Thousands evacuate as Fukishima nuclear emergency is declared

[Albert Doyle]

The attention span shelf life of this story is fading however the hot particles are sinking in.

[Keith Millea]

The attention span shelf life of this story is fading however the hot particles are sinking in.

That's right........


Published on Friday, June 24, 2011 by PR Watch

What Happened to Media Coverage of Fukushima?

by Anne Landman

While the U.S. media has been occupied with Anthony Weiner, the Republican presidential candidates and Bristol Palin's memoir, coverage of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster has practially fallen off the map. Poor mainstream media coverage of Japan's now months-long struggle to gain control over the Fukushima disaster has deprived Americans of crucial information about the risks of nuclear power following natural disasters. After a few weeks of covering the early aftermath of Japan's earthquake and tsunami, the U.S. media moved on, leaving behind the crisis at Fukushima which continues to unfold. U.S. politicians, like Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, have made disappointing and misleading statements about the relative safety of nuclear power and have vowed to stick by our nuclear program, while other countries, like Germany and Italy, have taken serious steps to address the obvious risks of nuclear power -- risks that the Fukushima disaster made painfully evident, at least to the rest of the world.
Problems Multiply

News outlets in other countries have been paying attention to Fukushima, though, and a relative few in this country have as well. A June 16, 2011 Al Jazeera English article titled, "Fukushima: It's much worse than you think," quotes a high-level former nuclear industry executive, Arnold Gunderson, who called Fukushima nohting less than "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind." Twenty nuclear cores have been exposed at Fukushima, Gunderson points out, saying that, along with the site's many spent-fuel pools, gives Fukushima 20 times the release potential of Chernobyl.

Efforts to bring problems at Fukushima under control are not going well, either. Japanese authorities only just recently admitted that nuclear fuel in the three damaged Fukushima reactors has likely burned through the vessels holding it, a scenario called "melt-through", that is even more serious than a core meltdown. Months of spraying seawater on the plant's three melted-down fuel cores -- and the spent fuel stored on site -- to try and cool them has produced 26 million of gallons of radioactive wastewater, and no place to put it.



After a struggle, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), finally managed to put in place a system to filter radioactive particles out of the wastewater, but it broke down soon after it started operating.

A filter that was supposed to last a month plugged up with radioactive material after just five hours, indicating there is more radioactive material in the water than previously believed. Meanwhile, TEPCO is running out of space to store the radioactive water, and may be forced to again dump contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. TEPCO already dumped some water into the ocean weeks ago, amid protests from fisherman, other countries and environmental organizations. And even if TEPCO does successfully filter the contaminated water and manage to bring its radioactivity down to acceptable levels, the utility will still have to deal with the pile of radioactive sludge the process will produce. The plan they've come up with to deal with the sludge is to seal it in drums and discard it into the ocean, which may cause even more problems. Greenpeace has already found levels of radiation exceeding legal limits in seaweed and shellfish samples gathered more than 12 miles away from the plant. The high levels of radiation in the samples indicate that leaks from the plant are bigger than TEPCO has revealed so far.

The cascade of other problems caused by the Fukushima disaster include the costs of relocating residents from the affected area around the plant, compensating people for the loss of their homes and belongings, and a drop-off in global sales of goods and products exported from Japan due to fear of radioactive contamination.
Domestic Nuclear Worries

For Americans who think "out of sight, out of mind" or "it can't happen here" when it comes to Fukishima and its ramifications, think again. Janette Sherman, M.D., an internal medicine specialist, and Joseph Magano, an epidemiologist with the Radiation and Public Health Project research group, noticed a 35% jump in infant mortality in eight northwestern U.S. cities located within 500 miles of the Pacific coast since the Fukushima meltdown. They wrote an essay, published by CounterPunch, suggesting there may be a link between the statistic and the Fukushima disaster. They cited similar problems with infant mortality among people who were exposed to nuclear fallout from Chernobyl. Sherman and Magano urge that steps be taken to measure the levels of radioactive isotopes in the environment of the Pacific northwest, and in the bodies of people in these areas, to determine if nuclear fallout from Fukushima could, in fact, be related to the spike in infant mortality.

