Kepco loses challenge to Takahama nuclear injunction
Residents on Friday hold a banner that reads: “Kepco’s request has been rejected; Court rejects restart of Takahama reactors.” The protesters are seen in front of the Otsu District Court in Shiga Prefecture.
OTSU, SHIGA PREF. – The Otsu District Court on Friday rejected a bid by Kansai Electric Power Co. to lift an injunction against restarting reactors at a nearby plant, dealing yet another setback to attempts by the utility and the central government to return swiftly to nuclear power.
The move means the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Takahama nuclear plant, in Fukui Prefecture, will remain idled.
In a statement, Kepco condemned the court’s action.
In his decision, Judge Yoshihiko Yamamoto said Kepco failed to provide sufficient evidence to back up its claims that the two reactors were safe.
“The very first article of the law that established the Nuclear Regulation Authority says a fundamental point of Japan’s nuclear power administration is clearly establishing the understanding that the maximum effort must be made at all times to prevent an accident involving the use of nuclear power,” said Yamamoto. “But unless the operator shows that there is nothing lacking in regards to safety, it’s presumed some safety points are lacking.”
The decision was welcomed by citizens’ groups fighting the restart of the two reactors, but it was also expected. Yamamoto was the same judge who had granted their initial request back in March that shut down the reactors, also citing a lack of convincing evidence on the part of Kepco that the plants were safe. The reactors were originally restarted at the beginning of the year.
“It was a just decision, very direct. We hope it will provide a spark to other legal efforts in other parts of Japan to stop nuclear power plants from being restarted,” Yoshinori Tsuji said after the ruling. Tsuji was one of the plaintiffs who filed for an injunction in March.
Legal wrangling over the two reactors continues. Kepco has filed a separate legal challenge to the Otsu court’s decision, and said Friday it hoped that when that ruling came, possibly in July or August, it will lead to restarts.
Shiga residents seeking to keep the reactors offline have said Friday’s decision did not mean their court battles were over.
“If the Otsu court rules against Kepco, it could end up in the Osaka High Court, possibly next year,” said Hidenori Sugihara, another one of the plaintiffs who sought the injunction.
The Otsu court case has demonstrated the difficulty of restarting nuclear power plants in a timely manner. Under laws drawn up by the NRA that went into effect in 2012, localities within a 30 kilometer radius of a nuclear power plant are supposed to establish evacuation plans in the event of an emergency.
But the expanded radius has greatly increased the number of local governments and residents who are concerned about a rush by the utilities to restart as many plants as possible.
In the Kansai region, where parts of Kyoto and Shiga prefectures lie within 30 kilometers of Fukui Prefecture’s plants, lawsuits by residents like the one in Otsu have the potential to slow down, if not halt, Kepco’s plans for restarts.
The original injunction was brought by Shiga residents who fear an accident at the plant would have a damaging impact on Lake Biwa, the nation’s largest freshwater lake and the source of water for about 14 million residents in cities such as Kyoto and Osaka.
Japan Lawmaker Denies Pressuring TEPCO Not to Say ‘Meltdown’
Yasuhisa Tanaka, center, chairman of an outside investigation team appointed by the operator of Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear plant, speaks during a press conference in Tokyo Thursday. Two other lawyers of the team are: Zenzo Sasaki, left, and Toshiki Nagasaki.
A Japanese opposition leader who was a senior official during the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant crisis denied Friday that he or the prime minister at the time pressured the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. not to use the term “meltdown.”
Democratic Party Secretary-General Yukio Edano called a special news conference to refute a finding in a new report that then-TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu apparently came under political pressure not to use the word. The report did not find direct evidence of that.
“The fact that I or then-Prime Minister (Naoto) Kan ordered or requested then-President Shimizu to avoid using the term ‘meltdown’ under any circumstance does not exist,” Edano said. He said the timing of the report was suspicious ahead of an Upper House election next month.
The report released Thursday by a team of three lawyers appointed by TEPCO found that an instruction from Shimizu to avoid using the term “meltdown” delayed full public disclosure of the status of the nuclear plant, which suffered three reactor meltdowns after a major earthquake and tsunami hit the northeastern Japanese coast on March 11, 2011.
The utility used the less serious phrase “core damage” for two months after the disaster.
TEPCO reported to authorities three days after the tsunami that the damage, based on a computer simulation, involved 25 to 55 percent of the fuel but did not say it constituted a “meltdown,” the report said. Yet the company’s internal manual defined a meltdown as damage to more than 5 percent of the fuel.
