Retreat

(photo by Sarah Moon)

There must be a new art to deal with the world now.  I don't know what it is, but it will develop.  There is a seismic shift literally and figuratively and we can't keep doing what we've been doing.  As my friend Q says, we have been enslaved by Policies and Procedures.  Art now will either confront it or hide from it.  Both, of course.  Today, I choose retreat.

Tokyo (CNN) -- Japanese utility and government authorities suffered fresh setbacks Tuesday with the detection of radiation in a fish and news that water gushing from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific had radiation levels more than millions of times above the regulatory limit.

"To put this in perspective, the Pacific Ocean holds about 300 trillion swimming pools full of water, and they are going to release about five swimming pools full," said Timothy Jorgensen, chair of the radiation safety committee at Georgetown University Medical Center. "So hopefully the churning of the ocean and the currents will quickly disperse this so that it gets to very dilute concentrations relatively quickly"

Michael Friedlander, a former senior U.S. nuclear engineer, claimed late Monday that authorities will continue to have problems related to excess, radioactive water -- and the need to dump some of it -- as long as they are injecting huge amounts of water, in order to prevent fuel rods from overheating in reactors' cores and spent fuel pools.

"This is not a one-off deal," Friedlander said of dumping tons of radioactive water into the ocean. "This issue of water and water management is going to plague them until they can get (fully operating) long-term core cooling."

My Soundtrack for Retreat