Yomiuri English incorrectly says Fukushima released 760,000 terabecquerels in iodine equivalence, TEPCO says 900,000 terabecquerels in iodine equivalence. Without converting cesium-137 to iodine equivalent, Fukushima released 10,000 terabequerels of cesium-137, Chernobyl released 85,000 terabecquerels.
Is Fukushima twice as bad, or four times as bad, as Chernobyl?
I’ve found two sure-fire ways to lose my Japanese Twitter followers. First is to tweet something critical of the current US president whatever the topic is, and second is to tweet something that doubts the orthodoxy commonly held almost as a sacred truth by people who are extremely afraid of radiation exposure (or so they say, while many continue to live and eat as before).
This one is the latter. And the particular orthodoxy is: “The amount of radioactive materials released by the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident is several times larger than the amount released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.” I’ve seen tweets saying “four times”, and a more modest “twice as much”.
From the tweet that was retweeted today by one of people I follow:
日本はもっとひどい惨劇が訪れると思う。だってチェルノの倍の放射能放出量+食べて応援+瓦礫
Japan will be visited by a far worse disaster [than Chernobyl]. Because the amount of radioactive materials released is twice as much as in Chernobyl, plus Eat and Support campaign, and disaster debris
I was at a loss for a moment as to where this person got this idea, so I googled the part of her tweet about the amount of radioactive materials. Up came a number of links that tried to figure out what this grave-sounding news was about, that radioactive materials released from Fukushima were several times greater than those released from Chernobyl. The date of these links were mostly May 2012. I followed one link, and the linked page mentioned a Yomiuri English article.
James Corbett of corbettreport.com and Broc West of apperspective.net are pleased to bring you the latest edition of their monthly video series, “The Asia-Pacific Perspective.” In this episode, we cover:
The Free Syria Army says it will allow UN’s nuclear watchdog inspectors into the Al-Kibar nuclear facility that rebels seized last week,
‘if our conditions are met’.
The IAEA has never been allowed to visit the suspected nuclear site that was allegedly ruined by an Israeli strike in 2007. Rebels claim they took control of the site, but said the premises were empty. The statement by a spokesman for the FSA, did not specify what conditions they were demanding.
Syria: IAF to blame for uranium traces at suspected nukes site – A depleted uranium mystery?
In Syria, for example, the IAEA was successful in collecting uranium particles at a site that had been “sanitized.” But then the IAEA cavalierly dismissed Syrian explanations that the natural uranium particles found at a bombed suspect site came from Israeli missiles. The agency’s claims that the particles are not of the correct isotopic and chemical composition for missiles, displays an appalling lack of technical knowledge about military munitions based on information from questionable sources. If the IAEA is to be respected it must get proper technical advice…………..
For the first time in Syria, 150 Kurdish women have set up a female-only battalion in the northern province of Aleppo, which has seen some of the heaviest fighting since the start of the Syrian uprising in early 2011.
The news comes from a statement by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Saturday. While women have been known to fight alongside men in both pro and anti-regime forces – as well as the Kurdish militia, it is the first time they have formed their own fighting unit. An amateur photograph has been circulating on the internet, showing rows of women in military fatigues during training.
The announcement comes a month after the government set up paramilitary units called the National Defence Forces, which have actively been seeking to recruit women of all ages. This is testimony to the steady increase of women’s numbers in armed units. They are also becoming very useful in assisting male fighters, as they arouse less suspicion when transporting supplies and weapons.
“Women are fighting on all the fronts now, though it’s possible the Islamist rebel ranks have the fewest women taking part in them,” says Abdel Rahman of the Observatory.
The Kurdish question
The city where the battalion originated is Afrin, which in late 2012, was the last scene of fighting between Kurdish units and Arab militias fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. While a number of Syrian Kurds remain neutral, they also exist on both sides of the current Syrian split, getting invariably involved in the violence.
Small amounts of HEU in solid form have long been exported, without incident, by the U.S. to Canada and turned into “targets” that are irradiated to produce medical isotopes. More than a million packages containing other radioactive material are transported in Canada each year.
By Ian MacLeod, Ottawa Citizen February 23, 2013 7:59 PM
As many as 76 transport truckloads of high-level nuclear waste could journey along the Trans-Canada Highway over the coming four years in an effort to ship decades’ worth of radioactive rubbish from Chalk River to a U.S. repro-cessing site.
The magnitude of the task is revealed in documents and statements from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Initial details were first reported by the Citizen last week.
