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Topic Started: April 11 2011, 02:28 PM (7,669 Views)
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Fukushima to check internal radiation exposure

Fukushima Prefecture has decided to check the internal radiation exposure of residents near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and adjacent areas with high radiation levels.

In Fukushima, there are mounting concerns among locals over the health effects of radiation after the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The prefecture had already decided to conduct health checks on all citizens, but will now assess residents' internal exposure to radiation from breathing and eating.

The targets will be residents near the plant and people who live in adjacent areas with high radiation levels.

A device called a "whole-body counter" will be used to precisely measure radiation.

But the prefecture currently has only one device and can screen just 10 people per day. It is urging research institutes and others with the device outside the prefecture to help them.

Fukushima is also studying whether it can fetch 2 devices from Okuma Town, which lies inside the no-go zone.

Thursday, June 02, 2011 16:28 +0900 (JST)
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Earthquake hits Niigata, no tsunami alert

A medium-strength earthquake hit Niigata Prefecture north of Tokyo on Thursday morning. But no major damage has been reported and a nuclear power plant in the prefecture is unharmed.

The earthquake hit at 11:33 AM local time. Japan's Meteorological Agency estimates the quake's magnitude at 4.7, with its focus in the prefecture.

Tremors with an intensity of 5 plus on the Japanese scale of 0 to 7 were registered in Tokamachi City in the prefecture, and an intensity of 4 in Tsunan Town, also in Niigata.

Weaker tremors were felt in other parts of Niigata, the southern Tohoku region, the Kanto region and Nagano Prefecture. But no tsunami alerts were issued.

About 3 minutes after the quake, an aftershock with an estimated magnitude of 2.9 struck the region.

A series of aftershocks have occurred in wide areas including in Niigata following the March 11th quake in northeastern Japan.

Thursday, June 02, 2011 13:37 +0900 (JST)
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IAEA wants latest information on nuclear accident

The International Atomic Energy Agency has called on Japan to report the latest, most detailed information on the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The IAEA explained to its member nations the current status of the accident at a meeting at its headquarters in Vienna on Thursday. The agency plans to hold an international, ministerial-level meeting to discuss the accident later this month.

Deputy Director General Denis Flory told reporters after the meeting that the agency has so far received adequate information on the accident from Japan.

He added that Japan should report the latest information, including the status of the nuclear reactors and why highly contaminated water leaked into the sea, at the coming meeting.

Flory also said countries must follow common safety standards to rebuild confidence in nuclear energy and that the IAEA standards should be their basis.

Friday, June 03, 2011 01:25 +0900 (JST)
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No-confidence motion against Kan voted down

The Lower House of Japan's Diet has voted down a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet of Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

The chamber rejected the motion by a vote of 293 to 152 at a plenary session on Thursday afternoon.

The motion was submitted on Wednesday by the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, New Komeito and the Sunrise Party of Japan.

Two lawmakers from Kan's Democratic Party voted for the motion, while Kan's opponent in the party -- former leader Ichiro Ozawa -- and others close to him were absent from the vote.

Former prime minister Yukio Hatayama and other Democrats who had expressed opposition to Kan reversed and voted against the motion.

The Communist Party abstained from voting, and the Social Democratic Party skipped the session.

Just before the Diet session on Thursday, Kan said at a meeting of his party's Lower House members that he intends to resign.

He said he wants the party's younger generation to take over various responsibilities once he fulfills his role in handling issues related to the March 11th disaster and the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Before the vote at the session, Liberal Democratic Party, Vice President Tadamori Oshima demanded that Kan step down immediately.

Oshima said Kan did not specify conditions under which he will resign, adding that an ongoing prime minister can neither run the Diet nor deal with diplomatic affairs.

Democratic Party deputy Diet affairs chief Kazunori Yamanoi said it was irresponsible for the opposition to submit the no-confidence motion while Japan struggles to recover from the disaster and contain the nuclear crisis.

Thursday, June 02, 2011 16:59 +0900 (JST)
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Fukushima Radioactive Water May Breach Plant’s Storage Trenches in 5 Days
By Tsuyoshi Inajima - Jun 2, 2011 11:32 AM GMT .

Radioactive water accumulating in Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant may start overflowing from service trenches in five days, potentially increasing the contamination from the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has been manually pumping water into overheating reactors after cooling systems broke down and much of that has overflowed into basements and trenches. The water is rising at a rate that means it will overflow as early as June 6, Bloomberg calculations from the company’s data show.

“There is still a risk of radioactive water leaking into the sea,” Hikaru Kuroda, an official at the utility known as Tepco, said in Tokyo today. “We may have between five and seven days before the water levels reach the top of the trenches.”

Almost 60 percent of Japanese adults worry they’ve been contaminated since Fukushima started emitting radiation almost three months ago, according to a Pew Research Center poll. The poll shows at least 80 percent of the population is dissatisfied with the response either from Tepco or the government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who survived a no-confidence vote today.

“Solving the problem of contaminated water is critical,” said Tetsuo Ito, the head of the Atomic Energy Research Institute at Kinki University in western Japan.

Tepco shares rose 2 percent to 305 yen in Tokyo. The stock has fallen 86 percent since March 10, the day before an earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and cooling at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, erasing 3 trillion yen ($37 billion) of the company’s market value.
Leaking Water

Tepco has pumped millions of liters of cooling water into the three reactors that melted down. By May 18, almost 100,000 tons of radioactive water had leaked into the basements of reactor and turbine buildings, connecting tunnels and service trenches at the plant, according to Tepco’s estimates.

Water levels are between 27.7 centimeters (11 inches) below the top of a shaft leading to a trench connected to the No. 2 building and 23.9 centimeters below the ground at the No. 3 unit today, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at Tepco, said.

The levels were 64.1 centimeters for the No. 2 building and 45.6 for No. 3 on May 27, showing a rate of increase that will reach the lip of the trenches as early as June 6.

To prevent leakage into the ocean, Tepco poured concrete and gravel to seal trenches closest to the sea near the No. 2, 3 and 4 reactors, Tepco spokesman Takeo Iwamoto said by phone.
Water Storage

“We are still considering the measures to be taken if contaminated water leaks,” Iwamoto said today.

The company may transfer more water than planned to a waste story facility to avoid overflows, Matsumoto said.

“There are likely to be underground leakage pathways that will be very hard to plug, and therefore the only way to stop the ongoing marine contamination is to remove the water from basements and other structures as quickly as possible,” environmental group Greenpeace International said in a statement.

The rate of increase in water level quickened because of three days of rain from typhoon Songda that weakened as it swept past Japan earlier this week. Namie, a town near the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station, had 112 millimeters of rain on May 30, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Japan is regularly buffeted by typhoons and tropical storms between May and October, adding another risk to containing the radiated water at the Fukushima station. Hydrogen explosions at the plant blew the roofs off three reactor buildings, exposing pools containing spent fuel rods.
Typhoon Measures

Takeo Iwamoto, a spokesman for the utility, said the company plans to complete installing covers for the buildings by October.

In early April, Tepco spent days trying to stop a leak of highly radioactive water into the sea from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. It turned to using concrete, sawdust, newsprint and absorbent polymer used in diapers to block the leak.

The efforts failed and drew comparisons with BP Plc’s attempts to plug an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico last year with golf balls and strips of rubber tires. The Tepco leak was eventually sealed with sodium-silicate, known as liquid glass.

Tepco on April 5 said it had dumped almost 10 million liters (2.6 million gallons) of radioactive water into the sea from the Fukushima plant, which led to radioactive cesium being found in fish at levels exceeding health guidelines.

The company said at the time the decision was the lesser of two evils as it needed to find space for storing water that was highly radioactive and more toxic that what was released into the sea.
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Startup Kurion Ships Nuclear Clean Up Tech to Japan.
Nuclear waste cleanup startup Kurion says it has shipped several hundred tons of its equipment that will be used to clean contaminated water at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan that suffered damage in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. Kurion says some of its engineers have already arrived at the Fukushima sites, and more will arrive over the next two weeks, and by June Kurion expects its radioactive water cleaning technology to be installed at the nuclear plants. We reported in April that Kurion was working on the Japanese nuclear disaster.

Kurion’s technology, and business plan, is to make the process of vitrification — turning nuclear waste into glass — modular, which makes it cheaper, faster and more efficient. Vitrification is the standard way to clean up nuclear waste, and Kurion essentially brings the technology to the waste tanks, instead of taking the waste to a massive centralized treatment plant.

Before Kurion turns the waste into glass, it uses a material to soak up the waste, which it calls “ion specific media,” and then shrinks the material down to a small enough size so that it can be turned into glass. Vitrification essentially permanently encapsulates the nuclear waste, and while it’s still radioactive, the waste can be stored and transported more easily.

Kurion says at the Fukushima plants, its technology will be used on radioactive contaminated water that is in the turbine buildings, as well as on new cooling water that is being added every day. Some of the more standard nuclear cleanup materials couldn’t be used because they don’t work with saltwater, and sea water was pumped into the Fukushima plants in order to cool the reactor in response to the disaster.

Kurion’s cleanup material has previously been used to clean up contaminated liquids at the Three Mile Island incident. But Kurion CEO John Raymont said in a statement that while the Three Mile Island clean up preparation process took 18 months, it only took five weeks to deliver the technology for the Fukushima project, due to developments in innovation and modularization. As an additional defense against radioactive waste at the Fukushima plants, Areva is also developing a second radioactive removal system that will be used, and both Toshiba and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy are involved in the project, too.

Kurion is a three-year-old company based in Irvine, Calif. backed by Lux Capital and Firelake Capital. Kurion says it is the only American company working on this cleanup project. Kurion has completed other milestones over the past several months, including small scale testing of its technology, and has also moved into “a long series of tests on simulated waste streams.” In addition Kurion says it has a contract with engineering firm CH2MHill to test out its tech to manage uranium metal bearing sludges at a site in the U.S.

Nuclear waste management is a problem that hasn’t seen a whole lot of innovation over the past few decades — according to some estimates $1 out of every $4 from the Department of Energy’s budget goes toward nuclear waste management, so there is a sizable opportunity to help the DOE cut that expense. Now with the Japanese nuclear disaster, there is an immediate market..
By Katie Fehrenbacher Jun. 2, 2011,
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Doctor describes fatigue of workers at Fukushima nuclear plant
David R Arnott writes

Newly released photographs taken by a doctor who has examined workers at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant show the difficult living conditions they have endured while battling to bring the situation under control.
Posted Image
Workers engaged in operations to stabilize the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant take a rest on the floor of a gymnasium inside the grounds of the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, about 10km away from the crippled Daiichi plant in Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan, in this photo taken May 7 and released June 2 by industrial medical doctor Takeshi Tanigawa, who examined the workers.
[IMG]The Japan Times reported that Ehime University professor Takeshi Tanigawa had visited the workers twice since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered a series of meltdowns at the plant. He warned that there was an increased risk of accidents because the workers had suffered from chronic sleep deprivation and fatigue, the paper said.[/IMG]
Posted Image
ndustrial medical doctor Takeshi Tanigawa, right, talks with a worker operating to stabilize the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant, in this photo taken April 16 and released by Tanigawa on June 2.

Tanigawa also warned that workers were at risk of developing PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) due to what they had been through in the early days of the disaster, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
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Japan may face a shortage of green tea as radiation leaking from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station tainted leaves, spurring the government to restrict shipments from four prefectures.
The government decided yesterday to curb shipments of dried tea leaves containing more than 500 becquerel per kilogram of radioactive cesium and ordered a halt in shipments from the eastern prefectures of Ibaraki, Chiba, Kanagawa and Tochigi where tainted produce was detected. Japan’s tea production, including fresh and dried leaves, was worth 102.1 billion yen ($1.3 billion) in 2009, according to the agriculture ministry.

One of the test results showed fresh tea leaves from Izu city in the prefecture contained 98 becquerel of cesium per kilogram, according to the Shizuoka website.
The government made the decision because green tea is also processed into seasoning for various food products including cookies and ice cream, said Taku Ohara at the inspection and safety division of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

“As dried tea leaves could be consumed directly by humans, we need to test them and ban sales of tainted products,” he said today by phone.

“We have not tested dried tea leaves as they are used in the middle of tea processing and are not a finished product. We have tested fresh tea leaves and tea drinks,” said Toshiyuki Aoki, assistant director at the office of tea and agricultural production at the Shizuoka prefectural government. “We would like to decide how to respond through discussion with government officials.”
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At stricken Japanese nuclear plant, water is the biggest worry.