In May 2011, TEPCO finally used “meltdown” after another computer simulation showed fuel in one reactor had almost entirely melted and fallen to the bottom of the primary containment chamber, and that the two other reactor cores had melted significantly.
TEPCO has been accused of softening its language to cover up the seriousness of the disaster, though the investigation found TEPCO’s delayed acknowledgement did not break any law.
In the 70-page report, the lawyers said Shimizu instructed his deputy not to use the word “meltdown” during news conferences immediately after the crisis. TEPCO’s vice president at the time, Sakae Muto, used the phrase “possibility of meltdown” until March 14, 2011.
Video of a news conference that day shows a company official rushing over to Muto when he was about to respond to a question, showing him a memo and hissing into his ear, “The prime minister’s office says never to use this word.”
Yasuhisa Tanaka, the lawyer who headed the investigation, said interviews of 70 former and current TEPCO officials, including Muto and Shimizu, showed that Muto had planned to use the word “meltdown” until he saw the memo, which has not been found.
“Mr. Shimizu’s understanding was the term ‘meltdown’ could not be used without permission from the prime minister’s office,” Tanaka said at a news conference at TEPCO headquarters. “The notion that the word should be avoided was shared company-wide. But we don’t believe it was a cover-up.”
Edano criticized the report as “inadequate and unilateral,” and said the team didn’t talk to him or Kan.
Tanaka said his investigation, which did not interview any government officials, could not track down what exactly happened between Shimizu and the prime minister’s office.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear regulatory unit at the time, was also reluctant to use the word. Two spokesmen were replaced between March 12 and 13, 2011, after suggesting meltdowns had occurred.
TEPCO has said the delay in confirming the meltdowns didn’t affect the company’s response to the emergency.
The issue surfaced earlier this year in a separate investigation in which TEPCO acknowledged that a company manual had been overlooked, reversing its earlier position that it had no internal criteria for a meltdown. TEPCO has eliminated the definition of a meltdown from the manual in revisions after the Fukushima disaster.
Radioactive Dust Vacuumed in Iwaki House
Cs 137 4440 Bq/kg
Cs 134 718 Bq/kg
40,26 km from Fukushima Daiichi to Iwaki city
State to lift evacuation order for most of Fukushima village of Iitate from March 31
FUKUSHIMA – The central government has said it is considering plans to lift its evacuation order for most of the village of Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture, effective March 31.
The village is nearby the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which experienced a meltdown disaster in 2011.
Yosuke Takagi, state minister of economy, trade and industry, conveyed the plan to Mayor Norio Kanno and other officials of the Fukushima Prefecture village at a meeting on Wednesday.
The government plans to make an official decision on the lifting shortly, along with a program to be launched in July to allow residents to stay overnight at their homes as part of preparations for permanent returns.
The evacuation order will be lifted for areas with less radiation from the three reactor meltdowns at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. plant, which was damaged in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
As of the end of May, 5,917 residents in 1,770 households, or over 90 percent of the overall population of the village, were registered as citizens of such areas.
The government plans to finish decontamination work on houses by the end of this month and on farmland, roads and other facilities by the end of this year.
Visiting the village’s temporary office in the city of Fukushima on Wednesday, Takagi said the government aims to get the residents to return home by “resolving a series of challenges one by one.”
Kanno said, “We still have a long way to go and have to rebuild our village in a new form.”
The evacuation order will remain in place for highly contaminated areas, where 268 residents in 75 households are registered as local citizens.
DPJ leaders deny urging cover-up of Fukushima meltdown
Naomi Hirose, president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., speaks in Tokyo on June 16 after an investigation team released its report on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Former government leaders vehemently rejected suggestions in a report that they were pulling the strings behind a suspected meltdown cover-up when the Fukushima nuclear disaster was unfolding in 2011.
The report, compiled by an investigation panel commissioned by Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the crippled nuclear power plant, said Masataka Shimizu, who was TEPCO president at the time of the accident, instructed employees not to use the term “meltdown,” leading to a delay in the official announcement.
But the report also implied that Shimizu was acting on orders from high up in the government.
Yukio Edano, who was chief Cabinet secretary of the Democratic Party of Japan-led government when the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered the nuclear crisis on March 11, 2011, described the report as preposterous.
“As far as I know, it is unthinkable for government officials back then to ask TEPCO to do such a thing,” Edano, now the secretary-general of the opposition Democratic Party, told reporters on June 16.
He accused the panel of merely skimming the surface of the matter and sidestepping the truth behind the instructions to avoid using the term “meltdown.”
