Thousands evacuate as Fukishima nuclear emergency is declared

[Peter Lemkin]

It just gets 'better and better'. The plant is obviously out of control and has not been stabilized! One can expect that additional reactors will further overheat, suffer partial or full meltdowns and leak more radiation. It is a literal ticking timebomb, but treated as if it is A-OK and under control. It is not....as they have just partially admitted, some years late. Tokyo is only a four hour drive away...and Japan is a very densely populated country. An unknown [or at least undisclosed] amount of the radiation released has traveled [and continues to be released] Worldwide, carried by water currents, wind and weather patterns [as with Chernobyl, higher radiation levels will be found on the ground based on winds and rainfall.]

There was a great two day conference of top experts on nuclear power and nuclear environmental consequences. It was organized by Helen Caldecott. Here is the program and one can download the powerpoint slides from the speakers and watch all of the conference at the url below.

The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, Day 2
March 12, 2013

A unique, two-day symposium at which an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy experts will make presentations on and discuss the bio-medical and ecological consequences of the Fukushima disaster, will be held at The New York Academy of Medicine on March 11-12, 2013, the second anniversary of the accident.

A project of The Helen Caldicott Foundation, the symposium is being co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Click on a bolded link below to jump to that section of the program.

Session Three:
THE MEDICAL CONSEQUENCES OF BOTH THE CHERNOBYL AND FUKUSHIMA CRISES AS THEY RELATE TO NORTH AMERICA
Session Chair: Andrew Kanter, Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Alexey Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences
Lessons from Chernobyl

Wladimir Wertelecki, Former Chair of the Department of Medical Genetics University South Alabama
Congenital Malformations in Rivne Polossia and the Chernobyl Accident

Ian Fairlie, Radiation Biologist and Independent Consultant
The Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima: Nuclear Source Terms, Initial Health Effects

Steve Wing, Gillings School of Public Health, University North Carolina
Epidemiological Studies of Radiation Releases from Nuclear Facilities: Lessons Past and Present

Joe Mangano, Radiation and Public Health Project
Post Fukushima Increases in Newborn Hypothyroidism on the West Coast of USA

Robert Alvarez, Institute for Policy Studies
Management of Spent Fuel Pools and Radioactive Waste

Questions and Answers

Cindy Folkers, Beyond Nuclear
Post-Fukushima Food Monitoring in the US

Mary Olson
Nuclear Information and Resource Services, Gender Matters in the Atomic Age

Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear
Seventy Years of Radioactive Risks in Japan and America

David Freeman, Former Chair. Tennessee Valley Authority
My Experience with Nuclear Power

Herbert Abrams, Stanford University School of Medicine
The Hazards of Low Level Ionizing Radiation: Controversy and Evidence

Questions and Answers
-----------------------------------------------
To view the entire two day symposium go the the url directly below:

http://www.totalwebcasting.com/view/?id=hcf#

[Jan Klimkowski]

A couple of posts from another forum by a person whose moniker is "nuke_engineer". I've followed his posts for several years, pre-Fukushima, and believe him to be generally credible.

Folks,

If there's anything the engineering and scientific community is learning from this disaster is that everything the book smart and academics believe is getting tested and in many cases being proven wrong or not occurring as expected. We've never had a loss of coolant accident where the core melted and went through the containment and so we learn new things and new rules every day. Here's some examples:

An Atomic Bomb is essentially a runaway fission reaction in the A-Bomb type of ordnance. Most people don't realize that this requires a sudden (in microseconds) jamming of a critical mass of Uranium or Plutonium to create the uncontrolled reaction. This means shaped charges and coordinated co-explosions of the shaped charges to force the material into a condensed shape. IMHO, it is doubtful (as far as I see right now) for this to happen at Fukushima, but my experience makes me reluctant to say it's impossible for it to happen. I'll also add that H-Bombs and N-Bombs use very small A-Bombs as triggers, so the odds this will happen in those type of weapons is slight as well. Notice I won't say impossible, because I've already seen the impossible happen several times!

This does not preclude that a terrorist group could bring a nuclear explosive device on-site and detonate this and possibly cause sympathetic explosions and damage, but with a terrorist act the real danger then would be another round of aerial and oceanic contamination.