By Chico Harlan, Friday, June 3,

TOKYO — At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, nothing is more problematic right now than the contaminated water that covers the basement floors, leaks into the environment and endangers any worker who goes near it.

After dousing its reactors for 21 / 2 months in jury-rigged cooling efforts following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. must deal with the severe side-effects of that strategy by removing at least 15 million gallons of water — enough to fill the first five floors of the Empire State Building.
But engineers planning that unprecedented clean-up job face questions about where they’ll put the water and how effectively they can filter its radioactive particles.

Tepco’s problem “resembles a board game with 16 squares and one empty spot,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who directs the Nuclear Safety Project of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Workers must inject the reactor cores with water to keep them cool. But that step guarantees that water will leak through the quake-damaged plant and into the basement-level turbine rooms. And the resulting radioactive water makes repair work all the harder. Which means that workers, still struggling to fix the usual re-circulation system, must continue to “feed and bleed” the reactors from above.

Which means water levels continue to rise down below.

“They’re just perpetuating the problem and making a bigger and bigger mess,” said Lake Barrett, a nuclear engineer who directed the cleanup of of the hobbled Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

A potential turning point comes roughly two weeks from now, when Tepco plans to begin a treatment process in which water is sucked from the basement rooms and fed into a special tank, then treated with chemicals that eliminate its radioactivity. The process creates a byproduct of radioactive sludge, which is generally mixed with bitumen, poured into drums, then sealed and buried. The water itself can either be cycled back into reactors or discarded into the ocean.

The treatment system is being set up by Areva, a French company that uses the technology at its La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant, off the Normandy coast. Since 1997, Greenpeace — after taking water samples from La Hague’s discharge pipe — has made repeated claims that the supposedly decontaminated water in fact contains radioactivity levels above the regulatory limit.

The process “is not 100 percent, but it’s better than nothing,” Lochbaum said. “The alternative: you let the water simply evaporate and radioactivity carries to all parts far and wide.”

Japan already has experienced substantial environmental problems from the failure at Fukushima, with authorities at the plant discharging contaminated water into the Pacific on at least three occasions. During a visit to Japan last week, Greenpeace officials presented data showing higher-than-legal radiation levels in seaweed and shellfish that were collected more than 12 miles from the plant. The samples’ high concentrations of iodine-131 — which has a half-life of eight days — indicated that leaks from Fukushima Daiichi were ongoing, and “much larger than has been declared by Tepco so far,” said Jan Vande Putte, a Greenpeace radiation expert.
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Transcript for Exclusive Arnie Gundersen Interview: The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think

Below is the transcript for Exclusive Arnie Gundersen Interview: The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think

Chris Martenson: Welcome to another ChrisMartenson.com podcast. I am your host, Chris Martenson and today I have the privilege of speaking with Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates. In my eyes, a kind of living legend in the field of nuclear engineering. He has over thirty-nine years of nuclear industry experience and oversight and is a frequent expert witness on nuclear safety matters to the US Federal Government and private industry.

Since the initial days of the disaster at Fukushima, Arnie and his staff at Fairewinds have produced hands down, the most thorough, measured, accurate analysis of the unfolding developments there. A feat made all the more challenging by the frequent lack of information from TEPCO and the Japanese government and media. Now today, Arnie and I will talk about the latest state of the situation at Fukushima, which remains wholly unresolved and it's quite troubling – we should keep our eyes on it. In addition, we are going to discuss what the important factors are for you to know, as well as what pragmatic preparations those of us who live in or near nuclear installations or countries that have them should really be doing. So Arnie, welcome to the show, it's a pleasure to have you.

Arnie Gundersen: Thank you very much and I note that a lot of your readers have come to our site and I appreciate it.

Chris Martenson: We have some great readers and they are interested in knowing the truth, as best they can find it and we have a way of being at our site, which is that we really like to keep our facts very separated from our opinions. Something that I really admire that you do, as well.

Arnie Gundersen: Well thanks.

Chris Martenson: Let’s just briefly review – if we could just synopsize – I know you can do this better than anybody. What happened at Fukushima – what happened and I really would like to take the opportunity to talk about this kind of specifically, like where we are with each one of the reactors. So first of all, this disaster – how did it happen? Was it just bad engineering, was it really bad luck with the tsunami? How did this even initiate – something we were told again and again – something that couldn’t happen seems to have happened?

Arnie Gundersen: Well the little bit of physics here is that even when a reactor shuts down; it continues to churn out heat. Now, only five percent of the original amount of heat, but when you are cranking out millions of horsepower of heat, five percent is still a lot. So you have to keep a nuclear reactor cool after it shuts down. Now, what happened at Fukushima was it went into what is called a “station blackout,” and people plan for that. That means there is no power to anything except for batteries. And batteries can’t turn the massive motors that are required to cool the nuclear reactor. So the plan is in a station blackout is that somehow or another you get power back in four or five hours. That didn’t happen at Fukushima because the tidal wave, the tsunami, was so great that it overwhelmed their diesels and it overwhelmed something called “service water 2” But in any event, they couldn’t get any power to the big pumps.

Now, was it foreseeable? They were prepared for a seven-meter tsunami, about twenty-two feet. The tsunami that hit was something in excess of ten and quite likely fifteen meters, so somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five feet. They were warned that the tsunami that they were designed against was too low. They were warned for at least ten years and I am sure that there were people back before that. So would they have been prepared for one this big? I don’t know, but certainly, they were unprepared for even a tsunami of lesser magnitude.

Chris Martenson: So the tsunami came along and just swamped the systems and I heard that there were some other design elements there too, such as potentially the generators were in an unsafe spot or that some of their electrical substations all happened to be in the basement, so they kind of got taken out all at once. Now, here’s what I heard – the initial reports when they came out said, “Oh, nothing to fear, we all went into SCRAM,” which is some kind of emergency shutdown and they said everything is SCRAMed and I knew that we were in trouble in less than twenty-four hours, they talked about how they were pumping seawater in. Which I assume, by the time you are pumping seawater you have a pretty clear indication from the outside that there is something really quite wrong with this story, is that true?

Arnie Gundersen: Yes. Seawater and as anybody who has ever had a boat on the ocean would know, saltwater and stainless steel do not get along very well. Saltwater and stainless steel at five hundred degrees don’t get along very well at all. You are right, they had some single points of vulnerability – the hole in the armor and the diesels were one of them. But even if the diesels were up high, they would have been in trouble because of those service water pumps I talked about. And they got wiped out and those pumps are the pumps that cool the diesels. So even if the diesels were runnable, cooling water that runs through the diesels would have been taken out by the tsunami anyway. So it's kind of a false argument to blame the diesels.

Chris Martenson: Okay, so take us through. Reactor number one, it was revealed I think about a week ago now that they finally came to the revelation that I think some of us had come to independently, that there had been something more than a partial meltdown, maybe even a complete meltdown. What is your assessment of reactor one and where is it right now?

Arnie Gundersen: When you see hydrogen explosions, that means that the outside of the fuel has exceeded 2,200 degrees and the inside is well over 3,500 degrees. The fuel gets brittle, it burns, and then it plops to the bottom of the nuclear reactor in a molten blob like lava. It was pretty clear to a lot of people, including apparently to the NRC, but they weren’t telling people back in March, that that had occurred in reactor one. There was essentially a blob of lava on the bottom of the nuclear reactor. So I have to separate this – a nuclear reactor - and that is inside of a containment. So there is still one more barrier here. But the problem is that the reactor had boiled dry and they were using fire pumps connected to the ocean to pump saltwater into the reactor. Now, if this thing were individual tubes, the water could get around the uranium and completely cool it. But when it's a blob at the bottom of the reactor, it can only get to the top surface and that would cause it to begin to meltdown. Now, on these boiling water reactors, there are about seventy holes in the bottom of the reactor where the control rods come in and I suspect that those holes were essentially the weak link that caused this molten mass. Now it's 5,000 degrees at the center, even though the outside may be touching water, the inside of this molten mass is 5,000 degrees. It melts through and lies on the bottom of the containment.

That’s where we are today. We have no reactor essentially, just a big pressure cooker. The molten uranium is on the bottom of the containment. It spreads out at that point, because the floor is flat. And I don’t think it's going to melt its way through the concrete floor. It may gradually over time; but the damage is already done because the containment has cracks in it and it's pretty clear that it is leaking. So you put water in the top. And the plan had never been to put water in the top and let it run out the bottom. That is not the preferred way of cooling a nuclear reactor in an accident. But you are putting water in the top and it's running out the bottom and it's going out through cracks in the containment, after touching directly uranium and plutonium and cesium and strontium and is carrying all those radioactive isotopes out as liquids and gases into the environment.

Chris Martenson: So this melting that happened, is this just a function of the decay heat at this point in time? We’re not speculating that there has been any sort of re-criticality or any other what we might call a nuclear reaction – this is just decay heat from the isotopes that are in there from prior nuclear activity – those are just decaying and giving off that heat. That’s sufficient to get to 5,000 degrees?

Arnie Gundersen: Yes, once the uranium melts into a blob at these low enrichments, four and five percent, it can’t make a new criticality. If criticality is occurring on the site - and there might be, because there is still iodine 131, which is a good indication - it is not coming from the Unit 1 core and it's not coming from the Unit 2 core, because those are both blobs at the bottom of the containment.

Chris Martenson: All right, so we have these blobs, they’ve somehow escaped the primary reactor pressure vessel, which is that big steel thing and now they are on the relatively flat floor of the containment – they concrete piece – and you say Unit 2 is roughly the same story as Unit 1 – where’s Unit 3 in this story?

Arnie Gundersen: Unit 3 may not have melted through and that means that some of the fuel certainly is lying on the bottom, but it may not have melted through and some of the fuel may still look like fuel, although it is certainly brittle. And it's possible that when the fuel is in that configuration that you can get a re-criticality. It's also possible in any of the fuel pools, one, two, three, and four pools, that you could get a criticality, as well. So there’s been frequent enough high iodine indications to lead me to believe that either one of the four fuel pools or the Unit 3 reactor is in fact, every once in a while starting itself up and then it gets to a point where it gets so hot that it shuts itself down and it kind of cycles. It kind of breathes, if you will.

Chris Martenson: Right, so when it's doing that breathing, it's certainly generating a lot of heat through the fission process and then of course, it's generating more isotopes to decay and contribute to the decay heat at that point. What’s your assessment if there is that sort of breathing going on, is sort of like a little pocket within one of the geometries that exists that would still allow fission to be supported or could you imagine this being a fairly significant amount or how much do you think might be happening?

Arnie Gundersen: I think it's a relatively significant amount – maybe a tenth of the nuclear reactor core starts back up and shuts back down and starts back up and shuts back down. And that’s an extra heat load; you are not prepared to get rid of one tenth of a nuclear reactor’s heat by pumping water in the top

Now, Unit 3 has another problem and the NRC mentioned it yesterday for the first time and it gets back to that saltwater and the effect on iron. They are afraid that the reactor bottom will break, literally just break right out and dump everything. Because it's now hot and it's got salt on it and it's got the ideal conditions for corrosion. So the big fear on Unit 3 is that it will break at the bottom and whatever else remains in it, which could be the entire core, could fall out suddenly. And if that happens, you can get something called a “steam explosion,” and this may be a one in a hundred chance. I don’t want your listeners to think it's going to happen tomorrow, but if the core breaks you will get a steam explosion, but we’re not sure the core is going to break. And that is a violent hydrogen explosion like the one we’ve already witnessed.

Chris Martenson: Reactor 3 caught me when it blew, because what I saw there with my eyes was a fairly focused upwards very high-energy event, which completely looked different from what I saw when Unit 1 blew. Are you talking about – is that or I know you have postulated in the past that you think that might have been -- what’s the name for it a “prompt” criticality?

Arnie Gundersen: I called it a “prompt criticality,” that created a detonation and engineers differentiate – either way it's going to be a big explosion. But the violence of Unit 3’s explosion and I did some calculations to show that the speed at which the flame traveled in order to through particles as far as this one threw particles – the speed of that shockwave had to be in excess of a thousand miles per hour. That’s a detonation, where the shockwave itself can cause incredible damage and that can happen if we were to have one of these steam explosions at the bottom of the reactor in Unit 3 falls out – you could have another one of those all over again

Chris Martenson: Obviously, not a good thing if that happens. What can they do at this stage though, if that is a concern that they have – this sounds very tricky to me, because if it turns out that there is excess heat being generated because we are having this breathing re-criticality event going on, but for whatever reason let’s just say that the core of reactor three is pretty hot. What can they really do beyond just keep trying to dump water in there and keep their fingers crossed?

