The Fukushima robots are dead; they die as soon as they go on the job. Five years on, the vaunted "subterranean ice wall" around the glow-tomb, intended to prevent further contamination of groundwater, it is not finished. The humans, they do not know how to dispose of the highly radioactive water, stored in an ever-increasing number of tanks, scattered around the site. The radiation, emanating from the mutant structure, it is so powerful, that it has proven impossible to find and remove melted blobs of fuel rods. The technology required to even establish the location of many such rods, it does not yet exist.

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, [Tepco "decommissioning" head Naohiro] Masuda said.

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building. "It takes two years to develop a single-function robot," Masuda said.

[Tepco site manager Akiro] Ono estimates that Tepco has completed around 10 percent of the work to clear the site up—the decommissioning process could take 30 to 40 years. But until the company locates the fuel, it won't be able to assess progress and final costs, experts say.

The much touted use of X-rays like muon rays has yielded little information about the location of the melted fuel, and the last robot inserted into one of the reactors sent only grainy images before breaking down.

And yet some of the humans, they want more of these horrors. The Hairball, for instance, he shrugged off Fukushima, decreeing "nuclear is a way we get what we have to get, which is energy. I'm in favor of nuclear energy, very strongly in favor of nuclear energy. If a plane goes down, people keep flying. If you get into an auto crash, people keep driving."

The Hairball does concede that "we have to be careful," because nuclear power "does have issues."

One such "issue" is this boy. He is a Chernobyl boy. Chernobyl made him what he is. If you are in favor of nuclear power, you are in favor of this boy.

You are also in favor of the experience of this young woman, and her dead Chernobyled husband, from Svetlana Alexievich' Voices from Chernobyl:

At the morgue they said, "Want to see what we'll dress him in?" I do. They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn't get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all—wounds.

The last two days in the hospital—I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love.

They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.

If you want nuclear power, that is what you want.

Chernobyl spewed out 40 types of radiation. One, plutonium, will remain dangerous for twenty times as long as human beings have thus far existed on this earth.

We hear there is a substance and it is called plutonium. We hear that "they" are somewhere (do you remember the name of the state?) manufacturing it. We don't know how it is made. We think the substance uranium is used. We know it is radioactive. We have seen the photographs of babies and children deformed from radiation. The substance plutonium becomes interesting to us when we read that certain parts of the building where it is manufactured have leaks. We don't know really what this means, if it is like the leak in our roofs, or the water pipe in the backyard, or if it is a simple word for a process beyond our comprehension. But we know the word "leak" indicates error and we know that there is no room for error in the handling of this substance. That it has been called the most deadly substance known. That the smallest particle (can one see a particle, smell it?) can cause cancer if breathed in, if ingested. All that we know in the business of living eludes us in this instant. None of our language helps us. Not knowing how to drive, to cook on a gas stove, to soap the diaper pins so that they pass more easily through the diaper, to wash cotton in cold water so that it doesn’t shrink, to repair the water pipes, or dress a wound. No skill helps us. Nor does quickness of mind, nor physical strength. We are like an animal smaller and more vulnerable than any nature has ever created. We have no defense. We try not to remember whatever we may know of plutonium.

Bill Wattenburg, a nasty, bitter old Science Man, acolyte of Edward Teller, full-time fellater of nuclear power, in the days after Fukushima, he snorted: "I have never said that anything is perfectly safe. And Mother Nature will always throw us a curveball."

Except, as Buckminster Fuller observed, Mother Nature here threw no curveball. But actually, kindly, wisely, showed the humans that the safe distance between a nuclear reactor, and themselves, is 90 million miles—the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHjkMeuCFVA]

Whenever the humans have one of their stupid wars, they tend to focus most on those killed from their own particular dirt-patch hallucinatorily known as a "nation." Even the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, evolutionary as it was, in listing the name of each US soldier killed in that conflict, rather than commemorating the slaughter with the usual towering obelisk and accompanying statue of some murderous serial-killing general—it wholly ignores the 1 million North Vietnamese slain, as well as the 4 million civilians whose lives were snuffed out.

