Rain clouds hang thick and heavy in early light this Tuesday morning on California’s north coast, a respite in a nice-sized storm pushing through southward.
And apparently nearing its end for us, but did bring some good rain and snow up in the mountains.

Yes indeed, we need all the rain we can get, but we don’t want it radiated.

(Illustration found here).

Poking westward, and kind of naked, the entire Pacific coastline of North American lies open to literal fallout drifting, springing, floating from Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture — there’s always usually something newsworthy about every day on the ongoing/never-ending clean-up after the March 2011 disaster, all of it bad, most of it horrible, and all the time awaiting arrival of the nuclear age.
And apparently, here and now — yesterday afternoon from the Guardian:

Trace amounts of Cesium-134 and Cesium-137 were detected in samples collected on 19 February off the coast of Ucluelet, a small town on Vancouver Island in Canada’s British Columbia, said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Ken Buesseler.
“Radioactivity can be dangerous, and we should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” Buesseler said in a statement.
The levels the group detected are extremely low. For example, swimming in the Vancouver Island water every day for a year would provide a dose of radiation less than a thousand times smaller than a single dental X-ray, Woods Hole said.
…
Buesseler said he expects similar low cesium levels to gradually reach other North American shores, possibly extending along the US West Coast from Washington state to California.
“Predicting the spread of radiation becomes more complex the closer it gets to the coast,” Buesseler said.

‘Closer it gets,’ yes, nice to know.

The reason being is the shit is fucking nuclear! Messing with atomic shit probably near the top of mankind’s real-real-bad fuck-ups, and now beyond the idiot-fantasy of nuclear-power-plant-waste storage/what-the-fucker-ever, there’s this real-horrible shit (via Energy News):

Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times: ‘I was at the plant last week on the tour and we talked Mr. Ono, the boss. He made no bones about the fact that the technology… to remove the molten or semi-molten fuel doesn’t exist yet… I asked him how can you be sure that it will be, and he said, “Well, 200 years ago people would never have dreamed of bullet trains or mobile phones, but they exist.”
‘That seems to be the scale of the leap… that’s going to be required.
‘So there must be immense uncertainties around that… There must surely be a chance that it won’t work out, and that the eventual solution will be something like the Chernobyl solution… a sarcophagus of some kind sealing in the 3 plants…’
…
The Times (Complete article), Mar 28, 2015: The chief of the Fukushima nuclear power station has admitted that the technology needed to decommission three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed [and] conceded that the stated goal of decommissioning the plant by 2051 may be impossible without a giant technological leap… [Tepco] continues to be embarrassed by leaks of radiation into the sea… Recent scans of one revealed the worst possible result: all the nuclear fuel that was in the reactor’s furnace has melted and dripped down into the concrete outer containment vessel… The alternative would be to seal the entire complex in a giant sarcophagus like the one covering Chernobyl — but it would have to extend underground to stop contaminated groundwater reaching the sea. [See the initial report based on an excerpt from this article here]
Akira Ono, chief of Fukushima Daiichi, Mar 28, 2015: “There are so many uncertainties… For removal of the debris, we don’t have accurate information… or any viable methodology… I believe human beings have the capability to develop technologies… It may take 200 years.”

Not much a good nightmare wouldn’t make better…

(Frightful future h/t Firedoglake).