Thousands evacuate as Fukishima nuclear emergency is declared

[Peter Lemkin]

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency's decontamination manual released in July says municipalities can bury such waste if radioactivity levels are 8,000 becquerels or less per kilogram. But the manual does not mention final disposal sites.

"We are aware of the need to show our policy," a NISA official said. However, the agency does not appear to be close to deciding on where the contaminated waste will end up.

That delay has led to the secrecy among municipal officials.

"It would be difficult to gain the consent of residents when we try to secure a waste disposal site," a Fukushima municipal official said. "The national government does not mention anything about how we can specifically cope with the situation under such circumstances."

The Japanese people need to abandon their deference to authority and start stopping this shit.

Unless they want large swathes of their largest island to become a Forbidden Zone.

Buying topsoil, etc. is not even a temporary solution - and there is no permanent one for it. One can slightly alleviate the imminent dose by scraping off the top layers of soil and putting them in mines, etc....but there is a constant 'rain' on new radioactive particles coming by air, wind, water, animals and other means. Look very bad for Japan...small island...large population....lots of radiation....enough for everyone there to have lethal dose, I'm afraid...unless they try some radical and quick thinking outside of their tea-ceremony boxes.

[Magda Hassan]

Nuclear safety: A dangerous veil of secrecy
Who can the public trust on nuclear safety - the anti-nuclear camp, the nuclear lobby or academics funded by the latter?
D. Parvaz Last Modified: 11 Aug 2011 13:09
EmailPrintShareFeedback

Anti-nuclear rallies marking the attack on Hiroshima don't distinguish between nuclear energy and weapons [Reuters]
There are battles being fought on two fronts in the five months since a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan.

On one front, there is the fight to repair the plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and to contain the extent of contamination caused by the damage. On the other is the public's fight to extract information from the Japanese government, TEPCO and nuclear experts worldwide.

The latter battle has yielded serious official humiliation, resulting high-profile resignations, scandals, and promises of reform in Japan's energy industry whereas the latter has so far resulted in a storm of anger and mistrust.

Even most academic nuclear experts, seen by many as the middle ground between the anti-nuclear activists and nuclear lobby itself, were reluctant to say what was happening: That in Fukushima, a community of farms, schools and fishing ports, was experiencing a full-tilt meltdown, and that, as Al Jazeera reported in June, that the accident had most likely caused more radioactive contamination than Chernobyl.


Read more of our coverage of Japan's disasters
As recently as early August, those seeking information on the real extent of the damage at the Daiichi plant and on the extent of radioactive contamination have mostly been reassured by the nuclear community that there's no need to worry.

This is worrying because while both anti-nuclear activists and the nuclear lobby both have openly stated biases, academics and researchers are seen as the middle ground - a place to get accurate, unbiased information.

David Biello, the energy and climate editor at Scientific American Online, said that trying to get clear information on a scenario such as the Daiichi disaster is tough.

"There's a lot of secrecy that can surround nuclear power because some of the same processes can be involved in generating electricity that can also be involved in developing a weapon, so there's a kind of a veil of secrecy that gets dropped over this stuff, that can also obscure the truth" said Biello.

"So, for example in Fukushima, it was pretty apparent that a total meltdown had occurred just based on what they were experiencing there ... but nobody in a position of authority was willing to say that."

A high-stakes game

There's no denying that there's a lot of money - and power - riding on the nuclear industry.

The money trail can be tough to follow - Westinghouse, Duke Energy and the Nuclear Energy Institute (a "policy organisation" for the nuclear industry with 350 companies, including TEPCO, on its roster) did not respond to requests for information on funding research and chairs at universities.

But most of the funding for nuclear research does not come directly from the nuclear lobby, said M.V. Ramana, a researcher at Princeton University specialising in the nuclear industry and climate change. Most research is funded by governments, who get donations - from the lobby (via candidates, political parties or otherwise).