“It is utterly irresponsible for the panel to say that it did not uncover that (Shimizu) was instructed by who and what,” he said.
The third-party panel of legal experts said in the report released on June 16 that it can be assumed that Shimizu understood that he was requested by the prime minister’s office to seek its approval beforehand if the company were to announce the “meltdown.”
The panel also said it would be difficult to conclude that TEPCO’s delay in declaring the meltdown was a “deliberate cover-up.”
“Since TEPCO released information on radiation levels inside the reactors and other related data at that time, just not using the term meltdown cannot be described as an act of a deliberate cover-up,” the panel said.
TEPCO declared the meltdown at three reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant in May 2011, two months after it occurred.
According to the report, Shimizu entered the chief Cabinet secretary’s office, which is located at the prime minister’s office building, by himself on March 13, 2011. The following day, Sakae Muto, vice president of TEPCO, explained the conditions of the reactors at the plant.
During the news conference, Shimizu handed a memo to Muto through a TEPCO public relations official, telling him not to use the word “meltdown” on the instructions of the prime minister’s office, according to the panel.
Naoto Kan, who was prime minister at the time of the disaster, denied giving the instruction to TEPCO.
“I myself have never given directions to TEPCO not to use the expression ‘meltdown,’” Kan, a member of the Democratic Party, said in a statement.
One reason for the lack of clarity in the report is that Shimizu, who was interviewed twice for a total of four hours, said, “I do not remember very well” with regard to who gave what instructions.
Another TEPCO employee interviewed by the panel said Shimizu “was under tremendous pressure and must not have a detailed recollection.”
The panel interviewed about 60 former and current TEPCO officials but no government officials and bureaucrats who were involved in dealing with the crisis.
“Our authority to investigate is limited, and it is difficult (to uncover the entire truth) in such a short time,” said Yasuhisa Tanaka, the lawyer who headed the investigation.
Tanaka and another panel member, Zenzo Sasaki, a former prosecutor at the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, were also in charge of the third-party investigation into the accident conducted in 2013.
That investigation, based on interviews of TEPCO officials, came under fire for “only arbitrarily presenting TEPCO’s argument that is convenient to the company.”
The findings by the latest panel showed TEPCO officials looking into the nuclear disaster were aware of Shimizu’s order not to use “meltdown,” but TEPCO’s in-house investigation team did not include it in its report in 2012, apparently believing it was not significant enough to mention.
“TEPCO’s efforts to share information inside the company were insufficient,” Tanaka said. “It lacked consideration for local governments, which should have been top priority.”
The revelation that Shimizu ordered the avoidance of “meltdown” fueled feelings of distrust toward TEPCO among local governments hosting TEPCO nuclear power plants.
“We are still in this stage of the investigation even five years after the accident,” said Toshitsuna Watanabe, mayor of Okuma, which co-hosts the crippled Fukushima plant.
Hirohiko Izumida, governor of Niigata Prefecture, home to TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, called for a further investigation to reveal the whole picture of the Fukushima disaster.
“We need to step up efforts to uncover what has not been sufficiently investigated before,” he said. “TEPCO, as an organization, should make a sincere response without hiding anything.”
The latest panel was established in March at the request of the Niigata prefectural government’s technology committee, which aims to determine why TEPCO waited until May 2011 to announce the triple meltdown.
TEPCO initially said it did not have the criteria for defining and determining a meltdown.
But it announced in February this year that the company “found” an in-house manual that explained whether a meltdown was taking place.
TEPCO’s nuclear commercials draw disgust from evacuees
A TV commercial about the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant (Provided by Tokyo Electric Power Co.)
The narration over uplifting music boasts of repeated safety drills and enhanced capabilities to judge and act in nuclear plant emergencies.
Workers in blue uniforms and hard hats appear, declaring: “We will devote our entire energy to drills so that we can deal with any circumstance.”
This TV commercial in Niigata Prefecture never fails to draw a look of disgust from a 41-year-old woman.
The woman and her two children, then aged 1 and 3, were forced to flee their home in Fukushima Prefecture to Niigata Prefecture after the 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The crippled plant is operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co., the producer of that commercial.
“The mess caused by the nuclear accident has yet to be cleaned up,” she said. “There are still evacuees facing hardships because they have no prospects for the future. If TEPCO has money to use for commercials, it should use it to support the evacuees.”
TEPCO, in fact, created six different commercials for an advertising campaign that started in June last year. The commercials have been aired a total of 320 times a month on four private broadcasting stations based in Niigata Prefecture, according to the utility.
