Like a landscape of the undead, the woods outside Chernobyl are having trouble decomposing. The catastrophic meltdown and ensuing radiation blast of April 1986 has had long-term effects on the very soil and ground cover of the forested region, essentially leaving the dead trees and leaf litter unable to decompose. The result is a forest full of "petrified-looking pine trees" that no longer seem capable of rotting.
What does radioactive salad taste like? How about rice sprinkled with nuclear fallout? Well, if you’re truly curious, consider taking your next vacation in Fukushima, where some intrepid farmers have begun the daunting task of farming the region’s tainted soil.
The newest update in the highly disconcerting
Hundreds of pounds of freshly caught fish are express-mailed to a building in the small town of Onjuku, Japan, everyday. There, a team quickly slices and dices the fish into fillets. But this is no kitchen, and the fresh fish are definitely not for consumption.
As the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has passed, Japan is faced with another conundrum: Where to store thousands of tons of radioactive soil that have been harvested from around the region. This week, officials unveiled a $970 million plan to build a massive storage facility to house the stuff.
Those Mexican thieves that stole a truckload of cobalt-60
In case you weren’t already concerned enough about the wacky (re: highly dangerous) antics going over at the Fukushima power plant, maybe this will do the trick. Six workers attempting to clean up the increasingly unruly mess have accidentally doused themselves with highly radioactive water.
It’s another week and another chance for TEPCO to embarrass itself at the beleaguered Fukushima power plant. Sometime on Monday morning, the cooling pump for the reactors shut down suddenly. It must’ve been some mechanical failure or some freak accident, right? Nah. Some worker just pushed the off button by mistake, according to the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
The operator of Japan’s infamously crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant recently attempted to move some radioactive water from one tank to another. In the process, it spilled four tons of deadly sludge.
The clean up crew at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant just can’t catch a break. Just a day after Japan’s nuclear watchdog raised the severity of a recent water leakage incident from a one to a three on the international scale, experts are stepping forward to say that the problem is actually much worse.