The Center for Responsive Politics - a non-partisan, non-profit elections watchdog group noted that even as many lobbying groups slowed their spending the first quarter of the year, the Nuclear industry "appears to be ratcheting up its lobbying" increasing its multi-million dollar spending.

"In the United States, a lot of the money doesn't come directly from the nuclear industry, but actually comes from the Department of Energy (DOE). And the DOE has a very close relationship with the industry, and they sort of try to advance the industry's interest," said Ramana. Indeed, nuclear engineering falls under the "Major Areas of Research" with the DOE, which also has nuclear weapons under its rubric.

The DOE's 2012 fiscal year budge request to the US Congress for nuclear energy programmes was $755m.

"So those people who get funding from that….it's not like they (researchers) want to lie, but there's a certain amount of, shall we say, ideological commitment to nuclear power, as well as a certain amount of self-censorship." It comes down to worrying how their next application for funding might be viewed, he said.

Kathleen Sullivan, an anti-nuclear specialist and disarmament education consultant with the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs, said it's not surprising that research critical of the nuclear energy and weapons isn't coming out of universities and departments that participate in nuclear research and development.


Naoto Kan, Japan's prime minister, vowed to challenge the "myth of safety" of nuclear power [Reuters]
"It (the influence) of the nuclear lobby could vary from institution to institution," said Sullivan. "If you look at the history of nuclear weapons manufacturing in the United States, you can see that a lot of research was influenced perverted, construed in a certain direction."

Sullivan points to the DOE-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkley (where some of the research for the first atomic bomb was done) as an example of how intertwined academia and government-funded nuclear science are.

The situation really isn't much different in the field of nuclear energy, said Sullivan.

"It's all part and parcel to itself."

Of course this isn't unique to the nuclear industry all energy lobbies fund research one way or another. But the consequences of self-censorship when it comes to the potential downsides of nuclear energy are far more dire, than, say, for wind power.

"For nuclear physics to proceed, the only people interested in funding it are pro-nuclear folks, whether that be industry or government," said Biello. "So if you're involved in that area you've already got a bias in favour of that technology … if you study hammers, suddenly hammers seem to be the solution to everything."

And should they find results unfavourable to the industry, Ramana said they would "dress it up in various ways by saying 'Oh, there's a very slim chance of this, and here are some safety measure we recommend,' and then the industry will say, 'Yeah,yeah, we're incorporating all of that.'"

Ramana, for the record, said that while he's against nuclear weapons, he doesn't have a moral position on nuclear power except to say that as a cost-benefit issue, the costs outweigh the benefits, and that "in that sense, expanding nuclear power isn't a good idea."

But generally speaking, he said that nuclear researchers have a stake in reassuring the pubic that nothing bad is happening.

"'How is this going to affect the future of nuclear power?'That's the first thought that came into their heads," said Ramana, adding, "They basically want to ensure that people will keep constructing nuclear power plants."

For instance, a May report by MIT's Center For Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (where TEPCO funds a chair) points out that while the Daiichi disaster has resulted in "calls for cancellation of nuclear construction projects and reassessments of plant license extensions" which might "lead to a global slow-down of the nuclear enterprise," that "the lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima accident are different."

Among the report's closing thoughts are concerns that "Decision-making in the immediate aftermath of a major crisis is often influenced by emotion," and whether"an accident like Fukushima, which is so far beyond design basis, really warrant a major overhaul of current nuclear safety regulations and practises?"

"If so," wonder the authors, "When is safe safe enough? Where do we draw the line?"

The Japanese public, it seems, would like some answers to those very questions, albeit from a different perspective.

Kazuo Hizumi, a Tokyo-based human rights lawyer, is among those pushing for openness. He is also an editor at News for the People in Japan, a news site advocating for transparency from the government and from TEPCO.

With contradicting information and lack of clear coverage on safety and contamination issues, many have taken to measuring radiation levels with their own Geiger counters.

"They do not know how to do it," he said of some of the community groups and individuals who have taken to measure contamination levels in the air, soil and food.

"But mothers are worried about their children so much and Japanese government has to consider their worries."

