© The Associated PressJapanese police officers carry a body during a search and recovery operation for missing victims
Tokyo - Levels of radioactivity have risen sharply in seawater near a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant in northern Japan, signaling the possibility of new leaks at the facility, the government said Saturday.
The announcement came after a magnitude-5.9 earthquake jolted Japan on Saturday morning, hours after the country's nuclear safety agency ordered plant operators to beef up their quake preparedness systems to prevent a recurrence of the nuclear crisis.
There were no reports of damage from the earthquake, and there was no risk of a tsunami similar to the one that struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant March 11 after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, causing Japan's worst-ever nuclear plant disaster.
Since the tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems, workers have been spraying massive amounts of water on the overheated reactors. Some of that water, contaminated with radiation, leaked into the Pacific. Plant officials said they plugged that leak on April 5 and radiation levels in the sea dropped.
But the government said Saturday that radioactivity in the seawater has risen again in recent days. The level of radioactive iodine-131 spiked to 6,500 times the legal limit, according to samples taken Friday, up from 1,100 times the limit in samples taken the day before. Levels of cesium-134 and cesium-137 rose nearly fourfold. The increased levels are still far below those recorded earlier this month before the initial leak was plugged.
Comment: Two things stand out about this case:
1) It's reasonable to assume that they have above-ground radiation monitors at radioactive waste dumps. Is it possible the readings are picking up on the fallout from Fukushima and that the idea that these readings were taken underground is just disinfo?
2) Or that radiation really IS leaking from this waste dump, which - considering the timing of Japans disaster - speaks to a phenomenon which might not be easily explainable. An example that comes to mind is of the many construction cranes collapsing around the US and in other countries prior to, and at the beginning of the housing crash.
See:
Florida: Crane Collapse Blamed For Fuel Spill
Illinois: Man dies in crane collapse
Deadly crane collapse probed in Hunan, China
Crane collapse kills seven at Vietnam port