‘Bold and drastic’ action essential at Fukushima
Japan’s nuclear watchdog urges ‘bold and drastic’ action at Fukushima Raw Story, By Agence France-Presse Monday, October 28, 2013 Japan’s nuclear watchdog on Monday urged “bold and drastic” action to fix problems with radioactive water at Fukushima, as it warned of the growing risks over coming months.
Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, told the president of operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) that no expense should be spared in getting to grips with the water leaks that have beset the plant over the last half-a-year.
He also told Naomi Hirose that the removal of spent nuclear fuel rods from a cooling pool, which is due to begin next month, would be a difficult and complicated task……. Tanaka also urged TEPCO to exercise the utmost caution when it starts taking used nuclear fuel rods from a cooling pool at Reactor No.4.
In what is widely acknowledged to be the trickiest operation since the overheating reactor cores were stabilized in December 2011, TEPCO plans to take more than 1,000 fuel assemblies (bundles of rods) from the pool using a crane.
The assemblies must be moved one at a time and have to be kept in water to prevent them from spontaneously heating up. “Once a problem occurs, the risks will grow,” Tanaka told the TEPCO chief, according to Ikeda. “I would like you to do it very carefully.”
Hirose said he was fully aware of the possible dangers surrounding the operation, saying the firm would closely work with expert companies on site.
The full decommissioning of Fukushima is likely to take decades and include tasks that have never been attempted anywhere in the world, such as the removal of reactor cores that have probably melted beyond recognition.
Meanwhile, villages and towns nearby remain largely empty, their residents unable or unwilling to return to live in the shadow of the leaking plant because of the fear of radiation. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/28/japans-nuclear-watchdog-urges-bold-and-drastic-action-at-fukushima/
Tepco’s ‘institutionalized lying’ might prevent restart of huge nuclear power plant
TEPCO must address ‘institutionalized lying’ before it restarts world’s biggest nuclear power plant – governor Rt.com October 28, 2013 Tokyo Electric Power Co must give a more thorough account of the Fukushima disaster and address “institutionalized lying” in the company, before it will be permitted to restart the Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant, according to a local governor.
“If they don’t do what needs to be done, if they keep skimping on costs and manipulating information, they can never be trusted,” Niigata Prefecture Governor Hirohiko Izumida told Reuters on Monday, adding that these limitations need to be overcome before the plant is restarted. It is up to Izumida to approve plans to restart the reactor at the TEPCO-run Kashiwazaki Kariwa – the world’s biggest nuclear complex, located on the Japan sea coast, north-west of Tokyo. His personal commission would examine both the causes and handling of the disaster at Fukushima and lay them alongside existing regulatory safeguards to ensure a similar crisis could not reoccur.
If Japanese nuclear safety regulators do lend their approval to the restart plans, Izumida remains able to essentially block TEPCO’s plans for the plant as the facility requires the backing of local officials, allotting Izumida some leverage. …….
Izumida suggested that TEPCO should be fully stripped of responsibility for decommissioning the destroyed Fukushima reactors, and the company subjected to a taxpayer-funded bankruptcy program. Presently, the company remains primarily concerned with funding the process, along with the frequently-occurring and very immediate issue of contaminated water leaking rather than overall nuclear safety.
“Unless we create a situation where 80-90 percent of their thinking is devoted to nuclear safety, I don’t think we can say they have prioritized safety,” he said. ……..
In September, a senior utility expert at Fukushima, Kazuhiko Yamashita, said that the plant was “not under control.” TEPCO downplayed his comments, saying that he had only been talking about the plant’s waste water problem – not the facility as a whole. … http://rt.com/news/tepco-address-lying-governor-879/
Fukushima’s radiation leaks – a slowly unfolding environmental misery
”There is no precedent for what is happening, so we are on untrodden ground.”
The Fukushima plant’s tainted water continues to contaminate the sea, Canberra Times, Martin Fackler and Hiroko Tabuchi, 28 Oct 13, FOR MONTHS now, it has been hard to escape the continuing deluge of bad news from the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Even after the company that operates the plant admitted this summer that tonnes of contaminated groundwater were leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day, new accidents have added to the uncontrolled releases of radioactive materials. Last month, newly tainted rainwater overflowed dykes. Two weeks before that, workers mistakenly disconnected a pipe, dumping 10 more tons of contaminated water onto the ground and dousing themselves in the process.
