Japan Radiation Fears Persist Around World

ralphrepo · Mar 23, 2011

This is the latest update from CNBC. IMHO, not very encouraging, but I guess the silver lining is that it isn't worst news:

Radiation Fears Grow From Stricken Japan Nuclear Plant
Published: Tuesday, 22 Mar 2011 | 10:56 PM ET

Further contamination of vegetables added to global anxiety on Wednesday at radiation from Japan's tsunami-smashed nuclear plant where engineers are struggling to cool reactors in the world's worst atomic crisis for 25 years. Above safety radiation levels have now been discovered in 11 types of vegetables from the Fukushima area in north-east Japan where the six-reactor plant was battered by a March 11 earthquake and tidal wave, the government said.

Radiation has also been found in milk, tap water and the nearby Pacific sea, though Japan and experts insist levels are still far from dangerous to humans. The Asian nation's worst crisis since World War Two has caused an estimated $250 billion damage, sent shock waves through global financial markets, and left nearly 23,000 people dead or missing, mostly from flattened coastal towns. More than a quarter of a million people are living in shelters, while rescuers and sniffer dogs continue to comb debris and mud looking for corpses and personal momentoes.

Worsened by widespread ignorance of the technicalities of radiation, public anxiety has been growing round the world. U.S. regulators announced import restrictions on contaminated milk and spinach from four Japanese prefectures, Japan's Jiji news agency said on Wednesday. Japan has already halted shipment of some food from the area and Asian neighbors are inspecting imports for contamination. Vienna-based U.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), expressed concern about a lack of information from Japanese authorities. It cited missing data on temperatures of spent fuel pools at the facility's reactors 1, 3 and 4. "We continue to see radiation coming from the site ... and the question is where exactly is that coming from?" added a senior IAEA official James Lyons. Although there has been progress in restoring power to the Fukushima site 13 days after the accident, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power(TEPCO) said it needed more time before it could say the reactors were stabilized.

Technicians working inside an evacuation zone around the plant, 250 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, have successfully attached power cables to all six reactors and started a pump at one to cool overheating nuclear fuel rods. Smoke and steam rising from two of the most threatening reactors, No. 2 and No. 3, have caused alarm in recent days, but had stabilized again on Wednesday. Experts say the steam blasts have probably released a small amount of radioactive particles. Concern is high over the core of reactor No. 1 after its temperature rose to 380-390 Celsius (715-735 Fahrenheit), TEPCO executive vice president Sakae Muto said. The reactor was built to run at a temperature of 302 C (575 F). As well as having its engineers on the front line in highly dangerous circumstances, TEPCO is also facing accusations of a slow disaster response and questions over why it originally stored more uranium at the plant than it was designed to hold.

US Concern for Troops

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was concerned about radioactive fallout affecting the 55,000 troops in and around Japan, many involved in a massive relief operation for Washington's close ally. "We're very concerned about the health of our men and women in uniform," he said. "But we're also deeply concerned about the wellbeing of our Japanese allies."

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said people in Fukushima prefecture should stop eating leafy vegetables and halt shipments of milk and parsley, Kyodo news agency said. Some radioactive particles thought to be from Fukushima have been detected as far away as Iceland, diplomatic sources said. They stressed the tiny traces, measured by a network of international monitoring stations as they spread eastwards from Japan across the Pacific, North America, the Atlantic and to Europe, were far too low to cause any harm to humans. "It's only a matter of days before it disperses in the entire northern hemisphere," said Andreas Stohl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research. The Japan crisis has dealt a blow to the nuclear power industry around the world. Italy became the latest nation to re-assess its program, announcing a one-year moratorium on site selection and building of plants.

World's Costliest Disaster

Crisis in the world's third-biggest economy — and its key position in global supply chains, especially for the auto and technology sectors — has added to global market jitters, also affected by conflict in Libya and unrest in the Middle East. Asian shares fell on Wednesday, with Tokyo's Nikkei shedding nearly 2 percent.