And rarely does any human, anywhere, reflect upon the other creatures who are killed when humans set about their unsane warring. Though the number of horses alone, dragooned and butchered in human combat over the millennia, is incalculable.

Emile Zola, he speaks of some of these, in Le Debacle. Surveying the terrain some two days after the battle of Sedan. Besmeared with horses dead and dying. And a herd of maddened, riderless animals, pounding over the fields. Driven insane. By the insanity of human beings.

Over there across the way at the feed store a number of months ago appeared a veiled chameleon. I was really charmed by the fellow. I liked his eyes. They moved independently, looked in two directions at once, swiveled nearly 180 degrees. This allows the creature to see what is going on, everywhere, at all times, without moving his head or his body. A pretty smart set-up, I thought. I was going to move him into the animal farm here, but the feed girl told me veiled chameleons require a lot of care, because they really don't like "captivity." So I demurred. The people I have here are all of the type who really don't mind hanging with human beings. Some animals go for that. Some don't.

A couple months later, I regretted it. When I learned these guys are refugees. Because the goddam humans are warring all over their land. The only place they naturally live in all the world is a small strip of territory stretching across "Saudi Arabia" and "Yemen." That's it. And the unsane humans are presently tearing it all to pieces. A veiled chameleon's eyes, they can swivel all they want, but that is not going to protect him from the tanks and the bombs and the guns. These people are going to be shot to shit, and they are going to die, and they are going to lie wounded, for days, with no one to attend to them, no one to write nice little odes about them, no one to put up a wall or a statue in their name. They are going to suffer. Because human beings are insane.

I know a man who once hunted. Until one day he shot a rabbit. And the rabbit limped into a culvert. And there screamed. And screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. The culvert served to echo and amplify the screams, so that they filled all the world. The man tried to go after the rabbit, this time to help him, rather than to kill him. But he couldn't reach him. All he could do was hear the screams. The screaming and the screaming and the screaming. This went on for hours. When it was over, the man broke the gun upon the rocks, and walked away.

Every firearm should sound with such screams. Every time a human being touches it. And those screams should continue. Until the firearm is put down. All firearms should be put down. Now. And they should stay down. Forever.

As screams should sound over all the graves of all those killed in the madness of war. Willi Heinrich, a combat infantryman in the German army during WWII, wrote this, in one of his novels, placing it in the mouth of a hunted Jew:

When we sing the national anthem in a military cemetery it is, of course, a very moving event, but it distorts the true nature of the matter. We should rig up giant loudspeakers and relay recordings of the screams of the wounded and dying and then no one would ever forget that cemetery. We ought not to play anthems over their graves or make solemn speeches in remembrance of them. A people which is proud of its war dead has learned nothing from the war. As long as we have no stronger feelings than a bad conscience about our dead when we talk of them, then there will always be other wars. It all began with falsehood and it will one day finish with falsehood. Lies breed death, death breeds lies and so it goes on. By distorting the meaning of our existence, we have legitimized mass murder.

The metaphysician G. I. Gurdjieff, asked during WWI what soldiers, the world over, might do, if they were to become awake, replied: "They would drop their rifles and go home to their families."

That's going to happen someday. I say: today. Shall be that day.

Joao Pereira de Souza is a bricklayer who lives in a shanty on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in "Brazil."

In 2011 he came across a small penguin, washed up on the rocks, starving, covered in oil. He took the bird home, carefully cleaned him, and fed him fish, until he was recovered. Then, he released the bird into the sea.

"But he wouldn't leave. He stayed with me for eleven months, and then just after he changed his coat with new feathers, he disappeared," Pereira de Souza said.

Then, in June, the penguin returned. Swimming 5000 miles from Patagonia. This the penguin does every year. Arrives in June, departs in February.

He's not much interested in other humans. "No one else is allowed to touch him. He pecks them if they do. He lays on my lap, lets me give him showers, allows me to feed him sardines and to pick him up," says the penguin's human.

The insane humans of Brazil have a "law" forbidding humans from congress with wild animals. But the authorities decided, in this case, to make an exception.

In my universe, that penguin, he is the president.