Those accidents have raised questions about whether the continuing leaks are putting the environment, and by extension the Japanese people, in new danger more than 2½ years after the original disaster – and long after many had hoped natural radioactive decay would have allowed healing to begin.
Interviews with scientists suggest they are struggling to determine which effects – including newly discovered hot spots on a wide swath of the ocean floor near Fukushima – are from recent leaks and which are leftovers from the original disaster. But evidence collected by them and the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co, or TEPCO, shows worrying trends.
The latest releases appear to be carrying much more contaminated water than before into the Pacific. And that flow may not slow until at least 2015, when an ice wall around the damaged reactors is supposed to be completed. Beyond that, although many Japanese believed that the plant had stopped spewing radioactive materials long ago, they have continued to seep into the air.
”This has become a slowly unfolding environmental misery,” said Atsunao Marui, a geochemist at the Geological Survey of Japan who has studied contaminated groundwater flowing from the plant. ”If we don’t put a stop to the releases, we risk creating a new man-made disaster.”…… Continue reading
AUDIO: Japan’s new Bill to restrict freedom of information
AUDIO: Japanese secrets legislation prompts rights concerns Radio Australia, 28 October 
2013, A legislative push by Japan’s government to clamp down on intelligence leaks is set to pass the country’s parliament, sparking major concerns about Freedom of Information. Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party has given cabinet approval for a State secrets bill, which will give government departments free reign to classify information if they deem it sensitive. Continue reading
Junichiro Koizumi, politician in harmony with Japan’s anti nuclear mood
“There is nothing more costly than nuclear power,” Koizumi said, marking a stunning reversal for an LDP stalwart…….
Koizumi siding with the anti-nuclear movement is important for two reasons. One, he’s an extraordinarily perceptive politician with a unique ability to read the public mood and sell sweeping change to the masses. Two, he’s calling for a kind of Manhattan Project in reverse
A Quake Revives Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare Bloomberg, By William Pesek Oct 28, 2013 As Tokyo shook early Saturday morning and loud shrieks from mobile-phone earthquake-warning alarms filled bedrooms around the city, one word immediately sprung to mind:Fukushima.
Those who don’t reside 135 miles away from the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl won’t understand this reaction. But the first thing most of Tokyo’s 13 million residents do once things stop wobbling is check if all’s well at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant still leaking radiation into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean…… Continue reading
Irradiated horses cared for by compassionate Japanese horse breeder
As Iitate’s population plummeted in the spring of 2011, Hosokawa managed to find new homes for more than 80 of his horses. Then, in January this year, he noticed that several among the 30 that remained, mainly foals, had become unsteady on their feet.
Within weeks, 16 had died in mysterious circumstances. Autopsies on four of the horses found no evidence of disease and tests revealed caesium levels at 200 becquerels per kilo – twice as high as the government-set safety limit for agricultural produce,
Fukushima horse breeder braves high radiation levels to care for animals Despite the departure of all his neighbours and the unexplained deaths of some of his stock, Tokue Hosokawa refuses to budge Justin McCurry in Iitate theguardian.com, Monday 28 October 2013 Until March 2011, Tokue Hosokawa had only to peer through the window of his home in Iitate village to confirm that all was well with his 100-year-old family business.
The 130 or so horses that once roamed this sprawling farm in Fukushimaprefecture have sustained three generations of Hosokawa’s family. Some were sold for their meat – a local delicacy – but his animals were better known for their appearances in commercials, period TV dramas and films, and local festivals celebrating the region’s samurai heritage.