Arnie Gundersen: Well, that’s two out of the three things they have to do. The other one is they can flood, if they can flood it from the outside – in other words, put water outside the pressure cooker, as well as inside the pressure cooker. They may be able to remove more heat that way and prevent the gross failure of the pressure vessel. But really, it's just hoping that you can put enough water in. And the other piece of that is and it relates to Unit 4 too, is a seismic event. If you put too much water in these reactors they get heavy, and they are not designed to sway when there is heavy – tens of tons of extra water in them. So they are really not designed to sway. So let’s say there is a severe aftershock, Unit 3 and Unit 4 are in real jeopardy. And if you remember the Sumatra earthquake, that was a nine plus about three or four years ago. The biggest aftershock occurred three months afterwards and that was an eight six, so aftershocks even though we are two months into this, if the Sumatra event is any indication, aftershocks are still possible.

Chris Martenson: Right and so you mentioned Unit 4 then, also being at risk for this. I thought that unit four, the core was out and that they have some water back in the pool. What is the concern with unit four at this point?

Arnie Gundersen: You are absolutely right and there is no reactor running there. Everything has been taken out and it was put in the spent fuel pool. But that means there is no containment either, so the entire spent fuel pool is visible literally. When they have those helicopter fly-overs, you can look down into this blown out shell of a building and see the fuel in the spent fuel pool. It's still relatively hot, because it only shut down in November. So there is still a lot of decay hear in that pool. Brookhaven National Labs did a study in 1997 and it said that if a fuel pool went dry and caught on fire, it could cause a hundred and eighty-seven thousand fatalities. So it's a big concern and probably the biggest concern. I now the Chairman of the NRC said that the reason he told Americans to get out from fifty miles out was that he was afraid that Unit 4 would catch fire, that exposed fuel pool would volatilize plutonium, uranium, cesium, and strontium. And if the Brookhaven Study is to be believed could kill more than a hundred thousand people, as a result.

Chris Martenson: And this is from the effects of radiation or long-term cancer exposures? Something we will get into in a minute.

Arnie Gundersen: Hot particles from long-term cancer exposure.

Chris Martenson: So we have these four units and each of them has sort of had their own crisis and each of them has released contamination into the environment – first how much contamination really got released here? Second, we see that a bunch of it is headed into the ocean, although we’re still questioning I think how much and where it all is – so my question is around how much contamination is around these buildings at this point in time and what are the challenges and what happens when – not if – but when typhoon season comes up? Say, we had sort of a large bunch or kind of a storm, would that create issues? I am just trying to play out how much has been released, how much might be released, and what it actually implies at this point in time.

Arnie Gundersen: Well, this event is – I have said it's worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind and blowing in-land. This could be – it could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees, I mean there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan. It could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.

So the plants, you will see them steaming and as summer goes on, you will see them steaming less, because the air is warmer, but it's not because they are not steaming, you just don’t see it. Because this event occurred in March and it was cool there, so you will see the steam a lot easier. Those plants are still omitting a lot of radiation. Nowhere near as much as on the first two weeks, but a lot of radiation: cesium, strontium, and mainly cesium and strontium – those are going to head south, whether or not there is a tropical hurricane. The wind is going to push it south this time and so the issue is not the total radiation you might measure with a Geiger counter in your hand, but hot particles.

Chris Martenson: Well, there was already and I was taken aback when I read the reports that in some predictors right around Tokyo. They had found what I consider to be pretty hot readings, 3,000 or 4,000 becquerels in the soil -- a 170,000 becquerels in some kind of a fly ash or they found some in sludge, as well. But I think the higher reading was from some sort of ash, which means it came through an incinerator or some sort of burning process. I felt those were pretty shocking levels, because I hadn’t really been informed that the winds had shifted south long enough and enough contamination had made it that far in order to get readings like that. So I felt fairly confused, as if I didn’t have a good understanding of how much might have gotten there or how it got there or when it got there. And that they had found those readings in March and of course, they didn’t release the data until sometime toward the end of April – did you follow that part and what do you make of readings like that?

Arnie Gundersen: Yes I followed it and I am as confused as you are. Individuals have sent Fairewinds some car air filters from Tokyo and they turn out to be one of the ideal ways of measuring ways of radiation, because they trap a lot of these hot particles. And had one person with seven filters and they ran a body shop or something and five of the filters were fine. And two were incredibly radioactive. So what that tells me is that the plume was not regular and you’ll have places where there was not much deposition and you’ll have places where there was a lot of deposition. That same thing happened up to the north, but within Tokyo it seems like wherever the official results were being reported didn’t really represent the worst conditions of the plume. And I saw that on Three Mile Island – we shouldn’t be surprised that a plume meanders and a plume may miss a major radiation detector by a quarter of a mile and not be detected. It doesn’t mean it's not there, it means we just didn’t detect it.

Chris Martenson: Sure, this is fluid dynamics. When you put a drop of dye in a glass of water and watch it swirl around, obviously more ends up in some places than others, so that’s part of it. And anybody who has looked at the aftermath of Chernobyl all across Belarus and Ukraine and what not -- it's obviously not a big circle. It's a very, very convoluted map of depositions, so that’s part of it. I guess I was surprised because I hadn’t heard of any warning signs that that amount could have been deposited that far south yet, but there was. That was pretty interesting to me.

Arnie Gundersen: What happened there was the plume went out to sea, but then curved south and then west. It actually came in like a hook. So that when you were measuring what was happening at Fukushima it appeared that the plume was heading out to sea, but then offshore the winds took it south and then west into Tokyo. It contained the particles that they are picking up in air filters and they are strontium and cesium and americium, which is an indication of fuel failures.

Chris Martenson: Right. That was the same plume that I remember was in South Korea and they actually shut some schools down because it was raining at the time and they had a lot of radiation coming down. So we know that there was a big south and then west ‘hooking’ in order for it to get there, so maybe that was part of that one process. But it speaks to something, which is that these plumes that are coming up and out of contaminated plumes with radioactive particles in them are pretty hot. As you might expect. I remember the reactor that was scaring me the most for a while was number two, which looked sedate – it had this little hole in the side, but it was just constantly emitting steam, constantly for a whole period of time and I knew what was in that steam – it was going to be pretty hot, I thought.

Arnie Gundersen: Unit 2 has gotten to the point where it can’t get any worse, because it is now laying at the bottom of the containment and the containment has a hole in it. That doesn’t mean that it's not really bad still: it just can’t get any worse. The concern now is this enormous amount of water that is being used to cool these reactors, so tens of tons an hour. And the original plan was to recirculate the nuclear reactor water through the nuclear reactor. And on the other side have a heat exchanger that took the heat away. So you wouldn’t generate any water. In fact, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water. It's not mildly radioactive and here’s the problem:

If you were to mineralize this or filter this, the filters and the mineralizers would become so radioactive that the filters might melt, because they are made of a plastic material, and the other part of it is that the personnel couldn’t get near the filters to change them. So it's a very difficult problem, what do you do with all of this contaminated water, the large volume and the high radioactivity make getting rid of that water very difficult.

Chris Martenson: I would like to talk about the other challenges they face, too. I don’t what they are going to do with all that water and I don’t think they do either. They are pumping it into a big storage tank right now and I just read that maybe that is leaking or at least some water went out of it. So one guess is that it is leaking. Talk to us about the other challenges that the engineers and clean up crews are going to be facing. What is the work environment like there right now?

Arnie Gundersen: We are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. The people outside are wearing completely enclosed clothing, taped to their faces and they have respirators on. The respirators are designed with a charcoal filter – but they are breathing through their lungs and they are taking from the outside through those respirators. It's hot, it's sticky, and you are constantly looking at this radiation gauge. But it is something that while uncomfortable, probably isn’t lethal. The people that are going in are a different problem. They are going in, in essentially a bubble suit and they have their own self-contained air like a fireman in a fire – a Scott AirPacks is sort of what they are called. So they are going in with their own self-contained air into a place that has no lights. Into a place that has water everywhere and a place that is dark with rubble. And on top of that it's highly radioactive and they are probably carrying thirty or forty pounds worth of gear to do whatever it is they were sent in there for. The stay time in that environment would be tough if there were no radiation. It's a hot, sticky, pretty miserable place to work for an hour or so. But the radioactivity levels are so high that these guys are being chased out on the order of fifteen minutes. And they are receiving an exposure, which is roughly equivalent to the worst an American worker would get over five years. These guys are picking it up in ten minutes.

Chris Martenson: So let’s assume that they do actually have the – I think they have bumped it up to two hundred fifty millisievert as an annual dose limit now. So once a worker gets to that threshold, then what?

Arnie Gundersen: Hopefully, they are no longer allowed to receive any more radiation - period. Not just for a year or for a month, but they really shouldn’t receive any more than that. Here’s a general rule of thumb: 250 rem will kill you. So that means that if ten people get twenty-five rem, one of them will develop a cancer. And if a hundred people get 2.5 rem, one of them will get a cancer. So it doesn’t mean lesser doses assure you of not getting a cancer. So what these people are doing is they are increasing the likelihood the they will get a cancer – 250 millisievert is 25 rem by the way - but they are increasing the likelihood that they will get a cancer by 10 percent.

Chris Martenson: And so, gosh, some of the readings that I saw in there are pretty scary hot readings, some are definitely all the way up in the one sievert zone for some of the areas and some are hotter in all of that. So we’ve got these damaged buildings – they are sending people in. My concern has been that there are only so many people who are trained to work in those facilities and so they know them and they know them well, the systems, the parts, and how to even navigate the hallways. Once they have gone through and used up their allotment of radiation exposure – they are done, right? And I guess they train the next people to go in. One thing that concerns me is that I know that when Chernobyl went – Russia just threw hundreds of thousands of people at it in small little bits to clean that up. Here we are seeing a very different response, it is much more measured and it is relatively small teams by my eye. I look at satellite photos and I don’t see hundreds of thousands of people converging on that – I see a pretty focused response. How long is it going to take with a focused response like that to get this job done, do you think?

Arnie Gundersen: The Russians needed thousands of people because large fragments of the fuel had fallen on the surrounding farmland, so literally people would pick up a fragment in a wheelbarrow and run toward where the reactor was – throw that fragment into the reactor pit and they were done. They had received their lifetime exposure. In this case, while the radiation is not contained, it's not coming out of solid particles that can get picked up, it's coming out of this liquid. Woods Hole has already said that the ocean has ten times more radiation from Fukushima than the Black Sea did from Chernobyl. So the Chernobyl reaction was a large staff of people and because it sort of blew up and the Fukushima reaction, while it did blow up, a lot of it is going down and we’re just beginning to deal with it. They are importing workers from the US already and I suspect they will again. I was in the business as a Vice President, I would hire people to work in very high radiation zones. Now, we would train them for two to three weeks in a mockup and then they would have three minutes in a high radiation zone to do what we trained them for and that would be their yearly exposure. We would give them a check and say thank you very much, see you next year. And that’s what will happen here at Fukushima.

Chris Martenson: So talk about -- realistically – I mean this is going to be months, years, whatever, it's going to take a long time. What do they do at this point, are they going to entomb these things, are they required to just keep dumping water on these things until they finally cool down, capturing water all the way through? Or is there some way that they can maybe just throw up their hands and just pour a bunch of concrete on it and call it a day?

Arnie Gundersen: I think eventually they may get to the point of throwing up their hands and pouring the concrete on. They can’t do that yet, because the cores are still too hot. So we are going to see the dance we’re in for another year or so, until the cores cool down. At that point, there’s not anywhere near as much decay heat and you probably could consider filling them with concrete and just letting sit there, like we have it at Chernobyl, as a giant mausoleum. That would work for units 1, 2, and 3. Unit 4 is still a problem, because again all the fuel is at the top and you can’t put the concrete at the top because you will collapse the building and it's so radioactive, you can’t lift the nuclear fuel out. I used to do this as a living and Unit 4 has me stumped.

Chris Martenson: So what do they do, do you think?