Additional details show the plan calls for an anticipated 40 to 50 payloads of highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium (HEU) liquid secured in fortified steel casks.
A total of about 23,000 litres of the solution would be moved in batches of a few hundreds litres at a time, the first attempt to truck liquid HEU in Canada.
The shipments would begin moving under armed guard through Eastern Ontario late this summer, pending approvals from Canadian and U.S. nuclear safety regulators, according to the NNSA.
“An initial agreement has been reached (with consignor Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.) but more preparations must occur before shipments and processing of the solutions can begin,” at the U.S. energy department’s Savannah River Site for nuclear waste reprocessing, Robert Middaugh, a NNSA spokesman in Washington, said in a Wednesday email.
Once there, the solution is to be downblended to low enriched uranium (LEU) and used as fuel in U.S. commercial power reactors.
The estimated $60-million cost will be paid by AECL, which operates Chalk River, Middaugh said.
As well, under a separate proposed plan, several thousand spent fuel rods also made from U.S.-origin HEU and used to drive Chalk River’s NRU and NRX research reactors since the 1960s are to be trucked to the Savannah River Site.
Those shipments are to begin late this summer, again pending approvals from regulators, according to 2012 NNSA documents. (NRX was shuttered in 1993 and NRU has used LEU since the early 1990s.)
Gerald talks with Jeff Rense on the latest Trends.
The Trends Journal® is the World’s #1 source for the most important trends that are shaping the future. The Trends Journal® shows you how these trends will affect your life, how to profit from them, and what to do to avoid pitfalls. Regardless of business or profession, the Trends Journal® provides insights, strategies and opportunities to help you navigate these treacherous, unprecedented times.
U.S. NUCLEAR LAB READY TO SHELVE COSTLY FACILITY PLAN NextGov 22 Feb 13, The Los Alamos National Laboratory is proposing to shelve plans to build an expensive new plutonium research facility and instead permanently parcel out work to an array of smaller buildings, the institution’s director said on Thursday.
“I’m concerned that in the current fiscal crisis, it may no longer be practical to plan and build very large-scale nuclear facilities,” Charles McMillan, who heads the New Mexico research site, said at a three-day conference on nuclear deterrence in Arlington, Va. “A new path forward is needed.”
A study team at Los Alamos has suggested scrapping plans to construct a $6 billion Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement plant in favor of replacing the nuclear facility’s intended functions with a more attainable constellation of structures, he said. Continue reading →
So, what can Mr. Obama do in order to maximize diplomacy’s chance of success despite structural congressional strictures? The answer is clear: Explore and exercise those foreign-policy options that cannot be easily hindered by Congress.
the president can also – without the hindrance of Congress – reactivate the United Nations’ dormant capacities and use them in favor of the upcoming negotiations.
It is clear by now that President Obama will likely never persuade Congress to lift its crippling sanctions on Iran even if Iran agrees to make significant concessions on its nuclear program. If anyone had any doubt about how hostile Congress is even to the mere idea of easing pressure on Tehran, watching the Senate Armed Services Committee’s treatment of Chuck Hagel at his confirmation hearing for secretary of Defense should have put that doubt to rest.
Pressuring Iran is no longer just a matter of tactical policy for Congress. It’s a deeply institutionalized ritual that every member is expected to partake in.
This is a sad reality that Tehran is fully aware of – one that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, tacitly acknowledged last week after the Obama administration implemented new congressional sanctions: He said that Iran would not be negotiating with America simply “for the sake of negotiating.” Iran wants a negotiating partner that can actually deliver on a promise to normalize relations and reciprocate concessions with mutual concessions.
As Congress has made this implausible for now, bilateral talks between Tehran and Washington are not likely to take place any time soon. On the other hand, the United States and Iran will inevitably meet to negotiate the latter’s nuclear program in the context of the multilateral “P5+1” talks scheduled to take place in Kazakhstan on Feb. 26. Continue reading →
“According to the agency’s report, enrichment to a purity level of 20 percent with the aim of fueling the Tehran reactor is going smoothly, and it indicates the peaceful use of enrichment to supply the Tehran research reactor with fuel to provide hospitals with radioisotopes they need,”
Last Updated:2013-02-23 23:34 | Xinhua
Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili said Saturday that the Islamic republic insists on its full nuclear rights within the framework of Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Making the remarks at an annual conference of the Iranian Managers of Nuclear Industry, Jalili said Iranians do not accept ” less rights or more tasks,” the state IRIB TV reported.
