Chapomatic

Update: Bubblehead adds technical info.

Update: Checks with Chart has context; story jumped to CNN. I declare a media event and secure from drill.

Update: Leakby, discovered in drydock in Hawaii.

The boat was in dry dock for scheduled maintenance when the leak was discovered, said Lt. Cmdr. David Benham, spokesman for Naval Submarine Forces Pacific at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. One of the shut valves associated with the boat’s propulsion system was “weeping” water at a rate higher than design specifications, he said.

“At no time was there any risk to the reactor plant, the safety of the crew or the safety of the public,” he said.

For context, he said the amount of radioactivity released was “less than the quantity of naturally occurring radioactivity in a bag of common lawn and garden fertilizer.”

Huh. This article hit Drudge (“U.S. sub may have leaked radiation in Japan…“). Anyone want to send aspirin to the Navy public affairs folks?

I remember living in Japan a decade ago. There’s a huge Japanese press desire to report stuff like this, and every report I saw in the papers like this when I lived there was entirely bogus. (Example: boat in Sasebo lights off its diesel engine, like it’s supposed to do, and the Communists–really–with telescopes pointed at the pier take a photo of the exhaust and the front page of the paper reads “US Submarine Leaks Radiation Steam On Japanese Soil”.) The press there have a very very strong master narrative, so much so that when I met a journalist or two not unsympathetic to the USN, they were embarrassed and apologetic about it.

This article is worth noting for the conflation of events to drive a narrative. A JMSDF ship hit a boat last year–and this is important why? Every once in a while water with barely detectable stuff (that I’d drink, frankly) goes out–and the magnitude of importance or risk is what?

Also, note the title above. Japanese citizens opposed to our existence and their own country’s decision to have us there know that the way to their change is to turn public opinion against the Americans there. Thus the focus on everything wrong any sailor or Marine does and the (in my view not entirely correct) local US military urge to turn the forward deployed Americans into cloistered monks.

So I read this article with a shaker of salt. That said, if Houston did gack it up there’ll be a particular kind of unpleasantness to pay…