A report released in July by Human Rights Now highlights the need for immediately accessible information on health and safety in areas where people have been affected by the disaster, including Fukushima, especially on the issues of contaminated food and evacuation plans.

A 'nuclear priesthood'

Biello describes the nuclear industry is a relatively small, exclusive club.

"The interplay between academia and also the military and industry is very tight. It's a small community...they have their little club and they can go about their business without anyone looking over their shoulder. "

This might explain how, as the Associated Press reported in June, that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was "working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nationalise ageing reactors operating within standards or simply failing to enforce them."

However, with this exclusivity comes a culture of secrecy "a nuclear priesthood," said Biello, which makes it very difficult to parse out a straightforward answer in the very technical and highly politicised field.

"You have the proponents, who believe that it is the technological salvation for our problems, whether that's energy, poverty, climate change or whatever else. And then you have opponents who think that it's literally the worst thing that ever happened and should be immediately shut back up in a box and buried somewhere," said Biello, who includes "professors of nuclear engineering and Greenpeace activists" as passionate opponents on the nuclear subject.

In fact, one is hard pressed to find a media report quoting a nuclear scientist at any major university sounding the alarms on the risks of contamination in Fukushima.

Doing so has largely been the work of anti-nuclear activists (who have an admitted bias against the technology) and independent scientists employed by think tanks, few of whom responded to requests for interviews.

Even anthropologists who study the behaviour of those working in the nuclear power industry, refused to comment on the culture of secrecy that surrounds it.

The situation is much the same in Japan, said Hizumi, with "only a few who give people true information."

So, one's best bet, said Biello, is to try and "triangulate the truth" - to take "a dose" from anti-nuclear activists, another from pro-nuclear lobbyists and throw that in with a little bit of engineering and that'll get you closer to the truth.

"Take what everybody is saying with a grain of salt."

Nobody likes bad news

Since World War II, the process of secrecy the readiness to invoke "national security" - has been a pillar of the nuclear establishment…that establishment, acting on the false assumption that "secrets" can be hidden from the curious and knowledgeable, has successfully insisted that there are answers which cannot be given and even questions which cannot be asked.

The net effect is to stifle debate about the fundamental of nuclear policy. Concerned citizens dare not ask certain questions, and many begin to feel that these matters which only a few initiated experts are entitled to discuss.

If the above sounds like a post-Fukushima statement, it is not. It was written by Howard Morland for the November 1979 issue of The Progressive magazine focusing on the hydrogen bomb as well as the risks of nuclear energy.

The US government - citing national security concerns - took the magazine to court in order to prevent the issue from being published, but ultimately relented during the appeals process when it became clear that the information The Progressive wanted to publish was already public knowledge and that pursuing the ban might put the court in the position of deeming the Atomic Energy Act as counter to First Amendment rights (freedom of speech) and therefore unconstitutional in its use of prior restraint to censor the press.


"Exciting Nuclear Land" is part of the Japanese school curriculum
But, of course, that's in the US, although a similar mechanism is at work in Japan, where a recently created task force aims to "cleanse" the media of reportage that casts an unfavourable light on the nuclear industry (they refer to this information as "inaccurate" or a result of "mischief."

The government has even go so far as to accept bids from companies that specialise in scouring the Internet to monitor the Internet for reports, Tweets and blogs that are critical of its handling of the Daiichi disaster, which has presented a unique challenge to the lobby there.

Hizumi said that the move to police online content on the disaster has upset the Japanese pubic and that the president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations has openly criticised the policy.

"The public fully trusted the Japanese Government," said Hizumi. But the absence of "true information" has massively diminished that trust, as, he said, has the public's faith that TEPCO would be open about the potential dangers of a nuclear accident.

But Japan's government has a history of slow response to TEPCO's cover-ups. In 1989, that Kei Sugaoka, a nuclear energy at General Electric who inspected and repaired plants in Japan and elsewhere, said he spotted cracks in steam dryers and a "misplacement" or 180 degrees in one dryer unit. He noticed that the position of the dryer was later omitted from the inspection record's data sheet.