By promoting the safety of nuclear power through the commercials, TEPCO hopes to gain support for its plan to resume operations at some of the seven reactors of its now-idle Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in the prefecture.
The commercials have drawn the opposite reaction from many of about 3,000 evacuees from Fukushima Prefecture who currently live in Niigata Prefecture.
In April this year, residents and evacuees in Niigata Prefecture visited TEPCO’s head office in Tokyo and submitted a letter of protest along with about 1,900 signatures. They demanded the company suspend the commercials and disclose the costs for the campaign.
Complaints have also been directed at Chubu Electric Power Co.’s TV commercials for nuclear power generation in Shizuoka Prefecture.
The company’s first post-3/11 commercial started airing on four private broadcasting stations in 2012, mainly explaining the company’s safety measures.
In July 2015, the utility began to air an eight-part series of commercials, in which employees working at a nuclear power plant appear with the lovely voice of a female vocalist in the background.
“In order to protect this place even at midnight,” and “We will engage in a drill again today” are among the captions shown in one part titled, “Nighttime training.”
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster unfolded, Nagoya-based Chubu Electric Power suspended all reactors at its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, under the request of the then Democratic Party of Japan-led government headed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
The utility is preparing to resume operations at some of the Hamaoka reactors, despite anxieties about the safety of the nuclear plant. The plant has been described as the most dangerous in Japan, given its proximity to a long-expected huge earthquake off the prefecture.
In 2012, a civic group made a request to Shizuoka Governor Heita Kawakatsu to hold a referendum on whether the Hamaoka plant should be restarted.
The group also presented about 165,000 signatures.
“The commercials on nuclear power plants are a unilateral strategy to improve image they project,” Shigeki Nishihara, mayor of Makinohara, located next to Omaezaki, said. “It is necessary for Chubu Electric Power to repeatedly hold dialogue and discussions with the people who have anxieties and doubts about nuclear power plants in order to educate itself.”
Japan court rejects appeal, keeps ban on restarting 2 nuclear reactors
The No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Takahama Nuclear Power Plant, from left to right, are pictured in this photo taken from a Mainichi helicopter in Takahama, Fukui Prefecture, on June 15, 2016.
OTSU, Japan (Kyodo) — A Japanese court kept its ban on operation of two nuclear reactors at the Takahama power plant in Fukui Prefecture on Friday by rejecting the plant operator’s request to suspend an injunction it had issued over the reactivated reactors.
The Otsu District Court’s decision concerns the injunction issued in March over the Nos. 3 and 4 units at the Kansai Electric Power Co. plant that marked a major setback for the government’s push to ramp up nuclear power generation. Local residents had filed for the injunction on safety concerns.
In Friday’s decision, the court said it “cannot conclude that (the reactors) are safe, merely because they have met new regulatory standards on nuclear power plants.” New, more stringent safety rules were introduced in 2013 in the wake of the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011.
“Kansai Electric should at least explain how the regulations on operation and designs of nuclear power plants were toughened and how it responded to them,” the decision said.
The decision, issued under the same presiding judge, Yoshihiko Yamamoto, as the injunction in March, marks the final word on one process regarding the injunction because Kansai Electric cannot take further action on it.
The two reactors will remain offline as long as the injunction is not invalidated through a separate track examining an objection filed by Kansai Electric when the court issued the injunction. This track is also being presided over by the same judge.
The March 9 injunction was the first of its kind affecting operating reactors. One of the reactors was taken offline one day after the order. The other reactor was already offline.
The court said then there are “problematic points” in planned responses for major accidents and “questions” on tsunami countermeasures and evacuation planning, in light of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
The Osaka-based utility subsequently sought to suspend the injunction, saying its safety measures are thoroughly proven and the court’s decision was scientifically and technologically groundless. It also said the suspension of the reactors has cost the company 300 million yen ($2.88 million) in losses daily.
The Takahama plant had cleared the post-Fukushima safety regulations in February last year, allowing Kansai Electric to reactivate the Nos. 3 and 4 reactors on Jan. 29 and Feb. 26, respectively. But their operations were beset with problems, with the No. 4 unit shutting down automatically due to a trouble just three days after it was rebooted.
The residents of Shiga Prefecture living within 70 kilometers of the four-reactor plant had filed the injunction as they worried about their safety in the event of a nuclear accident or disaster.
The plaintiffs argued that safety measures are insufficient and feared residents’ exposure to radiation in case of a severe accident.