In what will be the world's costliest natural disaster, the Nikkei newspaper on Wednesday quoted Economics Minister Kaoru Yosano as saying damage may reach 25 trillion yen ($308 billion). The official death toll has risen to 9,199, but with 13,786 still reported missing, it is certain to rise. There are reports that dozens of survivors, mostly elderly, have died in hospitals and evacuation centers due to a lack of proper treatment, or simply because of the cold. It is winter in Japan. At one sports arena in Minamisanriku where 1,500 evacuees are staying, old people crowded at a counter stacked with pills and bandages, while around 30 slept on beds or on the floor in a makeshift clinic with doctors on standby. "It's less a problem of medical supplies now, but a problem of finding out what medicine is lacking where and centralizing that information," said Nobuyuki Maki, a doctor. "Many places in this area haven't restored mobile phone connections yet so there are still problems with communication."

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42221315
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[video=youtube;8NEikCsLFdg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NEikCsLFdg"[/video]

Jeff · Mar 23, 2011

Only red the sentences highlighted in red.. sums everything up much faster.. appreciate that alot.

It seems like Japan will be going through very tough times for years. People think Japan is what.. the third best economy in the world so they dont need help?

They actually in fact, needs lots of help.

negiqboyz · Apr 10, 2011

Japan has always been the country with the far cutting edge technologies in the world but now, I wonder how long will it take them to clean up such a mess. I bet the chain reaction on the nearby countries can be felt shortly. Sigh ...

ralphrepo · May 27, 2011

Here's the latest in a growing chorus of TEPCO condemnation:

(NaturalNews) The Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) house of cards is toppling, as it has now been revealed that three reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility all melted shortly after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit them on March 11 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...tdown-of-no-2-3-reactors-at-fukushima-1-.html). TEPCO also now admits that holes likely exist in the reactors' containment vessels as a result, which explains the persistent water leaks and drastic temperature fluctuations that led to continuous containment problems (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_20.html).

TEPCO officials claim that the company has never hidden any of this information from the public, but that recent data analysis has confirmed what many scientists and experts had correctly predicted weeks ago based on observation of the situation. And rightfully so, many remain critical of TEPCO's drastic underestimation of the true condition of the plant, and say the company's unrealistic optimism since the disaster first occurred has been wholly misleading, and not at all based in reality.

The entire faulty approach taken by TEPCO throughout this unfolding mega-disaster can be compared to the following scenario:

A major vehicle accident has caused the engine of a semi-truck carrying a large fuel tank to catch fire and explode, which has obviously destroyed the truck's internal computer monitoring system and rendered it non-operational. The large fuel tank on the back of the truck has not yet caught fire, but instead of making a logical assessment based on simple observation that the situation is very serious, and that the fuel tank could soon catch fire, emergency responders (TEPCO) instead say that, because there is no way to run a computer analysis of the truck's engine, there is no way to know for sure to know exactly what is going on. So they instead pour water all over the engine and allege that everything is just fine, instead of making the logical decision to unhinge the truck from the fuel tank and fix the situation as quickly as possible. In the end, more explosions take place, and eventually the disaster escalates into a much worse one.

The only difference between this truck scenario and Fukushima is the fact that large explosions already took place very early on, which should have been an obvious indicator that things were out of control at the plant. But TEPCO officials, with the apparent approval of the Japanese government, minimized the severity of the situation since nothing could be confirmed with concrete data, despite the fact that nuclear experts everywhere observed the "symptoms" of the disaster, and had come to logical conclusions early on that meltdowns were likely taking place.

So instead of doing what most people would consider to be the right thing, and admitting that the plant was most likely beyond containment -- and that entombing it as quickly as possible in order to avoid the continuous spewing of radioactive particles into the environment was the best option to take -- TEPCO has instead been playing around with ocean water (http://www.naturalnews.com/031978_radioactive_water_Japan.html) and ridiculous polyester tents (http://www.naturalnews.com/032400_Fukushima_tents.html), all while radioactive materials continue to leak into the atmosphere, groundwater, and oceans. Clearly, things are amiss in the way the entire thing is being handled by those who are expected to be most privy to the nature of nuclear technology and how it behaves under current conditions.