Sugaoka told a Japanese networkthat TEPCO had instructed him to "erase" the flaws, but he ultimately wrote a whistleblowing letter to METI, which resulted in the temporary 17 TEPCO reactors, including ones at the plant in Fukushima.

"I guess, just, you know, they're not being open to the public. They should be more open to the public," said Sugaoka.

"Everything is always kept a secret."

But the Japanese nuclear lobby has been quite active in shaping how people see nuclear energy. The country's Ministry of Education, together with the Natural Resources Ministry (of of two agencies under Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry - METI - overseeing nuclear policies) even provides schools with a nuclear energy information curriculum.

These worksheets - or education supplements - are used to inform children about the benefits of nuclear energy over fossil fuels.

Fukushima = Chernobyl?

Depending on who you believe, either Fukushima is another Chernobyl in terms of the severity of the accident and risks of contamination or it's nothing like the 1986 disaster.

There's reason to believe that at least in one respect, Fukushima can't and won't be another Chernobyl, at least due to the fact that the former has occurred in the age of the Internet whereas the latter took place in the considerably quaint 80s, when a car phone the size of a brick was considered the height of communications technology to most.

"It (a successful cover up) is definitely a danger in terms of Fukushima, and we'll see what happens. All you have to do is look at the first couple of weeks after Chernobyl to see the kind of cover up," said Biello.

"I mean the Soviet Union didn't even admit that anything was happening for a while, even though everybody was noticing these radiation spikes and all these other problems. The Soviet Union was not admitting that they were experiencing this catastrophic nuclear failure... in Japan, there's a consistent desire, or kind of a habit, of downplaying these accidents, when they happen. It's not as bad as it may seem, we haven't had a full meltdown."

Fast forward to 2011, when video clips of each puff of smoke out of the Daiichi plant make it around the world in seconds, news updates are available around the clock, activists post radiation readings on maps in multiple languages and Google Translate picks up the slack in translating every last Tweet on the subject coming out of Japan.

In short, it will be a heck of a lot harder to keep a lid on things than it was 25 years ago.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/fea...99802.html

[Ed Jewett]

CounterPunch [ http://www.counterpunch.org/ ] has established that in the eight weeks after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima complex in Japan on March 11, infant mortality in 19 U.S. cities increased by 35 per cent.

In the course of this review, conducted by CounterPunch's statistical consultant, Pierre Sprey, it also became clear that the Environmental Protection Agency's monitoring system, known as RadNet, is hopelessly inadequate to assess the effect on U.S. public health of a nuclear accident either overseas or here in the Homeland. EPA's routine sampling is laughable, with sampling frequency and geographic coverage that are hopeless for tracking radiation exposures of concern to public health. EPA's extra sampling following disasters like Three Mile Island or Fukushima can, at best, identify only a tiny fraction of the significant touchdowns of the concentrated radiation plumes from an accident site.

Sprey selected 19 cities showing evidence of being near a plume touchdown within 20 days of the Fukushima disaster: Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Boise, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Berkeley, Long Beach, Las Vegas, Ogden, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Denver and, surprisingly, three cities in Florida - St. Petersburg, Tampa and Jacksonville.

Sprey found that, when compared to 2010, infant mortality in the 19-city sample increased by a statistically significant 35 per cent. He also notes that the EPA RadNet samples are so sparse in time and space - days or weeks apart and often hundreds and hundreds of miles between monitoring sites - that the vast majority of actual plume touchdowns across the country almost certainly remained undetected.

Read Sprey's full and deeply disturbing survey. (Requires subscription)
http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPun...tions.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

Long, detailed and deeply concerning investigative piece by David McNeill and Jake Adelstein.

Excerpts below, full article here.