Tensions are also rising over two U.S. nuclear reactors in Nebraska located on the banks of the Missouri River, which is now at flood stage. On June 20, the Omaha, Nebraska World Herald reported that flood waters from the Missouri River came within 18 inches of forcing the Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownville, Nebraska, to shut down. Officials are poised to shut down the Cooper plant when river reaches a level of 902 feet above sea level. The plant is 903 feet above sea level. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant, 20 miles north of Omaha, issued a "Notification of Unusual Event" to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on June 6 due to local flooding. That plant is currently shut down for refueling, but will not restart because of the flooding. Compounding worries over these two plants is a shortage of sand needed to fill massive numbers of sandbags to hold off Missouri River floodwaters. One ton of sand makes just 60 sandbags, and hundreds of thousands of sandbags are needed to help save towns along the river from flooding. Sand is obtained from dredging the riverbed -- and the companies that sell sand can't dredge the river while it is flooding. These plants are already in a risky situation, and the flooding in Nebraska could easily be worsened just by a summer afternoon cloudburst.

Global Support for Nuclear Power Drops; Some U.S. Reactors on Borrowed Time

Polls reveal that global support for nuclear power has nosedived in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. A survey of over 19,000 people in 24 countries showed that three quarters of people now think nuclear power will soon be obsolete. Three countries still show support for nuclear power: the U.S., India and Poland.

The relative safety of nuclear power in the U.S. is tenuous, despite what some politicians have claimed. A big problem is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been working with the nuclear power industry to keep our country's reactors operating within safety standards, but they've been doing it by either weakening those standards, or not enforcing them at all. A year-long investigation by the Associated Press (AP) revealed that the NRC has acted appallingly, extending licenses for dozens of aging U.S. nuclear plants despite their having multiple problems, like rusted pipes, broken seals, failed cables and leaking valves.

When such problems are found, the NRC will weaken the standards to help the plants meet them instead of ordering them to be repaired to meet current standards. The nuclear industry argues that the standards they are violating are "unnecessarily conservative," and in response, the NRC simply loosens the standards. Just last year, for example, the NRC weakened the safety margin for acceptable radiation damage to nuclear reactor vessels -- for the second time. Through public record requests to the NRC, the AP obtained photographs of badly rusted valves, holes eaten into the tops of reactor vessels, severe rust in pipes carrying essential water supplies, peeling walls, actively leaking water pipes and other problems found among the nation's fleet of aging nuclear reactors.
The Take Away

Fukushima has been a wake up call about the dangers of nuclear power, and some countries are heeding the information. But it seems the U.S. is still sleeping when it comes to this issue. Light-to-absent coverage of TEPCO's struggles to bring Fukushima under control, legislators who insist on acting favorably towards the nuclear power industry despite the deteriorated state of our current reactor fleet and an ineffective Nuclear Regulatory Commission have all contributed to a bad combination of a dangerous situation and a complacent American public on this issue.

Maybe now that the latest scandal in Washington has subsided, public and media attention will return to this crucial issue, and the U.S. will turn its attention to tackling some of the truly serious problems posed by a continuing reliance on nuclear power.

© 2011 Center for Media & Democracy

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/24-0

[Keith Millea]

A short clip from Arnie Gunderson:

[video=vimeo;25879103]http://vimeo.com/25879103[/video]

[Ed Jewett]

SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2011

Fukushima Cover Up Unravels

As I've repeatedly noted, the Japanese government, other governments and nuclear companies have covered up the extent of the Fukushima crisis.

Asia Pacific Journal reports:

Japan's leading business journal Toyo Keizai has published an article by Hokkaido Cancer Center director Nishio Masamichi, a radiation treatment specialist.

***

Nishio originally called for "calm" in the days after the accident. Now, he argues, that as the gravity of the situation at the plant has become more clear, the specter of long-term radiation exposure must be reckoned with.

***

Former Minister for Internal Affairs Haraguchi Kazuhiro has alleged that radiation monitoring station data was actually three decimal places greater than the numbers released to the public. If this is true, it constitutes a "national crime", in Nishio's words.
The Atlantic points out:
The reason for official reluctance to admit that the earthquake did direct structural damage to reactor one is obvious. Katsunobu Onda, author of TEPCO: The Dark Empire ... who sounded the alarm about the firm in his 2007 book explains it this way: "If TEPCO and the government of Japan admit an earthquake can do direct damage to the reactor, this raises suspicions about the safety of every reactor they run. They are using a number of antiquated reactors that have the same systematic problems, the same wear and tear on the piping."

***

Oddly enough, while TEPCO later insisted that the cause of the meltdown was the tsunami knocking out emergency power systems, at the 7:47 p.m. TEPCO press conference the same day, the spokesman in response to questions from the press about the cooling systems stated that the emergency water circulation equipment and reactor core isolation time cooling systems would work even without electricity.

