Fukushima damage leaves spent fuel at risk-U.S. lawmaker
by Roberta Rampton
AlterNet (source: Reuters)
April 16, 2012

WASHINGTON, April 16 (Reuters) - Japan, with assistance from the U.S. government, needs to do more to move spent fuel rods out of harm's way at the tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, said U.S. Senator Ron Wyden on Monday.

Wyden, a senior Democratic senator on the Senate Energy committee, toured the ruined Fukushima plant on April 6, and said the damage was far worse than he expected.

"Seeing the extent of the disaster first-hand during my visit conveyed the magnitude of this tragedy and the continuing risks and challenges in a way that news accounts cannot," said Wyden in a letter to Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan's ambassador to the United States.

Last March, an earthquake followed by a tsunami wrecked the Fukushima plant, causing the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years and prompting global scrutiny of the safety of nuclear power plants...
 

Fukushima Daiichi Site: Cesium-137 is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl Accident
by Akio Matsumura
updated April 6, 2012

I asked top spent-fuel pools expert Mr. Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy, for an explanation of the potential impact of the 11,421 rods.

I received an astounding response from Mr. Alvarez...

 

Reactor 2 radiation too high for access
by Minoru Matsutani
The Japan Times
March 28, 2012

Radiation inside the reactor 2 containment vessel at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant has reached a lethal 73 sieverts per hour and any attempt to send robots in will require them to have greater resistance than currently available, experts said Wednesday.

Exposure to 73 sieverts for a minute would cause nausea and seven minutes would cause death within a month, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said...

The utility said the radiation level in the reactor 2 containment vessel is too high for robots, endoscopes and other devices to function properly.

Spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said it will be necessary to develop devices resistant to high radiation.

High radiation can damage the circuitry of computer chips and degrade camera-captured images...
 

 islander wrote: 
AugieK lives!!!

Japan, Before And After The Tsunami

 Coaxial wrote: 
I love that line. I'd like to see that on CNN:

In other news, a mishandling of cause and effect, hidden bias, and plain stupid interpolation has resulted in the death of a small down in rural Iowa. 

 islander wrote: 
Those bastids!

 romeotuma wrote: 
This has already been debunked (several times)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/20/researchers-trumpet-another-flawed-fukushima-death-study/ 
First, the authors assert: "In the United States, Fukushima fallout arrived just six days after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns." They provide no evidence for this assertion, no citation to back up their facts. The authors then note that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitored radioactivity in milk, water and air in the weeks and months following the disaster. Ah, here must be the data, the careful reader hopes. Alas, "the number of samples for which the EPA was able to detect measurable concentrations of radioactivity is relatively few," the authors write. They then conclude, with evident disappointment, that "clearly, the 2011 EPA reports cannot be used with confidence for any comprehensive assessment of temporal trends and spatial patterns of U.S. environmental radiation levels originating in Japan." In other words, the EPA didn't find evidence for the plume that our entire argument depends on, so "clearly" we can't trust the agency's data.

Yet even if there isn't evidence for a plume, where do all the dead people come from? Here, from the abstract, is the chain of reasoning: "U.S. health officials report weekly deaths by age in 122 cities, about 25 to 35 percent of the national total. Deaths rose 4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks....Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths." In sum: Sloppy statistics killed 14,000 people.

 romeotuma wrote: 
ugh... correlation is not causation. buy the t-shirt.

 romeotuma wrote: 
Thanks Romeo! This article is a jaw dropper. I copied it and I'm going to paste it here, it's not long and it's worth reading. Fukushima has dropped out of the media spotlight but this thing has not been tamed.

Battle to control Fukushima has just 'stored up' dangers
by David McNeill
The Independent
December 16, 2011

Japan's government admitted this week that dismantling the reactors and the 260-tonne lethal cargo of nuclear fuel will take up to 40 years...

Much of the fuel in three of Fukushima Daiichi plant's six reactors has melted through the base of the containment vessels. Engineers are still pumping 4,000 tonnes of water a week on to the fuel to keep it cool, leaving 200,000 tonnes of heavily contaminated water on site. Despite the efforts, the rush to bring the plant under control is storing up complex problems, according to Tomohiko Suzuki, who spent a month working at the plant during the summer and has released a book this week about his experiences. "The question is, can they maintain this temperature for years and years?" he told reporters in Tokyo yesterday. "I believe the problems there are just starting."

Living with Fukushima City's radiation problem
by Ike Teuling
Greenpeace
December 8, 2011

We spent four days in Fukushima City doing a radiation survey in the neighbourhoods of Watari and Onami. People there have been left to cope alone in a highly contaminated environment by both the local and national governments. Our radiation experts found hot spots of up to 37 microSieverts per hour in a garden only a few meters away from a house and an accumulation of radioactivity in drainage systems, puddles and ditches. Overall, the radiation levels in these neighbourhoods are so high that people receive an exposure to radiation just from external sources that is ten times the annual allowed dose. How high their internal exposure is from eating contaminated food and inhaling or ingesting radioactive particles remains unknown, since no government program is keeping track of this...

In short, it is clear that the situation in Fukushima is rapidly spinning out of control, and if the national government does not take full responsibility for the protection of its population, the people affected by the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi will continue to suffer for a long time to come.

Magnitude-5.9 quake hits near Japan nuclear site

Shells of nuclear reactor buildings seen at stricken Japan plant

Fukushima nuclear disaster lifts Shell profit
by Peter Cripps
The Independent
October 27, 2011

Spiralling oil prices and strong demand for gas after the Fukushima nuclear disaster helped Shell double its profits between July and September.

Europe's largest oil company reported profits of £4.5 billion, up from £2.2 billion, at a time of continued fuel price misery for British motorists.

Shell has benefited from a 48% rise in oil prices — partly caused by unrest in the Middle East and North Africa — as well as a 2% increase in production, excluding asset sales.

Natural gas prices have risen nearly a third after the Fukushima nuclear disaster boosted demand as Japan sought alternative sources of power...

Radioactive Used Cars Being Sold Illegally in Japan

A Japanese person has cut my air the last 2 times.

Japan marks 6 months since earthquake, tsunami
Some really interesting pictures of some progress being made

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Fujioka-Atsushi/3599

Fukushima Desolation Worst Since Nagasaki as Residents Flee
By Yuriy Humber, Yuji Okada and Stuart Biggs
Bloomberg News
September 27, 2011

Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more...

What's emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima's $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture's mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished.

The March earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear crisis and left almost 20,000 people dead or missing may cost 17 trillion yen ($223 billion), hindering recovery of the world's third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation...

On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl reactor hurled 180 metric tons of nuclear fuel into the atmosphere, creating the world's first exclusion zone of 30 kilometers around a nuclear plant. A quarter of a century later, the zone is still classed as uninhabitable...

Tokyo Electric's decision in the 1960s to name its atomic plant Fukushima Dai-Ichi has today associated a prefecture of about 2 million people that's almost half the size of Belgium with radiation contamination. In contrast, Chernobyl is the name of a small town near the namesake plant in what today is Ukraine...