A part of Shiga falls within a 30-kilometer radius of the plant, which is set by the central government as an evacuation preparedness zone.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160617/p2g/00m/0dm/039000c
Japanese demographic statistics largely differ from census result
The population statistics of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications show Japanese census result is largely different from demographic and migration data.
It is the statistics titled “Time series of population estimates”.
From 2005 to 2010, Japanese population increased by 176,826 based on the population census.
On the other hand, natural change (Live birth – deaths) is summed up to -232,995 in the same period based on the vital statistics by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.
Also net migration and net increase by change of nationality was -243,538 according to the Ministry of justice.
In total, -476,533 people supposedly decreased from 2005 to 2010.
As a result, 176,826 Japanese increased when it theoretically should decrease by -476,533 for some reason.
The following demographic statistics show -1,176,356 Japanese “increased” from 2011 to 2015, which doesn’t seem to have a significant turning point in deaths since 2011.
Older files than 12. 2011 cannot be accessed by Mac used by Fukushima Diary so it cannot be checked if the past demographic statistics were not modified at some point after 2011.
Japanese demographic statistics largely differ from census result
Utility Head Blamed for Late Mention of Fukushima ‘Meltdown’
An outside investigation team appointed by the operator of Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear plant said Thursday that an instruction from the company’s then-president to avoid using the term “meltdown” delayed the full disclosure of the status of three reactors.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. described the condition of the three reactors as less serious “core damage” for two months after a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant.
The panel of three TEPCO-commissioned lawyers said the company used the milder term despite knowing that the damage far exceeded its meaning, because of the instructions by then-President Masataka Shimizu. The report said he was apparently under pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office, but that the panel did not find direct evidence of that.
TEPCO reported to the authorities on March 14, 2011, that the damage, based on a computer simulation, involved 25 to 55 percent of the fuel but did not say it constituted a “meltdown,” the report said. The company’s internal manual defined a “meltdown” as a core condition with damage exceeding 5 percent of the fuel.
In May 2011, TEPCO finally used the description after another computer simulation showed fuel in one reactor had almost entirely melted and fallen to the bottom of the primary containment chamber, and that the two other reactor cores had melted significantly.
TEPCO has been accused of softening its language to cover up the seriousness of the disaster. But the investigation found TEPCO’s delayed acknowledgement did not break any law.
In the 70-page report, the lawyers said Shimizu instructed his deputy not to use the word “meltdown” during news conferences immediately after the crisis when officials were peppered with questions about the reactor conditions. TEPCO’s vice president at the time, Sakae Muto, had used the phrase “possibility of meltdown” until March 14, 2011.
Video of a news conference that day shows a company official rushing over to Muto when he was about to respond to a question about the conditions of the reactors, showing him a memo and hissing into his ear, “The Prime Minister’s Office says never to use this word.”
Yasuhisa Tanaka, the lawyer who headed the investigation, said interviews of 70 former and current TEPCO officials, including Muto and Shimizu, showed that Muto had planned to use the word “meltdown” until he saw the memo, which has since not been found.
“Mr. Shimizu’s understanding was the term ‘meltdown’ could not be used without permission from the Prime Minister’s Office,” Tanaka told a news conference at TEPCO headquarters. “The notion that the word should be avoided was shared company-wide. But we don’t believe it was a cover-up.”
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear regulatory unit at the time of the accident, was also reluctant to use the word. Two spokesmen were replaced between March 12 and 13, 2011, after suggesting meltdowns had occurred.
Government and parliamentary investigations have suggested officials, seeking to play down the severity of the Fukushima Dai-ichi crisis, resisted using the term. Tanaka said his investigation, which did not interview government officials, could not track down what exactly happened between Shimizu and the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Prime Minister’s Office has denied putting any pressure on TEPCO and the safety agency over language. But previous investigations of the accident show it demanded they coordinate with the office and unify approaches before making any announcement.
TEPCO has said the delay in confirming the meltdown didn’t affect the company’s emergency response at the plant. Although the reactors have been stabilized significantly, the company is still struggling with the plant’s decades-long decommissioning.
Delays in the announcement of meltdowns surfaced earlier this year in a separate investigation in which TEPCO acknowledged that a company manual had been overlooked, reversing its earlier position that it had no internal criteria for a meltdown. TEPCO has eliminated the definition of a meltdown from the manual that was revised after the Fukushima accident.