August 12 - 14, 2011

The Fukushima Daiichi Reactors Were in Meltdown After the Earthquake, But Before the Tsunami Hit

TEPCO's Darkest Secret

By DAVID McNEILL and JAKE ADELSTEIN

It is one of the mysteries of Japan's ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the March 11 earthquake do to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: If the quake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan will have to be reviewed and possibly shut down. With virtually all of Japan's 54 reactors either offline (35) or scheduled for shutdown by next April, the issue of structural safety looms over the decision to restart every one in the months and years after.

The key question for operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) and its regulators to answer is this: How much damage was inflicted on the Daiichi plant before the first tsunami reached the plant roughly 40 minutes after the earthquake? TEPCO and the Japanese government are hardly reliable adjudicators in this controversy. "There has been no meltdown," top government spokesman Edano Yukio famously repeated in the days after March 11. "It was an unforeseeable disaster," Tepco's then President Shimizu Masataka improbably said later. As we now know, meltdown was already occurring even as Edano spoke. And far from being unforeseeable, the disaster had been repeatedly forewarned.

Throughout the months of lies and misinformation, one story has stuck: "The earthquake knocked out the plant's electric power, halting cooling to its six reactors. The tsunami a unique, one-off event - then washed out the plant's back-up generators, shutting down all cooling and starting the chain of events that would cause the world's first triple meltdown. That line has now become gospel at TEPCO. "We had no idea that a tsunami was coming," said Murata Yasuki, head of public relations for the now ruined facility. "It came completely out of the blue" (nemimi ni mizu datta). Safety checks have since focused heavily on future damage from tsunamis.But what if recirculation pipes and cooling pipes burst, snapped, leaked, and broke completely after the earthquake -- before the tidal wave reached the facilities and before the electricity went out? This would surprise few people familiar with the nearly 40-year-old reactor one, the grandfather of the nuclear reactors still operating in Japan.

Problems with the fractured, deteriorating, poorly repaired pipes and the cooling system had been pointed out for years. In 2002, whistleblower allegations that TEPCO had deliberately falsified safety records came to light and the company was forced to shut down all of its reactors and inspect them, including the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Sugaoka Kei, a General Electric on-site inspector first notified Japan's nuclear watchdog, Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) in June of 2000. The government of Japan took two years to address the problem, then colluded in covering it up -- and gave the name of the whistleblower to TEPCO.


(snip)

At 9:51 pm, under CEO orders, the inside of the reactor building was declared a no-entry zone. Around 11 pm, radiation levels for the inside of the turbine building, which was next door to the reactor reached levels of 0.5 to 1.2 mSv per hour.

The meltdown was already underway.

Oddly enough, while TEPCO later insisted that the cause of the meltdown was the tsunami knocking out emergency power systems, at the 7:47 pm 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. The emergency water circulation system (IC) did in fact start working before the power loss and continue working after the power was lost as well.

Sometime between 4 and 6 am, on May 12, Yoshida Masao, the plant manager decided it was time to pump seawater into the reactor core and notified TEPCO. Seawater was not pumped in until hours after a hydrogen explosion occurred, roughly 8:00 pm that day. By then, it was probably already too late.

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 was 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."

As Burnie points out, TEPCO also admitted massive fuel melt --16 hours after loss of coolant, and 7-8 hours before the explosion in unit 1. "Since they must have known all this -- their decision to flood with massive water volumes would guarantee massive additional contamination - including leaks to the ocean."

No one knows exactly how much damage was done to the plant by the quake, or if this damage alone would account for the meltdown. However, eyewitness testimony and TEPCO'S own data indicates that the damage was significant. All of this despite the fact that shaking experienced at the plant during the quake was within it's approved design specifications. Says Hasuike:

"What really happened at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to cause a meltdown? TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the government of Japan have provided many explanations. They don't make sense. The one thing they haven't provided is the truth. It's time that they did."

David McNeill writes for The Independent, The Irish Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator.

Jake Adelstein worked primarily as a police reporter for The Yomiuri newspaper from April 1993 to November 2005; he was the first foreigner to write in Japanese for a national newspaper. He now runs the website http://www.japansubculture.com, writes for Japanese periodicals and The Atlantic Wire, and does risk management consulting for foreign firms in Japan. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.