Iran is committed to its tasks within the directives of the NPT and insists on all its rights within the framework of the NPT regulations, he emphasized.
Jalili said that the Islamic republic hopes the so-called P5+1 group, comprising Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany, come to the upcoming nuclear talks with “new strategy and valid proposals,” according to IRIB.
On Saturday, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) announced that the Islamic republic plans to construct 16 nuclear power plants in different parts of the country, Press TV reported.
“After months of efforts, 16 new sites for nuclear power plants have been designated in coastal areas of the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, (southwestern province of) Khuzestan and northwestern part of the country,” the AEOI was quoted as saying.
The projects are in line with Iran’s long-term plans to develop electricity generation through nuclear power plants and in accordance with international regulations, according to the announcement.
It also said that Iran has discovered more uranium deposits which increase Iran’s uranium reserves to 4,400 tons, according to official IRNA news agency.
Earlier this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said in Moscow that Iran hoped Russia could participate in constructing the second unit of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant.
Russia’s state atomic agency Rosatom said last May it was ready to help Iran build another unit at the Bushehr plant after the plant “successfully” reached 100 percent of its nominal capacity last August.
AEOI’s Saturday announcement and Jalili’s remarks came ahead of Iran’s upcoming nuclear talks with the P5+1 slated for Feb. 26 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. It would be the first-of-its-kind meeting between Iran and the P5+1 since the stalemate in Moscow in June 2012.
In a reaction to the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian ambassador to the IAEA Ali-Asghar Soltanieh said that the report of UN nuclear watchdog on Iran’s nuclear program confirms the peaceful nature of the country’s nuclear activities, Tehran Times daily reported Saturday.
UN Report: Iran is Diverting Uranium for Peaceful Purposes http://news.antiwar.com/2013/02/20/un-report-iran-is-diverting-uranium-for-peaceful-purposes/ But the US still stubbornly insists Iran stop enriching uranium to 20 percent, despite proving good on its promises by John Glaser, February 20, 2013 A United Nations report due this week is expected to detail a decrease in the growth of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium because it is diverting much of the material to make fuel, as it has promised, Reuters reports. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and even Israeli intelligence admitted publicly last October that Iran was diverting much of its enriched uranium for peaceful scientific research and medical isotopes.
This information clashes with what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to warn about. On Monday, heissued another stern warning of Iran’s determination to become a nuclear state, insisting that a “robust, credible, military threat” is the only thing that can stop it.
Some reports claim Iran has installed new uranium enrichment, increasing its overall capacity. But this upcoming UN report is expected to conclude that the rate of growth of Iran’s capabilities is slowing, primarily because the material is being used for fuel and other peaceful purposes.
Iran has repeatedly announced its 20 percent enriched uranium is for peaceful purposes like fuel, scientific research, and medical isotopes. Iran has followed through on this promise.
Still, negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 are essentially stagnant because of Washington’s insistence that Iran give up its 20 percent enrichment.
Wuhan doctors on strike over X-ray radiation Shanghai Daily, February 22, 2013 Some hospital workers in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province reportedly went on strike after three gynecologists developed thyroid cancer, which they believed was caused by their frequent exposure to X-rays.
The three women doctors at the Wuhan Union Hospital were diagnosed with cancer last month, today’s Beijing News reported. They blamed the hospital in a statement made to the public on Monday.
The statement said they performed surgeries on a floor directly underneath two X-ray machines in two bone surgery rooms overhead. The two rooms were not insulated with radiation-proof materials. The hospital did not inform or warn them of the risks…… http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-02/22/content_28035886.htm
New 3-D Mammography is Basically a CT Scan for Breasts
The procedures give women twice as much radiation as a standard mammogram
New 3D Mammography Significantly Increases Radiation Exposure, and Your Risk of Radiation-Induced CancerMercola.com February 19, 2013By Dr. Mercola
Breast cancer is big business, and mammography is one of its primary profit centers. This is why the industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep it, by downplaying or outright ignoring its significant risks.
In the US, women are still urged to get an annual mammogram starting at the age of 40, completely ignoring the updated guidelines set forth by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in 2009.
Unfortunately, many women are completely unaware that the science simply does not back up the use of routine mammograms as a means to prevent breast cancer death.
