A Week is a Long Time

The ocean of time that laps through the doors of one's perception in the span of 168 hours is too sublime for the mind to comprehend. We use crude notations to give us a sense of what has gone before, but it's hopeless. We're animals trapped in the present permitted snatches of past presents.

I am resting up today for a 5K race tomorrow. So I didn't go out for my usual early Saturday morning eight-mile run. But I'm missing the mobility now. Movement is everything.

I did read an interesting blog post this morning on Naked Capitalism. It's a cross post from Wolf Richter's Testosterone Pit. Tokyo Electric Power Company has been systematically lying about the radiation exposure levels caused by the meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Here's what caught my attention:

All this came at a very inconvenient time: TEPCO is cooling the reactors and spent fuel rods with a constant flow of water – 400 metric tons per day – and then stores that contaminated water in tanks on site. But some of them have been leaking due to sloppy workmanship. Plus, it cannot indefinitely build new tanks for that endless flow of water. So, it is trying to get approval to just dump that contaminated water into the Pacific. Whatever isn’t already leaking into it.

For some reason I was under the impression that the reactors had been sealed and stabilized. I had no idea that they're still hot and requiring constant inundation with water to keep from burning and that the water has to be stored because it's radioactive. I consider myself informed. It just goes to show you that we are trapped in the present. You change the images on the screen for a few days and we forget what has gone before.