For decades, the 62-year-old horse breeder barely registered that his farm was just 25 miles north-west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant. But the rural idyll was shattered on the afternoon of 11 March 2011, when the facility was hit by a towering tsunami that caused meltdowns in three of its reactors…….
two and half years after the accident, Iitate has become a nuclear ghost town. When Hosokawa looks out of his window these days, it is at empty, irradiated fields. Continue reading
Japan’s nuclear regulator is in an unwinnable position
Nuclear regulators can’t win, Japan Times , 27 Oct 13 THE NUCLEAR REGULATION AUTHORITY – , which observed the first anniversary of its creation on Sept. 19, faces two diametrically opposed criticisms. Proponents of nuclear power generation criticize the NRA as the root cause of the delay in the government’s policy to promote nuclear power, while “no-nuke” groups brand the body as a mouthpiece of the “nuclear power village” (the strong network of public organizations and power companies that work toward expansion of nuclear power).
These bitter criticisms coming from both ends of a spectrum seem to summarize the contradictions of Japan’s nuclear power policy. The NRA has become a skewed organization because the idea behind creating it was to satisfy both proponents and opponents of nuclear power. That has resulted in the lack of capabilities to execute its missions, thus making nuclear power plants in Japan even more dangerous than before. Continue reading
Japan’s Prime Minister off to Turkey to push sales of nuclear technology
apan PM heads to Turkey to push nuclear exports, Yahoo 7 News, 28 Oct 13 Japan’s prime minister headed to Turkey Monday to cement nuclear contracts and push the export of more reactors as the industry tries to emerge from the shadow of the Fukushima atomic crisis……
During Abe’s previous visit a Japanese-French consortium won a $22 billion deal to build Turkey’s second nuclear plant on the Black Sea coast, a milestone for the Japanese nuclear industry as it tries to get back on its feet after the 2011 Fukushima crisis.
He and Erdogan also penned an agreement that allows Japanese manufacturers to build nuclear power plants in Turkey.
Abe has travelled the globe since coming to power in December last year selling Japan’s infrastructure as part of his bid to dramatically hike exports and light a fire under the country’s long-slumbering economy.
His drive comes even as all nuclear reactors at home remain offline amid continuing nervousness about atomic power in post-Fukushima Japan…… http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/japan-pm-heads-turkey-push-083205105.html
Niigata Prefecture Governor not ready to allow Tepco to restart world’s biggest nuclear plant
Tepco can’t yet be trusted to restart world’s biggest nuclear plant: governor (Reuters) 28 Oct 13,– Tokyo Electric Power Co must give a fuller account of the Fukushima disaster and address its “institutionalized lying” before it can expect to restart another nuclear station, the world’s largest, said a local government official who holds an effective veto over the utility’s revival plan.
“If they don’t do what needs to be done, if they keep skimping on costs and manipulating information, they can never be trusted,” Niigata Prefecture Governor Hirohiko Izumida told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
Izumida must approve the embattled utility’s plans
to restart the reactors at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the world’s biggest nuclear complex on the Japan Sea coast some 300 kms (180 miles) northwest of Tokyo.
A former economy and trade ministry bureaucrat who has emerged as a leading critic of Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, Izumida said he would launch his own commission to investigate the causes and handling of the Fukushima crisis and whether strengthened regulatory safeguards were sufficient to prevent a similar disaster.
Izumida, 51, declined to provide a timetable for completing that review – a process that could force the utility to scrap or abandon one of the key assumptions behind its turnaround plan…….http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/28/us-japan-nuclear-tepco-idUSBRE99R0KR20131028
Potentially ‘Apocalyptic’ consequences in removing Fukushima nuclear reactor’s spent fuel rods
Fuel Removal From Fukushima’s Reactor 4 Threatens ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenario. Radiation Fuel Rods Matches Fallout of 14,000 Hiroshima Bombs By Common Dreams Global Research, October 25, 2013 by Andrea Germanos
An operation with potentially “apocalyptic” consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now – “as early as November 8″ – at Fukushima’s damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor’s upper floor……
The potential radiation releases in this situation can only be described as apocalyptic. Continue reading
“Nuclear Gypsies” work in Japan’s $150-billion Fukushima radiation clean-up
Radiation, desperation and gangsters: Inside the hidden tragedy of Fukushima The Globe and Mail , 25 Oct 13 ANTONI SLODKOWSKI AND MARI SAITO IWAKI — Reuters , Oct. 25 2013 Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.
Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima’s hottest radiation zones.
