Lots of Leaking Lately

Have you been down to the basement lately? Oy, look at this mess and very little of it makes much sense and a whole lot of it scares me shit-less.

Here at home we have a very serious leak going on at the Hanford Site, the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States. Hanford is located in the state of Washington along the Columbia River and is as they say "a mostly deccommissioned nuclear production facility" however the double-shell tanks which store the nuclear waste has a leak.

If you think Edward Snowden or Spygate is a monumental leak just hold on to your PRD (Personal Radiation Detector) and keep an eye on the numbers. It has taken ten months to get a confirmation of this leak and to make matters worse the private company which manages the "tank farms" ignored the confirmation.

“This is evidence that the company was bending over backward to not find the bad news,” Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group based in Seattle told King5 news. “This is the mindset at the Hanford site — of denial.”

OK, so that is what is going on in America, now let's switch our focus across the sea to Japan and see what's going on lately. More bad news I'm afraid. Fukushima Daiichi is reported to have high levels of two radioactive substances in the well holding the groundwater at the nuclear plant.

It seems that there is hardly ever any good news coming out of Japan on this subject. I find it unfathomable with the many issues of cracks, leaks and an unsettled nuclear waste long-term storage plan that there would be actual discussions of planning construction of any new nuclear plants.

I returned recently from a wonderful trip that took me around this old world of ours. I saw some incredible and beautiful places. But I also saw extremes, from women at the side of a river beating their clothes on the stones to clean them, to a city like Dubai built of super extreme high-rise towers that went on for blocks and blocks.

Every year we add almost 78 million people to our world and even at the most basic levels energy consumption increases, it will be impossible to reverse this trend without reversing population growth. So we need to think very carefully about our choices for energy and how we choose to consume it. A word to the wise, right?