Thousands evacuate as Fukishima nuclear emergency is declared

[Ed Jewett]

Fission Detected at Damaged Fukushima Atomic Power Plant

November 2nd, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Tokyo Electric Power Co. detected signs of nuclear fission at its crippled Fukushima atomic power plant, raising the risk of increased radiation emissions. No increase in radiation was found at the site and the situation is under control, officials said.
The company, known as Tepco, began spraying boric acid on the No. 2 reactor at 2:48 a.m. Japan time to prevent accidental chain reactions, according to an e-mailed statement today. The detection of xenon, which is associated with nuclear fission, was confirmed today by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, the country's atomic regulator said.
"Given the signs, it's certain that fission is occurring," Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at Tepco who regularly talks to the media, told reporters in Tokyo today. There's been no large-scale or sustained criticality and no increase in radiation, he said.
Fission taking place in the reactor can lead to increases in radiation emissions and raises concerns about further leaks after another radioactive hot spot was discovered in Tokyo on Oct. 29. It's possible there are similar reactions occurring in the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, the other cores damaged at the station, Matsumoto said.
"Melted fuel in the No. 2 reactor may have undergone a sustained process of nuclear fission or re-criticality," Tetsuo Ito, the head of Kinki University's Atomic Energy Research Institute, said by phone. "The nuclear fission should be containable by injecting boron into the reactor to absorb neutrons."
Posted in Atrocities, Collapse, Energy, Environment, Health, Infrastructure

[Carsten Wiethoff]

IEEE Spectrum has a special report about Fukushima.

[URL="http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushima/0"]http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushima/0
[/URL]
Some Quote:

At 3:27 p.m. the first tsunami wave surged into the man-made harbor protecting Fukushima Dai-ichi, rushing past a tidal gauge that measured a water height of 4 meters above normal. At 3:35 another set of much higher waves rolled in and obliterated the gauge. The water rushed over the seawalls and swept toward the plant. It smashed into the seawater pumps used in the heat-removal systems, then burst open the large doors on the turbine buildings and submerged power panels that controlled the operation of pumps, valves, and other equipment. Weeks later, TEPCO employees would measure the water stains on the buildings and estimate the monstrous tsunami's height at 14 meters.
In the basements of turbine and reactor buildings, 6 of the 12 diesel generators shuddered to a halt as the floodwaters inundated them. Five other generators cut out when their power distribution panels were drenched. Only one generator, on the first floor of a building near unit 6, kept going; unlike the others, all of its equipment was above the water line. Reactor 6 and its sister unit, reactor 5, would weather the crisis without serious damage, thanks in part to that generator.
The rest of Fukushima Dai-ichi now faced a cataclysmic scenario that nuclear power plant operators have long feared but never experienced: a complete station blackout.

Also interesting:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...or-diaries

[Magda Hassan]

Fukushima: They Knew

Thursday, November 10, 2011
"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"
The Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN
by Greg Palast
for FreePress.org
I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.
Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.
"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.
The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have. Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....
WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986
[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday. Click here to get the videos and the book.]
Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.
The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That's what happens. Have a nice day.
On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew: the "SQ" had been faked. Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK. He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit. The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0. Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts. The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away. It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.
I was ready to vomit. Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it: Shaw Construction. The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.
But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company. I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down. I shouldn't have done that. Too bad.
All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn't sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the "SQ" tests.
SQ is nuclear-speak for "Seismic Qualification." A seismically qualified nuclear plant won't melt down if you shake it. A "seismic event" can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can't run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.
This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.
Here's what we learned: Dick's subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn't want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] "I believe these are bad results and I believe it's reportable," and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.
Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn't report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.
What did Wiesel do? What would you do?
Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It's always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant's owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, "Bob is a good man. He'll do what's right. Don't worry about Bob."
That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.
But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.
From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn't look back.
***
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.

[Jan Klimkowski]

This passage can read as a parable:

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.
The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That's what happens. Have a nice day.
On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew: the "SQ" had been faked. Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK. He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit. The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0. Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts. The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away. It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.
I was ready to vomit. Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it: Shaw Construction. The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

A parable of the corruption of ordinary men, and the calamitous consequences of greed, fear and cowardice.