Arnie Gundersen: I think they will be forced to build a building around the building and then, because you need heavy lifting cranes – cranes that lift a hundred and fifty tons, which are massive cranes, to put the put the nuclear fuel into canisters, which then can get removed. That is sort of what happened at TMI, but all of the fuel at TMI was still at the bottom of the vessel. But it was a three-year process to get the molten fuel out of Three Mile Island – four years actually. So the problem here is that all of the cranes that do that have been destroyed, at least on units 1, 3, and 4. And you can’t do it in the air. It has to be done under water. So my guess is that they will have to build a building around the building to provide enough shielding and water, so that they can then go in and put this fuel into a heavy lift canister.

Chris Martenson: Okay, all right, I hadn’t considered that. That’s a great insight.

So let me summarize here – we have these four reactors, three of them have melted through – one of them is – Unit 4 – is probably one of the more dangerous ones in the sense that it is going to be years to build a building around it. It's going to be years until really the situation is contained. And in unit four though, we are still concerned that in the year or two or however it takes to build a building and really stabilize that, another aftershock could come along. Or in the case of Unit 3, if another aftershock comes along and the pressure vessel is full of water there’s a chance here that we could see other event. That this situation is not yet fully stabilized in the sense that there are still surprises to be found. It's surprising where the water shows up. There might still be some surprises left in how the building behaves or systems hold up or fail. What else would you add to that summary?

Arnie Gundersen: The groundwater. I am very concerned – I am hearing nothing about ground water monitoring. We know the ocean – we know there have been leaks into the ocean. I am not convinced that there are not cracks in the structures that are allowing this highly radioactive water to get into the groundwater. And I have been talking to people in Japan and my recommendation there is that they should build a moat all the way around the reactor, down to bedrock, which is sixty feet or twenty meters, and about four and a half feet wide, which is a meter and a half wide. And fill it with a material called Zeolite. It's a very good absorber of radioactive material and it would prevent the outward migration of any of this radiation. That’s not happening and I don’t understand why.

So now we look at the building and we look at stopping the heat and the radiation that is going upward, but this is an enormous amount of radioactive material in the soil right now. And one of the prefectures nearby had radioactive sewage sludge. Someone who watches our site is an executive at a sewage business and he said it's not uncommon after an earthquake for groundwater to infiltrate a sewage system and that frightened me a lot, because if the groundwater is already contaminated out in these prefectures it could be a serious problem that is receiving no attention right now.

Chris Martenson: So generally speaking, do you have a sense of how fast groundwater migrates? Is this something that will be three miles away from the plant in ten years or in ten weeks. How big of a problem is this immediately?

Arnie Gundersen: I don’t think it's an immediate problem, but I do think unless mitigated pretty quickly, it can become an immediate problem. It moves slowly, but if it's already out of the barn, it's going to be harder the further out you have to build this trench, of course the bigger the trench has to be, so my goal is to trap it near the source, than to let the horse get too near the barn.

Chris Martenson: Okay, well thank you for that. What I would like to do now is I would like to move on to a part for our enrolled members and I would really like to talk about what the actual impacts of this are on people.



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Vast underestimation of radiation levels by Japan gov’t — Blames “calculation errors”
June 3rd, 2011.
The Ministry of Education and Science announced on June 3 that the estimated cumulative radiation level from March 12 to May 25 at one location in Namie-machi Fukushima Prefecture, 22 kilometers northwest of Fukushima I Nuke Plant, was 73.9 millisieverts. The Ministry also disclosed the cumulative radiation estimate map of the same period in the area around Fukushima I Nuke Plant.

Previously, the Ministry of Education and Science announced the cumulative radiation at this particular location up to May 11 was 31.7 millisieverts, but it corrected the number to 61.1 millisieverts. According to the person [unnamed] in charge at the Ministry, “A wrong formula was used in calculation in some parts.” Calculation errors were found for 10 additional locations within Namie-machi, resulting in a vast underestimation of the radiation levels.
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Highest-yet radiation levels are found near a steam vent in a reactor in Japan’s stricken nuclear plant as work continues to prevent more radiation from leaking from other reactors.

Link to video. radiation Levels video
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Pressure in Reactor No. 1 drops close to normal air pressure — Proves that ‘air’ inside reactor is escaping outside
June 5th, 2011 at 04:11 AM .
Pressure inside an operating reactor is normally around 70 atmospheres. But after the disaster, the pressure indicator showed 6 atmospheres in the Number 1 reactor, raising questions about data reliability.

On Friday, the utility replaced the gauge with a new one and made measurements again.

The reading was 1.26 atmospheres as of 11 AM on Saturday, almost equal to normal air pressure. The company says this proves that air inside the reactor is escaping outside.
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NRC afraid bottom of Reactor No. 3 will break out and dump everything — First time it’s mentioned problem.

Now, Unit 3 has another problem and the NRC mentioned it yesterday for the first time and it gets back to that saltwater and the effect on iron. They are afraid that the reactor bottom will break, literally just break right out and dump everything. Because it’s now hot and it’s got salt on it and it’s got the ideal conditions for corrosion. So the big fear on Unit 3 is that it will break at the bottom and whatever else remains in it, which could be the entire core, could fall out suddenly.

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The Japanese public is growing increasingly skeptical over Tokyo's handling of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, with noisy rumours about unused dosimeters becoming one of the latest points of contention with the government.

The continuing crisis has put the government under immense pressure and could yet lead to the resignation of Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

The government is also facing hard questions from a distrustful public, including those stemming from recent allegations that Tokyo failed to put into service tens of thousands of dosimeters donated by Western countries in the wake of the nuclear crisis.

CTV News has learned that all of the dosimeters Canada sent to Japan have been distributed.

Jung-Suk Ryu, a press liaison for the Japanese embassy in Ottawa, told CTV News in a telephone interview on Friday morning that the 5,000 dosimeters sent from Canada were "immediately" distributed upon arrival in Japan.

However, Ryu said he could not offer comment on the dosimeters sent from other countries.

In Japan, David Wagner, the director of crisis communications for the U.S.-based Country Risk Solutions, has followed the claims of the missing dosimeters closely, but has not been able to confirm any details himself.

But he recently wrote about the claims on Huffington Post, describing the video he saw of a Japanese lawmaker questioning government officials about why 40,000 dosimeters are "sitting in a warehouse at Narita airport" instead of behind handed out to people near the nuclear plant.

"Why no one is writing about this, especially since it became very public in a YouTube video involving Social (Democratic) Party Leader Mizuho Fukushima is beyond me," Wagner said in a recent email sent to CTV News.

Wagner said demand for dosimeters and personal Geiger counters soared as the public began to grasp the implications of the chaos at the Fukushima plant.

"In the beginning of the crisis in mid-March, they were sold out everywhere. Even overseas it was difficult to acquire," Wagner said.

Gordon Edwards, the president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, said dosimeters provide a measure of how much external radiation a person is exposed to and can provide insights as to whether further medical testing is needed for individuals.

"They are vitally important in keeping any track on radiation exposure," Edwards told CTV News during a telephone interview from Montreal.

To date, some 80,000 people living in Japan have been forced to evacuate towns that have been contaminated by the radiation-leaking plant in Fukushima.

With files from The Associated Press
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Workers at Fukushima plant treated for dehydration

Two workers at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been treated for dehydration at a hospital.

With 9 workers getting heatstroke, Tokyo Electric Power Company says it will take more measures to ensure the health of workers at the plant.

TEPCO said the 2 workers were installing cables near a nuclear waste disposal facility. Both are contract workers in their 40s. They were sent to a clinic inside the plant on Sunday morning after they said they felt unwell. TEPCO said they were later sent to a hospital in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, where they were treated for dehydration.

TEPCO said no radioactivity was detected, but one worker was advised to stay in hospital for about a week, and the other to stay home for 3 days.

The company said it is advising workers to wear vests containing cooling gels underneath the gear that protects against radiation, but that one of the 2 workers was not wearing a vest.

As the weather becomes hotter, the working environment at the plant will become tougher for workers wearing protective suits.

TEPCO plans to improve working conditions by setting up new rest areas and securing 2,500 cooling vests.

Monday, June 06, 2011 05:13 .

Disposal of radioactive debris to go ahead

A panel on nuclear waste disposal has decided to allow municipalities to burn highly radioactive debris if they have incinerators that can remove radioactive substances.

The panel was set up by the environment ministry. Members of the expert panel made the decision on Sunday.

The ministry measured radioactive substances on debris inside Fukushima Prefecture at collection posts, excluding areas such as those in a 20-kilometer radius no-entry zone. It had already decided to allow 10 municipalities where radiation levels are relatively low to resume usual methods of disposal, such as burning and burying.

On Sunday the panel discussed ways to dispose of highly radioactive debris in the areas.

The participants agreed, in principle, to allow municipalities to burn debris highly contaminated with radioactive substances if their incinerators have filters or electric dust cleaners to remove the substances.

The environment ministry will inform these municipalities of the decision by the end of June, after checking the capabilities of each facility.

The panel also agreed that the ministry and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency should measure the radioactivity of debris inside the 20-kilometer radius no-entry-zone and evacuation zones where monitoring has not been conducted.

Monday, June 06, 2011 05:13.

TEPCO mulls ways to cut humidity in No.2 reactor

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says it will try to reduce humidity inside the Number 2 reactor building.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says humidity and high radiation levels mean workers can work only for short periods of time even if they wear protective gear.

TEPCO says it plans to reduce the amount of radioactive materials inside the reactor building and then open the doors to lower humidity, now at 99.9 percent. The decision came after the failure of its initial attempt to bring down the humidity level. The company initially thought vapor from a storage pool of spent nuclear fuel was responsible for the high humidity. It installed a device to cool down the water. The device cooled down the water but failed to reduce the humidity.
At the Number 1 reactor, a device to reduce radioactive substances was installed in May. But TEPCO says the device needs to be adjusted for the Number 2 reactor since it has low resistance to humidity.

It is possible that radioactive substances will leak out of the Number 2 reactor building once the doors are open. TEPCO says it will make a final decision after carefully assessing the levels of radioactivity.

Work to fix a water level gauge was supposed to begin as early as mid-June, to help ensure stable cooling. But there may be a delay if the company cannot reduce the humidity.

Monday, June 06, 2011 05:.



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Worried residents near evacuation zone weigh leaving

Hiroyuki Sato / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

FUKUSHIMA--Fearing high radiation levels from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, people living just outside the evacuation zone established by the government are considering leaving voluntarily.

The cities of Date and Soma, both in Fukushima Prefecture, are preparing to offer public housing units and other facilities to people who live close to the evacuation zone the government established outside the no-entry zone within a 20-kilometer radius from the plant.

The choice whether to leave is a difficult one. The Ishida district of Date's Ryozenmachi area, for example, is located just north of Iitatemura, all of which has been deemed within the evacuation zone.

A monitoring survey conducted in Ishida in May found the estimated annual amount of radiation at one site there would be 21.7 millisieverts. This exceeds the 20-millisievert level used to determine which areas should be designated as evacuation zones.

Planning to offer municipal housing units for free to people who want to evacuate, the city government surveyed 160 residents of 44 households in Ishida. Of them, 48 residents of 15 households expressed their desire to move into public housing units in a different area of the same city, where radiation levels are lower.

The family of Akio Kanno, a 58-year-old driver living in the Ishida district, decided that four of its seven members, including Akio's eldest son, Takayuki, 31, would move into a public housing unit.

Kanno said he was worried about the health of his grandchildren--a 4-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl who has been hospitalized a number of times for colds and other ailments.

After the outbreak of the crisis at the plant, Akio stopped allowing his grandchildren to play outdoors. They now ride bicycles with training wheels, which Akio gave them as birthday gifts before the March 11 earthquake, only inside their home.

"I wanted to go out with my grandchildren, but now I don't know when I can let them ride the bicycles [outside]," Akio said.

Kanji Kanno, 32, a livestock farmer, has yet to decide whether to move to public housing. Of his nine-member family, he is particularly worried about the health of his 3- and 4-year-old sons.

However, he also wants to take care of his about 70 cows. If he leaves his parents and grandparents alone at the home, it would mean additional living expenses.

"What is the best option?" he wondered.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said it intends to provide sufficient information to local residents, believing the estimated amount of accumulated radiation likely would decline over time, as daily measurements are decreasing.

In the Tamano district of Soma, which also is adjacent to Iitatemura, about 10 of 161 households intend to move to temporary housing units in northern areas of the city, according to local officials.