This article appears in The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 32 No 2, August 8, 2011.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Japanese Govt. gave a subtle and semi-official/semi-unofficial announcement today...to as yet undefined persons in as yet undefined towns and villages in the area immediately around the nuclear plant. The message, however, was clear....it would be several DECADES before some willl be allowed to return to live there, due to the amount and the persistence [long half-lives] of the radioactive nuclei there [and still 'a comin']. I truly feel sorry for the poor schnooks who just happened to have the bad luck of the draw of living nearby. They will be lucky if they are allowed to return to get all their things and live in a box somewhere else....until the decades pass, and they can return 'home' without worry! :what:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Peter - yes. More detail here:

Fukushima disaster: residents may never return to radiation-hit homes

Japanese government will admit for first time that radiation levels will be too high to allow many evacuees to return home

Justin McCurry, in Tokyo guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 August 2011 17.22 BST

Residents who lived close to the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant are to be told their homes may be uninhabitable for decades, according to Japanese media reports.

The Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, is expected to visit the area at the weekend to tell evacuees they will not be able to return to their homes, even if the operation to stabilise the plant's stricken reactors by January is successful.

Kan's announcement will be the first time officials have publicly recognised that radiation damage to areas near the plant could make them too dangerous to live in for at least a generation, effectively meaning that some residents will never return to them.

A Japanese government source is quoted in local media as saying the area could be off-limits for "several decades". New data has revealed unsafe levels of radiation outside the 12-mile exclusion zone, increasing the likeliness that entire towns will remain unfit for habitation.

The exclusion zone was imposed after a series of hydrogen explosions at the plant following the earthquake and tsunami in March.

The government had planned to lift the evacuation order and allow 80,000 people back into their homes inside the exclusion zone once the reactors had been brought under control. Several thousand others living in random hotspots outside the zone have also had to relocate.

However, in a report issued over the weekend the science ministry projected that radiation accumulated over one year at 22 of 50 tested sites inside the exclusion zone would easily exceed 100 millisieverts, five times higher than the safe level advised by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. "We can't rule out the possibility that there will be some areas where it will be hard for residents to return to their homes for a long time," said Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretaryand face of the government during the disaster. "We are very sorry."

Edano refused to say which areas were on the no-go list or how long they would remain uninhabitable, adding that a decision would be made after more radiation tests have been conducted.

The government has yet to decide how to compensate the tens of thousands of residents and business owners who will be forced to start new lives elsewhere. The state has hinted that it may buy or rent land from residents in unsafe areas, although it has not ruled out trying to decontaminate them.

Futaba and Okuma, towns less than two miles from the Fukushima plant, are expected to be among those on the blacklist. The annual cumulative radiation dose in one district of Okuma was estimated at 508 millisieverts, which experts believe is high enough to increase the risk of cancer. More than 300 households from the two towns will be allowed to return briefly to their homes next week to collect belongings. It will be the first time residents have visited their homes since the meltdown.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power, is working to bring the three crippled reactors and four overheating spent fuel pools to a safe state known as "cold shutdown" by mid-January.

Last week the company estimated that leaks from all three reactors had dropped significantly over the past month.

But signs of progress at the plant have been tempered by widespread contamination of soil, trees, roads and farmland.

Experts say that while health risks can be lowered by measures including the removal of layers of topsoil, vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and children should avoid even minimal exposure.

"Any exposure would pose a health risk, no matter how small," Hiroaki Koide, a radiation specialist at Kyoto University, told Associated Press. "There is no dose that we should call safe."

Any government admission that residents will not be able to return to their homes will be closely monitored in Japan.

Suspicions persist that the authorities privately acknowledged this situation several months ago. In April, Kenichi Matsumoto, a senior adviser to the cabinet, quoted Kan as saying that people would not be able to live near the plant for "10 to 20 years". Matsumoto later claimed to have made the remark himself.