The most recent reports available explain that a shocking 94 percent of the fuel in Reactor 3 may have melted into containment water just three days after the May 11 disaster (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Large_scale_melt_predicted_at_units_2_and_3_2605111.html). Reactor 3, of course, contains the deadly, plutonium-based MOX fuel that is actually capable of "breeding" itself and regenerating beyond its original mass. And at this point in time, Reactors 1, 2, and 3 have all likely had their entire fuel rods completely melt, creating holes in the containment vessels that are leaking and spreading unknown levels of radiation directly into the environment (http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105170428.html).

And to make matters even worse, a "very intense" super typhoon, Songda, is making its way across the Pacific Ocean where it is expected to hit Japan in the next couple of days. This Category 5 storm is seeing sustained winds of 161 miles per hour (mph) and gusts of up to 195 mph, according to CNN (http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/26/super-typhoon-churns-through-pacific-threatens-okinawa/). Though the storm system is expected to drop to a Category 2 by the time it hits Japan, it has the potential to exacerbate the Fukushima situation by causing more flooding, or by further spreading radioactive particles (http://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/1102.html).

Source: http://www.onenewspage.com.au/news/...admits-that-three-Fukushima-reactors-have.htm
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Asia-Pacific
1 June 2011 Last updated at 02:11 ET

Japan nuclear: UN says tsunami risk was underestimated

The UN nuclear energy agency has said Japan underestimated the risk of a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant.
However, the response to the nuclear crisis that followed the 11 March quake and tsunami was "exemplary", it said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) draft report also said a "hardened" emergency response centre was needed to deal with accidents. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was badly damaged by the tsunami, is still leaking radiation. The IAEA inspectors spent a week in Japan compiling their report on the Fukushima nuclear crisis, a summary of which has been handed to the Japanese government. A full report will be submitted at an inter-governmental meeting in Vienna later this month, intended to improve nuclear safety around the world. The UN team was led by Britain's top nuclear safety official Mike Weightman and includes experts from France, Russia, China and the United States.

Independent regulators

The inspectors pointed out a key failure, already admitted by Japan, to plan for the risk of waves crashing over the sea wall and knocking out the plant's back-up generators. Even though a major fault line lies just offshore, the sea wall at Fukushima was less than 6m (20ft) high. The height of the tsunami wave was about 14m. "The tsunami hazard for several sites was underestimated," the UN team's three-page preliminary report said. "Nuclear plant designers and operators should appropriately evaluate and provide protection against the risks of all natural hazards," it said. Amid concerns about safety, just 17 of the country's 54 reactors are operating. Continued monitoring of the health and safety of the nuclear workers and the general public was necessary, it added. The report also emphasised the importance of independent regulators in the nuclear industry. In Japan there has been criticism because the Nuclear Safety Agency is part of the industry ministry, which promotes nuclear power. "The planned road map for recovery of the stricken reactors is important and acknowledged. It will need modification as new circumstances are uncovered and may be assisted by international co-operation," the IAEA report said. Goshi Hosono, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, accepted the report and said the government would need to review its nuclear regulatory framework. The government invited the IAEA in to Japan to demonstrate that lessons are being learned from what happened at Fukushima, says the BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo. The powerful earthquake and the tsunami it generated are now known to have killed more than 15,280 people, while nearly 8,500 remain unaccounted for.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13611797
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sonicbreeze · Sep 4, 2011

ppl around the world shud take japan as example..no nuclear plant

Japan Radiation Fears Persist Around World

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

Jeff 神之馬壯

negiqboyz Well-Known Member

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

sonicbreeze Well-Known Member