Regular fission created by bringing fissile materials together with some moderation as well created by just general decay is another matter. It's going on all the time all over the facility. Conventional wisdom would say that over time the fission process should decline, but to our surprise we have data otherwise (I can't go further here) and thus there must be other processes and systems at work we just don't understand yet. Aside from the radiological dangers, the heat generated from these processes has created spontaneous combustion in some cases as we learn that impurities in the fuel rod assemblies as well as the passage of time and regular contamination (rust, stress, strain, etc.) can certainly impeach the so-called safety zones of such materials. Conventional engineering says that over time things tend to stabilize, but the Chernobyl and TMI experience already had taught us that this is not the case, due to other system effects and interactions as well as the problem of loss of intimate and accurate engineering knowledge of the tactical situation as time goes by.

The "dilution" story is also getting some well deserved credibility hits. Although I was aware of but couldn't discuss the classified 1950's report of the then discovery of current "tunnels" in the Pacific which could essentially nullify some of the dilution, I hear now that the report has now been declassified and the Chinese are also working on a similar research project as well as our NOAA crowd. This could prove very interesting and change our comfort level here in the western hemisphere as that story unfolds.

My belief is that most of the Northern hemisphere will be affected in a variety of ways and levels of contamination. I also believe that the US and Canada as well as Latin America may be hit not by contamination via oceanic or aerial means, but by business. Unscrupulous business people could use contaminated seafood, feed or even animals and bring them to the Western Hemisphere and cause a more dangerous situation than the general environmental contamination. We will get hit IMHO by some way we don't expect or our legacy scientific and engineering methods and practices tell us "it's impossible" but here it shows up! Anyone who is confident and who steadfastly believes they know the answer, IMHO, is just showing their ignorance since we haven't ever seen a disaster of this magnitude interacting with so many other planetary environmental systems and man-made technologies.

What I still don't understand is how the Japanese could have built one of the world's largest concentrations of reactors and SFP's in such a place.

BTW, although I'll blame TEPCo for the initial design and the operations deficiencies, one cannot blame them for their hesitation to act. If what we face is truly unknown, a little (or a lot) of caution may make some sense, especially when their country will be the most affected by their actions.

Enough said. I'm checking out for now to do some other work.

In nuclear power plants, we do inventory by fuel assemblies, sometimes called bundles. The fuel assemblies are made up of multiple fuel rods. Depending on the BWR design, there's from 72 to 96 rods per assembly. At the Fukushima plant, we (at least in my documentation) used 96 as the standard for the number of rods per assembly.

At Fukushima prior to the tsunami, there were essentially four inventory locations for BWR fuel assemblies/bundles:

1. The individual reactor core
2. The individual reactor Fuel Pool (aka as the Spent Fuel Pool or SFP)
3. The Fukushima Facility Common SFP
4. The Air-Cooled Fuel Caskets

People keep forgetting about Central Storage and IMHO that could come to bite us. Six thousand fucking rods in a huge pool and to my knowledge, no one has inspected each one individually yet, but that's another story for another time and ecological disastrous leak.......

There are maybe 10-50 other fuel assemblies and other loose radioactive materials located in other places (transit pools, test lab, QC lab, radiology lab, in transport, etc.) but essentially they are a trivial amount of fuel when compared what's actually in cores and SFP's. That'll have to be cleaned up as well, but what a couple of month's clean-up and a few million dollars among us engineers looking at the macro picture.....LoL

So using the Wikipedia numbers (which are as accurate as any), just reactor 4 has 1331 spent fuel assemblies located in its SFP and 204 new fuel assemblies for a total of 1535 fuel assemblies or using the 96 rods per assembly standard a total of 96 x 1535 = 105,915 fuel rods.

Now that's just Unit 4.

If we take the numbers provided by wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_D....

the actual number of fuel assemblies at reactors and in reactor SFP's is:


Location Unit 1 Unit 2 Unit 3 Unit 4 Unit 5 Unit 6 Central Storage
Reactor Fuel Ass 400 548 548 0 548 764 0
Spent Fuel Ass 292 587 514 1331 946 876 6375
New Fuel Ass 100 28 52 204 48 64 N/A

Totals 792 1163 1114 1535 6375

So if we're going to try to recover just units 1-4 and repair the central SFP we
have

792 + 1163 + 1114+ 1535 + 6375 = 10979 Fuel Assemblies or Fuel Bundles

which represents in the neighborhood of 1,053,984 fuel rods to recover.