[Keith Millea]

Update from Fairewinds:

[video=vimeo;28014740]http://vimeo.com/28014740[/video]

[Keith Millea]

Another short update:

[video=vimeo;28222223]http://vimeo.com/28222223[/video]

http://www.fairewinds.com

[Magda Hassan]

TEPCO quietly paid 40 billion yen to areas near nuclear plants

2011/09/16

The Mutsu city government office building that was purchased with donations from Tokyo Electric Power Co. The building, which used to be a shopping center, has a total floor space of about 18,000 square meters. (Takuya Kitazawa)

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has been handing out about 2 billion yen (about $26 million) a year in unpublicized payments to local governments near its nuclear facilities, sources said Sept. 14.
Though the large sums in taxes and public grants paid by the firm to local communities are public knowledge, the full scale of its additional, anonymous giving has not previously been revealed.
It total, over the past 20 years, the company spent more than 40 billion yen on payments known internally as "funds to deal with local communities."
One TEPCO executive said: "We paid the donations because we wanted to obtain the understanding of local governments on the construction of nuclear power plants. (We did not disclose the amounts of the donations because) we wanted to avoid criticism that we had collusive relations with local authorities."
According to several TEPCO executives, the electric power company earmarked 1 billion yen to 2 billion yen at the start of each fiscal year for the payments. When necessary, that amount would be increased during the year, raising the average annual spending between 1990 and 2010 to more than 2 billion yen. That was in addition to the money flowing into local coffers from nuclear fuel taxes and grants mandated under the three laws on electric sources.
TEPCO would first screen requests from heads of local governments and others for the payments, and then forward the proposals to its board of directors for approval.
The company would often ask local governments not to reveal it as the source of the payments and would give money without specifying how it should be used, allowing local officials to use it freely.
The sum given to each local government was mainly decided on the basis of the amount of electricity generated in the nuclear power plants of each prefecture. When very large payments were due to a particular local government, TEPCO would divide it over several years.
Local governments receiving donations from TEPCO included the Fukushima prefectural government and the governments of the four municipalities where the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power plants are located.
Payments were also made to the Niigata prefectural government and two municipalities hosting the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, as well as the Aomori prefectural authorities and the city government of Mutsu, where a TEPCO-affiliated company planned to construct an intermediate storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.
Of a total of 34.7 billion yen identified as having been paid for the construction of public facilities, 19.9 billion yen went to local governments in Fukushima Prefecture, 13 billion yen went to authorities in Niigata Prefecture, and 1.8 billion yen went to Mutsu.
One TEPCO executive also said some local administrations had asked for money to cover budget deficits.
"We were not able to reject the requests because we had made those donations normal events," the executive said, adding, "The responsibility weighed heavily on us."
In exceptional cases, TEPCO disclosed donations for particularly expensive facilities. Fukushima Prefecture's 13-billion-yen "J Village" soccer facility and park improvements in Kashiwazaki city and Kariwa village in Niigata Prefecture worth 10 billion yen were funded by the company.
But the general approach was secretive.
A TEPCO public relations official said: "We refrain from disclosing each donation. We have disclosed the amounts of donations when the recipients have wanted to disclose them, or when the donations were made for large-scale projects."
A former executive of the Aomori prefectural government said: "We welcomed anonymous donations because we were able to use them freely."
The Mutsu city government purchased a shopping center building and turned it into a municipal government office building in 2006. Of the total cost of 2.8 billion yen, 1.2 billion yen was paid by donations from TEPCO.
According to former city government executives, the city had to move because of the age of its previous building, but could not pay for the relocation itself because of serious fiscal problems.
TEPCO was initially reluctant to pay, saying funding the relocation did not meet the donations' official purpose of revitalizing local communities. However, the Mutsu city government pressed the point, saying the city government office was used by local people. TEPCO eventually accepted the request.
The fact that TEPCO provided the funding was only revealed after city assembly members blocked passage of the budget plan and insisted on transparency.
In Aomori Prefecture, the Federation of Electric Power Companies donated a total of 17 billion yen to prefectural government-affiliated organizations during the period from 1989 and 2009. Of that amount, about 5 billion yen was shouldered by TEPCO.
The municipal government of Naraha, Fukushima Prefecture, where the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant is located, received a donation of 1 billion yen from TEPCO in fiscal 2007 to pay for the construction of a combined kindergarten and nursery school.
"We were not able to cover all of the construction costs, so we asked TEPCO for donations," a Naraha municipal government official said.
Shuji Shimizu, vice president of Fukushima University, said: "One of the reasons for enactment of the three laws on electric sources was that it is not good to be securing places for the construction of nuclear power plants by using dubious donations. It is obvious that the huge donations by electric power companies are related to nuclear power plants. If local governments depend on those donations, their finances will be forced to depend on nuclear power plants more and more."
Haruyuki Matsuyama, a certified public accountant active in uncovering the finances of public organizations, said: "I feel that donations by electric power companies are a kind of bribe. The donations are used to conciliate local communities. They are apparently different from genuine donations that do not seek a return. The operations of administrations must be based on information disclosure. Anonymous donations imply that both electric power companies and local governments regard the donations as dubious."
(This article was written by Takashi Ichida, Kamome Fujimori, Takuya Kitazawa, Hiroyoshi Itabashi and Yo Noguchi.)
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201109150395.html

