This improvised plan for dealing with huge volumes of radioactive sea-water is a far cry from whatever disaster response plans TOPCO filed with the appropriate agency of the Japanese Government. I expected as much as soon as they began desperately pouring salt-water onto the damaged reactor buildings.

Ideally, they would process the contaminated sea-water by boiling it down, and then storing the more concentrated radioactive sludge in armored dry casks. But you need a processing plant for that, with containment protection so that the water vapor doesn't carry radioactive volatiles out into the environment. They'll have to settle for much more temporary and imperfect measures until they can design and construct such a facility on site.

There was a unsettling report on CNN at noon that steam was seen escaping again from the Fukushima-2 nuclear complex 6 miles to the north. Sorry, we just won't stand for any more bad news.

Charley Noble