Tepco chief likely banned use of ‘meltdown’ under government pressure: report
The president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. during the Fukushima nuclear crisis told employees not to publicly use the term “meltdown,” apparently in response to government pressure, a third party report released Thursday said.
The report, compiled by three lawyers, said it is highly likely the government at the time pressured Masataka Shimizu, then Tepco’s president when the monstrous earthquake and tsunami disabled the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, about the utility’s disclosures in the early stages of the crisis.
The report said someone in the government, then headed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan of the Democratic Party of Japan, was unhappy Tepco had revealed a photo of the blown-up building for reactor No. 1 on March 12 without telling the government in advance.
The Prime Minister’s Office then called Shimizu the same day. After Shimizu returned to Tepco’s Tokyo headquarters, he told his fellow executives that they needed to check with the Prime Minister’s Office whenever disclosing information to the public, according to the report.
The report also said Shimizu sent a note on March 14 to Vice President Sakae Muto, who was overseeing the plant and holding a news conference, to warn him not to say meltdown.
“Considering this fact, it is presumable that the Prime Minister’s Office requested Shimizu to be careful about admitting to a meltdown in public,” the report said.
The panel thought this was a critical point that required further investigation but was unable to track down a specific bureaucrat who made such a request. Yasuhisa Tanaka, who headed the panel, said it conducted hearings with 60 Tepco employees but did not talk to anyone from the government side.
Tepco did not acknowledge that a reactor meltdown had occurred until May 15, 2011 — two months after the fact.
Asked whether Tepco was intentionally covering up the meltdowns, Tanaka said that was probably not the utility’s intention at the time.
“Looking at the situation back then, we think it was difficult for Tepco to use the term meltdown because even the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency couldn’t use it” due to apparent government pressure, Tanaka said.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was Japan’s nuclear watchdog at that time.
The panel spent about three months investigating why Tepco could not publicly reveal the meltdowns occurred earlier than it did.
In February, nearly five years after the crisis, Tepco announced it should have declared the meltdowns earlier, citing the existence of a company manual that listed what constitutes a meltdown. The manual says that meltdown is a state in which 5 percent or more of the fuel rods is damaged.
As of March 14, 2011, Tepco estimated that 55 percent of the fuel rod assemblies in reactor No. 1 and 25 percent of those in reactor No. 3 were damaged but did not declare that they had melted until May that year.
Niigata Prefecture has been pressuring Tepco to look into why it took about two months for the utility to admit to a meltdown.
Niigata hosts Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, which the firm desperately wants to restart, but Niigata Gov. Hirohiko Izumida has stressed that he won’t give the green light until the Fukushima crisis has been thoroughly investigated.
Tepco had explained to Niigata that it did not use the term meltdown because there was no clear definition of it. But it found the manual in February, which contradicted the explanation and led to the third-party investigation.
The report said that workers at the Fukushima plant were apparently following the manual but seemed to avoid using the term meltdown, presumably because there was a common understanding within the company not to use it.
Tokyo Electric changed its name in April to Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.
Panel: Use of words ‘core meltdown’ banned
A panel report says a former president of Tokyo Electric Power Company had instructed its officials not to use the words “core meltdown” in explaining the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The panel says the president banned use of the words following what he said was an instruction from the prime minister’s office.
TEPCO admitted meltdowns at 3 of its reactors at the Fukushima plant 2 months after the March 2011 accident. It had instead explained that the reactors’ cores had been damaged.
A third-party panel was set up by the utility in March to investigate responses to the accident. It submitted the probe results on Thursday.
The panel report says then-TEPCO president Masataka Shimizu instructed a vice president, who was attending a news conference 3 days after the accident, not to use the words “core meltdown.”
The report says the ban was conveyed to the vice president through a public relations officer and that it was explained as an instruction from the prime minister’s office.
But the panel says it did not carry out investigations of the prime minister’s office and that it could not gain details of the instruction through interviews with Shimizu and other officials. Such details include which member of the prime minister’s office gave it and how.
Another panel set up by the Niigata prefectural government has also been investigating TEPCO’s handling of the accident.
TEPCO earlier told the Niigata panel that it did not use the words “core meltdown” because there is no concise definition of them and that using the words may have given misleading information.
The third-party panel referred to the fact that it took more than 2 months for TEPCO to admit core meltdowns.
The panel report says it cannot say this was improper because TEPCO officials could not determine whether core meltdowns had taken place by inspecting the reactors at that time.
But the report also says core meltdowns were being mentioned within the company at that time and that it could have admitted the phenomena externally.