[Magda Hassan]

By MALCOLM FOSTER, Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) -- Chanting "Sayonara nuclear power" and waving banners, tens of thousands of people marched in central Tokyo on Monday to call on Japan's government to abandon atomic energy in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident.
The demonstration underscores how deeply a Japanese public long accustomed to nuclear power has been affected by the March 11 crisis, when a tsunami caused core meltdowns at three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex.

The disaster the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl saw radiation spewed across a wide part of northeastern Japan, forcing the evacuation of some 100,000 people who lived near the plant and raising fears of contamination in everything from fruit and vegetables to fish and water.
"Radiation is scary," said Nami Noji, a 43-year-old mother who came to the protest on this national holiday with her four children, ages 8-14. "There's a lot of uncertainty about the safety of food, and I want the future to be safe for my kids."
Police estimated the crowd at 20,000 people, while organizers said there were three times that many people.
In addition to fears of radiation, the Japanese public and corporate world have had to put up with electricity shortages amid the sweltering summer heat after more than 30 of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors were idled over the summer to undergo inspections.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, who took office earlier this month, has said Japan will restart reactors that clear safety checks. But he has also said the country should reduce its reliance on atomic energy over the long-term and explore alternative sources of energy. He has not spelled out any specific goals.

Before the disaster, this earthquake-prone country derived 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Yet Japan is also a resource-poor nation, making it a difficult, time-consuming process for it to come up with viable alternative forms of energy.
Mari Joh, a 64-year-old woman who traveled from Hitachi city to collect signatures for a petition to shut down the Tokai Dai-ni nuclear plant not far from her home, acknowledged that shifting the country's energy sources could take 20 years.
"But if the government doesn't act decisively now to set a new course, we'll just continue with the status quo," she said Monday. "I want to use natural energy, like solar, wind and biomass."
Before the march, the protesters gathered in Meiji Park to hear speakers address the crowd, including one woman from Fukushima prefecture, Reiko Muto, who described herself as a "hibakusha," an emotionally laden term for survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those evacuated from around the plant remain uncertain about when, if ever, they will be able to return to their homes.
An AP-GfK poll showed that 55 percent of Japanese want to reduce the number of nuclear reactors in the country, while 35 percent would like to leave the number about the same. Four percent want an increase while 3 percent want to eliminate them entirely.
The poll, which surveyed 1,000 adults between July 29 and Aug. 10, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
Author Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1994 and has campaigned for pacifist and anti-nuclear causes, also addressed the crowd. He and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who composed the score to the movie "The Last Emperor," were among the event's supporters.
(This version CORRECTS spelling of nuclear plant's name in second paragraph.)

Photos here