That's a lot of nuclear material and we aren't touching units 5 and 6.

Just don't use rods and fuel assemblies/bundles interchangeably unless you use the multipliers. IMHO, although the reactor 3 MOX is a problem, the real problem is taking out the staggering volume of damaged fuel assemblies in the other reactors. I'm going to estimate that just the complete removal (not the cleanup) job may take 10-15 years. I'm also wondering where the hell are they going to dispose of all of this nuclear refuse safely on that island, plus all the other debris that goes along with that.

[Peter Lemkin]

[video=vimeo;70628310]http://vimeo.com/70628310[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

TEPCO just announced the radiation levels around the Fukashima plant are 18! times higher than they reported [incredibly, because the radiation monitors stopped (maxed out) at 1/18th the values on site!]. At this higher level, what was assumed to be a 'tolerable' dose for those working on the cleanup is now a highly DANGEROUS daily dosage - and work hours will have to be drastically cut and persons only allowed to work once every few days*...even so, they are lab mice in a radiation experiment. It is not just the reactors themselves that seem to be in 'meltdown', but TEPCOs credibility...if it still has any...I think not! They really need to either nationalize the plant or have some international nuclear expert team supervising this.....it only gets WORSE and we keep finding out that they have minimized the damage and the radiation levels, leaks and so on..... But, that's a very bad error or clever trick to use radiation meters that don't go 'too' high! Hey guys, this is not a simulation, this is a World-Class Nuclear Disaster...stop playing games!

* The 'new' rate is considered enough to kill an unexposed person in four hours - and that would result in damage and death over a longer period if taken in 'smaller' time-spaced doses!

1 September 2013 Last updated at 09:09 GMT


Fukushima radiation levels '18 times higher' than thought

Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi inspected the site on MondayRadiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.
Last week the plant's operator reported radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank into the ground.
It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.
The plant was crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour.
However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.
The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.
The new reading will have direct implications for radiation doses received by workers who spent several days trying to stop the leak last week, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo.
In addition, Tepco says it has discovered a leak on another pipe emitting radiation levels of 230 millisieverts an hour.
The plant has seen a series of water leaks and power failures.
The 2011 tsunami knocked out cooling systems to the reactors, three of which melted down.
The damage from the tsunami has necessitated the constant pumping of water to cool the reactors.
This is believed to be the fourth major leak from storage tanks at Fukushima since 2011 and the worst so far in terms of volume.
After the latest leak, Japan's nuclear-energy watchdog raised the incident level from one to three on the international scale measuring the severity of atomic accidents, which has a maximum of seven.
Experts have said the scale of water leakage may be worse than officials have admitted.

[Peter Lemkin]

Today it was announced that 'sorry [bow] our preliminary correction of 18x higher radiation levels was wrong - in fact we now find that the levels are 36X higher'!

...this is enough to kill an unexposed person in a few [1-3] hours...and a radiation-suited person in about 4-5 hours!!!! [radiation suits only protect [totally] from alpha radiation ; beta radiation [by about 20-50%; and gamma radiation NOT AT ALL~!!!!!]
{to my knowledge, the complete 'mix' of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation has not been disclosed - but in a nuclear reactor there are always high levels of all three!!!

[Magda Hassan]

And where are the Tepco shareholders? Are they suiting up to mop up the radioactive mess of their nuclear plant? They managed to suit up and go to the bank to cash the dividend checks.

[Peter Lemkin]

And where are the Tepco shareholders? Are they suiting up to mop up the radioactive mess of their nuclear plant? They managed to suit up and go to the bank to cash the dividend checks.

Actually, there are rumors that TEPCO is about to declare bankruptcy......I don't know how that works in Japan, but I'd guess everyone will loose but a few big cigar smokers. The poor emergency workers who have been trying to find and fix the leaks - they were working under the assumption of one dangerous level of radiation - only to find out it was more than 20-30x stronger, and they'd been out much too long and too often.