These are just a handful of examples in what amounts to the beginnings of a global movement. Go100Percent.org, a project launched to track 100% renewable energy projects around the world, has mapped more than 8 Countries, 41 Cities, 48 Regions, 8 Utilities, and 21 NonProfit/Educational/Public Institutions that have shifted or are committed to shifting within the next few decades to 100% renewable energy in at least one sector.
Basic logic says that non-renewable energy, by definition, is finite and will run out.
By Diane Moss, Founding Director of Renewables 100 Policy Institute A decade ago, cities, regions, and businesses aiming for 20% renewable energy were on the cutting edge. Few believed that a higher target in a few decades was an achievable goal. Anyone even suggesting a target of 100% renewable energy was a radical. Fast forward to today and in much of Europe, and increasingly in the U.S. and the developing world, 100% renewable energy goals are becoming the new normal.
Entire countries like Denmark have passed laws requiring that the whole energy supply — electricity, heating/cooling, and transportation — be met by renewable resources. The Pacific island of Tokelau, which risks disappearing as climate change raises sea levels, is one nation that has already met the goal of 100% renewable energy supply, throwing down the gauntlet to far larger polluters around the world who are truly causing the problem.
Iceland is almost there, with 100% renewable electricity and 81% renewable energy overall.
Scotland has a mandate to achieve 100% renewable power supply by 2020.
Upper Austria, inspired by the town of Guessing, which is already there, has a target to achieve 100% renewable heat and power by 2030.
Whole regions in Germany are already meeting, if not surpassing, their power demand with renewables. Several have done the same for their heating requirements, and are busy working toward targets for integrating the transportation sector.
In the U.S, cities like San Francisco, Lancaster, and San José have set official goals to reach 100% renewable power within the next decade, and the state of Vermont has an energy plan in place to reach 90% renewable energy in all sectors by mid century. The heartland town of Greensburg, KS has already reached a 100% renewable power goal set after being destroyed by a tornado in 2007, and aims to achieve renewable energy for all sectors.
Additionally, businesses including IKEA, Whole Foods, and Google are aiming to power, or already are powering, their companies with 100% renewable energy technologies. Continue reading →
“It’s impossible to recover fully from a nuclear accident,” says Aiko. “Each anniversary Kenji and I will be thinking: ‘Is this the year that one of our daughters will get sick?'”
Two years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a new phenomenon is on the rise: atomic divorce. Abigail Haworth reports on the unbearable pressures and prejudices being faced by those caught in the radiation zone
Two years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a new phenomenon is on the rise: atomic divorce. Abigail Haworth reports on the unbearable pressures and prejudices being faced by those caught in the radiation zone.
Two years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a new phenomenon is on the rise: atomic divorce. Abigail Haworth reports on the unbearable pressures and prejudices being faced by those caught in the radiation zone.
‘Each anniversary we will be thinking, “Is this the year one of our daughters will get sick?”’ Kenji and Aiko Nomura with Sakura, 3, and 15-month-old Koto. Photograph: Panos Pictures/Eric Rechsteiner
Perhaps one day Aiko and Kenji Nomura will laugh about the Birthday Cake Incident. It happened last autumn. Aiko, a care worker from the city of Koriyama in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture, was celebrating her 35th birthday. Her husband Kenji decided to surprise her. On the way home from his job at the post office, he picked up the biggest cake he could find. It was filled with whipped cream and decorated with pink roses.
“I couldn’t help myself,” recalls Aiko. “Kenji had a huge smile on his face, but the first words that shot out of my mouth when I saw the cake were: ‘Is the cream safe?'”
Since March 2011, when a triple meltdown occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant 56km from their home, the Nomuras have avoided buying dairy and other foodstuffs produced in their region. Kenji, 42, confessed to Aiko that he had forgotten to check the cream’s origins. “I’m sure it’s fine. Please eat some – just this once,” he begged her. Aiko refused. She would not let their children have any, either. In silence, Kenji picked up a fork and ate the cake alone, right down to the last crumb. The couple did not speak for two days.
It is almost two years since the colossal earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan that killed 20,000 people and caused the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 25 years. The Nomuras’ home city of Koriyama, an inland commercial hub with 337,000 people and shimmering views of nearby mountains, was spared the tsunami’s monstrous waves. But it could not escape the clouds of radioactive particles that spread widely, following multiple explosions at the Daiichi plant. The total amount of radiation released into the air was (depending on who funded the estimate) between 18 and 40% of the quantity released during Chernobyl in 1986 – and over an area of Japan with a population density 10 times greater. In the aftermath, radiation levels in Koriyama spiked at 30 to 40 times higher than legal limits, contaminating the city with caesium and other long-life radionuclides for decades to come.