A panel jointly set up by Niigata Prefecture and TEPCO is expected to carry out further investigations of the matter.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20160616_32/
Fukushima 172 Children Thyroid Cancers Distribution
Distribution of 172 children who were 18 years old or younger at the time of the Fukushima nuclear accident and who were diagnosed with thyroid cancer or suspected of thyroid cancer as of March 31, 2016. 131 children out of 172 were confirmed to have thyroid cancer.
Radioactive soil turns up at Fukushima high school
FUKUSHIMA–Highly radioactive soil that should by law be removed by the central government has been left dumped in the corner of a schoolyard here because the construction of a local storage site for waste has been stalled.
Students at the school were not given an official warning that the radioactive soil was potentially hazardous to their health.
When a teacher scooped up soil samples at the site and had their radiation levels measured by two nonprofit monitoring entities–one in Fukushima and another in Tokyo–the results showed 27,000-33,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram.
The law stipulates that the central government is responsible for disposing of waste measuring more than 8,000 becquerels per kilogram.
But as a central government project to build an interim storage site for highly radioactive waste near the nuclear power plant has been stalled, the school appears to have no alternative to indefinitely keeping it in the schoolyard.
Principal Seiichi Takano at Fukushima North High School said the school does not plan to take extra safety measures with regard to the storage of the polluted dirt, saying the waste is not believed to be outright dangerous.
“The prefectural board of education has not set any criteria for us to conclude at what levels of radiation are hazardous to people,” he said.
The fallout is a result of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, which unfolded following the Great East Japan Earthquake and ensuing tsunami on March 11, 2011.
Before the cleanup operation at the school in the city’s Iizaka district on May 24-25, the teacher who took the samples called on school officials to take precautionary measures and issue an alert for students.
“Since it is highly radioactive, we should remind students and staff of the potential danger while taking a step to prevent the spread of polluted dust during cleanup,” said the teacher.
Highly radioactive dirt, which was mixed with tree branches and plants amounted to 20 cubic meters, according to cleanup workers. It was packed in bags and dumped in an area near the parking lot for bicycles used by students.
School officials say they plan to bury the bags by digging deep holes on the school premises to temporarily store them, but they have no idea when they will finally be removed.
The polluted dirt in the latest cleanup first came to the attention of school officials in March when a preliminary survey detected 1.6 microsieverts per hour of radiation at a point 1 meter from the surface of the ground near the bicycle parking lot. The survey is routine before any cleanup gets under way in earnest.
A cleanup operation is conducted with the aim of lowering radiation exposure to below 0.23 microsieverts per hour, a long-term goal the central government has set to limit residents’ annual additional exposure to a maximum of 1 millisievert.
In the previous decontamination operation, the school’s playground was cleaned in August 2011 before classes were resumed for that academic year after a break after the nuclear accident.
A large amount of contaminated soil–far more radioactive than in the current incident–is still buried in the schoolyard for temporary storage.
Cleanup resumed only this spring for the rest of the school premises and its neighborhood in line with a general cleanup plan in Fukushima.
An official with the prefectural board of education said it is not considering additional safety measures concerning the storage of polluted soil kept at the school.
“We are going to ensure safety by taking an approach similar to the existing one before the polluted soil is transported to the interim storage facility,” said a board official.
Fairewinds in the News: Gendai Business Online Feature Article
Gendai Business Online’s top ranked article is an exclusive interview with Fairewinds Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen titled, American nuclear expert warns: “There is a possibility that now in Fukushima recontamination is occurring.” With more than 10,000 likes on Facebook, this Japanese article delves into the truth about nuclear contamination from Fukushima Daiichi as uncovered by Arnie Gundersen during his most recent trip to Japan. Fairewinds, with the help of Japanese translators, provides you with an English translation:
On a mid-February morning, just before the 5th anniversary of the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, a group of young girls in the city of Minami-Soma rode their bikes to school past a shocked and saddened pedestrian. That upset observer was Arnie Gundersen, nuclear reactor expert and Chief Engineer with Fairewinds Associates. Mr. Gundersen has 45 years of experience as a design, operations, and decommissioning nuclear engineer. He has engaged in research of the effects of the meltdown at Three Mile Island (TMI) and conducts independent research of the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. Mr. Gundersen is in ongoing conversations with both the US and Japanese media concerning the dangers of nuclear reactors and nuclear power operation. Invited by “Peace News Japan” and several other civil groups, Mr. Gundersen visited the Fukushima prefecture five years after the catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi.