[Ed Jewett]

Engineers Knew Fukushima Might Be Unsafe, But Covered It Up … And Now the Extreme Vulnerability of NEW U.S. Plants Is Being Covered Up

Posted on November 12, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog
Engineers and Scientists Knew Fukushima Might Be Unsafe

Preface:The current nuclear reactor design was chosen not because it was safe but because it worked on navy submarines. And governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for 50 years.
BBC reporter Greg Palast reports based on a first-hand interview of a senior engineer for the corporation which built the Fukushima nuclear plants, and a review of engineers' field diaries thatthe engineers who built the Fukushima nuclear plants knew their design would fail in an earthquake:

The plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

That quote is about the Shoreham, New York, power station, not Fukushima. But Palast claims that:

(1) the company fraudulently changed the seismic report to pretend the plant was earthquake-safe;
and
(2) the exact same thing was done at Fukushima.

As I noted in March:

In 2004, Leuren Moret warned in the Japan Times of the exact type of nuclear catastrophe that Japan is now experiencing:

Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.
***
Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates, at the edge of the subduction zone, and is in one of the most tectonically active regions of the world.
***
Many of those reactors have been negligently sited on active faults, particularly in the subduction zone along the Pacific coast, where major earthquakes of magnitude 7-8 or more on the Richter scale occur frequently. The periodicity of major earthquakes in Japan is less than 10 years. There is almost no geologic setting in the world more dangerous for nuclear power than Japan the third-ranked country in the world for nuclear reactors.
"I think the situation right now is very scary," says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. "It's like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode."
***
On July 7 last year, the same day of my visit to Hamaoka, Ishibashi warned of the danger of an earthquake-induced nuclear disaster, not only to Japan but globally, at an International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics conference held in Sapporo. He said: "The seismic designs of nuclear facilities are based on standards that are too old from the viewpoint of modern seismology and are insufficient. The authorities must admit the possibility that an earthquake-nuclear disaster could happen and weigh the risks objectively."
***
I realized that Japan has no real nuclear-disaster plan in the event that an earthquake damaged a reactor's water-cooling system and triggered a reactor meltdown.
Additionally, but not even mentioned by ERC officials, there is an extreme danger of an earthquake causing a loss of water coolant in the pools where spent fuel rods are kept. As reported last year in the journal Science and Global Security, based on a 2001 study by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, if the heat-removing function of those pools is seriously compromised by, for example, the water in them draining out and the fuel rods heat up enough to combust, the radiation inside them will then be released into the atmosphere. This may create a nuclear disaster even greater than Chernobyl.
***
It is not a question of whether or not a nuclear disaster will occur in Japan; it is a question of when it will occur.

As the US Geological Survey notes, Japan has had many earthquakes, including:

• 1891 10 27 Mino-Owari, Japan M 8.0 Fatalities 7,273
  
• 1896 06 15 Sanriku, Japan M 8.5 Fatalities 27,000
  
• 1911 06 15 Ryukyu Islands, Japan M 8.1 Fatalities 12
  
• 1923 09 01 Kanto (Kwanto), Japan M 7.9 Fatalities 143,000
  
• 1927 03 07 Tango, Japan M 7.6 Fatalities 3,020
  
• 1933 03 02 Sanriku, Japan M 8.4 Fatalities 2,990
  
• 1943 09 10 Tottori, Japan M 7.4 Fatalities 1,190
  
• 1944 12 07 Tonankai, Japan M 8.1 Fatalities 1,223
  
• 1945 01 12 Mikawa, Japan M 7.1 Fatalities 1,961
  
• 1946 12 20 Nankaido, Japan M 8.1 Fatalities 1,330
  
• 1948 06 28 Fukui, Japan M 7.3 Fatalities 3,769
  
• 1952 03 04 Hokkaido, Japan region M 8.1 Fatalities 31
  
• 1964 06 16 Niigata, Japan M 7.5 Fatalities 26
  
• 1968 05 16 Off the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 8.2 Fatalities 47
  