A 28-year-old homemaker in one such household said, "I don't know what the truth is about the nuclear plant, so I want to move out soon so I don't have any remorse about my child's health."

A 51-year-old hospital worker who moved from an emergency evacuation preparation area in Minami-Soma to the Tamano district, where her family lives, said: "I evacuated because I thought the radiation levels wouldn't be so high in this area.

"If such information [about the high level of radiation] had been disclosed earlier, I could have made a different decision."

A Soma city official said the municipal government plans to consult with households individually to confirm whether they want to leave the area in question.
(Jun. 6, 2011)
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Japanese retirees ready to risk Fukushima front line.

TOKYO, June 6 | Mon Jun 6, 2011 5:15am EDT

TOKYO, June 6 (Reuters) - At age 72, Yasuteru Yamada believes he has a few more good years ahead.

But not so many that the retired engineer is worried about the consequences of working on the hazardous front line cleaning up the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

"I will be dead before cancer gets me," said Yamada, who has organized an unlikely band of more than 270 retirees and older workers eager to work for nothing but the sense of service at the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Yamada, who spent 28 years at Sumitomo Metal Industries, says the Fukushima clean-up job is too sprawling, too complex and too important to be left to Tokyo Electric Power , the Fukushima plant's embattled utility operator.

Instead, he wants to see the Japanese government take over at Fukushima with his group of greying volunteers with expertise in civil engineering and construction stepping in on an unpaid basis, "like the Red Cross."

Japanese government officials were initially cool to the unsolicited proposal. Goshi Hosono, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, dismissed Yamada's volunteers as a "suicide corps".

But in a late May meeting at Tokyo Electric's headquarters, Hosono seemed more receptive to the suggestion amid mounting concern about the health risks for younger workers already at Fukushima.

Three unidentified workers collapsed at Fukushima from apparent heat stroke over the weekend. Meanwhile, at least two plant workers have exceeded the government's limit for radiation exposure by a wide margin, putting them at a higher risk of cancer and other disease.

"The problem is that the first wave of workers came for the money. And they didn't - they couldn't - object to the conditions," said Yamada, who has been running his project from a tiny office above a beauty shop a short walk from Tokyo Electric's headquarters.
"Because we don't expect a fee we can speak to (Tokyo Electric) as equals," he said, adding that his team would press the utility to uphold the highest safety standards.

Tokyo Electric aims to bring three reactors at Fukushima that experienced a meltdown to a stable shutdown by January. After that, experts see a project of a decade or more to remove the uranium and plutonium fuel and secure the site.

Kazuhiko Ishida, a 63-year-old construction worker in Shiga prefecture, has volunteered to join Yamada's team. As a young worker, he helped build the Fukushima No. 1 reactor's outer shell and says he had "complicated feelings" watching it blown apart by a hydrogen explosion after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami as its reactor melted down.

"I told my wife I wanted to go," he said. "She told me to do what I had to do."

Yamada met on Monday with Trade Minister Banri Kaieda, whose ministry oversees Japan's nuclear safety agency. Kaieda seemed receptive to the proposal of a volunteer corps, he said.

"Depending on the situation, there might be a need for a suicide mission. :( :( :( :( But that is the last resort," Yamada said. "I myself would volunteer for that, but everyone must make up their own mind." (Editing by Daniel Magnowski)
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Scientists call for radiation exposure reduction

A group of scientists at Fukushima University is urging the prefectural government to take stronger precautions in reducing radiation exposure to citizens.

The croup comprises 12 associate professors at the university, including Hazuki Ishida, an environmental engineering specialist. On Monday they presented the Fukushima Governor with a 7-point request in
connection with the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

A health risk management expert for the prefecture said that radiation exposure of up to 10 microsieverts per hour causes no health problems.

But for those remaining outdoors in such conditions for only 5 days, the total radiation exposure will exceed 1 millisievert, the annual limit for ordinary people, as recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
The professors called for reducing exposure to radioactivity as much as possible and urged the prefecture to establish guidelines toward this purpose.

They also asked that prefectural government radiation experts who say that even relatively low levels of radioactivity are harmful be included as health risk management advisors.
They also requested that the prefectural government draw up and make public a concrete plan to remove contaminated topsoil.
Ishida says the prefectural government should take measures to protect its residents, on the premise that even low levels of radiation exposure are dangerous.

Monday, June 06, 2011 22:31 +0900 (JST)
No.1 reactor vessel damaged 5 hours after quake

Japan's nuclear regulator says the meltdown at one of the Fukushima reactors came about 5 hours after the March 11th earthquake, 10 hours earlier than initially estimated by the plant's operator.

The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency on Monday issued the results of its analysis of data given to it by Tokyo Electric Power Company.

The report says the fuel rods in the Number 1 reactor began to be exposed 2 hours after the earthquake due to the loss of the reactor's cooling system in the tsunami. Its fuel rods may have melted down 3 hours later, causing the damage to the reactor. This means the meltdown occurred about 10 hours earlier than TEPCO estimated last month.

The nuclear agency also says a meltdown damaged the Number 2 reactor about 80 hours after the quake, and the Number 3 reactor 79 hours after the quake.

The agency's analysis shows that the Number 2 reactor damage came 29 hours earlier than the TEPCO estimate, and the Number 3 reactor damage came 13 hours later than in the utility's assessment.

The agency says the total amount of radioactive iodine 131 and cesium 137 released from the Numbers 1, 2 and 3 reactors for the 6 days from March 11th is estimated at 770,000 terabecquerels.

That is about twice the figure mentioned in April when the agency upgraded the severity of the accident to the highest level of 7 on an international scale.

The agency attributes the discrepancies to the assumption that radioactive substances might have been released from the Number 2 reactor containment vessel as well as from its suppression chamber.

Monday, June 06, 2011.
Govt. document shows offsite center dysfunctional

An internal document from Japan's nuclear safety agency reveals that an emergency response office was nearly dysfunctional at the time of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on March 11th.

NHK has obtained a document from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency that shows how the office, called an "off-site center" failed to function properly due to a rise in radiation levels in the wake of a power outage.

Off-site centers were established at 22 locations near nuclear power plants throughout the country after a criticality accident in 1999 at a nuclear fuel processing plant in Tokai Village in Ibaraki Prefecture.

Officials of the national and local governments, police and Self-Defense Forces were to gather at these offices in the event of nuclear power plant accidents to formulate plans to evacuate residents.

A Nuclear Safety and Industrial Agency log shows that an off-site center 5 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi plant was barely functional after the March 11th earthquake.

It reveals that after the power outage, an emergency diesel generator did not work at all, communications were down, and other critical functions were lost.

The document reveals that officials from only 3 out of more than 20 organizations assembled at the off-site center at around 10:00 PM on March 11th, 7 hours after the earthquake.

On the following day, the document shows that radiation levels were rising inside the center after an explosion occurred at the Number One Reactor building. It is believed that the off-site center was poorly equipped and unable to prevent radioactive materials from getting in.

Later, as radiation levels continued to rise, the authorities decided to relocate the functions of the off-site center to the Fukushima Prefectural Government office, 60 kilometers from the nuclear plant, on March 16th.

Monday, June 06, 2011

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June 7th, 2011
BREAKING: More serious than a meltdown — Japan Gov’t now raising possibility that fuel had a “melt through” at all 3 reactors
The Japanese government will submit a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency that raises the possibility the fuel dropped through the bottom of the pressure vessels [of the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors], a situation described as a “melt through” and considered more serious than a “meltdown,”

5.77 microsieverts per hour of radiation measured near Tokyo at ground level — Gov’t “is desperately trying to keep it quiet”
I am 135 miles / 220 Km south of Fukushima, on the outskirts of the Tokyo area. It is Tuesday, June 7th [...] I just walk outside of my house and …. radiation. The air is not dangerous but the ground is. The radiation is much higher in low lying areas and the government here is desperately trying to keep it quite.

Video Link ........... http://youtu.be/i9a0Q1v93SA
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Tuesday, June 7, 2011
#Fukushima II (Not I) Nuke Plant Wants to Dump 3,000 Tons of Water into the Ocean

Did you even know that there was water in the basement of Fukushima II ("Daini")? And that water needs to be treated to remove the radioactive materials?

TEPCO fears that the power supply equipments in the basements may degrade from the salt water from tsunami, but if they have been sitting in the salt water for nearly 3 months, they are practically worthless, I would assume.

Again, a brilliant design by GE, having the power supply in the basement in a nuclear power plant right by the ocean in an earthquake/tsunami-prone country.
It has been revealed that TEPCO wants to release about 3,000 tons of water in the reactor buildings [and turbine buildings, according to the news clip at the site] of Fukushima II Nuclear Power Plant. However, fearing the negative effect on marine products, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is strongly against the plan, making the negotiations between TEPCO and the Ministry difficult.
The reactors at Fukushima II Nuke Plant are in "cold shutdown". But the tsunami after the March 11 earthquake inundated the reactor buildings and the turbine buildings. TEPCO planned the release of this large amount of water into the ocean, and has been negotiating with the government officials.
This salt water is estimated to be about 3,000 tons. Since it has been sitting in the basements for long time now, the power supply equipments in the basements may degrade
TEPCO says it will remove the radioactive materials in the water to the level lower than allowed by law before releasing it into the ocean. But the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is strongly against the plan, fearing the effect on the marine products.
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Tuesday, June 7, 2011
#Radiation in Japan: Gifu Prefecture Doesn't Have Potassium Iodide Pills Ready for Residents
Gifu Prefecture, which sits right about the middle of Japan and downwind from the "Genpatsu Ginza" (Nuke Plant Thoroughfare) in Fukui Prefecture where 14 nuclear reactors including the fast breeder Monju are located right on the pristine Wakasa Bay, admits that it didn't have potassium iodide pills for the residents ready for a nuclear accident. Gifu Shinbun reported on June 7 (in Japanese).
According to Gifu Shinbun, the Gifu prefectural government used to store about 2,500 doses, but that was ditched in 2006, partly because there was a company that manufactured potassium iodide pills in the prefecture. The government decided to rely on the company and the pharmaceutical industry associations in the prefecture to supply the pills to the government as necessary in a nuclear accident.

Gifu Prefecture has a population of over 2 million as of August 2010.

The newspaper reports that in late March this year after the Fukushima accident, the pharmaceutical company donated 35,000 doses of potassium iodide, which then were distributed to seven hospitals in 5 areas.

Well, Gifu Prefecture is not alone. Back on March 16, CBS News in the US reported that the Japanese national government only had 230,000 doses of potassium iodide.

(Is it any wonder that 2 TEPCO employees who exceeded 250 millisievert/yr limit by wide margin didn't take potassium iodide after one day? Maybe there were no more doses...)

Nuclear power plants have been sold to the populace as "safe" for almost a half century in Japan. Stocking up on potassium iodide has been considered an awkward admission that the nuke plants may not be so safe, and therefore hasn't been done at least publicly. It turns out it hasn't been done privately either.
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Govt report calls for measures on multi-disasters

A government report for the world nuclear watchdog says Japan should step up measures to deal with multiple disasters.

The report for the International Atomic Energy Agency describes the challenges in simultaneously dealing with the damage from the March 11th earthquake and tsunami as well as the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

It says the quake and tsunami cut off roads, obstructing the transport of materials and fuel needed to respond to the nuclear accident. Communication systems were also disrupted, hampering contact between the plant, Fukushima Prefecture and Tokyo.

The report also says the response to the quake and tsunami required so much manpower that there were not enough government officials and experts to deal with the nuclear accident.

It says the nuclear crisis is forcing residents around the plant to evacuate for much longer than initially anticipated.

The report points to the importance of securing distribution and communication channels and making better preparations for the prolonged impact of a nuclear accident.

Wednesday, June 08,

Utilities asked to submit nuclear safety measures

The government's nuclear safety agency has instructed utility companies across Japan to come up with measures to better respond to a serious nuclear accident like the one at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The government has compiled a report for the International Atomic Energy Agency about the nuclear accident. It said the Fukushima plant lacked sufficient safety measures to deal with such a serious accident that caused the loss of all power sources.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency asked utility firms to take such measures as preparing portable lights and communication equipment as well as generator trucks. These vehicles would be used for emergency ventilation to keep radiation below certain levels in the central control room.
The agency also proposes boring holes or removing panels in a reactor building if there is a high concentration of hydrogen. The measure is aimed at releasing hydrogen outside to prevent an explosion.