The Nomuras, who have two small daughters, Sakura aged three and 15-month-old Koto, have managed to hold together their marriage and family throughout the crisis so far. But only just. Over the past two years, they have had to cope with the arrival of a new baby (Aiko was pregnant with Koto when the disaster struck), periods of enforced separation and life in an environment that feels infinitely less wholesome and secure than it did before.
The stress on family life for all two million people across Fukushima has been immense. Marital discord has become so widespread that the phenomenon of couples breaking up has a name: genpatsu rikon or “atomic divorce”.
There are no statistics yet, but Noriko Kubota, a professor of clinical psychology at the local Iwaki Meisei University, confirms there are many cases. “People are living with constant low-level anxiety. They don’t have the emotional strength to mend their relationships when cracks appear,” she explains. Couples are being torn apart over such issues as whether to stay in the area or leave, what to believe about the dangers of radiation, whether it is safe to get pregnant and the best methods to protect children. “When people disagree over such sensitive matters, there’s often no middle way,” adds Kubota, who also runs a counselling service.
Moreover, now that what Kubota calls the “disaster honeymoon period” of people uniting to help each other in the immediate aftermath is over, long-term psychological trauma is setting in. “We are starting to see more cases of suicide, depression, alcoholism, gambling and domestic violence across the area,” says the psychologist. The young are not immune either. In late 2012, Fukushima’s children topped Japan’s obesity rankings for the first time due to apparent comfort eating and inordinate amounts of time spent indoors avoiding contamination. “From the point of view of mental health, this is a very critical time,” says Kubota.
Most unmentionable of all, cases of discrimination against people from Fukushima are arising within Japanese society. Social stigma attached to victims of radiation goes back to the aftermath of the wartime atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when men could not find work and women were unable to marry due to fears they were “tainted”. While the ignorance that remains is far from universal, it is highly insidious. Tales exist of people from Fukushima being barred from giving blood, having their car windows smashed or being asked to provide a medical certificate of their caesium levels on job applications.
A Tokyo maternity hospital advised a new mother not to let her Fukushima-based parents visit their new grandchild, “just to be safe”. Prejudice against women is the most pervasive: many negative comments in the media and on websites insinuate that Fukushima women are “damaged goods”. Even some people who are supposedly on the side of radiation victims are prepared to throw them on the reproductive scrap heap.
Last year, prominent anti-nuclear activist Hobun Ikeya, the head of the Ecosystem Conservation Society of Japan, said at a public meeting: “People from Fukushima should not marry because the deformity rate of their babies will skyrocket.”
Aiko and Kenji are eating lunch when I arrive to meet them at a wooden restaurant just outside Koriyama’s city centre. It is a freezing winter’s day, but inside there is a charcoal-burning stove and the comforting smell of roasted sesame. The couple are sitting at a low table on a tatami-mat floor eating calmly while their impossibly cherubic girls, Sakura and Koto, clamber all over them.
The restaurant, Aiko says, is their new sanctuary. Called Ginga no Hotori (“Edge of the Galaxy”), it is a former Japanese health-food restaurant that has transformed itself into a place serving something even better for the body: guaranteed non-radioactive meals. “It’s relaxing to eat here. I don’t have to cook or worry,” says Aiko, who is swaddled in a brightly coloured jumper and scarf. “And the food is very tasty.”
Enormous effort goes into preparing the tofu burgers, black sesame buns, organic miso soup and other menu items. Hidden behind a rustic partition is a high-tech metal panel with dials and switches that operates a gamma spectroscopy machine. It looks similar to an industrial-size Magimix, except it measures levels of the potentially deadly radioisotope caesium 137. The restaurant’s owner, Katsuko Arima, an energetic 50-something in a blue bandana, explains that each food item must first be peeled and chopped before being placed in the machine for 30 minutes. “Samples from everything we use in our cooking are checked and re-checked,” Arima says. “It’s a lot of work, but I wanted to do this to give people some certainty, some peace, when they eat here.”
While the restaurant is one of a kind, numerous citizens’ groups with similar machines have set up makeshift offices in shopping centres so people can self-test everything from their groceries to garden soil. “Nobody trusts the government any more,” says Arima. She cites recent cases of official incompetence when supplies of beef, rice and vegetables declared safe by the authorities were found to be heavily contaminated. “You can only trust yourself.”
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