• 1995 01 16 Kobe, Japan M 6.9 Fatalities 5,502
  
• 2000 10 06 Western Honshu, Japan M 6.7
  
• 2003 05 26 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 7.0
  
• 2003 09 25 Hokkaido, Japan Region M 8.3
  
• 2003 10 08 Hokkaido, Japan Region M 6.7
  
• 2003 10 31 Off the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 7.0
  
• 2004 05 29 Off the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.5
  
• 2004 09 05 Near the South Coast of Western Honshu, Japan M 7.2
  
• 2004 09 05 Near the South Coast of Honshu, Japan M 7.4
  
• 2004 09 06 Near the South Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.6
  
• 2004 10 23 Near the West Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.6 Fatalities 40
  
• 2004 11 28 Hokkaido, Japan Region M 7.0
  
• 2004 12 06 Hokkaido, Japan Region M 6.8
  
• 2005 03 20 Kyushu, Japan M 6.6 Fatalities 1
  
• 2005 07 23 Near the South Coast of Honshu, Japan M 5.9
  
• 2005 08 16 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 7.2
  
• 2005 10 19 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.3
  
• 2005 11 14 Off the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 7.0
  
• 2005 12 02 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.5
  
• 2006 06 11 Kyushu, Japan M 6.3
  
• 2007 03 25 Near the West Coast of Honshu,Japan M 6.7 Fatalities 1
  
• 2007 07 16 Near the west coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.6 Fatalities 9
  
• 2008 05 07 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.8
  
• 2008 06 13 Eastern Honshu, Japan M 6.9 Fatalities 13
  
• 2008 07 23 Eastern Honshu, Japan M 6.8 Fatalities 1
  
• 2008 09 11 Hokkaido, Japan region M 6.8
  
• 2009 08 09 Near the South Coast of Honshu, Japan M 7.1
  
• 2009 08 10 Near the South Coast of Honshu, Japan M 6.1 Fatalities 1
  
• 2009 08 12 Izu Islands, Japan region M 6.6
  
• 2009 08 17 Southwestern Ryukyu Islands, Japan M 6.7
  
• 2009 10 30 Ryukyu Islands, Japan M 6.8
  
• 2011 03 11 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan M 9.0 Fatalities 10,019
  

Yet:

Japanese engineer Masashi Goto, who helped design the containment vessel for Fukushima's reactor core, says the design was not enough to withstand earthquakesor tsunamis.

Indeed, Reuters points out today:

[A] review of company and regulatory records shows that Japan and its largest utility repeatedly downplayed dangers and ignored warnings including a 2007 tsunami study from Tokyo Electric Power Co's seniorsafety engineer.
***
In other words, Tokyo Electric scientists realized as early as 2007 that it was quite possible a giant wave would overwhelm the sea walls and other defenses at Fukushima by surpassing engineering assumptions behind the plant's design that date back to the 1960s.
***
Despite the projection by its own safety engineers that the older assumptions might be mistaken, … "There are no legal requirements to re-evaluate site related (safety) features periodically," the Japanese government said in a response to questions from the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in 2008.

***
In addition, years before Fukushima engineer Mitsuhiko Tanaka blew the whistle on the fact that Tepco covered up a defective containment vessel, the above-quoted Japan Times article blew the whistle:

Yoichi Kikuchi, a Japanese nuclear engineer who also became a whistle-blower, has told me personally of many safety problems at Japan's nuclear power plants, such as cracks in pipes in the cooling system from vibrations in the reactor. He said the electric companies are "gambling in a dangerous game to increase profits and decrease government oversight."
[Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American senior field engineer who worked for General Electric in the United States, who previously blew the whistle on Tepco's failure to inform the government of defects at the reactors] agreed, saying, "The scariest thing, on top of all the other problems, is that all nuclear power plants are aging, causing a deterioration of piping and joints which are always exposed to strong radiation and heat."