The agency has instructed utility companies to submit the safety measures by Tuesday next week.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Ministry failed to publish some radiation data

The Japanese government says it failed to publish some radiation data from the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The science and technology ministry says it did not release radiation monitoring data from March 16th through April 4th and radiation measurements for soil on March 16th and 17th. The data was taken by the Fukushima prefectural government outside a 20-kilometer radius of the plant.

The ministry apologized for not disclosing the data.
It says it thought the Fukushima government had already released it.

The data was collected as a reference for deciding on evacuation measures and restrictions on food and water consumption. The ministry says the unpublished information does not affect the steps that are now in place.

The ministry says it will publish the data on its website.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

    The IAEA is to survey the long-term effects of the spillage of radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the environment in the Pacific Ocean
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Unwanted radioactive sewage sludge piling up

Posted Image
Bags of incineration ash are piled up on the passageway of a sewage treatment facility in Kawasaki. (Mikio Kano)

Radioactive sewage sludge is quickly filling up treatment facilities in eastern Japan as recycling companies have refused to accept it for safety reasons.

The central government, which has only presented guidelines for temporary storage, plans to set standards on final disposal.

Radioactive cesium was first detected in sludge at a sewage treatment facility in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, on May 1.

Radioactive sewage sludge has since turned up at facilities in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and other prefectures.

Officials believe that radioactive materials from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant flowed into sewage pipes with rainwater and were condensed during sewage treatment.

In normal times, about 80 percent of sewage sludge nationwide is recycled into cement and fertilizers after it is incinerated into ash.

But at the Iriezaki Centralized Sludge Treatment Center in Kawasaki, about 220 tons of incineration ash in 550 double-layered bags have been piled up on the passageway and elsewhere.

Director Takashi Ookouchi said the center will run out of storage space in a few days.

An inspection on May 13 found 470 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram of sewage sludge and 13,200 becquerels per kilogram of incineration ash.

A local company that reuses ash for cement said it will not take it until safety is confirmed.

At a sewage treatment facility in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, bags of incineration ash occupy half of an underground warehouse.

A cement company has refused to accept it since radioactive cesium and iodine were found from sludge and ash.

Toshiyuki Hattori, chief of the sewage treatment plant, said the storage space will run out at the end of June.

In Ibaraki Prefecture, radioactive sludge has been found at all of its eight sewage treatment facilities, and shipments have been suspended.

Concerns are growing among workers and residents about health effects.

The city of Chichibu and three neighboring towns in Saitama Prefecture submitted an emergency request to Governor Kiyoshi Ueda on June 3 to demand the central government set specific disposal standards.

The Chichibu municipal government also ordered protective clothing for workers at sewage treatment facilities.

The city of Saitama will post on its website results of inspections at sewage facilities, while the Saitama prefectural government will place dosimeters at sewage facilities.

The Tokyo metropolitan government decided in May to bury incineration ash from its 23 wards at a disposal facility in Tokyo Bay.

Ash was mixed with cement and covered with soil, but the amount of radiation at the site was three to eight times larger than in Shinjuku Ward on May 25.

In late March, 170,000 becquerels of radioactivity was detected in 1 kilogram of incineration ash at a sewage treatment facility in Koto Ward, and radioactive materials were also found at other facilities.

At that time, the metropolitan government shipped the ash for recycling because the central government did not have guidelines.

The Nagano prefectural government is worried because cesium was found in incineration ash at a sewage facility in Suwa.

The prefecture has been selling the ash, which contains a high concentration of gold, for the past three years, raising tens of millions of yen annually.

It is not clear where the gold came from. One theory is that elements from a nearby gold vein flow into hot spring water and find their way into sewage pipes.
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Blackout hits Fukushima nuclear plant's Nos. 1, 2 reactors

TOKYO, June 8, Kyodo

The crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered power outages at its Nos. 1 and 2 reactors Wednesday, with lights cut off in the units' central control room, and water level and pressure indictors for one of the reactors out of service for more than three hours.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said the blackout did not affect its water injection operation to prevent the crisis from worsening and no evidence of abnormalities was found in data on the No. 2 reactor after power was restored in the evening, but the government urged the utility again to diversify power sources at the six-reactor complex.

The power outage occurred around 2:20 p.m. and electricity began to be restored around 5:30 p.m., the utility known as TEPCO said, adding that it is investigating the cause of the incident.
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The Nuclear Disaster That Could Destroy Japan – On the danger of a killer earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago

Link ...................... http://japanfocus.org/-Hirose-Takashi/3534
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Radiation leaking from Fukushima power plant should be monitored more closely

Residents of the Tokyo metropolitan area are becoming increasingly concerned about levels of radiation spreading to their neighborhoods from the tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

There are some areas called "hot spots," where high levels of radiation have been detected even though they are far away from the crippled nuclear plant. When radioactive substances leak from a nuclear facility as a result of an accident and spread through the sky, they fall on some limited areas depending on geographical features, wind direction and rain, resulting in high concentration of radiation in these areas.

Following the Chernobyl nuclear crisis that was ranked level 7 -- the worst level equal to the Fukushima crisis -- an area nearly 300 kilometers away from the plant was contaminated with high levels of radiation, forcing authorities to relocate local residents.

Municipal governments in Matsudo and five other cities in northwestern Chiba Prefecture requested the prefectural government to monitor radiation levels and release the results on the grounds that some data shows comparatively high levels of radiation in the area. The prefectural authorities complied, and conducted measurements of radiation levels in these cities.

The six municipal governments are urging the prefectural government to continue to regularly monitor radiation dosages in these areas, and to have the data examined by a working group that includes experts.

In Chiba Prefecture, high levels of radioactive substances in excess of the legal limits have been detected in spinach and some other locally grown vegetables.

A private organization that monitored radiation levels in Tokyo detected higher amounts of radiation than Tokyo Metropolitan Government official data. Residents of the 23 wards in central Tokyo and cities in the Musashino district in western Tokyo have voiced concerns about their exposure to radiation, prompting many of these municipalities to launch or plan measurements of radiation levels. Similar moves are spreading in neighboring Kanagawa and Saitama prefectures.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry has commissioned all of the nation's 47 prefectural governments to monitor radiation levels, but monitoring is conducted at only one location in each prefecture. Apart from this, only figures released by universities and data around the crippled nuclear plant are available.

On the other hand, observations by the government's System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information hint at the possibility that on the morning of March 15 -- when it is estimated that the largest amount of radioactive substances were released from the Fukushima plant since the crisis began -- such substances were likely to have spread toward the Kanto region around Tokyo.

Even experts are divided over the levels of radiation that could cause health hazards. Therefore, it is only natural that members of the general public wonder which standards they should believe. Some have expressed anxiety over possible contamination of water in swimming pools, which they fear could affect their children's health, as summer approaches.

Local governments must be sensitive about their residents' anxiety and proactively monitor radiation levels in a bid to relieve them. If specific and detailed data is released, individual residents can use the figures to try to reduce their exposure to radiation.

However, most municipal governments neither employ radiation experts nor have the expertise or equipment to monitor radiation levels. The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry says it intends to take action to monitor radiation levels and to reduce it in so-called "hot spots" if requested by a growing number of local residents. However, the national government is primarily responsible for responding to crises at nuclear power plants. It should step up its monitoring of radiation levels and set clear standards for monitoring methods employed by different organizations, which critics say vary from entity to entity. Prefectural governments should also proactively get involved in such efforts.
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Two Hundred and Thirty Nine Aftershocks Facing Fukushima by Sept. 9th, 2015

info link........ http://pissinontheroses.blogspot.com/2011/06/two-hundred-and-thirty-nine-aftershocks.html
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http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/nrsb/miscellaneous/SekimuraPresentation.pdf
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TOKYO—Japanese government officials said they are considering evacuating more towns affected by radiation, after recent monitoring data showed new "hot spots" of elevated contamination farther away from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The areas under review include one neighborhood each in two cities, and could affect more than 180 families. The areas fall outside Japan's existing evacuation zone of 30 kilometers, but within the 80-kilometer evacuation zone initially recommended by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The reports of additional radiation-threatened areas shows how, nearly three months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster, the Japanese government is still struggling to determine the extent of the risk to its population and how best to respond.

The possibility of more evacuations was confirmed following a series of recent reports that showed the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was more severe than earlier described. The data have added to concern among residents near the plant and elsewhere that the government hasn't done enough to protect its citizens, particularly children, from the harms of radiation.

"We really wanted Prime Minister [Naoto] Kan to show us a resolve that the government will take full responsibility for fixing the problems," said Katsunobu Sakurai, mayor of Minamisoma City, where one of the newly found hot spots is located. "Unfortunately, those of us who are on the ground have had to make our own judgments to reassure our people."

Mr. Sakurai said some residents have expressed concern about high levels of radiation in their neighborhood, prompting the city to request closer monitoring by the central and prefectural governments. Residents have grown more knowledgeable about radiation levels, in part as municipalities and non-profit organizations have leased measuring equipment.

Officials said the discovery of new hot spots doesn't mean there are new problems at Fukushima Daiichi. They said the elevated readings likely come from soil in the areas that absorbed the radiation spread in the air and through rain during the early days of the nuclear disaster, rather than from new accumulation.

The operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has said airborne radiation has been brought under control.

"The government would like to come up with the safest and most conservative possible steps to deal with the situation, with residents' health in mind," Tetsuro Fukuyama, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, said Thursday.

Tokyo's policy calls for the evacuation of residents when their estimated exposure to radiation is estimated to exceed 20 milisieverts for a full year. Based on the government's latest radiation monitoring data from May 25, four locations are newly determined to have surpassed that level. The government says there are no immediate health effects from exposure to those levels, at least in the short to medium terms.

The new hot spots, though located well outside the 30-kilometer evacuation zone surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi plant, are close to other places outside of the radius, to the northwest of the stricken plant, where the government has already ordered targeted evacuations.

Three of the four new hot spots are in the Ryozencho area of Date City, a neighborhood with 180 households located 50 kilometers from the plant. Ryozencho lies about 16 kilometers from the center of Fukushima City, the area's most populous community, with 300,000 people.

A Date City spokesman said the city is monitoring the situation closely while analyzing the latest data. The three points in Date showed estimated radiation levels of between 20.0 and 20.8 milisieverts per year.

Earlier in the week, Date delivered basic radiation monitoring devices to all 8,000 children in its schools. The children will wear badge-type dosimeters for about a month, according to an official at a local education committee, after which the devices will be sent to a laboratory to check radiation levels.

Another new hot spot, within Minamisoma's Haramachi neighborhood, has just "several households," Mr. Sakurai said at a news conference. The reading there was 23.8 milisieverts.
—Toko Sekiguchi and Hiroyuki Kachi contributed to this article.
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Radiation in No. 3 reactor too high for work

The operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says radiation levels in one of the reactor buildings remain too high for workers to do their jobs.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, sent 9 workers into the No.3 reactor building for about 20 minutes on Thursday, in a bid to start stabilizing the reactor.

The utility plans to inject nitrogen gas into the containment vessel to prevent accumulated hydrogen from causing an explosion. It also intends to install a system to cool the reactor with circulating water.

The workers withdrew after measuring radiation of 100 millisieverts per hour near the reactor's containment vessel.

TEPCO says it intended to limit the workers' exposure to below 5 millisieverts per hour. But as all 9 received higher doses, it has suspended work while considering a course of action.

Friday, June 10, 2011 20:23

TEPCO to install cooling system at No. 4 reactor

The operator of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant is preparing to install a circulatory cooling system for a spent nuclear fuel pool in the plant's Number 4 reactor building.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, has been using a vehicle to try to cool the pool, which contains 1,535 fuel rods, the most among the plant's 6 reactors. The rods continue to generate high heat, raising temperatures in the pool above 80 degrees Celsius.

TEPCO plans to start operating the cooling system as early as July to pump water out of the pool to a heat exchanger and return the water to the pool as coolant.

On Friday, workers entered the 4th floor of the building for the first time since a hydrogen blast on March 15th severely destroyed the building and damaged water pipes connected to the pool.

The workers checked the pipes and monitored radiation levels. Data on these matters is to be used to study routes for injecting water into the pool.

TEPCO began operating a similar circulatory cooling system at the plant's Number 2 reactor on May 31st.

Friday, June 10, 2011 19:45

High-temperature warnings to prevent heatstroke

Japanese weather officials will begin issuing high-temperature advisories from mid-July to prevent heatstroke.