He was told he would have to wear an oxygen tank and a double-layer protective suit. Even then, his handlers told him, the radiation would be so high it could burn through his annual exposure limit in just under an hour.
“I felt cheated and entrapped,” Hayashi said. “I had not agreed to any of this.” Continue reading
Poor working conditions in Japan’s nuclear industry
At Fukushima, ‘nuclear gypsies’ struggle with low wages and steep risks The Verge, By Katie Drummond on October 25, 2013 “….. the process of cleaning up that mess has become something of a disaster itself: an estimated 50,000 “nuclear gypsies” employed by the project are now grappling with poor wages, risky working conditions, and rampant labor violations. In a sweeping investigation, Reuters reports that a combination of factors like lax governmental regulations, sketchy contractors, and poor oversight is to blame for the fiasco. Some workers complain of having their wages skimmed by illegal labor rackets, while others say they were hired to do one job before being forced into a much more dangerous one. Unfortunately, the investigation notes that the Fukushima cleanup merely highlights problems that have long plagued the industry. “Working conditions in the nuclear industry have always been bad,” Saburo Murata, deputy director of Osaka’s Hannan Chuo Hospital, told Reuters. “Problems with money, outsourced recruitment, lack of proper health insurance — these have existed for decades.” http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/25/5028568/fukushima-nuclear-cleanup-low-wages-high-risks
Japan’s government moves to gag press freedom
Fuk-‘hush’-ima: Japan’s new state secrets law gags whistleblowers, raises press freed.om fears Rt.com. October 25, 2013 Many issues of national importance to Japan, probably including the state of the Fukushima power plant, may be designated state secrets under a new draft law. Once signed, it could see whistleblowers jailed for up to 10 years……. Under the new legislation a ministry may classify information for a five-year term with a possibility of prolongation to up to 30 years. After that a cabinet ruling would be needed for the secret to be treated as such, but there is no limit for how long information may be kept under a lid.
“Basically, this bill raises the possibility that the kind of information about which the public should be informed is kept secret eternally,” Tadaaki Muto, a lawyer and member of a task force on the bill at the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, told Reuters.
“Under the bill, the administrative branch can set the range of information that is kept secret at its own discretion.”
Media watchdogs in Japan fear the bill would allow the government to cover up serious blunders, like the collusion between regulators and utilities, which was a significant factor in the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. …… http://rt.com/news/japan-state-secrets-law-712/
Organised crime syndicates run Fukushima labour rackets
Radiation, desperation and gangsters: Inside the hidden tragedy of Fukushima The Globe and Mail , 25 Oct 13 ANTONI SLODKOWSKI AND MARI SAITO IWAKI — Reuters , Oct. 25 2013 “…….The yakuza connection The complexity of Fukushima contracts and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicates, which have run labour rackets for generations.
Nearly 50 gangs with 1,050 members operate in Fukushima prefecture dominated by three major syndicates – Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, police say. Continue reading
Radiation level in Fukushima water doubles in one day
Radiation level in Fukushima water doubles http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-radiation-level-in-fukushima-water-doubles-1908226, Oct 24, 2013, : IANS
The water, extracted Wednesday at the channel near the tank that leaked 300 tons of highly toxic water in August, showed a record high 140,000 becquerels per litre of beta radiation emitted by radioactive materials such as strontium-90, compared with the previous day’s reading of 59,000 becquerels, Xinhua reported citing local media as quoting TEPCO.
The operator said the spike may be caused by highly contaminated soil with radioactive substances entering into the drainage channel. TEPCO is struggling to prevent leaks in Japan’s typhoon season as rainwater accumulates inside the leak-protection barriers around the tanks.
1 This Month
Read the Public Inquiry Report, the Commissioners’ report, Surrendering Australia: The AUKUS Deception is available to download for free at aukuspublicinquiry.com. Or just watch the replay of the National Press Club Luncheon.
19 November – Webinar – The Reality of Reprocessing
Time: 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) / 2:00 PM Eastern / 7:00 PM UK / 8:00 PM CET
Register for the Zoom Event Here
Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
-
Archives
- November 2026 (103)
- October 2026 (302)
- September 2026 (339)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