U.S. Plants Unsafe As Well


As Palast notes, the Shoreham power station could very well fail in an earthquake.
And as I pointed out in my March article:

As MSNBC notes, there are 23 virtually-identical reactors in the U.S. to the leaking Fukushima reactors.
As McClatchy notes, American reactors hold much more spent fuel than the Japanese reactors (the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima in turn dwarfs Chernobyl):

U.S. nuclear plants use the same sort of pools to cool spent nuclear-fuel rods as the ones now in danger of spewing radiation at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant, only the U.S. pools hold much more nuclear material.

***
The Japanese plant's pools are far from capacity, but still contain an enormous amount of radioactivity, Lyman said. A typical U.S. nuclear plant would have about 10 times as much fuel in its pools, he said.

And yet the nuclear industry and American government are poo-poohing the danger. As McClatchy notes:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reaffirmed its position that the U.S. pools are operated safely.

The Nation notes:

Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action Kyoto, met Fukushima plant and government officials in August 2010. "At the plant they seemed to dismiss our concerns about spent fuel pools," said Mioko Smith. "At the prefecture, they were very worried but had no plan for how to deal with it."
Remarkably, that is the normboth in Japan and in the United States. Spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not equipped with backup water-circulation systems or backup generators for the water-circulation system they do have.
The exact same design flaw is in place at Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant of the same GE design as the Fukushima reactors. At Fukushima each reactor has between 60 and 83 tons of spent fuel rods stored next to them. Vermont Yankee has a staggering 690 tons of spent fuel rods on site.
Nuclear safety activists in the United States have long known of these problems and have sought repeatedly to have them addressed. At least get backup generators for the pools, they implored. But at every turn the industry has pushed back, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has consistently ruled in favor of plant owners over local communities.
After 9/11 the issue of spent fuel rods again had momentary traction. Numerous citizen groups petitioned and pressured the NRC for enhanced protections of the pools. But the NRC deemed "the possibility of a terrorist attack…speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action." So nothing was donenot even the provision of backup water-circulation systems or emergency power-generation systems.

Similarly, Pro Publica points out:

Opponents of nuclear power have warned for years that if these pools drain, either by accident or terrorist attack, it could lead to a fire and a catastrophic release of radiation.
***
The nuclear industry says fears about the storage pools at U.S. plants are overblown because the pools are protected and, even if fuel is exposed to the air, the chance of a fire is incredibly small.
***
"People should be very concerned because the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has acknowledged that spent fuel pools that are not located inside the containment have the potential to cause catastrophic accidents," said Diane Curran, a lawyer who has represented environmental groups and governments in challenges to fuel storage plans.
"These are not high-probability accidents," Curran said, "but we have seen how low-probability accidents can happen."
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress asked the National Academies to study the vulnerability of spent fuel to a terrorist attack.
The resulting 2005 report, "Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage ," concluded that "an attack which partially or completely drains a plant's spent fuel pool might be capable of starting a high-temperature fire that could release large quantities of radioactive material into the environment."
The report found that the vulnerability of the spent fuel to fire depends on how old it is and how it is stored. As the fuel ages, it cools, so it becomes less susceptible to a fire.
"The industry standard is that fuel that is older than five years can be dry-stored," said Kevin Crowley, director of the nuclear and radiation board for the National Research Council, part of National Academies.
The report recommended that the nuclear industry take steps to decrease the vulnerability of the storage pools to fire. Some of those steps are classified, Crowley said. But he said others, like making sure there were fire hoses or spray systems above the pools, were pretty simple.
***
The nuclear industry disagreed with the national academy about the vulnerability of the spent fuel to a fire.

So a Fukushima-type disaster was inevitable … and will be inevitable in the U.S. as well, unless steps are taken to make the plants safer.