The latest 'smart idea' to stop the radioactive water from leaking into the ocean sounds both difficult and insecure to me. They plan to build a wall of frozen earth in a deep trench surrounding the facility. The earth used will be kept frozen by very cold liquids in pipes [like in very cold refrigeration systems]. Even if that would work [which to me is questionable], it would only take an earthquake or tsunami to destroy it, it seems. Maybe they should hire a good magician to make it all just disappear......It will really take the best engineering minds in the World to minimize the damage - which under the 'best' scenarios will be immense!...under the worst scenarios.....well.....I'd rather not even go there.....:nosmilie: And don't forget, the exact same types of reactors are all over America - some near large cities [like New York] and some on earthquake prone areas. All are potential targets for real terrorists or false-flag ones. Even without an earthquake or crash/explosive event, they are getting brittle and eventually will fail. [radiation causes all metals to become brittle in a few years]. Remember 'GE brings good things to life!' The most radiation resistant metals are VERY expensive, so the designs were usually for moderately resistant metal parts that needed replacement from time to time. But, when the bottom line is the bottom line, they often wait until a part fails.

[Peter Lemkin]

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]

Humankind's Most Dangerous Moment: Fukushima Fuel Pool at Unit 4.
"This is an Issue of Human Survival."

By Harvey Wasserman
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 60%"] [/TD]
[TD="width: 40%"] 9/21/13[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"]

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

We are now within two months of what may be humankind's most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.
Fukushima's owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1,300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.
Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.
The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.
Why is this so serious?


We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil's brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.
Tepco continues to pour more water onto the proximate site of three melted reactor cores it must somehow keep cool. Steam plumes indicate fission may still be going on somewhere underground. But nobody knows exactly where those cores actually are.
Much of that irradiated water now sits in roughly a thousand huge but fragile tanks that have been quickly assembled and strewn around the site. Many are already leaking. All could shatter in the next earthquake, releasing thousands of tons of permanent poisons into the Pacific.
The water flowing through the site is also undermining the remnant structures at Fukushima, including the one supporting the fuel pool at Unit Four.
More than 6,000 fuel assemblies now sit in a common pool just 50 meters from Unit Four. Some contain plutonium. The pool has no containment over it. It's vulnerable to loss of coolant, the collapse of a nearby building, another earthquake, another tsunami and more.
Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.
Radioactive hot spots continue to be found around Japan. There are indications of heightened rates of thyroid damage among local children.
The immediate bottom line is that those fuel rods must somehow come safely out of the Unit Four fuel pool as soon as possible.
Just prior to the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that shattered the Fukushima site, the core of Unit Four was removed for routine maintenance and refueling. Like some two dozen reactors in the US and too many more around the world, the General Electric-designed pool into which that core now sits is 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel must somehow be kept under water. It's clad in zirconium alloy which will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Long used in flash bulbs for cameras, zirconium burns with an extremely bright hot flame.

Each uncovered rod emits enough radiation to kill someone standing nearby in a matter of minutes. A conflagration could force all personnel to flee the site and render electronic machinery unworkable.
According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.
The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.
Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all of us.

Chernobyl's first 1986 fallout reached California within 10 days. Fukushima's in 2011 arrived in less than a week. A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.

Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima "would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival."


Neither Tokyo Electric nor the government of Japan can go this alone. There is no excuse for deploying anything less than a coordinated team of the planet's best scientists and engineers.
We have two months or less to act.

For now, we are petitioning the United Nations and President Obama to mobilize the global scientific and engineering community to take charge at Fukushima and the job of moving these fuel rods to safety.

You can sign the petition at: http://www.nukefree.org/crisis-fukushima...l-response
If you have a better idea, please follow it. But do something and do it now.

The clock is ticking. The hand of global nuclear disaster is painfully close to midnight.

[David Guyatt]

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]Humankind's Most Dangerous Moment: Fukushima Fuel Pool at Unit 4.
"This is an Issue of Human Survival."

By Harvey Wasserman
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 60%"][/TD]
[TD="width: 40%"] 9/21/13[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"]

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

We are now within two months of what may be humankind's most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.
Fukushima's owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1,300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.
Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.
The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.
Why is this so serious?