The Meteorological Agency decided to take the step as the power shortages that followed the Fukushima nuclear plant accident have increased the risk of people developing heatstroke this summer.

The high-temperature advisories will be issued for all areas of Japan, except for Hokkaido and Okinawa, where power shortages are not expected. They will be issued for each prefecture and region when the temperatures for the next 2 days are forecast to be 35 degrees Celsius or higher.

In Miyagi and Aomori prefectures, advisories will be issued if temperatures are forecast to rise beyond 33 degrees, because temperatures in these 2 prefectures are usually lower than in other parts of Japan.

The Environment Ministry says the number of heatstroke cases increases when the temperature is above 30 degrees. It says the health risk becomes more severe when the temperature rises above 35 degrees. Last summer, more than 1,600 people died of heatstroke in Japan between July and September.

When issuing advisories, the Meteorological Agency will also caution people to take enough water and salt and to use air-conditioning properly. The head of the Agency's Office of Weather Disaster Prevention, Hiroyuki Uchida, says temperatures usually rise rapidly after the rainy season. He says that when an advisory is issued, room temperatures need to be lowered with air-conditioners and special care should be taken for the elderly.

Friday, June 10, 2011 14:12

Fukushima workers' exposure tops 650mSV

Detailed tests have found that 2 workers who were exposed to radiation at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant received doses of more than twice the government-mandated emergency limit.

The men in their 30s and 40s were each found in early June to have been exposed to over 250 millisieverts -- the new higher limit for exposure that the government introduced after problems began at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The National Institute of Radiological Sciences conducted 2 more rounds of detailed tests to measure the amount of radioactive iodine and cesium the 2 men could have inhaled.

After analyzing the men's work shifts since the March 11th disaster, the Institute concluded that the man in his 30s was exposed to 678 millisieverts, and the man in his 40s, 643 millisieverts. Internal exposure accounted for more than 80 percent of the figures.

The 2 men were on duty in the central control rooms of reactors No.3 and No.4. They have told the health and labor ministry that they don't remember whether they wore protective masks or not when a hydrogen explosion occurred at the No.1 reactor on March 12th.

The Institute said separately that it is conducting detailed tests on another Fukushima worker in his 50s, who could have received a radiation dose above the emergency limit.

Friday, June 10, 2011 19:45

Children in Fukushima to be given dosimeters

A city 60 kilometers away from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has decided to distribute dosimeters to all kindergarteners and school children to monitor their radiation exposure.

Voices of parents expressing concern about their children's health due to the radioactive contamination are growing louder.

Shoji Nishida, the mayor of Date City, Fukushima Prefecture, announced the plan on Thursday.

Date City is now outside the evacuation zone but earlier this month the estimated radiation levels at 3 locations topped the evacuation level of 20 millisieverts per year.

This level is 20 times higher than the long-term annual reference level for ordinary people recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

The city has allocated about 300,000 dollars to give dosimeters to about 8,000 children at local kindergartens, day-care centers, elementary and junior high schools.

Mayor Nishida said that the city decided to take the broad scale measurements as parents are deeply concerned about their children's radioactive exposure.

Friday, June 10, 2011 09:07

Cesium detected in Shizuoka tea

Radioactive cesium exceeding the legal limit was detected in tea made in a factory in Shizuoka City, more than 300 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Shizuoka Prefecture is one of the most famous tea producing areas in Japan.

A tea distributor in Tokyo reported to the prefecture that it detected high levels of radioactivity in the tea shipped from the city. The prefectural government confirmed the contamination on Thursday, detecting 679 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium. The legal limit is 500 becquerels.

The prefecture ordered the factory to refrain from shipping out the product.

After the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, radioactive contamination of tea leaves and processed tea has been found over a wide area around Tokyo.

Starting last month in Shizuoka Prefecture radioactive cesium has been detected in tea leaves and processed tea from many production areas, including Shizuoka city, up to the level of about 460 becquerels per kilogram. This is the first time that cesium beyond the legal limit was found in tea leaves picked in the prefecture.

Friday, June 10, 2011 06:45
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Friday, June 10, 2011
#Fukushima I Nuke Plant: Areva's System Leaks

TEPCO did the test run of the contaminated water processing facility by Areva at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, and found leaks in more than 10 places.
Oops.

But don't worry, only minor leaks. Just like they used to have a water puddle or two in the turbine building basements.
TEPCO announced on June 10 that leaks were found at the facility to treat contaminated water at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. TEPCO was doing the test run using regular water for the start of full-scale treatment on June 15, but the discovery of the leaks could delay the start.
The water processing facility was scheduled to start on June 15 to reduce the highly contaminated water in the reactor buildings and turbine buildings. If the start is delayed, TEPCO may run out of space to store the water.
Junichi Matsumoto of TEPCo said, "We don't know for sure that the system will be operational on June 15. It is possible that the date will be delayed because of the repair. As we haven't been thoroughly informed of the situation at Fukushima I [regarding the leaks], we don't know the extent of the necessary repair."
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Friday, June 10, 2011
#Fukushima I Nuke Plant Reactor 3 Bldg Has Over 6,400 Tons of Contaminated Water .
TEPCO announced on June 10 that they confirmed the presence of water in the basement of the Reactor 3 reactor building at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. TEPCO had estimated that 6,400 tons of water would be in the basement as of the end of May, based on the amount of water injected into the RPV. Now its existence has been confirmed.
According to TEPCO, workers entered the reactor building and descended the stairs from the 1st floor to the basement, and saw the water. Depth of the water was 5.8 meters [19 feet] from the basement floor, and the amount of water looked to be slightly more than TEPCO's estimate. The radiation level near the surface of the water was 51 millisieverts/hour.
According to TEPCO, it is possible that the RPV has been damaged by the core meltdown, leaking the water. TEPCO plans to test the water for radioactive materials.
Survey of the 1st floor found distorted doors of the instrument panel and a ladder dropped from the floor above. Part of the equipment was blackened with what looked like soot. TEPCO thinks they were caused by the hydrogen explosion.
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Japan 'concealed' data during nuke crisis.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 10/06/2011

Reporter: Ali Moore

Radiation expert Peter Karamoskos says the Japanese government "concealed" radiation exposure data during the country's nuclear crisis.
Transcript
ALI MOORE, PRESENTER: Well, as we've just seen the issue of nuclear radiation is causing some major health concerns in Japan.

To discuss this, I was joined a short while ago from Melbourne by nuclear radiologist, Peter Karamoskos.

Doctor Karamoskos is the public representative of the Radiation Health Committee of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, although he is not representing ARPANSA tonight.

Peter Karamoskos, welcome to Lateline

PETER KARAMOSKOS, NUCLEAR RADIOLOGIST: Thank you Ali, thanks for having me.

ALI MOORE: Three months on, it does seem that, not only does the news continue to get worse, it's a constantly changing scenario with a sort of drip-feed, if you like, of information; does that tell you that this government is really struggling to, I guess, assess the extent of this disaster and also the extent of the risk?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Well I think it's a combination of both really. Initially there was a paucity of information released and we thought that that was originally due to the fact that they just didn't have the information to hand. But as time wore on we realised that a lot of it that was being drip-fed to us was known to the government, to the Japanese government, and to the Japanese regulator from early on, and it just was not being released.

Of course you can't institute counter measures or introduce proper public health, or make proper public health decisions without timely information, and this is the risk that the Japanese people have faced.

ALI MOORE: So what do you think was known and not being released, and how did you, yourself, know that?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Well, we know that there's system called Speedy in Japan, which is an atmospheric monitoring system for radioactive discharges, it's throughout Japan. And what it does, is it assesses the levels of radioactivity at any particular point, combines it with the meteorological data and determines what the likely doses, or rather what the likely contamination levels in any particular area are. And further, over time it can integrate back and determine the overall burden on that particular part of the country.

Now this is run by the government. The data for two months following the disaster was concealed from the public, and only in early May did they concede that this was an error and they were prepared to release the data, and you can actually go to a website now and see what it is. Now they knew the data, they knew what the likely contamination was and, furthermore, they knew the isotopes at the time, so they could say, firstly, that the cores were damaged, the spent fuel ponds were probably involved and also they could determine the estimate of the burden. The argument they used in May as to why they didn't reveal this information, was that they didn't want to panic the population. I mean, this is absurd.

I might add that the Austrians, who used the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) monitoring data, the test ban treaty stations in the Northern Hemisphere, they determined within the first week to 10 days, that the contamination levels around Fukushima, within 20 kilometres, were probably going to be higher than that of Chernobyl. Furthermore, they could calculate, using their computer modelling, out to what the contamination levels were going to be out to 200 kilometres. Now, this is the Austrians.

The Japanese had much more reliable data and yet they concealed it from the public by their own words.

ALI MOORE: If they hadn't, how would it have changed the likely outcome?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Well, firstly, the problem lies in the exclusion zone. The Japanese instituted a 20 kilometre exclusion zone, and up to 30 kilometres they said people should stay indoors, but within the first week the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, both said that that was too little and you needed to have an 80 kilometre exclusion zone.

So that would, that's just basic public health 101, if you like. Furthermore, it would have enabled appropriate counter measures for people exposed to radioactive iodine.

Now I don't know precisely what the doses of people outside the exclusion zone were, but the fact that the overseas authorities were advocating an 80 kilometre exclusion zone, tells me that it wasn't of a safe level. And, perhaps, people who could have benefited from iodine, failed to receive it, and children particularly.

ALI MOORE: And the fact that we just heard today, for example, in fact yesterday it was, that radiation has been detected in tea grown in a prefecture south-west of Tokyo, when Fukushima is actually 220 kilometres north-east of the capital; what does that tell you?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Well it tells me that, first of all, the obvious thing, the contamination has entered the food chain. It's not only tea of course, but it's green leafy vegetables, the fish stocks off the coast there, I mean there's been widespread contamination. I'm not quite sure how, at 300 kilometres, the tea leaves that are being grown there have been contaminated to that extent. But it does say that the contamination levels are much greater than were originally revealed and thought.

ALI MOORE: We also heard earlier, in Mark Willacy's story, about the fact that Strontium-90, this so-called bone seeker, has been found as far away as 60 kilometres from the plant; how significant is that, how potentially dangerous is that?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Well strontium, radioactive strontium, is one of the fission by-products found in the nuclear core. So it's just another product that arises from fuel rod damage, the same as caesium and the iodine. The problem with strontium is it's long-lived, it's got a half-life of 30, 29 years. So, therefore, if you factor in about 10 half lives, you're looking at about 300 years before it is effectively removed, or decays in the environment.

But its health effects are due to the fact that it acts like calcium does, and gets taken in by bones, and it is a beta-emitter, which means that it's got a high degree of energy deposition in small distances in the bone, and it thus predisposes to bone cancer and Leukaemia. Of course those risks are proportional to the actual dose of anybody who's absorbed it.

But, you know, that just enhances the risk that the fall out poses to the public.

ALI MOORE: From what we do know, are you able to make an assessment of the risk to the Japanese people; is there enough information to say 'here are the most likely scenarios'?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Not in any precise way. I mean we know what the contamination levels are, and we know for a fact that severe contamination levels have exceeded the exclusion zone imposed by the Japanese. The plume of contamination extends north-west up to about 40-50 kilometres, at a level comparable to the exclusion zone in Chernobyl. Remember the contamination doesn't spread like a concentric circle, it spreads according to a plume, depending on the prevailing winds and the, and so on.

So we know that those levels are quite high at some distances. And furthermore, we know that the public will have been exposed to some extent. But there's too much imprecision, at this stage, to know what amounts of radioactive contamination have been absorbed, and what that dose has meant to the people, and therefore, we can't make that decision today.

But it does underscore the importance of there being a proper longitudinal study to study the effects on the population over the ensuing decades. Because, to the extent that this contamination predisposed to the development of cancer, you need a proper study to actually be able to measure it.

ALI MOORE: But that can take decades?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Absolutely, it can take up to 50-60 years before the full number of cancers are known. And that was part of the problem with Chernobyl, there were no internationally co-ordinated longitudinal studies with control groups. Now we were relying on variable cancer statistics from cancer registries, from various countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, of varying quality, and therefore, to this day, there's much conjecture about the absolute cancer numbers and deaths.

In fact, it's become so uncertain that it's become highly politicised and that's disappointing because it detracts from what we can actually learn for future public health implications.

