by Robert Moorehead

I’m re-blogging Jake Adelstein‘s brilliant post from the Japan Subculture Research Center. Adelstein figures out TEPCO’s plan: to do a sufficiently poor job of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster that the Japanese government has to take over. The more TEPCO spends cleaning up the mess, the less profit it makes. So it spends as little as possible, until the situation becomes so untenable that it gets relieved of the responsibility.

As Homer Simpson said, “If adults don’t like their jobs, they don’t go on strike. They just go in every day and do it really half-assed.”

The mis-measurement of radiation at the plant is especially mind-blowing: TEPCO used devices that maxed out at 100 millisieverts, thereby avoiding having any record of the true radiation levels, which were later measured at 1800 millisieverts, which enough to kill a person after 4 hours of exposure.

This clever use of technology reminds me of the speedometers on American cars in the 1970s and 1980s, which topped out at 85 mph. So, if you floored the gas pedal and kept it floored as you flew down the highway, you would have no visual cue that you were going any faster than 85. Unless you looked out the window, of course.

Or maybe if you don’t want to know how much weight you’re putting on, but you’re expected to weigh yourself every day, get a scale that tops out at your ideal weight.

TEPCO, Nuclear Disaster & Spaghetti-Os: Bad Deeds Get Rewarded.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO, is getting a lot of criticism for its inept clean-up attempts of the Fukushima nuclear power plant site, which had triple-meltdowns in March of 2011—after the company had failed to take precautions which might have prevented the meltdown in the first place. There is also a 4^th reactor where spent fuel rods are waiting to be extracted, and if mishandled they have the potential to release huge amounts of radiation into the air. TEPCO, like the Central Intelligence Agency, has a wonderful legacy of failure, and now it literally has “a legacy of ashes”.

To read more, check out Jake Adelstein’s full post.