Engineers Pretend Fukushima Never Happened


Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen noted yesterday that new US plant designs are very near being licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission without any Fukushima modifications:

[see embedded 17-minute Vimeo video at http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/e...ed-up.html ]


Indeed, Palast notes that the same company that designed the failed Fukushima plants, and the vulnerable Shoreham facility is:

the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

• Post
  

[Peter Lemkin]

Prime Minister has just officially declared a cold shut down* at the reactor - and all is safe...go back to sleep [and don't believe it!] :popworm: He also said he hoped the residents would soon return. What a joke......maybe their grand children will. Maybe not. They don't even have a realistic plan at 'decomissioning' [burial under lead, boron and concrete somewhere]. He mentioned a figure of one Trillion Yen. I doubt it can be done for less than ten times that.....and it will take 30 years or so....by a plan that is not even imagined yet. Any new earthquake, pipe break due to radiation brittleness, tsunami or other such could re-start a full-scale disaster over that 30 year period. I wish them luck...they will need it! Not to mention the assumed 5-10x Chernobyl radiation already released, their so-called shutdown does NOT mean the end of radiation leakage...at BEST, it means a reduced amount, only. How they EVER plan to remove the top layer of soil [2-5 m] etc. over an enormous area - and where to put it - is beyond me [and beyond them, frankly]. Maybe they can just sell the whole plant and all the contaminated buildings and area on ebay.

*a cold shut down has a precise definition in an intact reactor. There is NO definition for a damaged one, like these...so they are mis-using the term as a PR exercise.

A great poster child for the nuclear industry who will do their best to make it disappear from everyone's mind. Rotsa Ruck!

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, I agree Peter. Everything i am reading from scientists is telling me things are far from settled or over. :nuke:

[Peter Lemkin]

Yes, I agree Peter. Everything i am reading from scientists is telling me things are far from settled or over. :nuke:

Hey, maybe OZ would like to get paid to dump it in some large [LARGE] hole in the outback!? I'm sure Helen Caldecott would be all for that!:mexican::mexican:

[Magda Hassan]

Dr Helen Caldicott



Operating on their frighteningly successful premise that "if you say enough times, people will believe you," officials in Japan announce the damaged, dangerous, Fukushima reactors to be "stable," implying the accident is over. That this is far from the truth is known by many, but that doesn't mean it's ok to stay silent about this serious inaccuracy. The accident has been and will remain ongoing for the forseeable future. Radiation continues to leak into the atmosphere, the groundwater, and the ocean. People remain at risk, workers are knowingly endangered, buildings are unstable, and the real condition of the reactors is unknown. What they are announcing is the best guess of a smart computer, a guess based soley on what it entered in, not the real life scenario.
"...whether the cleanup effort is moving ahead is dubious, according to an undercover report by freelance reporter Tomohiko Suzuki. Mr. Suzuki worked at the Fukushima No. 1 site for a month as a general laborer while documenting a long list of substandard practices and unsafe behavior by companies involved in cleanup at the plant. He charges that "absolutely no progress is being made" toward resolving the Fukushima crisis..."

Skeptics cast doubt on Fukushima status, even as Japan declares nuclear reactors 'stable'

Japan's government declared that the damaged reactors from the Fukushima disaster were 'stable.' Not everyone is convinced.

By Arthur Bright, Correspondent / December 16, 2011
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda speaks during a press conference at his official residence in Tokyo on Friday. Noda told a government nuclear emergency meeting that 'The reactors have reached a state of cold shutdown' and are 'stable,' reports Reuters.
Hiro Komae/AP

[/url]



The Japanese government announced that the [url=http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Fukushima+Daiichi]Fukushima nuclear complex, heavily damaged by the March 11 tsunami in the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, is now stable. But serious doubts remain about Fukushima's status, as officials remain unable to confirm the status of the reactors' fuel and an undercover report impugns the clean-up efforts' efficacy.


Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda told a government nuclear emergency meeting that "The reactors have reached a state of cold shutdown" and are "stable," reports Reuters. Mr. Noda and his environment and nuclear crisis minister, Goshi Hosono, both said that the situation at the plant is under control, though the clean-up may still take decades. The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates the reactor and has been leading the clean-up, had been attempting to achieve cold shutdown before the end of the year.
The state of "cold shutdown" means that the water used to cool the nuclear fuel rods in the reactors is at a temperature below boiling, thereby preventing the fuel rods from overheating and emitting excessive radiation. The Japan Times reports that government officials said that the temperatures of the lower portions of the rods' containment vessels measure 38.9 degrees C in reactor 1, 67.5 degrees in reactor 2, and 57.4 degrees in reactor 3. "If the authorities are correct and cooling of the reactors is stable, it would be an important milestone in ending the world's worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl crisis," writes the Times.
RELATED PHOTO GALLERY: Fukushima survivors

But the Times adds that skeptics worry that the readings would be inaccurate if the melted fuel rods punctured their containment vessels and fell to the bottoms of the outer containment tanks. TEPCO has not been able to take direct measurements of the temperatures at the bottoms of the containment vessels, and the site is still too radioactive for the fuel rods' status to be visually confirmed.
Even if the reactor is under control, the cleanup could still take 30 years, and the problems remain "immense," writes The Wall Street Journal.

Indeed, there can be few firm declarations about the plant's status. Daiichi's reactors are littered with debris. Many measurement and control systems are on the blink. Radiation levels are too high for people to get close to the reactors, leaving engineers and scientists to make important judgments using computer simulations, scattered bits of data and guesses.

And whether the cleanup effort is moving ahead is dubious, according to an undercover report by freelance reporter Tomohiko Suzuki. Mr. Suzuki worked at the Fukushima No. 1 site for a month as a general laborer while documenting a long list of substandard practices and unsafe behavior by companies involved in cleanup at the plant. He charges that "absolutely no progress is being made" toward resolving the Fukushima crisis, reports the Mainichi Daily News.


...Despite there being no concrete data on the state of the reactor cores, claims by the government and TEPCO that the disaster is under control and that the reactors are on-schedule for a cold shutdown by the year's end have promoted a breakneck work schedule, leading to shoddy repairs and habitual disregard for worker safety, he said. ...


"Working at Fukushima is equivalent to being given an order to die," Suzuki quoted one nuclear-related company source as saying. He says plant workers regularly manipulate their radiation readings by reversing their dosimeters or putting them in their socks, giving them an extra 10 to 30 minutes on-site before they reach their daily dosage limit. In extreme cases, Suzuki said, workers even leave the radiation meters in their dormitories.
He added that the companies overseeing the work never order the workers to take these measures, but rather assign projects to be completed within time periods impossible to meet without manipulation of the safety tools. He added that daily radiation screenings are "essentially an act," as the detector is passed too quickly over each worker to get an accurate reading, and "the line to the buzzer that is supposed to sound when there's a problem has been cut."
Suzuki also says that inter-corporate secrecy and competition is undermining the repair effort, as "Reactor makers Toshiba and Hitachi [brought in to help resolve the crisis] each have their own technology, and they don't talk to each other. Toshiba doesn't tell Hitachi what it's doing, and Hitachi doesn't tell Toshiba what it's doing."
The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in an article he co-wrote with Tomoyuki Taira for British science journal Nature, called for the government to take over the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. Mr. Hatoyama criticized TEPCO for providing the government only limited information on the status of the nuclear site, and said there needed to be a broad investigation of what went wrong. As such, the plant "must be nationalized so that information can be gathered openly," he argues.
Roger Cashmore, chairman of Britain's Atomic Energy Authority, expressed similar criticism of TEPCO to Voice of America, though he said the Japanese government also deserved blame for failure to share information about the disaster. "Transparency is the word. One has got to be completely open about all of this and make sure that shortcuts and things like this can't be taken," said Mr. Cashmore. "People, I think, in retrospect have become very concerned about the regulatory system that existed in Japan."

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-Ne...8page%29/2

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, I agree Peter. Everything i am reading from scientists is telling me things are far from settled or over. :nuke:

Hey, maybe OZ would like to get paid to dump it in some large [LARGE] hole in the outback!? I'm sure Helen Caldecott would be all for that!:mexican::mexican:

No doubt we have been requested to do just that and since we sell the uranium we are under some obligation also. And what is a bit more radioactivity since the UK dropped their atomic bombs all over the desert. Unoccupied except for a few aboriginals....and kangaroos...