***

On May 15, TEPCO went some way toward admitting at least some of these claims in a report called "Reactor Core Status of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Unit One." The report said there might have been pre-tsunami damage to key facilities including pipes. "This means that assurances from the industry in Japan and overseas that the reactors were robust is now blown apart," said Shaun Burnie, an independent nuclear waste consultant. "It raises fundamental questions on all reactors in high seismic risk areas."

***

Eyewitness testimony and TEPCO'S own data indicates that the damage [done to the plant by the quake] was significant. All of this despite the fact that shaking experienced at the plant during the quake was within it's approved design specifications.
The Wall Street Journal writes:
A former nuclear adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan blasted the government's continuing handling of the crisis, and predicted further revelations of radiation threats to the public in the coming months.

In his first media interview since resigning his post in protest in April, Toshiso Kosako, one of the country's leading experts on radiation safety, said Mr. Kan's government has been slow to test for possible dangers in the sea and to fish and has understated certain radiation dangers to minimize what it will have to spend to clean up contamination.

And while there have been scattered reports already of food contaminationof tea leaves and spinach, for exampleMr. Kosako said there will be broader, more disturbing discoveries later this year, especially as rice, Japan's staple, is harvested.

"Come the harvest season in the fall, there will be a chaos," Mr. Kosako said. "Among the rice harvested, there will certainly be some radiation contaminationthough I don't know at what levelssetting off a scandal. If people stop buying rice from Tohoku, . . . we'll have a tricky problem."
British Shenanigans

It's not just the Japanese. As the Guardian notes:
British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.

Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse...

Officials stressed the importance of preventing the incident from undermining public support for nuclear power.

***

The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who sits on the Commons environmental audit committee, condemned the extent of co-ordination between the government and nuclear companies that the emails appear to reveal.

***

The official suggested that if companies sent in their comments, they could be incorporated into briefs to ministers and government statements. "We need to all be working from the same material to get the message through to the media and the public.

***

The office for nuclear development invited companies to attend a meeting at the NIA's headquarters in London. The aim was "to discuss a joint communications and engagement strategy aimed at ensuring we maintain confidence among the British public on the safety of nuclear power stations and nuclear new-build policy in light of recent events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant".

Other documents released by the government's safety watchdog, the office for nuclear regulation, reveal that the text of an announcement on 5 April about the impact of Fukushima on the new nuclear programme was privately cleared with nuclear industry representatives at a meeting the previous week. According to one former regulator, who preferred not to be named, the degree of collusion was "truly shocking".

The Guardian reports in a second article:
The release of 80 emails showing that in the days after the Fukushima accident not one but two government departments were working with nuclear companies to spin one of the biggest industrial catastrophes of the last 50 years, even as people were dying and a vast area was being made uninhabitable, is shocking.

***

What the emails shows is a weak government, captured by a powerful industry colluding to at least misinform and very probably lie to the public and the media.

***

To argue that the radiation was being released deliberately and was "all part of the safety systems to control and manage a situation" is Orwellian.
And - as the Guardian notes in a third article - the collusion between the British government and nuclear companies is leading to political fallout:
"This deliberate and (sadly) very effective attempt to calm' the reporting of the true story of Fukushima is a terrible betrayal of liberal values. In my view it is not acceptable that a Liberal Democrat cabinet minister presides over a department deeply involved in a blatant conspiracy designed to manipulate the truth in order to protect corporate interests". -Andy Myles, Liberal Democrat party's former chief executive in Scotland

"These emails corroborate my own impression that there has been a strange silence in the UK following the Fukushima disaster … in the UK, new nuclear sites have been announced before the results of the Europe-wide review of nuclear safety has been completed. Today's news strengthens the case for the government to halt new nuclear plans until an independent and transparent review has been conducted." -Fiona Hall, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European parliament

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/07/f...avels.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

AP IMPACT: NRC and industry rewrite nuke history

JEFF DONN, AP National Writer
Published Tuesday, June 28, 2011

ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) When commercial nuclear power was getting its start in the 1960s and 1970s, industry and regulators stated unequivocally that reactors were designed only to operate for 40 years. Now they tell another story insisting that the units were built with no inherent life span, and can run for up to a century, an Associated Press investigation shows.

By rewriting history, plant owners are making it easier to extend the lives of dozens of reactors in a relicensing process that resembles nothing more than an elaborate rubber stamp.

As part of a yearlong investigation of aging issues at the nation's nuclear power plants, the AP found that the relicensing process often lacks fully independent safety reviews. Records show that paperwork of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sometimes matches word-for-word the language used in a plant operator's application.

Also, the relicensing process relies heavily on such paperwork, with very little onsite inspection and verification.

And under relicensing rules, tighter standards are not required to compensate for decades of wear and tear.