“What surprised me at this visit to Japan [his third since the meltdowns] is that the decontaminated area is contaminated again,” Mr. Gundersen said while explaining why it was such as sad shock to witness the girls on their bicycles. “This was not what I had expected. I had thought that we would not find such high doses of radiation in the decontaminated area. But, sadly, our results prove otherwise.”
During his Japan visit, Mr. Gundersen collected samples of dust from the rooftop of Minami-Soma city town hall, the floor mat of a 7-Eleven convenience store, and the roadsides of Minami-Soma city. Although the official data cannot be released before the publication of formal scientific papers, it is evident that high doses of radiation, usually found in nuclear waste, was detected from these samples.
“This means that highly radioactive dust is flying around the city. In other words, the decontaminated land is contaminated again. Little girls are affected by the radiation 20 times as much as adult men. The Japanese government’s standard of 20 mSv is based on exposure assessments for adult men. The girls on their bicycles are actually being affected by a radiation dose equivalent to as much as 400 mSv.”
Mr. Gundersen also pointed out that human lungs are heavily affected by internal exposures to radiation.
“At this visit, I wore a radiation proof mask that can filter out 99.98% of radiation for six hours. I sent my filter to the lab, and they found a high dose of Cesium. But, unfortunately, the Japanese government only cares about the number on a Geiger counter and does not consider the internal exposure. This has resulted in a hazardous downplay of this kind of data and human lungs are affected by the serious internal exposure.”
Why is the recontamination happening? One of the reasons is that the government did not decontaminate thoroughly. Mr. Gundersen witnessed first-hand the poor decontamination of the prefecture.
“In the house I visited, only half of the garden area was decontaminated because only that half fell into the category of a contaminated area. It should not be like that. The other half would be contaminated too. Furthermore, one person discovered highly radioactive dust in their driveway where decontamination had occurred. So, of course, this person notified the related offices but the related offices told them that it was not necessary to decontaminate the driveway again because it had already been done once. It’s unbelievable. This person’s house is located near a ravine and the opposite side of the ravine is designated a non-habitable zone.”
Another reason for recontamination is that the radiation from the mountains are coming back to the city by way of wind and rain. Mr. Gundersen noted the extreme radioactive contamination of the mountains.
“We tracked wild monkeys in the mountains and found a high dose of radiation in their feces. I received the meat of a wild pig as a gift and since I could not bring it back to the US [it is illegal to bring meat back to the United States from Japan], tested the meat on a Geiger counter. The meat showed 120 counts/min. I think that the Japanese government should spend more money to decontaminate the mountains but they don’t appear to have that kind of political will. I also worry that contamination in the rivers is not monitored as rain from the mountains flow down into the rivers.”
Due to the heavy radiation contamination of the mountains, vegetables grown in that area exceed the government’s standard by 1500 Bq. These vegetables were sold at the MichinoEki in Tochigi prefecture, and the bamboo shoot grown in this contaminated region was used for elementary school lunches in Utsunomiya. These school lunches contained more than twice as much radiation as the government’s standard.
Recontamination is happening due to poor decontamination and residents of Kawauchi village in Fukushima prefecture claim that the decontamination in the forests is not enough. However, the government continues to push for the end of people’s relocation and force the return to recontaminated areas.
“If I had a little child, I would never let them live there,” Mr. Gundersen pointedly states.
Mr. Gundersen also found that Tokyo remains contaminated. He measured dust collected from the sidewalk in front of MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and found a high dose of radiation. That dust is in the air that will be inhaled by the visitors and athletes of the 2020 Olympic Games. Needless to say, the current residents are inhaling it every day. “Mr. Abe should not take the advice from IAEA, MITI and TEPCO seriously,” Mr. Gundersen insists. “Instead, he should have an independent organization conduct research and listen to the advice from them.”
Over double density of Cesium-134/137 as safety limit detected from served school lunch in Utsunomiya city
According to Utsunomiya city government, they detected over double density of Cs-134/137 as safety level from school lunch after serving it to the students this May.
It was bamboo shoot contained in the school lunch of 5/10/2016 as an ingredient.
It was already served and consumed by 560 students and teachers at an elementary school when they obtained the analysis result.
It was 234 Bq/Kg in total of Cs-134/137 (food safety limit is 100 Bq/Kg). The city government comments no health problem was reported related to the contaminated bamboo shoot.
http://www.city.utsunomiya.tochigi.jp/oshiraselist/19078/035312.html
http://www.city.utsunomiya.tochigi.jp/dbps_data/_material_/localhost/gakkoukenkou/20160614.pdf
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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