ALI MOORE: What about other health impacts, how soon would you expect them to start to show up, and who is most vulnerable?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Well the most vulnerable are children. Children, particularly infancy, have three to four times the rate of induction of cancer. Women are one and a half times more likely to develop cancer than men, for similar doses. But, as I said, these will take some time to manifest. And if we are ever able to detect them, unless the proper studies are instituted.

I might add on that point, with children, the government has actually raised the public dose limit threshold from one millisievert per annum to 20 millisieverts for children outside the exclusion zone. The reasoning being that they didn't want to evacuate them, because they would be deprived of their education and so on. But it's an absurd proposition; they're posing unnecessary risks to children.

In fact, there's a worldwide campaign at the moment by medical practitioners, to get the Japanese government to reverse the absurd decision. Furthermore, the Japanese Government's scientific adviser resigned as a consequence of that decision.

ALI MOORE: And Peter Karamoskos, will the people who have been evacuated, will they ever be able to go home?

PETER KARAMOSKOS: I find the Japanese government's comments, that this is somehow a temporary situation and these people will return, a little bit puzzling, because we know that the levels of contamination in many places are comparable to those of the Chernobyl exclusion zones, which still apply 25 years later. These areas will be, or are, so highly contaminated, as we now know for certain, that it's unlikely these places will be inhabitable for, you know 200 years say, at least, particularly until the caesium decays to a safe enough level. The iodine has gone, the caesium has not. We're looking at 200,000 people; these people will not be going back home and, furthermore, this area will not be arable countryside. There is a lot of agriculture in the area as well, beef and so on. These industries have been wiped out, not to mention the fish stocks, what survived of the tsunami and earthquake, the fishing industries, has been wiped out by the contamination and the radioactive contamination of the food stocks there.

ALI MOORE: Extraordinary challenges for the Japanese people.

Peter Karamoskos, many thanks for talking to Lateline tonight.

PETER KARAMOSKOS: Thank you for having us Ali, pleasure.
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Discrimination increases torment of Fukushima

* Rick Wallace, Tokyo correspondent
* From: The Australian
* June 11, 2011 12:00AM

IT was supposed to be a lifetime highlight, but the wedding plans of a bride-to-be from Fukushima have turned into a nightmare thanks to the new post-crisis phenomenon of radiation discrimination.

The woman, whose name is not yet known, had booked a photographer for her wedding this month and was looking forward to tying the knot with her partner of eight years.

But her plans turned to ashes when her future mother-in-law blurted out: "What if we don't have a healthy child because of the radiation?"

It scarcely mattered that she had been living in Tokyo and was no closer to the plant than the majority of Japanese - the fact she grew up in Fukushima was enough for her to be discriminated against.

Although her friends were looking forward to the wedding to brighten the gloom of their post-tsunami lives, she called off her engagement, saying she could not accept such prejudice.

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Her story surfaced on a blog and spread through Japanese online chat rooms, where it began to be dismissed by some as internet myth.

However, The Weekend Australian has spoken to the wedding photographer who first posted the story and he has confirmed its accuracy, although he declined to provide names.

While Japanese society's cohesion and strength has shone through during this disaster, isolated examples of discrimination against the tens of thousands of refugees from around the nuclear plant began surfacing not long after the March 11 quake.

They include institutional and individual discrimination. The government of the city of Tsukuba, just northeast of Tokyo, was forced to apologise after forcing Fukushima area refugees who had sought shelter to obtain "radiation-free" certificates or undergo screening.

The Mayor of Minamisoma, a town of 71,000 that lies 25km from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, said this week he been approached directly by several victims of discrimination.

Katsunobu Sakurai said: "I was told by a mother with some children that when they went to a different area of Japan, they were warned by other children: 'You are contaminated don't come near me.'

"The children came home in tears. Having heard such stories, I made an appeal to the national government to ensure that proper education is given so that children do not say such terrible things."

Japanese media have reported on a Fukushima area evacuee family with young children that was driven out of Funabashi City near Tokyo after local children complained they might "infect" them with radiation.

Although such examples are isolated, the severity and callousness of them led chief government spokesman Yukio Edano to condemn such actions. But many Japanese from outside the affected area remain wary in their dealings with Fukushima locals.

The Fukushima Bar Association says evacuees and their children have been victimised and petrol stations have denied access to cars with Fukushima plates.

"Discrimination to the Fukushima people is based on misunderstandings and prejudice, and it is an extremely serious violation of human rights," association chairman Akihiro Sugano said.

"Fukushima people have suffered from a great earthquake and tsunami. And because of the nuclear power plant accident, these people are now forced to leave their home town.

"In the midst of such unrest, it is extremely distressing to face discriminatory treatment at a new place where they evacuated to.

"It becomes more serious for the children if they are bullied or teased at school because that's where they spend most of their time apart from their homes."

The Weekend Australian spoke to a Fukushima area courier company whose Tokyo customers were still insisting they don't bring parcels using trucks with Fukushima prefecture plates.

"So we agreed to deliver products up to Saitama (north of Tokyo) and hand the parcels over to another company, and they do the final delivery to the Tokyo area clients," Akai Transport president Jinichi Sasaki said.

"But it is, of course, not a very pleasant way of doing business."
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The Irish Times - Saturday, June 11, 2011
Unthinkable nuclear woes may yet become normal in Japan.

Not much is worse than children having radiation metres strapped to their chests, writes DAVID McNEILL in Tokyo

FROM THE countryside of post-disaster Japan come two starling stories: 8,000 schoolchildren in Date City, 60km from the ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant, are to be given dosimeters to measure radiation. Thousands more children in day-care centres, kindergartens and primary schools in towns and villages around the area are likely to follow suit.

Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometres southwest, officials in Shizuoka Prefecture, home to the nation’s tea-growing industry, have reportedly asked Tokyo retailers to refrain from informing consumers that above-normal levels of radiation have been detected on tea leaves. The prefecture felt that issuing the warning could “fan public anxiety”, said Kyodo News.

It’s hard to imagine something much more frightening than five-year-olds marching off to irradiated school playgrounds in the morning with Geiger counters strapped to their chests.

Yet otherwise, the story, exactly three months since Japan’s worst ever seismic event on March 11th, is a very predictable tug of war between those who want business as usual, and those who say nothing will ever be the same.

With memorable exceptions, including the elite professor who burst into tears on national TV because he couldn’t toe the government line on radiation, officialdom and business have united in assuring Japan that nuclear power is safe. Industry minister Banri Kaieda said yesterday that without the nation’s 54 reactors, 30 of which are off-line, the economy would be effectively crippled.

The government says it is screening food and water, monitoring the fallout from the Fukushima plant, and evacuating those in real danger. Dissenters will be out in force across the country today, protesting this line and demanding the permanent shutdown of the reactors. Most people will sit at home, frustrated and anxious at the lingering atomic crisis on their doorstep.

In carefully modulated dispatches, Fukushima plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co has made it clear the crisis is not over. Frantic efforts to cool the complex after the world’s first triple meltdown have left a staggering 100,000 tons of highly radioactive water on site, which could leak. The threat of more explosions has not been ruled out.

Observers in the press lament the once unthinkable: a new generation of hibakusha – the name given to survivors of the twin nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. About 80,000 nuclear refugees have officially left the 30km zone around the plant. Thousands more are unofficially scattered around the country, fleeing radiation.

The nuclear pall and the threat – real or imagined – of tens of thousands of extra cancer victims in the decades ahead has overshadowed the continuing plight of tsunami and earthquake victims in the northeast. Twenty-three thousand are dead or missing. Nearly 100,000 people are still homeless, living behind cardboard partitions and eating donated food in shelters.

Shigeko Oikawa, who shares a single tiny room with her husband and three young children in the coastal city of Ofunato, says many are struggling to rebuild. Next week she will move to temporary housing while the family home is being reconstructed, uphill from where her house was swallowed by the tsunami. Her family, she says, is one of the lucky ones. “We own our land. Others will have to rebuild from scratch.”

Many victims here snort with derision at the political drama being played out in Tokyo, hundreds of kilometres away. Prime minister Naoto Kan is a lame duck, living on borrowed time after bickering lawmakers from his party sided with the opposition to force him out.

Japan will over the summer elect its sixth prime minister in five years, probably to head a ragbag coalition government of conservatives and liberals.

Katsubobu Sakurai, major of the stricken city of Minamisoma, which lost over 400 people in the disaster, says Kan is paying the price for a lack of leadership. “The prime minister could have avoided the no-confidence motion had he said ‘I will do everything in my power to help’, and then moved mountains to do so. But he didn’t. The people entrusted their lives to the politicians – they should have led.”

In the absence of that direction, local people and governments have taken the initiative. It was the protests of parents in Date City that forced mayor Shoji Nishida to announce its plan. Fitting children with dosimeters will cost $300,000, which is the price of protecting the under-15s from annual radiation estimated in three so-called hot spots at more than 20 millisieverts. This is 20 times the non-crisis level recommended by international experts.

Like many stories over the last three months, it is just one more example of how a national crisis can normalise the once unthinkable.
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Fukushima already ten times worse than Chernobyl in ocean waters, suggests data

Saturday, June 11, 2011.
(NaturalNews) Recent readings taken roughly 19 miles out to sea from the Fukushima nuclear power facility in Japan have revealed radioisotope levels ten times higher than those measured in the Baltic and Black Seas after the massive Chernobyl disaster. Because Fukushima is much closer to water than the Chernobyl plant is, the ongoing fallout there is shaping up to be far worse than Chernobyl, at least as far as the world's oceans are concerned, and time will tell just how devastating this massive disaster will be on the entire world as radiation continues to circulate around the globe.

"Given that the Fukushima nuclear power plant is on the ocean, and with leaks and runoff directly to the ocean, the impacts on the ocean will exceed those of Chernobyl, which was hundreds of miles from any sea," said Ken Buessler, Senior Scientist in Marine Chemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, several months back. Since that time, it has been revealed that Fukushima reactors 1, 2, and 3 have all experienced "melt-throughs," which are considered to be the worst possible outcome in a nuclear disaster (http://www.naturalnews.com/032657_F...).

Various atomic experts are now in agreement that the unfolding situation in Japan truly is "as serious as it gets in a nuclear disaster." Even the Japanese government itself is now admitting the grave reality of the situation, having recently announced it will submit a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) explaining the details of the melt-throughs, which basically mean that radioactive fuel appears to have burned through the outer containment vessels of the reactors and have gone directly into bare earth.

"Dangerous levels of radioactive iodine and cesium have already contaminated the sea, the soil, groundwater, and the air," said reporter Mark Willacy of the Australian Broadcast Corporation in a recent Lateline interview (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/cont...). "This week plutonium was detected for the first time outside the stricken plant, and Strontium-90, known as a bone seeker because it can cause bone cancer and Leukemia, has now been found as far away as 60 kilometers (37+ miles) from the facility."



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23,482 people confirmed dead or missing

The number of people who died or are listed as missing from the March disaster now stands at 23,482.

Police say 87 percent of the 15,413 people who died have been identified.

8,069 people, who were reported to the police, remain missing.

88,361 people are staying in shelters in 21 prefectures around Japan.

Sunday, June 12, 2011
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NHK poll: 77% don't see progress in reconstruction

More than three quarters of the people responding to an NHK survey say rebuilding in areas hit by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami is not progressing smoothly 3 months after the disaster.

Asked whether reconstruction of their municipalities was going smoothly, 5 percent of the respondents said yes and 15 percent to some extent.

But 29 percent said they haven't seen much progress and 48 percent no progress.

They were also asked what they expect of their municipalities in reconstruction. Respondents were allowed to give multiple answers.

Speedy recovery topped the list at 38 percent. 30 percent said they expect their governments to accept residents' suggestions. Another 30 percent said they want their communities to be restored to the state before the disaster. 28 percent said they expect safety issues to be a priority.

NHK conducted the survey on about 500 people living in evacuation shelters and temporary housing in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures earlier this month. The 3 prefectures were the hardest hit by the disaster.

Professor Yo(censor)eru Murosaki of Kwansei Gakuin University says many survivors may not see much progress because they are not part of reconstruction planning.

He urges municipalities to have many people take part in discussions on reconstruction, including survivors.

Saturday, June 11, 2011
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Residents who were allowed to return to the evacuation zone and gather some belongings. Their bus broke down and they had to endure further exposures as they waited for a replacement bus to show up!
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