So far, 66 of 104 reactors have been granted license renewals. Most of the 20-year extensions have been granted with scant public attention. And the NRC has yet to reject a single application to extend an original license. The process has been so routine that many in the industry are already planning for additional license extensions, which could push the plants to operate for 80 years, and then 100.

Regulators and industry now contend that the 40-year limit was chosen for economic reasons and to satisfy antitrust concerns, not for safety issues. They contend that a nuclear plant has no technical limit on its life.

But an AP review of historical records, along with interviews with engineers who helped develop nuclear power, shows just the opposite: Reactors were made to last only 40 years. Period.

The record also shows that a design limitation on operating life was an accepted truism.

In 1982, D. Clark Gibbs, chairman of the licensing and safety committee of an early industry group, wrote to the NRC that "most nuclear power plants, including those operating, under construction or planned for the future, are designed for a duty cycle which corresponds to a 40-year life."

And three years later, when Illinois Power Co. sought a license for its Clinton station, utility official D.W. Wilson told the NRC on behalf of his company's nuclear licensing department that "all safety margins were established with the understanding of the limitations that are imposed by a 40-year design life."

This is a long and important article. It continues here.

[Peter Lemkin]

Radiation Coverups Confirmed: Los Alamos, Fort Calhoun, Fukushima, TSA

Welcome. This is James Corbett of The Corbett Report with your Sunday Update from the Centre for Research on Globalization at globalresearch.ca on this 3rd day of July, 2011. And now for the real news.

A series of disasters, potential disasters, bad news and worrying studies over the course of the past week have brought public attention back to the issue of radiation and its attendant health risks, and further exposed how governmental agencies that are supposed to protect the public have in fact knowingly put the public at risk and even colluded with the very industries they are supposed to be "regulating."

Last Sunday, a wildfire started in New Mexico that grew to a 162 square mile inferno and came within 50 feet of the grounds of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that was the birthplace of the atomic bomb. The site is an historical testing ground for nuclear weapons and a storage area for about 20,000 barrels of nuclear waste. The disaster exposed the remarkable fact that this nuclear waste was stored not in a secure containment facility, or even in a solid building, but in a "fabric-type building" that would be quickly consumed by the fires.

In addition to the risk of the nuclear waste burning up in the fire and sending radioactive materials into the atmosphere, Joni Arends of the Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety has pointed out that the fire could stir up the nuclear-contaminated soil on lab property where nuclear experiments have long been conducted. In either event, harmful radiation could pass into the jet stream to be distributed across the United States and beyond.

As a recent report from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability documented, the site has been the disposal ground for some 18 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemical solid wastes since 1943, as well as 899,000 curies of so-called transuranic waste, including plutonium. Liquid wastes from the plant were discharged into the canyons, initially with little treatment whatsoever.

Winds have now shifted the fire away from the facility and initial air samples from the inferno have indicated there has so far been no catastrophic release of radiation in the area, but it is unclear why no basic precautions were in place to secure the nuclear waste at the facility prior to the fire or what such measures, if any, are being contemplated in the wake of this emergency.

Also last Sunday, flood waters from the Missouri River reached the containment buildings of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station. A levee protecting the site's electrical transformers gave way and the plant was forced to switch on emergency generators in order to continue cooling the nuclear reactor.

Although officials are maintaining that the plant is still functioning and is not in meltdown, the incident has raised serious questions about the facility and its preparedness for just such an event. Just last October, nuclear regulators warned that the Fort Calhoun plant "failed to maintain procedures for combating a significant flood" and newly released documents reveal workers were still scrambling to plug holes where flood water could potentially get into the facility as late as last week.

It is unclear what, if any, punitive actions the plant's operator will face for their negligence, or if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is even concerned. Commission director Gregory Jaczsko said last week that "all the plants in the U.S. have been been designed to deal with historically the largest possible floods," seeming to imply that the Fort Calhoun situation was not dangerous by definition and that the NRC had full faith in the plant despite its documented safety violations.

This is in line with an AP investigation last month that found that American federal nuclear regulators have been working with the nuclear industry to ensure that reactors passed safety inspections by repeatedly lowering safety standards for the plants or failing to enforce existing standards. The investigation showed that a myriad of documented problems at nuclear power plants across the country, from failed cables and busted seals to broken nozzles, dented containers and rusty pipes, were routinely resolved by claiming that existing safety standards were too conservative. When valves were found to be leaking, for instance, the standards were simply changed to allow for more leakage, in some cases 20 times the original limit.

