found in soil at various points in and around Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear complex, officials admitted. The plutonium presumably comes from partially-melted MOX fuel from reactor Number 3.
Sharply elevated radiation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex forced an emergency evacuation of the Number 2 unit, as highly radioactive seawater has been detected a mile off coast from the plant.