We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil's brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.
Tepco continues to pour more water onto the proximate site of three melted reactor cores it must somehow keep cool. Steam plumes indicate fission may still be going on somewhere underground. But nobody knows exactly where those cores actually are.
Much of that irradiated water now sits in roughly a thousand huge but fragile tanks that have been quickly assembled and strewn around the site. Many are already leaking. All could shatter in the next earthquake, releasing thousands of tons of permanent poisons into the Pacific.
The water flowing through the site is also undermining the remnant structures at Fukushima, including the one supporting the fuel pool at Unit Four.
More than 6,000 fuel assemblies now sit in a common pool just 50 meters from Unit Four. Some contain plutonium. The pool has no containment over it. It's vulnerable to loss of coolant, the collapse of a nearby building, another earthquake, another tsunami and more.
Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.
Radioactive hot spots continue to be found around Japan. There are indications of heightened rates of thyroid damage among local children.
The immediate bottom line is that those fuel rods must somehow come safely out of the Unit Four fuel pool as soon as possible.
Just prior to the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that shattered the Fukushima site, the core of Unit Four was removed for routine maintenance and refueling. Like some two dozen reactors in the US and too many more around the world, the General Electric-designed pool into which that core now sits is 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel must somehow be kept under water. It's clad in zirconium alloy which will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Long used in flash bulbs for cameras, zirconium burns with an extremely bright hot flame.

Each uncovered rod emits enough radiation to kill someone standing nearby in a matter of minutes. A conflagration could force all personnel to flee the site and render electronic machinery unworkable.
According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.
The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.
Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all of us.

Chernobyl's first 1986 fallout reached California within 10 days. Fukushima's in 2011 arrived in less than a week. A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.

Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima "would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival."


Neither Tokyo Electric nor the government of Japan can go this alone. There is no excuse for deploying anything less than a coordinated team of the planet's best scientists and engineers.
We have two months or less to act.

For now, we are petitioning the United Nations and President Obama to mobilize the global scientific and engineering community to take charge at Fukushima and the job of moving these fuel rods to safety.

You can sign the petition at: http://www.nukefree.org/crisis-fukushima...l-response
If you have a better idea, please follow it. But do something and do it now.

The clock is ticking. The hand of global nuclear disaster is painfully close to midnight.

Unleash Pluto, the God of the Underworld, at your peril.

[David Guyatt]

U.S. Forcing Japan to Burn Plutonium In Nuclear Reactors
Posted on July 3, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