Meanwhile in Japan, where three of the reactors at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been confirmed to have been in full meltdown since the very first days of the tsunami-induced disaster, the first series of health checks of area residents are already revealing suprising and troubling results about radiation exposure in the area. Tests of 15 Fukushima residents between the ages of 4 and 77 have revealed radioactive cesium and iodine in their urine.

[video]

The tests also indicate that residents have been exposed to between 1 / 5 to 3 / 4 of their yearly allowable radiation dose in just two months.

Now, documents are beginning to surface confirming what many have been alleging since the start of this crisis: that governments the world over have been conspiring with the nuclear energy industry to downplay the significance and ramifications of the Fukushima disaster.

Just last week, emails released under the Freedom of Inforrmation Act show how the Departments of Business and Energy in the UK government were coordinating their response to the Japanese disaster with companies like EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to ensure the accident did not interfere with plans to build a new generation of nuclear power plants in Britain.

The emails reveal how the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills was emailing the nuclear firms on the 13th of March, as the crisis was still unfolding, to assure them that "radiation released has been controlled the reactor has been protected," a surprisingly definitive description of the events at Fukushima that have now been shown to have been categorically wrong, as reactor 1 had in fact melted down in the first 16 hours of the disaster, with 2 and 3 also melting down in the following days.

They also show how the BIS intimated that comments from the nuclear industry would be worked into the departments briefs to ministers and government statements: "We need to all be working from the same material to get the message through to the media and the public."

In other radiation-related news, an entirely different set of emails among government officials obtained under the Freedom of Information Act last week reveal that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the very same organization that has refused to release the data that its model for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 was based on because it would "jeopardize public safety," has accused the Department of Homeland Security of lying about its findings on the safety of the full body scanners being used in airport screening by the TSA.

The email reveals how NIST rebuked DHS head Janet Napolitano for claiming in a USA Today op-ed that:

"AIT machines are safe, efficient, and protect passenger privacy. They have been independently evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who have all affirmed their safety."

According to the email, however, NIST was angry at this mischaracterization of their work, pointing out that "NIST does not do product testing. [And] NIST did not test AIT machines for safety."

As it turns out, not only did Napolitano lie about NIST's certification of the scanner safety, but she also lied about the Johns Hopkins backing of her position. An internal document produced by Johns Hopkins for the DHS shows that far from "affirming the safety" of the technology, the University in fact warned that the scanners as designed produces an area around the machine that exceeds the general public dose limit for radiation exposure.

Napolitano's op-ed was widely criticized at the time because Dr. Michael Love, the head of an X-ray lab at Johns Hopkins warned just two days before the op-ed was published that "statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays."

[Keith Millea]

A new update from Fairewinds.

[video=vimeo;26651670]http://vimeo.com/26651670[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

People have short memories, and the MSM / Propaganda Matrix make sure it is enforced. Were this not true, we wouldn't be in the fucking mess we are on Environmental, Political, Ethical, Financial, Peace, Rights, Freedom, Class and other issues.

Most people are trained not to think independently, and not to retain what little they think about / learn about...and never, never to see patterns endlessly repeating. hutup:

[Magda Hassan]

Gov't to allow use of less-demanding radiation detector for beef

Prefectural officials interview livestock farmers after radioactive cesium was detected in cattle raised in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, on July 10. (Mainichi)

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- The government is set to allow inspection of beef for radiation contamination using more widely available, less-demanding detectors as it prepares to impose broader beef cattle screening to contain the widening food scare, government officials said Friday.
The decision comes when there is a limited number of regularly used equipment, called a germanium semiconductor detector, available to monitor radioactive materials in beef from all cattle in areas where straw containing radioactive cesium above the government-set limit has been found.
Detailed inspection will continued to be required near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after the government ordered to screen all cattle shipped from Fukushima Prefecture.
The government is under pressure to step up its measures to contain the beef scare as fears of radiation taint spreads from vegetables and seafood to livestock products, scaring consumers away from beef and causing the meat's wholesale prices to drop.
The government is considering setting a more stringent safety limit for inspection with the lighter version of detectors and requiring a detailed check for beef screened out by the initial monitoring.
The equipment for quick inspection is about one-tenth the cost of more than 20 million yen of the germanium semiconductor detector and takes one hour or less to gauge radioactive materials, against hours of the conventional device.
More than 1,600 cattle suspected of being fed contaminated rice straw have been shipped, reaching all but Okinawa Prefecture.

(Mainichi Japan) July 23, 2011

[Peter Lemkin]

If they just take the batteries out of the detectors this will create a cloud field reducing the pesky little nuclear particles [alpha, beta and gamma] to zero - its guaranteed~