The AMERICAN Government Is Dictating Japanese Nuclear Policy
Mainichi reports:
A Japanese prime ministerial envoy secretly promised to the United States that Japan would resume its controversial "pluthermal" program, using light-water reactors to burn plutonium, according to documents obtained by the Mainichi.
***
The revelation comes as Japan's pluthermal project remains suspended in the wake of the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster due to safety concerns. The fact that a Japanese official promised to the U.S. to implement such a controversial project without a prior explanation to the Japanese public is expected to stir up controversy.
***
Under the pluthermal plan, spent nuclear fuel generated in light-water reactors is reprocessed to extract plutonium, which is then mixed with uranium to create mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel for use in power generation. However, many experts have raised questions about the program, citing its high costs and the risks posed by the fuel's comparatively low melting point and the decreased effectiveness of control rods.
***
The documents that the Mainichi obtained are a compilation of cables recording the Ogushi-Poneman talks in the U.S. on Sept. 12 last year. During the meeting, Ogushi explained that Japan would inject all available policy resources to break away from nuclear power generation in the 2030s, that it would steadfastly promote the nuclear fuel cycle program in the medium and long term….
***
Despite the country not knowing which nuclear reactors will be authorized to resume operations following the July implementation of the new regulatory standards, the government has been pushing ahead with its plans to restart the controversial pluthermal program.
"It is abnormal for sure," said one official with the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy. "But it can't be helped if the Rokkasho plant is to be put into operation."
We explained last year:
The former Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland Mitsuhei Murata said recently:
In the US there are 31 [sic] units the same type of that of Fukushima nuclear plant [23 are virtually identical to Fukushima]. So, if the accident be spread too far that really embarrasses the US. So that is why the crisis of Unit 4 has been toned down recently. The USA is actually the main reason.
***
This is not the only indication that the U.S. has had a large role in Japanese nuclear policy after the Fukushima disaster. For example in an effort to protect the American nuclear industry the U.S. has joined Japan in raising "acceptable" radiation levels after the disaster.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also purportedly signed a pact with her counterpart in Japan agreeing that the U.S. will continue buying seafood from Japan, despite the fact that the FDA is refusing to test seafood for radiation in any meaningful fashion. So U.S. actions are helping to protect a pro-nuclear policy in Japan.
Indeed, leading Japanese newspaper Nikkei also reports that it was President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton who pressured the Japanese to re-start that country's nuclear program after the Japanese government vowed to end all nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
Ex-SKF reports:
Japanese media has been saying for some time that it was the US government who pressured the Noda administration to drop the "zero nuke by 2030″ (which morphed into "zero nuke sometime in 2030s) from its new nuclear and environmental policy decision. Tokyo Shinbun reported it a while ago, and now Nikkei Shinbun just reported it with more details. There is no news reported in the US on the matter.
The difference of the Nikkei Shinbun's article is that it names names: President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
It's hard for me to believe that this president has time for trivial matters like actually governing the affairs inside and outside the US in the election year (he must be very busy right now preparing for the big "debate"), but that's what Nikkei Shinbun wants us to believe. The article also mentions Secretary of State Clinton pressuring the Noda administration officials by strongly indicating it was the wish of President Obama and the US Congress that Japan scrap that silly nuclear energy policy.
And then, one added twist: the Nikkei article has disappeared. [Washington's Blog has located a version of the article cached by Google.]
***
Here's Nikkei article:
The US request that Japan continue nuclear power plant is "the President's idea"
2012/9/25 0:12
It has been revealed that the United States government was strongly urging [the Japanese government] to reconsider its policy of "zero nukes in 2030s" which was part of the energy and environmental strategy of the Noda administration, as "President Obama wishes it". [The US objection] was based on the fear that the framework of Japan-US cooperation for non-proliferation and peaceful use of nuclear energy might collapse [under the new policy]. [The Noda administration] eventually shelved the cabinet decision, but this ambiguous resolution may cause further trouble in the future.
According to the multiple government sources, as the Noda administration was moving in August toward explicitly putting down "zero nuke" in the official document, the US strongly requested that Japan reconsider the "zero nuke" policy, saying the request was "the result of discussion at the highest level of the government", indicating it was the Obama administration's consensus, from the president on down.
On September 8, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda met with the US Secretary of State Clinton during the APEC meeting in Vladivostok in Russia. Here again, representing the US president, Secretary Clinton expressed concern. While avoiding the overt criticism of the Noda administration's policy, she further pressured Japan by stressing that it was President Obama and the US Congress who were concerned.
The Noda administration sent its officials, including Special Advisor to Prime Minister Akihisa Nagashima, to the US on an urgent mission to directly discuss matters with the high-ranking White House officials who were frustrated with the Japanese response. By treating the new strategy as only a reference material, the Noda administration averted the confrontation with the US with the "equivocal" resolution (according to the Japanese government source) which allowed the US to interpret the Japanese action as shelving the zero nuke policy.
(According to Former Deputy Energy Secretary Martin,) the US government thinks that "The US energy strategy would be more likely to suffer a direct damage" because of the Japan's policy change toward zero nuclear energy. It is because the Japanese nuclear policy is closely linked also to the nuclear non-proliferation and environmental policies aimed at preventing the global warming under the Obama administration.
In the Atomic Energy Agreement effective as of 1988, Japan and the US agreed to a blanket statement that as long as it is at the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, reprocessing of the nuclear fuel is allowed without prior consent from the US. Japan's most important role [in the agreement] is to secure the peaceful use of plutonium without possessing nuclear weapons.
The current Japan-US agreement will expire in 2018, and the government will need to start preliminary, unofficial discussions [with the US] as early as next year. There is some time before the expiration of the agreement, but if Japan leaves its nuclear policy in vague terms the US may object to renewal of permission for nuclear fuel reprocessing. Some (in the Japanese government) say "We are not sure any more what will happen to the renewal of the agreement."
And U.S. influence on Japanese nuclear policy started well before the Fukushima accident.
For example, archaic nuclear reactor designs such as those used at Fukushima built by American company General Electric were chosen because they were good for making nuclear bombs. The U.S. secretly helped Japan develop its nuclear weapons program starting in the the 1980s. Therefore, the U.S. played a large role in Japan's development of nuclear energy. (See this).

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